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The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

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Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#231

Post by tjalfi »

indy wrote: post #41
elagost wrote: post #9

This is really well written and researched but confuses me. Do most people not do this - make choices based on values (and constantly re-evaluate those choices in the face of new information)? When I decide to use software, move to a new location, purchase cereal at the grocery store, buy music, and a variety of other daily activities, these are choices I make based on my values. Many times I end up picking something…

Most people are creatures of habit. Once they make a decision ("this is my brand of toothpaste") they tend to stick to that in spite of any new information.

This reminds me of a quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann!.

"When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind - nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again - I had the solution to that problem."

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#232

Post by Steltek »

moocowtruck wrote: post #80
mercer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use VSCode for my day to day coding, so I have nothing against it, but explain to me how I can 'do' Magit and the like in VSCode...?

https://github.com/kahole/edamagit

I use Edamagit but I still find myself popping open emacs+magit sometimes. I guess I haven't completed the assimilation into VSCode yet.

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#233

Post by na85 »

craigsmansion wrote: post #221
na85 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When you finally learn to master and config Emacs, Should be "if" and not "when", in my opinion. It's so incredibly frustrating to watch emacs from the outside. Maybe they don't want emacs to become popular? Certainly given the state of Hurd that could be true, and perhaps merely the fact that a Free editor exists is enough for them. For me, I really like emacs. It's great. But it has flaws/warts/roadblocks that rou…

[Never mind]

Whether intentionally or not you seem to have directly reinforced the argument I was making.

>Why from the outside? You're, quite literally, one command away from being on the inside: "M-x ielm"

I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. By opening with what I'm sure is an oh-so-witty commit like this you signal that you aren't going to engage honestly in this debate.

>Emacs is very popular amongst emacs-users

It's like you didn't even read what I wrote, and instead you've constructed a straw man to argue with. I think it's pretty obvious I was using "more popular" to refer to "attracting new emacs users".

>GNU nano, GNU ed, GNU moe, GNU emacs

Again, not sure what the point of just listing a bunch of editors is. Your entire comment is pretty much one giant non-sequitur.

>Obviously the emacs community is going to care about software freedom. I don't understand how anyone would expect differently.

Again, it's like you didn't want to respond to what I actually wrote. You seem to be responding to what you wish I wrote.

I never implied that I expect the Emacs project not to care about freedom at all, merely that I think it's silly to prioritize freedom at the expense of everything else. Is Free Software of any utility if nobody uses it? Or is it merely intellectual masturbation?

The default emacs experience is clunky, ugly, and dated. It turns people away. This is an objective truth.

I categorically reject the idea that polished software is mutually exclusive of free software. I think emacs would do a better job of promoting the use of free software if emacs had a better onboarding experience and was more user-friendly, and I think it can achieve this goal without betraying the principles of Freedom on which it was founded. And yet at any suggestion of this, RMS and the other grognards are content to ridicule and belittle (just as you have done here) rather than engage honestly in the arguments being presented.

>The very least one can do when addressing perceived flaws/warts/roadblocks, is to accompany them with a snippet of code, so users/developers can actually experience these suggested improvements.

Are you seriously suggesting I should post a patch to HN? It's comments like this that leave the very distinct impression you're just trying to shield yourself from any criticism rather than have to confront viewpoints that challenge the status quo of the emacs project.

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#234

Post by adrian_b »

Filligree wrote: post #218
emptysongglass wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people are moving Linux --> Windows. At the company I work for everything is native to Linux--I am floored by the number of interns we get who are using Windows (it's all of them). We have an intake script for getting them up on WSL2 with our stack on top but man these graduates are CompSci people and they did 4 plus years of CompSci using Windows? I can only imagine the pain. Or rather, I know…

Speaking as someone who regularly attempts to switch back to Linux, I did that because the Windows desktop is a genuinely nicer experience. In no particular order... - The traditional start menu / taskbar is genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. OS X is also genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. I'd take either over Gnome. - The Linux desktop environment is laggy. This is difficu…

While I have to use occasionally Windows for work, on my own desktops and laptops I have used only Linux for almost 20 years and I have not seen any of the problems encountered by you.

Your problem with Wayland I could not have seen, because I have not attempted to use Wayland yet, but most of the others seem to be Gnome related.

I have never used Gnome, as I have never liked what I have briefly seen in the Linux distributions that default to Gnome.

Perhaps that is the reason why I did not have your problems.

(While KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows was at that time, I have been hugely disappointed by the unbelievable regressions in KDE 4, so I have also abandoned KDE at that time and I am using XFCE since then. XFCE imposes very little restrictions on the desktop applications, allowing the free mixing of graphical applications that were designed for either Gnome or KDE, so I can choose whichever works better.)

Linux is much more diverse than other operating systems and there are a lot of alternatives for most components.

Almost all complaints that I have seen about Linux, were in fact not applicable to Linux in general, but only to certain specific configurations that I would not attempt to use, because I agree that they are bad.

Unfortunately, choosing a Linux configuration good for a certain purpose and for certain hardware frequently requires either a lot of experience or the wasting of much time with trying various variants.

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#235

Post by chimprich »

ashtonian2 wrote: post #87
mercer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use VSCode for my day to day coding, so I have nothing against it, but explain to me how I can 'do' Magit and the like in VSCode...?

Literally anything you can do in emcas there is an extension for or at least one in dev. Vscode will outgrow emcas given its critics mass and momentum.

Genuine question: is there one for regional undo? That is, can you select an arbitrary region of a file and step back through modifications that have been made to that section of the file only?

This is just one "killer feature" of Emacs for me that I have yet to come across in other editors/IDEs (maybe I just haven't looked hard enough!)

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#236

Post by inertiatic »

Filligree wrote: post #218
emptysongglass wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people are moving Linux --> Windows. At the company I work for everything is native to Linux--I am floored by the number of interns we get who are using Windows (it's all of them). We have an intake script for getting them up on WSL2 with our stack on top but man these graduates are CompSci people and they did 4 plus years of CompSci using Windows? I can only imagine the pain. Or rather, I know…

Speaking as someone who regularly attempts to switch back to Linux, I did that because the Windows desktop is a genuinely nicer experience. In no particular order... - The traditional start menu / taskbar is genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. OS X is also genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. I'd take either over Gnome. - The Linux desktop environment is laggy. This is difficu…

That's very weird.

I'm using both, Linux for 8 hours at work and then Windows for my personal computing needs.

I live mostly in the browser. Both OSes basically work. I can move my windows around lag free, entirely, always.

Bluetooth audio works. This 4k screen I'm using now for the first time on Linux just worked.

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#237

Post by inertiatic »

dleslie wrote: post #211
emptysongglass wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people are moving Linux --> Windows. At the company I work for everything is native to Linux--I am floored by the number of interns we get who are using Windows (it's all of them). We have an intake script for getting them up on WSL2 with our stack on top but man these graduates are CompSci people and they did 4 plus years of CompSci using Windows? I can only imagine the pain. Or rather, I know…

Most of the world uses Windows. If you're building software targeted at most of the world it makes sense to use Windows.

Most of the world uses Android to run their browsers, right? Should I develop on Android?

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#238

Post by axaxs »

Filligree wrote: post #218
emptysongglass wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people are moving Linux --> Windows. At the company I work for everything is native to Linux--I am floored by the number of interns we get who are using Windows (it's all of them). We have an intake script for getting them up on WSL2 with our stack on top but man these graduates are CompSci people and they did 4 plus years of CompSci using Windows? I can only imagine the pain. Or rather, I know…

Speaking as someone who regularly attempts to switch back to Linux, I did that because the Windows desktop is a genuinely nicer experience. In no particular order... - The traditional start menu / taskbar is genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. OS X is also genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. I'd take either over Gnome. - The Linux desktop environment is laggy. This is difficu…

Vanilla Gnome is terrible. You must embrace extensions. At first I loathed the idea, but it's just become part of life. One for a dock, one for weather, one for tray icons, and if you prefer, one for top menu that gives you your more traditional start menu type thing.

Or, there's always Xfce or KDE, of course.

AMD drivers are now open source and finally working well. Nvidia is not, granted.

Bluetooth audio works well, even on rando cheap noname devices I've tried. My primary speakers are some Logitech bluetooth pair.

Don't use wayland. Run gnome in xorg mode.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say I'm blown away by how much -just- works on Linux. My printer is autodetected on the network and print. My wireless mouse works. My monitor runs at 1440p.

If you're open to it, I always suggest using a modern distro that stays up to date because you get better hardware support(if using new hardware, that is). Typically, that means something Arch based, but there are distros around making that simple.

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#239

Post by mtalantikite »

harrygeez wrote: post #156
diragon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naah, not really. I've done that emacs exercise countless of times over a few decades and now I use vscode. I don't feel like I'm missing much.

I'm on the same boat as you. I love Emacs, the uniform keybindings and especially Magit, I thought I could never use anything else until I started working with TypeScript React in my current job, which Emacs has very bad support for. The funny thing is: I don't even consider VSCode a superior text editor, it's just that Emacs is _so slow_. I used Emacs back then because compared to many other editors and IDE it allow…

I had a similar experience recently, where I had to spend some time working in TypeScript on a React front-end and my emacs really was falling over unfortunately. Tried tide, tried the LSP, but ultimately I found myself in VSCode in order to make the deadline. Turns out there is a pretty great magit layer in VSCode (https://github.com/kahole/edamagit), and as a former long term vim user that had been using spacemacs, a great spacemacs-like bundle for VSCode (https://github.com/VSpaceCode/VSpaceCode).

It’s the first time I’ve actually felt like I could drop emacs if I wanted to, I actually was enjoying the setup.

Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

#240

Post by ilaksh »

Jugurtha wrote: post #118
ilaksh wrote: post #74

I use vim frequently. But I think that people should realize and be able to admit that vim and emacs are outdated. They can still be useful especially for people like me who have a sunk cost in learning them. But the honest evaluation is outdated. For example, the core modal interface of vim is related to historical limitations at the time it was created. http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.htm..…

> My current favorites are Jupyter Notebooks and the combination of gedit with fish shell. Do you mind elaborating on what you're doing with notebooks?

Just to be clear, those are two separate cases: 1) Jupyter and 2) gedit + fish. Two different types of programming projects.

I am using Jupyter Notebooks for what they are normally used for: machine learning experiments.

But it might be a good idea to try to expand to other use cases since its such a powerful concept.

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