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Let's just use Emacs

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Re: Let's just use Emacs

#141

Post by vdm »

pandakar wrote: post #77
parfe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ditto. With el-get, I can link into the source git repository, and not wait for manual submissions to the ELPA repository, which always lag the actual release.

ELPA/package.el is broken as far as I'm concerned. el-get is a breath of fresh air by comparison.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#142

Post by mixmax »

Goladus wrote: post #127
mixmax wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're talking more usability than design. In that regard emacs doesn't exactly rate well.

Emacs is very usable if you can make a few reasonable assumptions about the user. Obviously it's not perfect (see the discussion of changing fonts in the originally posted blog) but making those assumptions about the user allows for a great deal of capability .

I agree entirely, but capability and usability are unrelated concepts. I don't doubt for a moment that emacs is immensely capable, which is why it has a large following.

Usability is, according to wikipedia "the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object" Ease of use and learnability isn't exactly emacs strong points. As an obvious example you need to learn emacs-lisp to unlock its potential.

Capable: absolutely. Easy to use: definitely not.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#143

Post by [deleted] »

jcromartie wrote: post #30
to3m wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use Visual Studio to wrangle giant enterprisey C# applications, but I still use find+grep/Emacs for browsing code quickly. Visual Studio is a long way off from matching the simple blazing speed of grep and file buffers in Emacs. P.S. I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. It's what I do. There's really no debate about whether grep is faster than VS search.

[deleted]

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#144

Post by Mpdreamz »

jcromartie wrote: post #30
to3m wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use Visual Studio to wrangle giant enterprisey C# applications, but I still use find+grep/Emacs for browsing code quickly. Visual Studio is a long way off from matching the simple blazing speed of grep and file buffers in Emacs. P.S. I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. It's what I do. There's really no debate about whether grep is faster than VS search.

Check out entrian code search which can be thought off as full text search for your source code. I never ever uwe VS builtin search any more.

Alt+=, search, navigate matches with key arrows. Sadly it doesnt do replacing.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#145

Post by lurker19 »

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.

Well, emacs is the most popular Lisp implementation and area of application.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#146

Post by lurker19 »

pmr_ wrote: post #71
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.

Namespaces are nice when the language lets you name a space at the top of a file or a block and then not repeat the name prefix on every identifier inside. They are not just used to add dots to identifier names, although that would often be NSNice in NSItself.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#147

Post by raganwald »

yarian wrote: post #138
Jach wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add myself as another data point to sensing a hidden criticism/accusation of brain damage in your original post. Particularly, I think the main problem is this: > I don't think it's a coïncidence. This invites the reader to ask "Well, then what's the reason?" And you as the author haven't stated what you think is the answer, which makes the careless reader (in my defense, it's a single post!) bring up a cached t…

The above goes for me as well. You might not have meant for it to be that way, but you just happened to use a pattern of sentences used by people with hidden criticism quite frequently.

Now I'm really worried. My comment received 36 upvotes. How many were from people who (a) think think that Lisp and Emacs users are brain-damaged and (b) Upvote what they perceive as an insult as a kind of social bullying rather than to signal a contribution to the discussion?

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#148

Post by raganwald »

lurker19 wrote: post #145
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.

Well, emacs is the most popular Lisp implementation and area of application.

I was thinking along these lines. Although, the thing that occurred to me is that Lisp is sometimes called a programmable programming language. And emacs is the canonical programmable text editor. It had occurred to me that it was not a coincidence that someone who had embraced a fully programmable tool (language or editor) would feel this way about it. I thought the article was interesting in that the author was pointing out that emacs' programmability could be used to emulate design features like a distraction-free environment and not just "power" features.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#149

Post by lurker19 »

jlongster wrote: post #79

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 4…

But if one insists in staying on the fence, one has viper and vimpulse: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-es/Vimpulse

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#150

Post by lurker19 »

EdiX wrote: post #42
eropple wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a 5GB source tree at work with a couple (or more? I haven't looked) thousand Java source files. After my last machine decided it would be a good time to crap out and I started over with a new OS X install, I tried working strictly with vim and emacs and our scripts (written by vim aficionados, it seems) to navigate around the codebase. It was like a root canal. If I was on fire. Seriously--I'm not an Eclips…

> I work on a 5GB source tree at work with a couple (or more? I haven't looked) thousand Java source files. the linux kernel is 14 million lines of code and the size of its source tree is 500MB, you are working on a source tree that is ten times the size of linux? 140M lines of code? In any case it can't be all 140M LoC in a couple thousand java files so something should be clarified. > I'm not an Eclipse fan by any…

C. For Java, at least, Eclipse will automatically display Javadoc for a library you download (in both mouseover hover and a sidebar window) , and will navigate to source if the library has an attached source jar (which maven will usually find from a Repository )
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