Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toward a “modern” Emacs

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 539 posts

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#361

Post by bananaface »

da39a3ee wrote: post #37
smabie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that lsp-mode works pretty well most of the time. If you look at the commit history, the project is very active. It's also pretty easy to set up.

I found that it didn't work out of the box for me (Rust and Python) but that eglot did work out of the box. Eglot, not lsp-mode, will be the LSP implementation that makes it into the GNU Emacs distribution (because it is being developed with FSF assignments, and because the maintainer is active in the GNU Emacs development community, maintaining eldoc and flymake, and maybe others).

It would be bad if it did, IMO. Eglot is a pretty dodgy piece of software and the code is much worse than lsp-mode.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#362

Post by [deleted] »

kungtotte wrote: post #326
konjin wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt they have had 20 years of using to it though.

This kind of ties back in to the point of the article. For people who have used $EDITOR for 20+ years there's little incentive to change to something else, but if you want to bring in fresh eyes to your project so that there'll be enough people around in another 20 years to maintain the whole thing it behoves you to think about attracting those people. Sane defaults and being more approachable is a good way to do tha…

[deleted]

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#363

Post by nikanj »

mapgrep wrote: post #28

I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.” Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It…

The default display colors for software have gone from green text on black background to black text on white background, and then back again in the 40 years that emacs has been on the scene.

It’s quite silly to think that dark mode is a modern invention. It’s just a example of how software trends are a form of fashion, and they do behave cyclically.

See also: return to lightweight clients and fat servers as we moved onto the web, and then moving the bulk of work back to fat clients with React etc

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#364

Post by quanticle »

turing_complete wrote: post #347
gnulinux wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing. I already wrote this to another comment, but quoting myself: > Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Last few years, VSCode has been getting popular though. I had a similar experience when I was a student in UC Berkeley, although it seems like there were more vim users in school than in industry. Anyway, pretty much all my current cowo…

I am using Vim. Is it worth it to try emacs?

If you're happy with vim, stick with it. In general, when it comes to editors, you're better off trying to get really good at the editors you already know than being mediocre at using a bunch of different editors.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#365

Post by ginko »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #244
TheGrassyKnoll wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Windows IS evil...

Yeah cool. I guess all the people who write software for Windows based ecosystems are evil too right? Just make them use linux and the world will be candy and smiles.

I would say so, yes.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#366

Post by mkesper »

turing_complete wrote: post #347
gnulinux wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing. I already wrote this to another comment, but quoting myself: > Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Last few years, VSCode has been getting popular though. I had a similar experience when I was a student in UC Berkeley, although it seems like there were more vim users in school than in industry. Anyway, pretty much all my current cowo…

I am using Vim. Is it worth it to try emacs?

Try doom-emacs, consequently evil-mode and highly adaptable. https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#367

Post by quanticle »

necubi wrote: post #287
_benj wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reference to musical instruments resonates with me (I play piano) and the fact that emacs call they keyboard bindings "chords" further complements that view. I guess the issue that is being handled here thought is that, just like the piano, the road for those actions to become unconscious is a long painful one. When I started using Golang for work the first thing that I did was buy GoLand from jetbrains. It just…

It's really not that painful. In college I spent two weeks forcing myself to use emacs for everything. I printed out a reference card and unplugged my mouse to prevent cheating. It was not a productive two weeks, but afterwards I was proficient in emacs editing and have been ever since. (Of course true emacs mastery goes much deeper, but it really doesn't take that long to become proficient.)

A broke college student with nothing to lose but time and a professional programmer have entirely two different definitions of "painful". A broke college student will spend two weeks learning emacs to avoid paying for a $100 IDE. A professional developer will happily pay for a $100 IDE if it saves him two weeks of time.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#368

Post by anoncake »

mapgrep wrote: post #28

I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.” Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It…

The author seems to confuse "better" and "more like others". The colors are a clear example of the latter, the developers didn't choose a light theme back then because dark ones weren't invented yet or because computers weren't powerful enough for them. Things like the completion UI may be a different story.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#369

Post by anoncake »

m463 wrote: post #339
mapgrep wrote: post #28

I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.” Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It…

transparency, gradients and rounded window corners. oh, and a thin sans-serif font. maybe a soundtrack

Can we move Emacs into the cloudchain somehow?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#370

Post by ssivark »

BeetleB wrote: post #284
ssivark wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t wish to do a point-by-point rebuttal as you’re entitled to your view — just that it misses the perspective of a large fraction users. As for me, I’m fairly happy using Emacs Doom. > While I agree that a convenient way to download things from MELPA would be nice, I hardly see not having it as a barrier. Most people new to, say, Visual Studio don't start with "How do I download plugins". I think this statement…

> I think this statement is untethered from reality, and matches approximately zero people I know. Note that I'm referring to Visual Studio, not VS Code. In my last job, we didn't use any plugins with Visual Studio for a bunch of years before one developer convinced the rest to use Resharper. > Almost everyone using a text editor is using it for purposes which would definitely be helped by task-specific enhancements…

> a lot of people use Emacs for all kinds of things unrelated to programming: TODO management, document authoring, writing emails, etc.

Those still need addons/plugins like org, mu4e or some other mail client, etc. This my point — not just a vanilla text editor.

Post reply on HN