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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

#171

Post by jolux »

dmortin wrote: post #75
jolux wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I don’t think it’s easier, actually, but it does translate in a way that the language-specific servers don’t.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#172

Post by b0afc375b5 »

agumonkey wrote: post #168
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magit was the emacs killer app for me. I'm now slowly learning other parts of emacs, such as org-mode.

I was in college around the svn days, then git came then IDEs tried to integrate.. at best you had cute crud. First use of magit was a shocker. It's so good it makes you usage better.. crafting thin coherent commits in 2 seconds. Out of curiosity and objectivity I tried Eclipse / IDEA git integration (a few years ago tbf).. they were still complex and distracting. I'm not fond of org-mode it's too large imo but maybe…

Yes code snippets is most of the reason why I forced myself to learn org-mode. I have several *.notes files (node.notes, ruby.notes, linux.notes) in which I place important things I've learned about a particular subject, but the code snippets in them aren't executable (yet).

Ultimately I want the code snippets in them to be executed in a docker container so that I won't have to install various dev tools in my host machine.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#173

Post by ywei3410 »

oblio wrote: post #140
ywei3410 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we have any hard data here? Or is this just an anecdote? 55% according to the Emacs survey 2020 (obviously, take it with a pinch of self-selection bias due to the survey being self selecting). [1] https://emacssurvey.org/2020/

You're completely misreading that graph, I think. And that graph actually proves his point. 91.4% of Emacs users use it for coding (so the overwhelming majority, as you'd expect), and then some of them use it for something else. Those groups are not separate, if you look at the percentages, they add up to a lot more than 100%. So people could check multiple options. All this tells us is that: A) Emacs is primarily us…

The grandfather'ed post was:

> 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.

Whether it was used by developers or not, didn't have any bearing on the question/data.

I don't know whether I would draw the conclusion they primarily use it for coding or "other tasks" from the graph; for example a developer using Emacs for `org-mode` only with the occasional git usage would check both boxes.

Just as you've reached the conclusion that 90% means all of them use it primarily for coding, an equally valid conclusion is that 50% use it primarily for /not/ coding.

I don't make that leap - but it seems strange to discount one possibility heavily it favour of another; could you elaborate why?

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#174

Post by xxpor »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #152
xxpor wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TRAMP used to be my reasons to use emacs too, but VS code's ssh remote plug in is amazing.

Remote SSH plus indexing a code base of my size over a 10mbpsa connection is just... oh nope, no way. Can't even reliably index it locally.

The indexing runs on the remote server. Now, not sure what traffic autocomplete and such ends up using, but most of the hard work happens remotely.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#175

Post by sachac »

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?

I used to play Nethack within Emacs using nethack-el. It was really useful being able to bind a shortcut to something that could copy the map and append it to a text file with a note. :)

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#176

Post by bachmeier »

oblio wrote: post #141
bachmeier wrote: post #16

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 I actually find the opposite. As much as I dislike the clumsy GUI, I just keep coming back to Emacs for some things, for the sole reason that it's easier in Emacs. I find Emacs to be the easiest way to customize my text editor, and that's what makes it easy to get my work done. I've tried VS Code many times and I just d…

1. How long have you been using Emacs? 2. Did your journey into computing start with CLIs, TUIs, GUIs?

1. About a decade probably.

2. It started in the 1980s, back when GUIs were considered a luxury upgrade for the wealthy. This was the first computer I ever owned: https://oldcomputers.net/trs80pc1.html

I'd say the biggest reason for the difference is because (by my understanding) you use JSON for configuration and write functions to extend VS Code using Typescript. I've never been a web developer and I've done very little with Typescript (and not much more with Javascript). OTOH, I've been using Lisp in various forms since forever. For me to pop open my .emacs, add an interactive function, and start using it is usually a couple minutes at most.

Now I think most users of VS Code probably feel more comfortable with Typescript and JSON, but Emacs for me is just a dead easy thing due to my ability to customize tasks almost trivially.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#177

Post by e3bc54b2 »

agumonkey wrote: post #168
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magit was the emacs killer app for me. I'm now slowly learning other parts of emacs, such as org-mode.

I was in college around the svn days, then git came then IDEs tried to integrate.. at best you had cute crud. First use of magit was a shocker. It's so good it makes you usage better.. crafting thin coherent commits in 2 seconds. Out of curiosity and objectivity I tried Eclipse / IDEA git integration (a few years ago tbf).. they were still complex and distracting. I'm not fond of org-mode it's too large imo but maybe…

Org-mode is too big, but you don't have to use all of it. You can only learn the tiny subset you need and simply ignore the rest.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#178

Post by sooheon »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #126
sooheon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the only reason why emacs is no longer my default editor. I value customization, but I learned I value snappiness more.

If you don't mind sharing, what is your current default editor?

Intellij idea for project based coding, nvim/emacs for quick edits. I've gone from "my life lives in emacs and org mode" to "I use a couple made for purpose apps and live with the fact that not everything is a buffer in a self modifying strange loop."

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#179

Post by hvis »

oblio wrote: post #138
jolux wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 projec…

> The question is whether we want Emacs to be the best text editor for everyone, or the best text editor for an elite few. I can answer that for you. Emacs definitely wants B). They might pay some lip service to A), but as usual, keep your eye on what people do, not on what they say. To offer a comparison point, Neovim. Neovim is also an Open Source project, but it wants to make Vim more powerful > more user friendly…

> It has a ton of long term users that just don't want their defaults changed.

For all we know, there might be just a dozen of them, but with the (low) popularity of the mailing lists, they are certainly making themselves heard.

> I think Emacs will change over the following decades. Not because its users will >, but because its > will change. To clarify, it's like that saying about science: science advances, one funeral at a time.

Right. Hopefully it won't alienate the newer generations of users too much by that time.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#180

Post by legends2k »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #47
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…

Don't get me wrong, a lot of these problems aren't really Emacs's fault. Jetbrains puts a lot of money and effort into its IDEs. If some commercial or nonprofit entity was actually committed to developing and maintaining elisp packages providing superb language support, then Emacs would have it. Maybe language support will get better with LSP; anyone know how that is going in the emacs world?

I use LSP for Rust (rust-analyzer) and C++ (ccls) and I would say the experience is pretty good. For C++ projects I generate a compile_commands.json (Ninja, CMake or meson should help) and after that it's smooth sailing. I get contextual auto complete suggestions (yasnippet and complete even fills function arg placeholders), definition lookups, find all references, alternate between header and source, etc.
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