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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#431

Post by Symbiote »

konjin wrote: post #349
kungtotte wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Does emacs even offer anything like `vimtutor`? https://i.stack.imgur.com/egD8V.jpg That is the splash page that hasn't changed much since 2000. Reading the helpfully highlighted first menu entry do you think that Emacs has a tutorial? Users who can't even be bothered to read the text in front of them are not an asset to a project that doesn't charge them, they are a liability since they force the project in stupid…

> releasing a space cadet mechanical keyboard

The mechanical keyboard community will probably get there first.

From a quick search, I've found this [1], which goes a bit beyond the original Space Cadet keyboard.

[1] https://yiancar-designs.com/portfolio/hyper7/

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#432

Post by how_gauche »

gnulinux wrote: post #137
oblio wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've personally known 2 Emacs users in my ~15 years in the industry. I've worked in Europe for various startups and a bunch of corporations. Both of them used it as a sort of hobby/side editor, their main money maker was an IDE (VS, IntelliJ). I've probably worked with 500 developers, if not more. My personal impression is that Emacs is like the Yeti of programming editors. Everybody has heard about it, few claim to…

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…

Huge skew depending on what platforms you like to work on. Java or Windows people are significantly less likely to use trad Unix tools. Backend or Linux people, it's 30/30/* in my experience between vim/Emacs/everything else -- this was certainly the case at Google when I was there.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#433

Post by dcassett »

dgellow wrote: post #392
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…

I just tried opening a large (11 MB) log file on a 2008 netbook and, except for the unexpected "File is large, really open?" question, the load time seemed instantaneous (Emacs 26.3, Lubuntu 16.04).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#434

Post by new_realist »

celeritascelery wrote: post #273
new_realist wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lesson is to be the first editor with an API and plugin system. That’s the trick. It’s like QWERTY.

But the funny thing is Emacs has neither of those. There is no real "API" or "plugin system". Just code. You can copy a function off the internet and paste it into editor and now it is part of your Emacs. And you can modify any of the existing code as much as you please. That is the lesson of Emacs.

I don’t see that as a benefit, I see that as an accident. The fact that the whole thing is a hairball isn’t how editors two centuries from now will be. But it is an approximation to a modern system.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#435

Post by how_gauche »

spudlyo wrote: post #134
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the thing about Vi and Vim that has the most value in 2020 is not the software itself, but rather the keyboard-centric composable modal editing system that they popularized. Some of the growth that Emacs has enjoyed over the past several years is from folks who want the Vim style modal editing in an editor as customizable and extensible as Emacs. Emacs "distributions" such as Doom and Spacemacs cater to these…

Many of us switched to evil mode because we got RSI from incorrectly chording all the time! C-a & C-e I'm looking at you

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#436

Post by dan-robertson »

TrisMcC wrote: post #410
trenchgun wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, unfortunately doom isn’t designed to be beginner friendly. I’m personally in two minds about customize. It is quite clunky and I think it’s too easy to have your customisations overwritten by customise or something else or to have them overwritten in confusing ways. But it also gives a non-lisp interface to a lot of customisation (manually setting up the data structures can be a big pain to get right without it).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#437

Post by tonyarkles »

zarkov99 wrote: post #430
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.

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.

> There will be major new areas of innovation

I’m really curious what you mean by that, and how you see the world evolving such that Emacs, as is, won’t be able to come along with it.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#438

Post by stingraycharles »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #417
stingraycharles wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Great. Now where is the starter pack. Better with some lisp in a box etc. as well. I use lisp download with Mac because at least the key I know of. No strange key combination.

I'm sorry, I don't understand the point that you're trying to make?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#439

Post by CJefferson »

Davidbrcz wrote: post #389
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.

However, users have to first know it's an option to use. Why not add it by default, and even have a menu option to install package? VSCode will even recommend popular packages depending on file types you load.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#440

Post by CJefferson »

olejorgenb wrote: post #350
baby wrote: post #157

All of these are missing the point imo. The biggest advantage of modern IDE is the ease in trying new plugins and functionalities. Everything is a menu away, and fuzzy searching makes it easy to find out commands and learn their shortcuts. This whole process just doesn’t exist in emacs. To get a plugin, it’s a huge step (setting up custom elisp to get melpa) and then it’s a huge learning curve just to try a plugin.

> The biggest advantage of modern IDE is the ease in trying new plugins I don't think think pasting a few lines[1] into a file can be counted as a huge step? There's built-in UI [2] for installing and configuring packages. To me the overwhelming advantage of an IDE is good semantic language support out-of-the box. Even having invested quite some time in language-support configuration in emacs I usually use an IDE ins…

Pasting in a few lines is a HUGE step, because how are beginning Emacs users supposed to even know they are supposed to do that?

I see this every year with new undergraduates at uni -- they are often aware of vim, Emacs, VSCode and eclipse, and play around with them. They don't have any reason to believe Emacs and vim are good, and any step to get stuck at loses you a bunch of users.

Some students take up vim, but Emacs gets almost no use, as it doesn't (to the beginner user) seem to do anything well, and everything is hard to do.

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