111–120 of 169 posts
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I think most of the "ugly" gripes come from people who either don't know how to change the font or haven't bothered to turn the tool bar off.
I'm not trying to be snarky here, but if you change the font and turn the toolbar off what's left of the design?
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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.
That said, the number of people who hate on Elisp is surprising to me. No, a hacked-up version of Maclisp is not the best Lisp in existence. But, seriously, you're competing against vimscript. Will even the most diehard Vim addict actually argue that vimscript is even comparable to Elisp?
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…
Another example: Vernor Vinge (sci fi author, and a former math and CS professor at San Diego State) uses emacs [ http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview... ]
"I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor."
- In the Beginning was the Command Line http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
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I think most of the "ugly" gripes come from people who either don't know how to change the font or haven't bothered to turn the tool bar off.
I'm not trying to be snarky here, but if you change the font and turn the toolbar off what's left of the design?
Exactly.
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That's true. I'm considering making a few screencasts that show how go from nothing to a full Emacs installation/customization on different platforms. I think that would be neat/fun.
Please do. Bonus points if you include something about Vimpulse ( http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/vimpulse.el ) to entice vim users to give it a try.
Please check back with http://jlongster.com/ in a few months, I have plans to start doing this kind of stuff there.
I use Emacs for coding, wanderlust mail, rcirc and jabber-el. All which are provided as packages in the distros I run. I've been trying to get into clojure which entails installing clojure-mode, swank-clojure, leiningen (which brings the pain of maven) and slime. This is where emacs has always broken down for me. Once I step outside the distro provided packages I find broken tutorials, unspecific versions, and instru…
Regarding Clojure on Emacs, just use the up-to-date stuff by technomancy. The following is based on my notes from a recent talk by Phil Hagelberg at a Boston Clojure Meetup. 1. Download lein from https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/raw/stable/bin/lein 2. Launch lein (self-install) from the command line. 3. Run lein plugin install swank-clojure 1.3.0 on the command line. 4. When you first run swank, it may compla…
Wish I had thought of that a week earlier! Could have saved us a lot of time at the meetup.
(The way you posted still works fine, so if you've already got it set up there's no need to switch.)
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I'm not taking a stand on the argument one way or the other, just pointing out how similar they sound. Uh, no. You're making an editorial point that they both seem equally silly, you just aren't saying that. If your only purpose to posting was a bland linguistic analogy with no bearing on the subject being discussed, then I withdraw my argument on the grounds that your post is unimaginably boring. :) But to respond:…
My words meant exactly what they said, no more and no less. I know this because (a) I wrote them, and (b) I happen to like Lisp, Emacs, and the people I know who use them. I'm pretty sure I am not in the habit of describing their arguments as "silly." At the risk of appealing to authority, I do not consider this essay silly: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html What I was doing is making a commentary about the similari…
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He mentioned being affected by cognitive dissonance when referencing other editors - he was probably thinking of vim :)
A lot of modern IDEs provide features that are pretty close to magic, compared to what emacs sports. The emacs user response to this generally seems to be something like, "Code navigation can't be as good as M-x rgrep", and "How can refactoring ever be as good as C-M-%?" This reminds me of various people I have worked with in the past who have wondered why I ever bothered with the complexity of searching and replacin…
My projects are usually not large enough that it matters. If they were, I suspect my typical response would be that I would simply install the appropriate mode for emacs and use that.
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A lot of modern IDEs provide features that are pretty close to magic, compared to what emacs sports. The emacs user response to this generally seems to be something like, "Code navigation can't be as good as M-x rgrep", and "How can refactoring ever be as good as C-M-%?" This reminds me of various people I have worked with in the past who have wondered why I ever bothered with the complexity of searching and replacin…
> 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).
Perhaps I was guilty of hyperbole, and "magic" is excessive. But stuff that comes out of the box in the above IDEs, and in its out-of-the-box state is slicker, easier to use and requiring less effort on one's own part than in emacs:
- Symbol browsing with search by substring, so you can leap to a symbol knowing only its name or part thereof;
- Project file browsing with search by substring, so you can open a file by name or part thereof;
- Pretty reliable jump-to-symbol with context sensitivity (so p.xyz, say, will take you to the right xyz), so you can find something given a valid mention of it in the source code;
- Popup code completion without my having to do anything funny or wait for the next build;
- Refactoring - OK, actually my use of refactoring tools could probably be done in emacs without making me want to die, but I know people who like 'lift method' and all that other junk, which would be basically a manual process in emacs.
I tried a couple of things to try and bring this stuff to emacs. M-x imenu, M-x ctags, CEDET and ido-mode are the ones that stick in my mind. None of them were up to much, though I wrote some helper functions to combine ide-mode and imenu, and I was somewhat pleased with the result. Then I upgraded emacs, and they stopped working. I took this as a sign, and didn't bother rewriting them. I don't use emacs for C/C++ any more.