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Let's just use Emacs

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Re: Let's just use Emacs

#71

Post by pmr_ »

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 really don't see what namespaces would achieve. The way it is I can look at something and explicitly see which module it belongs to (e.g. dired-next-line, image-next-line vs. org-agenda-next-line).

In my experience namespaces only introduce notation to distinguish modules but so does a simple convention.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#72

Post by autarch »

mhd wrote: post #59

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…

Steven Brust worked as a programmer before he was a full time novelist, according to his son, who is also a programmer.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#73

Post by evangineer »

parfe wrote: post #63
eeperson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs 23 does not come with ELPA installed. The next version of Emacs (24) is going to have a package manager included by default (it is based on ELPA) that will allow you to use Marmalade. If you are using Emacs 23 (which you probably are if you installed from your distro's package manager) then you should use ELPA. If you installed Emacs from a nightly build then you can use Marmalade.

Sorry, you're right. I was confused by the ELPA page which lists instructions only for emacs 21 and 22, but says elpa will be included in the next version of Emacs. (edit: now I can't find where I read this. I'm incredibly confused.) Now I'm confused about how my other installs have it working.

I've suffered from the same confusion, on finding that ELPA no longer worked for me with Aquamacs 2.0, I tried using the Marmalade repo with no joy.

Quite frustrating as I was using ELPA in my fork of the Aquamacs Emacs Starter Kit: https://github.com/evangineer/aquamacs-emacs-starter-kit

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#74

Post by singular »

grandalf wrote: post #65
singular wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed emacs 23 is a vast improvement, however the UI elements i.e. menubar, scrollbars, etc. still suck, as does the initial splash screen. OS X is better than linux for defaults, but no matter what you do have to work hard to get a decent appearance.

I just turn off all the chrome and use it as a text editor.

Me too, but my point is that you have to do that to begin with.

If anyone is interested, this gets rid of the splash screen + chrome:-

    (setq inhibit-splash-screen t)
    (if (fboundp 'scroll-bar-mode) (scroll-bar-mode -1))
    (if (fboundp 'tool-bar-mode) (tool-bar-mode -1))
    (if (fboundp 'menu-bar-mode) (menu-bar-mode -1))

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#75

Post by ajross »

raganwald wrote: post #18

Articles about why anything you can do in a "simpler" text editor can and should be done in emacs strongly resemble articles about why anything you can do in a less powerful programming language can and should be done in Lisp. I don't think it's a coïncidence.

I think that's a little unfair. Programming languages are tools for your head: you're always thinking when using them. That means that the impedance mismatch of "switching" between languages is fairly low, and scales with the problem. So pick the tool for the job, and don't sweat the simple stuff.

Editors are tools for your fingers. There are huge penalties to being good with an editor if you are forced to use a different one. I use emacs for writing things other than code (email, web forms like this very comment) not just because I think it's better than whatever built-in editor is provided for the task, but because it hurts so badly to use something other than emacs.

The converse point is that there are huge benefits available if you give up all your existing editing tools and spend some time (and yeah, it can be months to years) getting really, really good at just one. Really, that one has to be emacs or vim, which are the only editors out there designed to scale to this level of specialization.

It always makes me sad to watch other people work and see how much time they spend fighting with their editor, moving their hand around to the arrows or mouse or function keys, fighting with the presentation logic of their word processor to get the page break on the right spot on the screen, etc... It doesn't have to be that way.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#76

Post by raganwald »

ajross wrote: post #75
raganwald wrote: post #18

Articles about why anything you can do in a "simpler" text editor can and should be done in emacs strongly resemble articles about why anything you can do in a less powerful programming language can and should be done in Lisp. I don't think it's a coïncidence.

I think that's a little unfair. Programming languages are tools for your head: you're always thinking when using them. That means that the impedance mismatch of "switching" between languages is fairly low, and scales with the problem. So pick the tool for the job, and don't sweat the simple stuff. Editors are tools for your fingers. There are huge penalties to being good with an editor if you are forced to use a diff…

What's unfair? That the arguments made by emacs users with respect to less powerful editors resemble the arguments made by Lisp users with respect to less powerful programming languages?

I'm not taking a stand on the argument one way or the other, just pointing out how similar they sound. You said:

"There are huge benefits available if you give up all your existing editing tools and spend some time (and yeah, it can be months to years) getting really, really good at just one. Really, that one has to be emacs or vim, which are the only editors out there designed to scale to this level of specialization."

How does this differ from:

"There are huge benefits available if you give up all your existing languages and spend some time (and yeah, it can be months to years) getting really, really good at just one. Really, that one has to be Lisp, which is the only language out there designed to scale to this level of specialization."

Whether you agree or disagree with the sentiments, haven't you heard people expressing those sentiments in much the same terms?

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#77

Post by pandakar »

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…

And Dave Abrahams is now actively developing el-get, which I prefer to ELPA. http://github.com/dimitri/el-get

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#78

Post by tedunangst »

raganwald wrote: post #18

Articles about why anything you can do in a "simpler" text editor can and should be done in emacs strongly resemble articles about why anything you can do in a less powerful programming language can and should be done in Lisp. I don't think it's a coïncidence.

I'm not sure if you're making a general point, but I don't think it's universally true. Anything you can do on a netbook can be done faster and more accurately on a supercomputer. Working backwards from why we don't all use supercomputers, we can probably figure out why not everyone uses lisp and emacs.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#79

Post by jlongster »

I resonate somewhat with the gripes about Emacs' crustiness. But on the other hand, I don't understand the complaints about it being ugly. I haven't heard that for a while. I'd like to think that my Emacs is quite pretty:

http://jlongster.com/s/emacs.png

There are things Emacs can do which VIM will never do. And vice-versa. They are separate editors embracing separate philosophies.

Lastly, keep in mind that this is 40 year old software, and considering that it's done a great job keeping up with the times.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#80

Post by akkartik »

raganwald wrote: post #18

Articles about why anything you can do in a "simpler" text editor can and should be done in emacs strongly resemble articles about why anything you can do in a less powerful programming language can and should be done in Lisp. I don't think it's a coïncidence.

The title raised my hackles as well, but it turned out to be a fun, un-dogmatic read with nothing to do with the editor wars. Upvoted.

Or perhaps it was just that he didn't bash my favorite editor :)

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