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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

#271

Post by no_wizard »

axaxs wrote: post #238
Filligree wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This all highlights is a lot of choices and “do this don’t do that” kind of things I don’t like about the Linux Desktop environment, I don’t want to think about these kinds of things in my usage of a desktop. It’s a summation of everything I find lacking in the Linux desktop community

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

#272

Post by philderbeast »

adrian_b wrote: post #234
Filligree wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

"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."

This is why I stay with windows for my dev machines and either use WSL or ssh to a linux box. All my machines at home have WSL2 installed and I use it as my default shell, I never open powershell/cmd, they may as well not be on my machine, for all my development needs and use all the linux tools that I would be using if I was on a native linux desktop.

I can be up and running on a windows dev machine in the time it takes me to download VScode and open it, or I can spend weeks trying to get a linux environment to the same place. With my setup I still have all my linux toolset that I would use on a linux desktop, but I don't have to contend with all the issues of getting a linux desktop environment running.

I have run into all the same problems as the parent of this and more, I have tried different desktop environments including Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cinnaman, and XFCE. I have moved between xorg and wayland more times then I care to count, each ended up giving a different set of problems.

At the end of the day, I want to spend my time being productive and getting work done, not fighting with my OS to get the basics running. I love linux but it's just not ready to replace windows on the desktop.

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

#273

Post by spamizbad »

hazz99 wrote: post #254
spamizbad wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Docker and occasionally periodic sluggishness that includes my pointer skipping on some websites. Also, despite a faster CPU and an SSD at only 14% utilization things like emacs and Sublime seem more sluggish in terms of I/O.

I would probably benefit from a reinstall of Big Sur: this machine has gone through 3 OS upgrades.

What I really appreciate on Linux tho is workspace ordering and switching. Which I don’t think you can customize to the degree you can on Linux anymore in Big Sur.

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

#274

Post by yudlejoza »

caymanjim wrote: post #252
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.

Well after reading your comment, I thought maybe the big win for neovim might be reduced (code-size) complexity. So I checked the code sizes for latest versions of both vim and neovim (from github):

- vim is at 900k (717k without po files)

- neovim is at 677k (562k without po files)

Savings of only 25% of code size is unfortunate. It's even worse if we ignore the po data files (only 22%). I would like to see a fully-capable modern editor/IDE for under 100k of clean, readable code. Until then, the quest goes on.

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

#275

Post by dleslie »

kenbolton wrote: post #270
dleslie wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to give Doom a shot; I ignored Spacemacs because rebinding native keys and forcing evil-mode was a nonstarter for me. If I wanted to use Vim then I would, and did for a time.

"forcing evil-mode"?! Spacemacs asks if you want to use "evil", "holy", or "hybrid" mode early in the process.

Interesting, I suppose I missed that when skimming the GitHub repo readme.

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

#276

Post by philderbeast »

csomar wrote: post #266
Filligree wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are doing it wrong. If you are using Linux, use a window manager (sway or i3 are a good start). I'm running Archlinux with Nvidia and it's going great. No problems with the card, performance, and I have 3 screens of different DPI. I'm yet to try Bluetooth, though. ps: If you are using an Nvidia card, you can't, unfortunately, use Wayland.

if it doesn't work out of the box, Linux is doing it wrong.

why should I have to install an os, then change my desktop environment, then spend weeks learning keyboard shortcuts for said new environment, to get basic functionality working.

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

#277

Post by dleslie »

BeetleB wrote: post #262
dleslie wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I switched from Linux to Windows This is where many people leave Emacs. It's not that there's better tools on Windows, it's that Emacs on windows is terrible. Magit is orders of magnitude slower, for instance, and external tool integration is grossly impeded by the poor availability and quality of package management on Windows. Maintaining Emacs on windows takes considerable effort. Personally, I make do with WSL1…

> it's that Emacs on windows is terrible. I use Emacs on Linux and Windows equally. I've used Emacs on Windows at work for a decade. Other than magit, there's virtually no difference in experience between the two platforms.[1] Of course, perhaps you use a different set of features than I do. > Maintaining Emacs on windows takes considerable effort. I install it on my work laptop every 2-3 years, and for the last 5 or…

Mostly issues with lsp servers; particularly ccls and omnisharp.

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

#278

Post by dleslie »

csomar wrote: post #267
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.

Not really. Android, Web, Embedded, Networking can be done in Linux.

I meant desktop software, but even so most Android users also use Windows, and pair Android with Windows. Most Android developers use Windows.

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

#279

Post by alexisread »

For me, the value of emacs lies in the fact that it works from the cli ie. Ssh, and that I can use it productively from termux on my phone- with a Bluetooth keyboard I can do split-screen working with ease. Vscode would be considerably harder to setup.

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

#280

Post by Koshkin »

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…

> Emacs is _so slow_

That’s exactly what it felt like in 1991: “eight megabytes and constantly swapping!”

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