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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#391

Post by rkangel »

ashtonkem wrote: post #302
jrimbault wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add links to the SO surveys mentionned here : - 2019: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e... - 2018: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#development-e... - 2017: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-_-... - 2016: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#technology-de... - 2015: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015#tech-editor What's real…

I remain utterly perplexed by the popularity of VS Code, to me it basically does nothing well, but does a bunch of things mediocrely.

I was an avid emacs user for almost a decade and it only 2 a week with VSCode for me to jump ship completely.

The issue I had with Emacs is that while could get it to do anything, often it took a lot of time. I would often end up spending an entire afternoon or Sunday tinkering with my config to get set up to develop in a new language. Whe I adopted VSCode it took about 20 minutes - install a plug in, set some config. I had a better setup for Elixir in a text editor I had never used before in minutes, after having spend hours achieving an inferior result in Emacs.

The reason for this basically comes down to abstraction levels in a couple of places.

Language support in VSCode is at the 'plugin' level whereas in emacs you usually have to assemble several pieces. Partly this is achievable because VSCode made their own life easy pushing the hard work of language support out using the language protocol. Its widespread adoption in a relatively short time is a great benefit to everyone (emacs included).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#392

Post by dgellow »

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…

So I agree in part with your point that emacs doesn't really need to change their UI/UX (new menu, new shortcuts, etc). The Emacs model takes time to learn and is different from the rest of the world, but it works quite well once you take the time to learn it. That's not for everybody, not necessarily beginner friendly, but that's fine, emacs is a quite advanced editor environment, it has its own niche of users.

But some things make emacs just a bad editor, even for people who did spend the time to learn it. For example emacs is horrible at dealing with big files. The entire editor is stuck for seconds if you open a log file with just a few megabytes of content. Emacs performances are also really bad when compared to other editors, simple syntax highlighting or intellisense is just really, really slow.

I used emacs for years as my main editor because I was happy to have something stable, because I love lisp, and because I really like the introspection and control you get. But at some point I realized how fast and way more advanced other editors were in comparison to what I could get with a tuned emacs environment and jumped ship.

Even keeping the emacs UI and UX there is a lot of modernization that can be done under the hood to make it up to the task of the modern world.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#393

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #231
jrimbault wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add links to the SO surveys mentionned here : - 2019: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e... - 2018: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#development-e... - 2017: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-_-... - 2016: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#technology-de... - 2015: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015#tech-editor What's real…

The huge advantage of VSC: plugins can use HTML to implement whatever UI they want, from a workflow tool, to a test tool, to a Git graph view to a debugger data structure visualizer. And all that in widely-known to tons of people HTML/CSS. Never understood why other editors, like ST, didn't give more UI options (checkboxes, buttons, dropdowns, a canvas, etc) to plugin authors. Consider how clunky a lot of plugin inte…

It is the only Electron app that I tolerate willingly, but hoping that eventually React Native team at Microsoft will manage to drive a transition, somehow.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#394

Post by addicted »

cpach wrote: post #346
ashtonkem wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remain utterly perplexed by the popularity of VS Code, to me it basically does nothing well, but does a bunch of things mediocrely.

A product doesn’t need to be excellent to be popular. Take for example McDonald’s or Burger King. You will not get excellence there. But you will consistently get a filling meal to a quite good price. Or take TV-series. They don’t need to be excellent either to get lots of viewers. They just need to be available and entertaining. (I don’t mean this as a critique of VSCode. I have never used it.)

Yeah but VS Code is considered by many to also be best in class.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#395

Post by pjmlp »

ashtonkem wrote: post #302
jrimbault wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add links to the SO surveys mentionned here : - 2019: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e... - 2018: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#development-e... - 2017: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-_-... - 2016: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#technology-de... - 2015: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015#tech-editor What's real…

I remain utterly perplexed by the popularity of VS Code, to me it basically does nothing well, but does a bunch of things mediocrely.

As avid Electron hater and someone that found refuge in XEmacs, back when IDEs and UNIX did not mix, it is a matter of defaults and not everyone likes ELisp.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#396

Post by cpach »

addicted wrote: post #394
cpach wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A product doesn’t need to be excellent to be popular. Take for example McDonald’s or Burger King. You will not get excellence there. But you will consistently get a filling meal to a quite good price. Or take TV-series. They don’t need to be excellent either to get lots of viewers. They just need to be available and entertaining. (I don’t mean this as a critique of VSCode. I have never used it.)

Yeah but VS Code is considered by many to also be best in class.

To each their own :)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#397

Post by addicted »

rxhernandez wrote: post #185
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've worked in California all my life and have worked in the following industries: medical devices, scientific devices, blockchain, and plasma physics research. I am the only person I've seen use emacs. Almost every developer I've worked with either used VS Code, Visual Studio, or uVision. Everyone else used Sublime Text, Eclipse or a JetBrains IDE. I haven't even used emacs in years so I don't even know anyone that…

I mean, just go on YouTube and start clicking around in random presentations at programmer conferences.

Unless it’s an emacs related conference you will rarely see emacs being used as an editor. You will see a few VIM users sprinkled around. But if it’s a recent conference the vast majority are gonna be VSCode users.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#398

Post by doxanthropos »

Igelau wrote: post #116
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…

I have a feeling the SO numbers aren't accounting for Org Mode users.

Same feeling, especially with the number of Org users that are not programmers, but just writers. There has been a time for me, when I used vim for programming and Emacs with Org Mode for structured texts, like essays and articles, so I can imagine there being a lot of people outside of the CS and dev bubble enjoying their Org Mode and not being counted by any survey.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#400

Post by nikanj »

School-Cotton wrote: post #384
nikanj wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we're talking about different things here. You're talking about the physical restrictions of the media, I'm talking about the defaults selected by software developers.

My first computer could display dozens of colors, but defaulted to a dark background and light text. Windows 3.11 defaulted to black-on-white, on hardware from the same era. And now we're cycling back to defaulting to dark modes again.

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