Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

hongchao.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 180 posts

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#61

Post by xfer »

jolux wrote: post #55
koz_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that VS Code is easier to edit code in, but Emacs is easier to program and extend. Ease of use simply isn't why people use Emacs and I think that at this point it would be hard for it to ever compete with VS Code on that front. VS Code is like the Java of text editors. It relies on a universally understood and accepted model of editing text (non-modal, leveraging the mouse heavily), one that is familiar to al…

>I do, however, somewhat suspect that the crucial difficulty of Emacs comes from its messiness, from the huge number of people writing interesting extensions in it, and how they don't always quite play nicely with each other without a bit of glue code. There's no excuse for Emacs to be as inaccessible as it is though. What is "crucial difficulty?" You write an awful lot of words to excuse why the world's most powerfu…

> I'm advocating for improving the out-of-the-box usability story so that the editor isn't putting people off before they get a chance to understand and experience its power.

There are atleast a couple of projects like spacemacs and doom-emacs that already do that. The problem with the point you are making is someone has to do that hard work and also need to market it to the beginners. There isn't any money to make Emacs friendly to beginners. So i doubt it's ever going to be better than it already is through collaborative efforts of people with different goals.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#62

Post by Haarisgrey »

Of course we got people like this!. I smoke and I’ve been a smoker for years. Most of the time I am surrounded by people who do not smoke at all. Doesn’t amaze me. I have some close friends, we hangout together international;y and vacation parties but they both have never smoked weed and I am a regular smoker and this thing doesn’t affect our friendship at all. It’s not about something being legal or illegal. If a thing is facilitating you either way it is totally okay for the other person to use it. I started using it for my chronic pain and eventually ended up like this. https://www.weedmarket420.us/ Being a marijuana enthusiast I keep on researching for good material and here I came across 5 new researches! Have a good day!

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#63

Post by neolog »

d0mine wrote: post #36
dragonwriter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first used emacs 25ish years before VSCode existed and VSCode was pretty much immediately easier to use and customize; to be fair, it's not like I was using Emacs heavily in the intervening quarter century, but I was using it fairly regularly. OTOH, I have no problem believing someone using Emacs as a daily driver for years would find it easier (but I think most developers, and particularly newer developers—where t…

VSCode will likely get you to 80% productivity compared to Emacs pretty fast. The question how easy is to get from 80% to 100%. It is like a prototype vs. polished code: you can create something that provides 80% of the result over a weekend and then spend 2 years polishing it, to get remaining desired functionality. For example, I'm sure VSCode does git but does it as well as Magit? Everyday things can be done on mu…

VSCode has a Magit port and at least two roam/org clones.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#64

Post by dmortin »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #43

Sometimes I think people trick themselves into thinking that all their fiddling with Emacs counts as part of their productivity. Don't hate on me. I use Emacs just about every day. I used to use Emacs as my go to editor for writing code ... and it almost worked. But it was never hassle free, and things often worked more poorly than I would have liked, or ended up requiring too much fiddling to get it to work right, o…

> Now I use Pycharm for python and web development for things that can reasonably be called a "project"; the level of language support, introspection, and intelligent code prediction exceeds anything I ever achieved in Emacs.

It can be said for any other text editor. Of course, specialized tools are better most of the time.

The open source community should pool resources to create code inspection, refactoring libraries for all kinds of languages, so all extendable editors can use these libraries to provide these features.

LSP is a first step for this, but there needs to be a deeper language integration to give intelligent tips, refactoring operations, etc. for all popular languages.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#65

Post by dmortin »

Emacs is a text UI (though it can show images too) on top of a cross OS programming platform where you can create quick UIs for any kind of task you have (interfacing with APIs, command line programs, editing tasks, etc.).

Once you learn how Emacs works and how it can be programmed, you can create interactive tools extremely quickly to make lots of tasks you encounter day to day easier. I do this all the time.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#66

Post by BeetleB »

jolux wrote: post #6

I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code, which is vastly more popular. I think what made VSCode popular was the availability of many high-quality extensions for major languages. Unfortunately, my experience with Elisp packages is that they tend to be much less stable. This is changing some with LSP mode, of course, but I think the Emacs community would do well…

> I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code

Emacs discussions on HN are always unsatisfying, because everyone seems to want to compare it with IDEs or other programming editors.

Only a small portion of the article is about SW development.

The fraction of Emacs users who use it primarily for things other than programming is a lot bigger than most HN readers think it is. Comparing it to VSCode is meaningless to them. Kind of like having a discussion about PCs, and having people repeatedly talking about how iPods are better. Yes, lots of people use PCs to listen to music, but the comparison is rather silly.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#67

Post by jolux »

xfer wrote: post #61
jolux wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I do, however, somewhat suspect that the crucial difficulty of Emacs comes from its messiness, from the huge number of people writing interesting extensions in it, and how they don't always quite play nicely with each other without a bit of glue code. There's no excuse for Emacs to be as inaccessible as it is though. What is "crucial difficulty?" You write an awful lot of words to excuse why the world's most powerfu…

> I'm advocating for improving the out-of-the-box usability story so that the editor isn't putting people off before they get a chance to understand and experience its power. There are atleast a couple of projects like spacemacs and doom-emacs that already do that. The problem with the point you are making is someone has to do that hard work and also need to market it to the beginners. There isn't any money to make E…

>There are atleast a couple of projects like spacemacs and doom-emacs that already do that.

Both of which are not really true to the core Emacs philosophy in several ways though. And thus, they add a whole new layer to have to debug when something breaks.

>So i doubt it's ever going to be better than it already is through collaborative efforts of people with different goals.

But there are plenty of open source projects that succeed at usability despite having different people working on different goals. The question is whether we want Emacs to be the best text editor for everyone, or the best text editor for an elite few.

>The problem with the point you are making is someone has to do that hard work and also need to market it to the beginners. There isn't any money to make Emacs friendly to beginners. So i doubt it's ever going to be better than it already is through collaborative efforts of people with different goals.

Of course someone has to do this work, but how hard did Microsoft market VSCode? VSCode's rise has been fueled by word of mouth and strong first-party support for popular tooling. "Marketing" in this case is overstated. You need a product good enough to sell first.

I'm not at all denying this would be a lot of work, but I think it's worthwhile. If you think it's a problem that work is not being done in this area then we don't disagree.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#68

Post by jolux »

BeetleB wrote: post #66
jolux wrote: post #6

I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code, which is vastly more popular. I think what made VSCode popular was the availability of many high-quality extensions for major languages. Unfortunately, my experience with Elisp packages is that they tend to be much less stable. This is changing some with LSP mode, of course, but I think the Emacs community would do well…

> I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code Emacs discussions on HN are always unsatisfying, because everyone seems to want to compare it with IDEs or other programming editors. Only a small portion of the article is about SW development. The fraction of Emacs users who use it primarily for things other than programming is a lot bigger than most HN readers think…

>Only a small portion of the article is about SW development.

The article, is, however written by a software developer.

>The fraction of Emacs users who use it primarily for things other than programming is a lot bigger than most HN readers think it is.

Do we have any hard data here? Or is this just an anecdote?

Sure, Emacs is usable for a lot of stuff outside programming. I personally use it for org-mode and as a general-purpose git client. That doesn't mean that the Emacs usability story could be better overall. Obviously I don't think Emacs should be as narrowly focused as VSCode. Greater usability would benefit users who don't program.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#69

Post by jolux »

clircle wrote: post #59
jolux wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs has a lot of amazing extensions! Magit is unparalleled for working with Git. The problem is that they break more frequently, in my experience. The very fact that I have to install a 3rd-party DSL to have a sane package management experience is beyond the pale from a usability perspective.

Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I assume you are talking about use-package? I've been using it for several years. There is a long standing effort to have it merged into emacs/elpa, so we hope the situation will improve. https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package/issues/282

Yes, I think it should be merged. Although the fact that this has been open since 2015 also highlights how the copyright assignment requirement slows down the pace of development.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#70

Post by jolux »

joseph wrote: post #42
koz_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that VS Code is easier to edit code in, but Emacs is easier to program and extend. Ease of use simply isn't why people use Emacs and I think that at this point it would be hard for it to ever compete with VS Code on that front. VS Code is like the Java of text editors. It relies on a universally understood and accepted model of editing text (non-modal, leveraging the mouse heavily), one that is familiar to al…

> I agree that VS Code is easier to edit code in, but Emacs is easier to program and extend. Ease of use simply isn't why people use Emacs and I think that at this point it would be hard for it to ever compete with VS Code on that front. I don't program in Emacs except to fix bugs or make small modifications to my init.el. I use Emacs because it's the easiest editor to use. The keybindings are ubiquitous: they are st…

I will also add that I think Emacs is a better text editor than VS Code, and easier to edit code with. What I don't think it's better at is intelligent autocomplete, live static analysis, etc. It turns out I value those things more than I value having a hyper-flexible text editor, but that doesn't mean I don't miss the flexibility when using VS Code.
Post reply on HN