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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#461

Post by pseudalopex »

BeetleB wrote: post #168
tsuujin wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think adopting cua-mode as the default would go a long way towards reducing the initial friction for new users. Most of the time when I try to get people to adopt emacs, they abandon it because it feels like a huge task to relearn basic text manipulation. They never get to actually see what makes emacs good because they don't feel compelled to get past the initial bump.

But here's the question: If Emacs defaulted to CUA, how many of those people would get to see Emacs's goodness? CUA alone doesn't get you there. To do most of the things that make Emacs stand out involves a fair amount of learning (and possibly customizing). You have to put in some amount of effort before you get its benefits. While I certainly don't mind making simple things easier (e.g. CUA mode), I also see that d…

Would you have decided to learn Emacs if you didn't already use it?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#462

Post by professoretc »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #294

There's this response that VSCode is just another editor in the vein of Sublime/BBEdit/Atom, that will be killed by a newer, shinier competitor, while emacs persists. That's a great story—indeed it was told to me by a teacher who proselytized emacs. But what if you're wrong? What if VSCode is a massive challenger? For one, no editor has had the backing of a major tech corporation. Sure, XCode and Visual Studio exist,…

> Stuff like multiple cursors are a few elisp lines away...

Last time I tried to get multiple cursors/selections working, it was definitely more than that, and the result was awkward and cumbersome at best. The problem is that everything else is written assuming that there's one cursor and one selection, so you can't really make a multiple cursor system in Emacs that integrates with everything else; it remains a special case.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#463

Post by twblalock »

Davidbrcz wrote: post #460
CJefferson wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t you see why that’s a problem? Multiple package managers, with none enabled out of the box, and poor usability?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#464

Post by pjmlp »

ashtonkem wrote: post #456
pjmlp wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VSCode has the power of free beer, and most major plugins are done by Microsoft, Red-Hat, Google and friends, while most InteliJ goodies are available online on the commercial license.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#465

Post by anamax »

I've been using Emacs since it was a set of teco macros. (Yes, there was an Emacs before Emacs lisp.)

Apart from some settings to keep a keyboard-grabbing co-worker happy several jobs ago, I haven't had a config file in decades.

My experience has been that whenever I need something news, Emacs had it several years before. The most that I've ever had to do is update to a version that isn't 10 years old, and that hasn't happened for a long time. (I keep computers for a long time and the first thing I do with a new computer is install Emacs. I rarely update it.)

I've looked at other text editors. They seem to be better on things that don't much matter to me. They often require configuration to do things that Emacs does out of the box.

Yes, there are some things that I'd like to be different and about every year or so I think about adding a config file, but then I ask myself whether I'm going to propagate that config file everywhere I use Emacs. So far the answer has been "no".

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#466

Post by jojohohanon »

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.

well, the same can be said of Swiss martial cutlery...

To connect this a bit back to emacs, I think the big contribution VSC has made is to popularize the language-server concept, which decouples the UI from the automagical autocomplete and context-sensitive documentation we expect from IDEs.

Emacs's lsp-mode and (I'm told, not yet tried) eglot make it possible to use emacs to productively write java, something I won't attempt without tooling support.

The LSP interface, like slime, enables a whole class of interaction, rather than re-implementing the language support for each languge, like in days of yore.

That truly is a modern coding practice, brought to emacs.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#467

Post by guenthert »

oaiey wrote: post #319
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…

Same here. 20 years, Europe, corporate and open source projects, zero emacs users. Seen vim, notepad++, sublime, uedit, atom and vscode. And all types of fat ides

Yeah, we European Emacs users went to the states to earn real money :^)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#468

Post by nobody9999 »

CJefferson wrote: post #441
nobody9999 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The keybindings need to be fixed. CUA has been the norm for what, 35 years at this point. M-x cua-mode Oh, and you're welcome.

If it's so easy to switch, and a beginner is more likely to want it on, why not set it on by default and let everyone who wants it off put it in their config?

>If it's so easy to switch, and a beginner is more likely to want it on, why not set it on by default and let everyone who wants it off put it in their config?

Why is it important to prioritize beginners over experienced users?

I can understand that point of view in the context of a new product, or one that is struggling to make money from an existing product.

But last I checked, Emacs is free software, with no impetus for increasing "user counts" or "market share," since "revenue" from "sales" of GNU Emacs remains the same regardless of either.

Perhaps you might ask the fine folks over at Lugaru Software, ltd.[0] why they haven't done so.

Espeially since they've been selling their emacs-based Epsilon Programmer's Editor since 1984[1][2], which, incidentally, was before GNU Emacs was available for any desktop computers.

[0] https://www.lugaru.com/

[1] https://www.lugaru.com/history.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_(text_editor)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#469

Post by JoshTriplett »

konjin wrote: post #353
andeee23 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A community can be technically capable without being full of elitists. Just look at Clojure.

It helps to have a lot of very visible brackets when people sign up, it scares away the majority who won't cut it. Emacs is in that unfortunate position that you can learn the shortcuts and 'use' it for months before you even see your first bracket and end up thinking the brackets are the problem, not you. The number of times I've heard people demand the scripting language change to python...

And that exact attitude also drives away people who could handle and enjoy Lisp just fine, just not unwelcoming elitism.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#470

Post by guenthert »

dan-robertson wrote: post #442
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 think it hugely depends on the programming languages one uses (or used to use), as well as personal history. For example basically everyone learning lisp was, for a long time, encouraged to use emacs (I think this is still the case for Common Lisp but I’m not sure about other varieties). This makes for a pretty unpleasant lisp learning curve as most people are not already familiar with emacs. Other functional langu…

You're going way back in time there though. I started like the other kids in my generation with BASIC on 8bit home computers, but my first paying programming job (early nineties on a shared Unix workstation which crashed about once a day, much more reliable than the Windows PCs of that era), I was given the vi cheat sheet. At first I thought that was worse than CP/M, but it did grew on me quickly. At home I used Emacs on a PC with 8MiB RAM (and it wasn't constantly swapping). Emacs was perfectly usable there, but when using a 9600baud serial terminal, vi was snappier.
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