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Toward a “modern” Emacs

lwn.net

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#421

Post by eigenhombre »

cozzyd wrote: post #310
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…

Strange, I feel like I'm in a minority among physicists for using vim instead of emacs. Many new students seem to prefer GUI editors though...

Makes me happy to hear some physicists still use Emacs.

- Former physicist turned programmer

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#422

Post by NateEag »

baby wrote: post #212
dybber wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Emacs for around 14 years now, I rarely touch my configuration. There's lines in my config today, that I haven't changed since I first learned to use Emacs and set it up (e.g. keybindings, tab-width, etc.). I like that kind of stability, makes it possible to move my focus away from the editor, towards the problems I'm trying to solve.

Not a downside necessarily, but I can imagine that life would get very stressful if you're ever to lose your custom configuration for emacs.

And that's why you keep it in version control and mirror it to, say, Gitlab and Github.

Could burn an archive to an archival-quality DVD, too.

I suspect I'm more likely to die spontaneously than have all of those and my local machine fail spontaneously.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#423

Post by ordu »

zarkov99 wrote: post #102
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Emacs for 33 of those 40+ years, and I agree with that until the word "without". You don't mean "modernization". You mean "without it changing". And the answer is yes, it will die out.

What are some of the changes you would want to see?

The article on lwn pretty much nails it. The discoverability of features would be great. I have been used emacs for ~20 years and I had finally switched to VSCode after I was stuck for half an hour finding a way to type single-quote in org-mode. I had found a way first time in the past, but then I completely forgot how to do it and was forced to search again. (It something to do with locales, it is traditional for Russian to use and > quotes instead of ' and ", so someone made it default when LANG=ru_RU.UTF8, so one types ' but gets . But how it was done? How to undo this damage to emacs? Now I cannot remember it one more time, but luckily I do not use emacs now so it doesn't matter anymore).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#424

Post by daedalus_f »

Fishysoup wrote: post #312
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…

I would like it to be multithreaded and for Org mode to have some more UI features (and I think a lot of people would - at least the former). From what I understand it's really hard to do that by building on the existing C base ELisp base. Unpopular opinion: we should write the "new" Emacs in Julia (and maybe Rust).

As for Julia, I mean I like the matlab like syntax for data science use, and I’m sure its great for prototyping computation heavy algorithms where run time dwarfs the JIT lag, but its surely not suitable for a text editor, at least at present. I’ve tried Julia several times as new versions of have been released and for simple scripting tasks that required a few external libraries I’ve always ended up rewriting the script in Python because the scripts were faster to run from start-up, more consistent in performance (no unexpected pauses to re- pre-compile) and simpler (no messing around getting packagecompiler.jl working etc).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#425

Post by how_gauche »

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 know dude, I've had new grads recently wholesale switch to Emacs just after watching me work for five minutes. "Holy crap, why are you editing these programs so much faster than me?"

Completely agree that out-of-the-box Emacs experience is NOT where it's at. I have twenty years invested in tweaking it to minimize keystrokes and operate faster for my use cases. Just remember that Emacs is not actually an editor, it's a Lisp Machine OS you can use to build an editor out of parts

Also keep in mind that alternate distros like Spacemacs are the way Emacs has to evolve, because making drastic structural changes to defaults would break so many user scripts and packages -- the things that provide most of the long-term value proposition of using Emacs in the first place.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#426

Post by phaer »

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…

> 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.

I started using Emacs ~2008 and it's longevity has been a major factor in my decision, as I thought it would likely be usable for the next 30 years as well and help me to avoid changing environments every few years with each new hype.

Later I found a talk which expresses the same sentiment in it's title: "The Editor of a Lifetime" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VADudzQGvU8&t=1823s

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#428

Post by mkovach »

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…

The only version of Emacs I ever used regularly was (Lucid|X)emacs. According to folks on the Lucid side working with RMS was difficult[1] to say the least. In the end, Xemacs lost traction (and development) and I moved on from Emacs, it just didn't suit how I wanted to work well.

Emacs has the developers to correct the problems but they need to let go over a 40 year old vision and evolve a bit.

[1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html - Of course, this is biased towards to Lucid side of the story. But I remember following this.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#429

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#430

Post by zarkov99 »

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.

Well I care, and so should anyone who would like to see Emacs live on for another 40 years. There will be major new areas of innovation, that will require massive amounts of work, and without an energetic and large community Emacs will not be able to adapt.
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