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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

#251

Post by runiq »

simias wrote: post #161
u801e wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The great thing about Emacs is that everything is a buffer[...] > It frustrates me endlessly that this one simple, almost self-evident piece of Emacs wisdom failed to gain traction almost everywhere else. Even the venerable Vim drops the ball hard here, with the various "widgets" it uses in its interface which have slightly different semantics and behaviours. Perhaps I don't understand emacs well enough, but I know…

Yeah quickfix pane is a big annoyance of mine, but you also have things like :message that dumps a bunch of text to stdout that you can't meaningfully use directly. Compare that to Emacs' permanent Messages buffer that is just like any other buffer. Vim is not the worst offender by any mean, but it's definitely a lot less uniform than Emacs.

You can redirect stuff to a register with the following dance:

:redir "a :messages :redir END

Then, you can just paste from that register using "ap.

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

#252

Post by caymanjim »

Macha wrote: post #34

On vim vs neovim: My deep vim usage hasn't really changed much since it stopped being my primary editor usage 5 years ago, so this isn't the world's most informed opinion, but I've not noticed a drastic difference between vim and neovim. The one difference I've noticed and literally the only reason I've moved to neovim is that it uses XDG dirs by default and thereby clutters my home directory less. Otherwise, the two…

Vim 8 and neovim don't have any major differences. Even as a decades-long Vim power user, I can use either. neovim deserves credit for stimulating Bram to accept changes, though. Most notably Vim 8's support for async plugins. I don't think Vim 8 ever would have happened without neovim.

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

#253

Post by marcmarc »

oefrha wrote: post #5

> It also shines in areas where Emacs doesn’t: if you’re a programmer working on typical contemporary projects, mostly just wanting to get stuff done, things usually… just work. You install VSCode, open a source code file, get asked to install the extension for that particular language, and that’s it. You get smart completion, static analysis, linting, advanced debugging, refactoring tools, deep integration with git…

I use Emacs inside VSCode's terminal just for Magit. And I've configured Emacs to open directly with the magit-status buffer. It beats all the VSCode extensions I have tested.

  (when (string-match "code" default-directory)
    (magit-status)
    (delete-other-windows))
  (with-eval-after-load 'magit
    (define-key magit-status-mode-map (kbd "q") 'save-buffers-kill-terminal))

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

#254

Post by hazz99 »

spamizbad wrote: post #248
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…

Having used all 3 major platforms, for me the developer experience in Linux really is the best. And I say this as someone currently trapped on MacOS. For personal hacking I use an older Dell XPS15 w/Ubuntu and it’s like a breath of fresh air every time I dig into a project. Containers just seem to work so much faster, there’s fewer weird things, no hiccups, and things like git and Emacs scream compared to Windows. I…

I always felt that Mac struck a good balance between my programming productivity and “the rest”, because I could use some great applications that were otherwise unavailable on Linux, sadly.

What pains did you have? Docker support was a big one for me, but otherwise I haven’t encountered anything too bad.

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

#255

Post by aprdm »

submeta wrote: post #97
cannabis_sam wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m kinda in love with VSCode at the moment, even though I have used Emacs (or at least some mac customized version, maybe SpaceEmacs?) for agda-mode When I tried to go outside of the agda-mode documentation, to try to learn emacs properly, I kinda struggled to find a reliable tutorial or introduction that got me started on how emacs and the culture/ecosystem works. (Maybe it was just me who got tripped up by my unfa…

I do admit VSCode is a very polished product. Just like the other tools I mentioned (PyCharm, Kaleidoscope for diffs, Tower App as git client etc). What makes Emacs different - when you look beyond the simple looking interface - is the possibility to make the packages / plugins work together not intended by the original authors by creating hooks that change the return value of the packages, and you can tie together t…

Textmate users moved to sublime because they felt it was better, so did sublime users to vscode.

They could get a better experience with very minimal time of training or mastery, because the next tool they used was user friendly and better for them.

What’s wrong with that ? If new tools that are better and easy to use keep coming then that is something to celebrate.

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

#256

Post by pjmlp »

emptysongglass wrote: post #198
hibbelig wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very interesting. I used Emacs for a long time, but slowly got weaned off it. - I used it for email, then I had to collaborate with people who wrote "please see my comments in orange below". (Of course, they were Outlook users.) Emacs did not show that orange color, so I didn't know... Maybe these days it's possible to read Outlook emails nicely in Emacs. - I used it for development, then the Java software I wor…

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…

Back when I did my degree in the mid-90's, our labs were running a mix of LC III, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, the recent Windows 95 and terminals for the DG/UX server.

The only classes using UNIX were the ones specific about UNIX content.

A the end of the 5 years, the DG/UX server had been replaced by a Red-Hat one and most terminals, were dual booting between the university own distribution and Win95/95 OSR, some of us also had access to the freshly released Windows NT.

The large majority of students was still only booting into GNU/Linux for the UNIX related labs.

Anything related to graphics programming, Smalltalk, databases, AI, engineering tools (UML, Boochs, CASE), digital circuits, was done on Windows/Mac OS (System).

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

#257

Post by pjmlp »

inertiatic wrote: post #237
dleslie wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Actually according to Google own statistics, most of Android Studio users are on Windows.

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

#258

Post by GordonS »

cle wrote: post #244
GordonS wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In VSCode, you can selectively stage lines in files too, just select them in the diff, right-click, "stage selected" - I love being able to do that so easily within such a nice UI.

The big appeal of magit, at least for me, is that I can quickly do it with the keyboard. Open magit, press “s” on each hunk to stage it and magit moves to the next hunk, then “c c” to write a commit message, C-c C-c to commit, then “q” and I’m right back in the code. If you need to edit a hunk you press enter on it and it drops you into the file. This is much much faster than doing it with the mouse, and keeps me mor…

VSCode has an extension for that too, edamagit[0] :)

One of the big appeals of VSCode for me is the huge community around it, and the range of plugins available.

[0] https://github.com/kahole/edamagit

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

#259

Post by BeetleB »

emptysongglass wrote: post #198
hibbelig wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very interesting. I used Emacs for a long time, but slowly got weaned off it. - I used it for email, then I had to collaborate with people who wrote "please see my comments in orange below". (Of course, they were Outlook users.) Emacs did not show that orange color, so I didn't know... Maybe these days it's possible to read Outlook emails nicely in Emacs. - I used it for development, then the Java software I wor…

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…

> But these Windows jockeys I dunno I get the feeling they don't necessarily love computing?

When I was younger, I wanted to work in places that had a passion for these types of things.

Older me realized that was a bad idea. It inevitably seeps into things unrelated to doing the actual work (even performance reviews via 360 feedback). People are paid to do a job, and I've found that whether they love computing or not is mostly orthogonal. Sure, there are some that are wiz's because of it, but they're usually neutralized by those who become ideological and inflexible because of it.

Tangentially related: I'm a Linux guy - it's been my primary OS for almost 20 years now. However, at my current company, I prefer roles that don't involve Linux. The reason is they typically will not give me my own machine - I'll merely get an account on some server, with a poor window manager, and missing a lot of the nicer tools I use on my home machine, and no superuser privileges. In the last job I had, their provided Emacs was a little too old for some of the features I used, and I had to compile my own Emacs from scratch (along with tens of other dependent packages). This was time wasted for me and the company. At least on my Windows machine at work, I have Admin privileges and can make things nicer.

Paradoxically, it is because I'm a "hard core" Linux user that I prefer Windows for work. I've optimized my Linux workflow, and if my work cannot provide me my preferred tools/window managers, I might as well just use Windows.

I don't even use WSL. I use xonsh, which works fairly well on Windows. I have multiple desktops on Windows. And most importantly, I live in Emacs which for the most part works just as it would in Linux :-)

(And no, using/installing Emacs on Windows is not a pain, despite what you often hear - the last time I did it some months ago, it was literally "Download and unzip into directory and you're good to go.")

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

#260

Post by BeetleB »

inertiatic wrote: post #237
dleslie wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you suggesting that most of the existing Windows SW out there could be developed on Linux and would just run fine on Windows? Can MS reasonably develop MS Office on Linux? Can Adobe develop Lightroom on Linux and it'll just work on Windows?

For most Windows SW, the answer is no. So the analogy with Android doesn't make much sense.

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