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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#401

Post by edw »

spudlyo wrote: post #146
edw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I basically gave up on Emacs and switched to a combination of VS Code and old-school vi for Go and everything else, respectively. Finding an effing theme that allowed me to program in Go in a terminal without making LSP’s overlays unreadable was nearly impossible. I spent days trying to make this work. I’ve used Emacs since 1991.

This is possible, but it's a bit of a pain. One problem is that the popular themes cater to GUI Emacs users where you have 24-bit color depth. On the terminal this gets approximated to one of the available 256 colors, and this approximation is often not great. This makes themes on the terminal look weird sometimes. With some work, you can enable 24-bit color support in TTY emacs, which solves this problem. Combine th…

I wanted a monochrome terminal but was willing to tolerate traditional ANSI color. Once you start with 24 bit color you may as well start using a VNC client.

What sapped my will to live was the impossibility of doing a C-u C-x = on the overlays to determine how their contents were styled, forcing me to go into the source code of a ton of different packages to go fishing for face names to coerce to visible values.

Yes it’s possible but it’s insane. Emacs carries around all of this terminal baggage but many module developers seem to have forgotten about terminal users. Additionally, theming is conceptually broken in that it creates an MxN problem with themes and modes’ face names. This could be solved if modes stopped with the proliferation of mode-specific face names but good luck with that.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#402

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

I don't think nice color schemes are the point - although I do highly appreciate them.

I've tried Spacemacs and it's pretty nice. Using it in vi-mode, it provides multicursors that are far more advanced than in any other editor I know. Also it has a sidebar.

On the other hand for me Spacemacs is pretty buggy (macOS + Linux), I sometimes have to redo commands. Some important vim shortcuts are not implemented and the sidebar is also not always working as it should. Therefore I refrain from adding more plugins to the mix.

Experienced Emacs tend to not use the Spacemacs theme and are working with solid configurations. Maybe a rock-solid default configuration would work.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#403

Post by stingraycharles »

School-Cotton wrote: post #382
hardwaregeek wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not that black and white. A simple hint when installing or downloading, “hey did you know that there are these starter packs?” would already do wonders.

It’s not that people are suggesting emacs tries to be everything to everyone; heck, by pure virtue of its extensibility, emacs is actually the one editor that could potentially be everything to everyone. But a simple startup screen, “hey, it looks like this is your first time using emacs. what kind of defaults would you like?” would do wonders and existing users would be entirely unaffected.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#404

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

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.

It's an investment and the payback is considerable. I can start up emacs in any environment and it works the same. I could go back 20 years and use emacs without trouble.

Also I can move around in emacs and do stuff with macros that has saved me a lot of time. And emacs rarely has problems, unlike visual studio, which crashes occasionally and is permanently sending my dual-core to 100% of both.

Emacs refactoring, heh, not so good... So I use both, do main editing in emacs.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#405

Post by aldanor »

School-Cotton wrote: post #382
hardwaregeek wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If new people don't use it, both its user base and developer list will monotonically decrease until both reach zero which may happen sooner than it could've been otherwise.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#406

Post by msla »

Qwertious wrote: post #315
robocat wrote: post #13

I love this: “Or, as Richard Stallman put it”: ‘It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.’ It is interesting to see a comment that is 100% at odds with the brutal evolution of ideas that occurs in a good ecology of software. If the same mindset applies to the rest of emacs then they really stand no chance or real progress. (edit: the rest of emacs, and not j…

Yes, what really pisses me off about emacs is the mind-numbing arrogance - they're basically saying "people ought not to have broke from our button scheme, so we'll just ignore it to our users' detriment!". There's this implicit argument that convention is some sort of monarchist hierarchy where the successor mustbenamed as heir first, and what convention is most common is somehow irrelevant. It's infuriating.

That isn't Emacs, that's Stallman, who is known to be stubborn.

It already caused a major fork, XEmacs, which used to be important, I suppose, but a combination of GNU Emacs catching up with the features XEmacs people wanted and XEmacs simply sputtering out has made GNU Emacs the last full Emacs standing again.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#407

Post by fennecfoxen »

stingraycharles wrote: post #318
hardwaregeek wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I think this is on point. The core maintainers are always kind of resisting changing things to more sane defaults, which is a pity. I recently had the experience of a friend of mine, a data scientist, tell me he tried to use emacs but just couldn’t get it to work. When I asked how he installed it, he was like “well I just downloaded it, and started tinkering a bit with my config”. After which he just ditched it,…

A little messaging about starter-pack options, in the default welcome screens, would go a long way.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#408

Post by trenchgun »

blablabla123 wrote: post #402
hardwaregeek wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think nice color schemes are the point - although I do highly appreciate them. I've tried Spacemacs and it's pretty nice. Using it in vi-mode, it provides multicursors that are far more advanced than in any other editor I know. Also it has a sidebar. On the other hand for me Spacemacs is pretty buggy (macOS + Linux), I sometimes have to redo commands. Some important vim shortcuts are not implemented and the s…

Doom emacs is probably the state of the art emacs starter pack now. A lot faster than spacemacs, more stable etc.

A rock solid default config made out of Doom emacs might work.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#409

Post by yoz-y »

aldanor wrote: post #405
School-Cotton wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If new people don't use it, both its user base and developer list will monotonically decrease until both reach zero which may happen sooner than it could've been otherwise.

I think that's okay. I see that many younger colleagues and friends no longer use Emacs or Vim, preferring editors with Textmate heritage (sublime, vs code and so on).

I think the middle ground during the transition would be the worst of both worlds and there is no shame to no longer be on the top if the times change.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#410

Post by TrisMcC »

trenchgun wrote: post #408
blablabla123 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think nice color schemes are the point - although I do highly appreciate them. I've tried Spacemacs and it's pretty nice. Using it in vi-mode, it provides multicursors that are far more advanced than in any other editor I know. Also it has a sidebar. On the other hand for me Spacemacs is pretty buggy (macOS + Linux), I sometimes have to redo commands. Some important vim shortcuts are not implemented and the s…

Doom emacs is probably the state of the art emacs starter pack now. A lot faster than spacemacs, more stable etc. A rock solid default config made out of Doom emacs might work.

I don't think a starter pack that completely disables the "Customize" interface would be a good candidate for default.

https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/a2a5038b970df20e...

"Doom doesn't support `customize' and it never will. It's a clumsy interface"

I find the Customize interface very useful.

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