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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#451

Post by rcdwealth »

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.

I don't think so. Emacs developers are quite friendly and accept opinions and advices of anybody, feel free to write to developers: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#452

Post by d0mine »

xrd wrote: post #39

I've been an emacs user for more than 20 years. Is it just me, or is this article completely missing the point? I've switched to VS Code because I can install extensions so easily. Getting a theme installed is not my concern at all. With emacs, I'm still never sure how to get elpa (or why not melpa) to work correctly. And, modern packages for react never seem to be available there anyway. I'm still astounded package…

YMMV, out of hundreds emacs packages I use, I remember issues installing exactly one package. For comparison, I easily remember issues with more than deb package on Ubuntu and I consider apt-get ecosystem as pretty reliable.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#453

Post by ashtonkem »

rkangel wrote: post #391
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.

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 get that, but VS code plugins are generally mediocre at best. If I want a “install plugin and it works” editor, I use IntelliJ, which does a better job at basically everything.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#454

Post by ashtonkem »

oaiey wrote: post #321
ashtonkem wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language? Some languages have Emacs usage in the range of 0%, such as Java and C#.

That is very fair question. In my experience of html, css, js/ts, C#, VB, java, php, c/c++ and python I have never seen any emacs users in 20 years. I think it is really a language and region cut going maybe back to the universities supporting lisp or something else

Maybe it’s a region thing. Back when I did Python it was fairly popular, but VS Code appears to have largely taken over in that language, much to me continual confusion.

Most of the other languages you listed have extremely poor Emacs integration, both for cultural reasons (C# devs tended to be on Windows), and because some of those languages are so dominated by other IDEs that nobody bothered to write a good emacs extension. Java is a great example of this; the IntelliJ experience in Java is just so good, nobody managed to come anywhere close in Emacs, which created a self reinforcing cycle.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#455

Post by ashtonkem »

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.

I find that assertion utterly perplexing.

I mean, to each their own. Someone else using an editor I dislike doesn’t harm me in any way. But if someone told me that VS Code was “best in class” for anything other than a language I have never touched and have no knowledge of, I’d look at them like they’d just asserted that the sky is green.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#456

Post by ashtonkem »

pjmlp wrote: post #395
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.

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.

Sure, but it’s not like the choice is between Emacs and VS Code alone. I for one find IntelliJ to be far superior to VS Code for the languages I use. Especially since search and autocomplete actually work, which it doesn’t do in VS Code.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#457

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

Well, as sad as it is for someone like me, who lives and breathes Emacs, there are already signs showing. There's still no decent support for C++, even in community. If you have a patience to bash together a number of elisp packages and write some extra config to paper over the idiosyncrasies of your project, then sure, you'll get something mostly working. But then just downloading Visual Studio will get you 90% there.

There's support for language servers (and I consider the existence of LSP to be a new hope for Emacs and Vim to stay relevant in the future), but it's arguably so-so.

As good as the Emacs community is, it still has pretty limited amount of time and manpower to throw at problems. I feel the wider development world starts to outpace this capacity.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#458

Post by xrd »

d0mine wrote: post #452
xrd wrote: post #39

I've been an emacs user for more than 20 years. Is it just me, or is this article completely missing the point? I've switched to VS Code because I can install extensions so easily. Getting a theme installed is not my concern at all. With emacs, I'm still never sure how to get elpa (or why not melpa) to work correctly. And, modern packages for react never seem to be available there anyway. I'm still astounded package…

YMMV, out of hundreds emacs packages I use, I remember issues installing exactly one package. For comparison, I easily remember issues with more than deb package on Ubuntu and I consider apt-get ecosystem as pretty reliable.

How and what do you use for package management on emacs?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#459

Post by TeMPOraL »

TylerE wrote: post #211
xfer wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can learn about the magic and wield it.

I am a craftsman, not a tool maker.

A craftsman makes his own tools. Not all of them, but some, whenever they see a possible improvement, or their work is novel.

It's the assembly line worker that doesn't, and sticks to using the company-provided "industry standard" tooling. The assembly line worker doesn't need to make custom tools, because he/she has no agency - the worker's role is just to close a feedback loop in a well-defined industrial process of mass manufacturing a fully specified end product.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#460

Post by Davidbrcz »

CJefferson wrote: post #439
Davidbrcz wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it's not core emacs. Core emacs uses ELPA, which has fewer packages.
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