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Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

hongchao.me

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Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#71

Post by jolux »

dmortin wrote: post #64
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 librari…

>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.

Emacs specifically also needs a lot of user interface-side polish to deal with the increase in the complexity of these plugins.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#73

Post by colordrops »

anschwa wrote: post #11
colordrops wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If emacs adopted vim-like keybindings early on the war would have ended. It's the only reason I stick with vim, and I suspect I'm not alone. Yes, yes, evil mode and whatever, but it's not seamless - you still have to get familiar with emacs keybindings.

I'm not sure I agree keybindings were/are the significant factor. The editors have a completely different history and their authors come from very different backgrounds.

I'm talking about the war of usage/mindshare rather than a war between the authors.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#74

Post by rcdwealth »

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…

Use Emacs in simpler way like you use other editors and it will always work.

Use it in complex way and you will stumble upon plethora of troubles. That is feature, not bug.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#75

Post by dmortin »

jolux wrote: post #71
dmortin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 librari…

>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. Emacs specifically also needs a lot of user interface-side polish to deal with the increase in the complexity of these plugins.

The main thing is having the capability. Adding the interface for it is the easier task.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#76

Post by colordrops »

mcbuilder wrote: post #24
colordrops wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If emacs adopted vim-like keybindings early on the war would have ended. It's the only reason I stick with vim, and I suspect I'm not alone. Yes, yes, evil mode and whatever, but it's not seamless - you still have to get familiar with emacs keybindings.

I am not sure. Sure with deamon mode and lazy loading emacs can be really fast to start up and open files nowadays, but the old joke was EMACS stood for "eights megs and constantly swapping". Evil mode is just the more recent iteration of vim keybindings in EMACS that go all the way back to modes like viper mode.

Most vi users actually use vim or neovim with complicated configs and dozens of plugins - setting up daemon mode and lazy loading would not be a problem. Emacs would be my daily driver if it had native vi keybindings. And i could go back to vi/vim if I logged into a server and had to edit a file.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#77

Post by rcdwealth »

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 once submitted a bug to the Emacs mailing list and after determining > it was indeed a defect, a flame war ensued between maintainers of > different subsystems that were competing over how a specific feature > was supposed to be used, which was the source of the bug. It was > offputting and felt juvenile. Social problems are inevitable in any > open source project, but I can’t help but wonder if the highly dynamic > nature of Emacs Lisp causes more problems than a less dynamic language > would.

Commercial developers have many internal discussions, with the difference that they will not show it to you.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#78

Post by BeetleB »

jolux wrote: post #68
BeetleB wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ge…

> 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.

My comment had nothing to do with usability. I merely find the incessant comparisons with VSCode to be (mostly) noise. I'm not even here to advocate for Emacs (although I love it). People want better usability? Fine. But let's not let SW development be the benchmark for how good Emacs is. It's just one use for Emacs.

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

Very much an anecdote. Thing is, so is any other perception. There is no hard data out there. Having said that, hang out on places like the Emacs subreddit and quite a lot of submissions are not related to SW development. Looking at it right now, only 3 submissions on the front page are related to coding/SW. If you follow the weekly Emacs news, you'll similarly find that the bulk of it is not related to coding/SW.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#79

Post by QuesnayJr »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #2

This is pretty tangential, but I don't understand why there isn't a roguelike framework available for Emacs. It seems like the perfect roguelike platform for playtesting and hacking on and would on-board a lot of new people into the Emacsen ecology without any real difficulty. The standard roguelike library libtocd has bindings for every other language--why not elisp?

That's funny. I've wondered that too, and from the other replies it seems you and I aren't the only ones. I half-assumed it existed and was just called something-incomprehensible-mode so I never heard of it.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#80

Post by zephyr9 »

jolux wrote: post #68
BeetleB wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ge…

>> 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?

https://emacssurvey.org/2020/

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