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Let's just use Emacs

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Re: Let's just use Emacs

#51

Post by s1rech »

gecko wrote: post #23
singular wrote: post #8

I deeply love emacs, but its crustier elements really bite on a regular basis. The amount of effort required to make it non-ugly is just... unpleasant (a problem I've noticed with a lot of gnu ui stuff, both with applications and websites - appearance matters guys), the lack of namespaces in elisp is quite horrid (though it's very nice to have a lisp as the language of choice), the weird annoying regex conventions, a…

I'm with you. Making Vim look pretty involves adding ":color " to your .vimrc. Making Emacs look pretty involves installing color-theme, hopefully compiling it so it doesn't take forever to load, editing your .emacs.d/init.el since you can't customize that via customize-apropos (AFAIK), and so on. Likewise, I'm with you that the default regex implementation is...surreal, at best. Having reb-re-syntax be 'string shoul…

"standard" regex syntax for emacs would make me really happy.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#52

Post by lelele »

Emacs beats every other editor. Yes, including Vim both because you have a Vim clone inside Emacs and because once you start pushing the limits of Vim, just like the developer of Slim-Vim, you'll find yourself implementing Emacs. Vim's editing model is great - and that's what I use - but it ain't Emacs.

Emacs has its warts, but it's your best choice if you want a serious editor.

Bashing an editor because its support for programming languages whose programmers have chosen other platforms, is not fair. Comparing Emacs to Eclipse or Netbeans when it comes to Java development is not fair, just like comparing Eclipse or Netbeans to Emacs when it comes to Common Lisp development is not fair either.

Using a general-purpose editor instead of a specialized tools means that everything you learn will serve you in every other editing task.

If you are not serious about editing text, then you will be

But, truth to be told, Emacs isn't even an editor: it is an Emacs Lisp interpreter which by default runs a program to edit text.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#53

Post by lelele »

lelele wrote: post #52

Emacs beats every other editor. Yes, including Vim both because you have a Vim clone inside Emacs and because once you start pushing the limits of Vim, just like the developer of Slim-Vim, you'll find yourself implementing Emacs. Vim's editing model is great - and that's what I use - but it ain't Emacs. Emacs has its warts, but it's your best choice if you want a serious editor. Bashing an editor because its support…

Continued:

If you are not serious about editing text, then you will be served by many other editors.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#54

Post by jordan0day »

RexRollman wrote: post #19
evangineer wrote: post #5

tl;dr Use Emacs 23 to create a distraction-free writing environment using org-mode, darkroom-mode & markdown-mode.

I'm not directing this at you personally, even though I am responding to your comment, but do we really need "tl;dr" type comments here on Hacker News?

It really depends. evangineer's tl;dr comment was a decently accurate summarization of the content of the article. If you're meaning the typical "tl;dr [witty/sarcastic comment about TFA's author's shortcomings]", sure, those don't belong on hn. evangineer's comment seemed genuinely useful, though.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#55

Post by nkurz »

raganwald wrote: post #45
RexRollman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not directing this at you personally, even though I am responding to your comment, but do we really need "tl;dr" type comments here on Hacker News?

IMO, "tl;dr" is a misnomer. Or at least, I don't value such a thing as an alternative to reading the post. There's no way that one line captures the whole article, it captures that one person's main takeaway. Rather than assuming that such a thing tells me everything I need to know, or thinking it can help me understand the nuänces of the discussion, I take it as one reader's executive summary which will help me deci…

I guess the question is whether it's a misnomer or not.

I find "Too Long Don't Read" to be a dismissive attitude that I don't want here on HN, so I almost always vote down such comments (yes, including the ancestor here). But I appreciate executive summaries, and frequently vote them up to encourage their creation even if I didn't find the article itself compelling.

I realize that "TL;DR" is "just an abbreviation", but parsimony encourages me to conclude that it still connotes the words that it abbreviates and represents an attitude I do not like. Perhaps I'm reading too much into word choice, but in the end, word choice is really what makes the comments here worth reading.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#56

Post by raganwald »

nkurz wrote: post #55
raganwald wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, "tl;dr" is a misnomer. Or at least, I don't value such a thing as an alternative to reading the post. There's no way that one line captures the whole article, it captures that one person's main takeaway. Rather than assuming that such a thing tells me everything I need to know, or thinking it can help me understand the nuänces of the discussion, I take it as one reader's executive summary which will help me deci…

I guess the question is whether it's a misnomer or not. I find "Too Long Don't Read" to be a dismissive attitude that I don't want here on HN, so I almost always vote down such comments (yes, including the ancestor here). But I appreciate executive summaries, and frequently vote them up to encourage their creation even if I didn't find the article itself compelling. I realize that "TL;DR" is "just an abbreviation", b…

tl;dr: http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-...

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#57

Post by GrooveStomp »

parfe wrote: post #38
astine wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever installing software for Emacs, it's usually worth checking ELPA http://tromey.com/elpa/ (which comes installed on Emacs by default now,) to see if the package is there already. The ELPA provide both slime and clojure-mode and they work out of the box with swank-clojure. You'll still need to install Leiningen/Cake with swank-clojure separately, but there isn't much Emacs can do to help there.

Ah, but now you're not following the instructions provided by swank clojure which says to use marmalade (which is an elpa extension/replacement/clone/additional repository?) The clojure-mode available through elpa ( clojure-mode 1.7.x) is not new enough to deal with swank-clojure which needs 1.9.x (specifically I was after M-x clojure-jack-in) Plus, the elpa instructions don't include emacs23 because it allegedly com…

I can't say that I've run into this exact issue, or even exactly what the issues have been that I've run into with Emacs, but I know I've spent many hours reading instructions, following tutorials and generally just trying to get a basic emacs/lisp setup running. It's really difficult to do. I think I had a partially working Clojure setup, but then I tried to make it support Common Lisp in addition, and things completely broke down.

I'm not claiming to be a genius level programmer here, but I don't think I have to make that claim either. There's something seriously wrong with Emacs when an experienced programmer has serious issues setting up a basic development environment.

For comparison's sake, I hit "comfort-level" with Vim within two weeks, including a fully customized .vimrc, colour files and keyboard navigation. After a month of using Emacs I was somewhat comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts for basic navigation, but didn't know how to do several things that I could do in Vim. I also had no idea how to add syntax highlighting for language X - managing only to get it working for one dialect of Lisp and nothing else. Ah, and installing from ELPA had a nice tendency to show me error messages instead of actuall installing anything.

Bah, sorry for the rant. It just frustrates me when I hear about Emacs and how great it is, and I totally get on-board with it, but then it's just this fustercluck of configuration hell that never ends well.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#58

Post by jasonkester »

danssig wrote: post #39
EdiX wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of modern IDEs provide features that are pretty close to magic, compared to what emacs sports. Which modern IDEs and what features? I have used eclipse for months before deciding I was better off with emacs with eclim-mode anyway to provide the only two features of eclipse I liked: the compiler and the ability to see the members of an object (occasionally).

Refactoring. In Visual Studio I can click on any usage of a badly named class, press F2, type in the new name and it will be updated everywhere. Even the name of the file holding the class is updated.

More importantly, it won't be updated for things that aren't it. As in, you can have a class called 'i', used in 50 files, and confidently replace those usages and only those usages with another name. That's something you just plain can't pull off with Regular Expressions.

[waits for somebody to post the 4000 character Regex that actually does this correctly]

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#59

Post by mhd »

Lots of professional authors use "advanced" text editors for their stuff. And sadly, that often means old editors, because they often tend to have features that modern word processors lack (or make it easier to accept then). And of course once you get used to something...

There was a Salon article about people still using XyWrite[1]. As mentioned in the post, GRRM is one of the people[2] still using WordStar. I know that Steven Brust is using Emacs[3].

[1]: http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/25feature.html/

[2]: http://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

[3]: from the front matter of http://dreamcafe.com/firefly.html

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#60

Post by mhd »

singular wrote: post #36
gecko wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you. Making Vim look pretty involves adding ":color " to your .vimrc. Making Emacs look pretty involves installing color-theme, hopefully compiling it so it doesn't take forever to load, editing your .emacs.d/init.el since you can't customize that via customize-apropos (AFAIK), and so on. Likewise, I'm with you that the default regex implementation is...surreal, at best. Having reb-re-syntax be 'string shoul…

Yeah, both 21 -> 22 and especially 22 -> 23 were vast improvements. Appearance issues aside however, emacs is starting to feel a little like windows in a way (uh oh downvotes ahoy), in that it's lumbered by backwards compatibility considerations. Emacs with namespaces + a nicer lisp would be... something very special.

I think even with the existing lisp it would be interesting to keep the interpreter and rewrite a lot of the basic elisp modules. Another Emacs "distribution" would be quite interesting...
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