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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#381

Post by alecigne »

flowerlad wrote: post #30

I have been an Emacs user for 20+ years, and I don't use editors that can't be configured to use Emacs key bindings. Luckily IDEs like Visual Studio can be configured to mimic Emacs. To me the issues that make Emacs not modern are: (1) Slow startup. (2) Buggy language modes. (The ones that come with it are good, but third party ones such as web-mode are buggy.) and (3) No intellisense out of the box.

It is not that slow. On my machine Vanilla Emacs starts in 0.1 second. With my 12 years-old config, it starts in 0.4 second. Emacs 27 pre-init system made it even faster.

And if your machine is slow you can use a daemon.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#382

Post by School-Cotton »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #316
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…

That's great and all, but people who are learning emacs for the first time don't know or care that it's one of the most successful text editors or that it's been around for 40 years. They care about being able to write code effectively. And emacs doesn't let users write code effectively by modern standards. Sure, after boatloads of configuration and tinkering it does, but it's unclear if it's worth it. Forking it is…

Who cares if new people use it or if it looks modern? It’s working well for the people who want it. Not every piece of software has to be everything to everyone.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#383

Post by School-Cotton »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #81
Miraste wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks. Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and industry experience I've never seen anyone use emacs for anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions online. Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but…

Meanwhile, I’m always amazed how, on HN threads about Emacs, people talk about preferring the Vi family of editors. When I installed Linux on my computer two decades ago and had to learn *nix, my own (totally subjective) impression was that the Vi family was regarded as clunky and half-obsolete, about as much of a pain as editing in ed. As I began to contribute to the Free Software community, most of the other people…

Funnily enough, Bill Joy (creator of vi) said he would have made a modeless editor if he had thought of it, he just didn’t.

I use vi-family editors for the same reason I use grep: it’s installed everywhere. I’m not religious about its benefits.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#384

Post by School-Cotton »

nikanj wrote: post #363
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…

Green on black was not exactly a “software default”. It was a physical property of the display hardware.

Dark on light is at least thousands of years old, think of ink on papyrus in ancient Egypt.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#385

Post by elevader »

globular-toast wrote: post #348
JacksonGariety wrote: post #4

The Emacs community should start by perfecting lsp-mode so that it can compete with VS Code in terms of functionality. That will simultaneously keep power users from switching AND bring in people from other "easy to use" editors that lack such functionality.

Is the LSP architecture the way to go, though? In my experience it's quite a bit slower than built in emacs modes. I can't use tools that are slower than me.

Maybe, but at the same time it seems like the best option for general language support in emacs.

A lot of languages have working lsp implementations (at least according to https://langserver.org/) and, assuming it will stick around, this means that emacs can get all of these nice features "for free" by having an lsp implementation. This is a much safer bet than just assuming that somebody will provide and maintain emacs plugins for that provide everything that lsp would.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#386

Post by miduil »

sirffuzzylogik wrote: post #341
danShumway wrote: post #84

Do the defaults in Emacs matter, at all? Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and dozens of other default configs already exist. I've been using Emacs for years, I never learned the default keybindings. I used Evil mode right from the start. I just don't see this as a real problem. A small (incomplete) list of real problems: - No timeline on Wayland support, Wayland will likely require substantial work and refactoring. - Performan…

Wayland support is actually being actively worked on. It is done via "native" (no X widgets) GTK support. You can find it on: https://github.com/masm11/emacs The plan is to get that merged upstream at some point, you can find out more about it on the official mailing lists.

Oh thank you for the link, I've had to discard emacs when I've switched to sway/wayland and I can't wait finally having emacs available for my muscle memory. Magit changed my life

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#387

Post by nullc »

Making it easier to set colors sounds fine to me.

It probably won't make it attractive to many more people (personally I didn't find inverting the colors hard...) but at least it doesn't gut what makes emacs useful and interesting in the first place.

... which isn't something you can say about every improvement people suggest. :)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#388

Post by antepodius »

quanticle wrote: post #367
necubi wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this case, it isn't about money, but proficiency.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#389

Post by Davidbrcz »

twblalock wrote: post #246

Emacs needs a package manager that is as easy to use as the one that comes with VS Code. The plugins are the reason VS Code is popular. It's so, so easy to discover them and install them. You can download VS code and have a working dev environment with autocomplete and a debugger for almost any major programming language in 10 minutes. When I started working in the tech industry, Textmate was pretty popular. It was s…

As of today, there are 4 721 packages for Emacs on MELPA (https://melpa.org/#/). The setup to use it are a couple of lines in the config file.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#390

Post by zitterbewegung »

I think that the article brings up good points about how to make the default install of emacs better for new users.

On the other hand there are many alternative versions of emacs that solve this problem like Aquamacs.

Maybe instead of changing the core version instead the FSF could make or suggest an emacs for beginners .

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