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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#4

Post by sokoloff »

aww_dang wrote: post #2

Who is actually using the GUI elements mentioned in the article? Emacs is a comfort zone where I don't need the mouse. >...buttons could be improved with rounded corners...

I’m a 30-year user of emacs. I still pick up the mouse to do something in emacs at least once a month.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#5

Post by thom »

aww_dang wrote: post #2

Who is actually using the GUI elements mentioned in the article? Emacs is a comfort zone where I don't need the mouse. >...buttons could be improved with rounded corners...

I would worry if people started moving away from Emacs as text-centric. My biggest complaint with VSCode (which I do fully expect to take over and to which I will one day presumably have to migrate) is that there's so much damn UI for things. The terminal window isn't just a buffer of text like everything else, it's its own ungodly window that pops up differently. Most extensions are primarily UI instead of keyboard and text driven. There's a nice Magit clone which does things properly, and I'd love to see more effort on things like that. But fundamentally VSCode doesn't seem to have the right level of abstraction to allow all this.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#6

Post by rich_sasha »

I’m surprised at the disparity between Emacs and vim use (20% vs 3% according to some survey). I thought it’s more equal.

I suppose, while the learning curve for Vim is a lot steeper, you reach the power regions very quickly too. With Emacs, while it’s less alien initially, you need to learn quite a bit more to get to “power user” levels. But then, in turn, it seems that Emacs is much easier to mold into an IDE sort of thing, whereas this seems against the Fu of Vim. One tool, one purpose.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#8

Post by agumonkey »

rich_sasha wrote: post #6

I’m surprised at the disparity between Emacs and vim use (20% vs 3% according to some survey). I thought it’s more equal. I suppose, while the learning curve for Vim is a lot steeper, you reach the power regions very quickly too. With Emacs, while it’s less alien initially, you need to learn quite a bit more to get to “power user” levels. But then, in turn, it seems that Emacs is much easier to mold into an IDE sort…

Emacs is also a whole distribution. You never see the end of it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#9

Post by ho_schi »

The complain about the weird and twenty year old issue in Gtk questionable[1]. Gtk2, X11 and disconnecting a display and Emacs calls abort(). I cannot speak about EMACS because I prefer VIM and NEOVIM. My requirements are usability - where VIM excels with your knowledge (learning curve) - and LSP-Support. The later is provided since NEOVIM '0.5`[2] nearly ready to use. A modern editor should know what the user is actually doing and interact with the compiler, spell-something (languagetool?) or whatever :)

LSP with NEOVIM? Requirements:

  1.) VIM-PLUG  
  2.) NVIM-LSPCONFIG  
  3.) NVIM-CMP
Your compiler will provide everything. In my case CLANGD for C and C++. Setup isn't hard but I would appreciate a HowTo directly at neovim.io or even built-in NVIM-LSPCONFIG and NVIM-CMP within the package. Because figuring out is hard, setup is not. Where GNU needs to catch up quickly is LSP with GCC, the compiler doesn't provide a user back-end. This is important and actually I want know what GCC things about my code - I'm using GCC to compile. EMACS and VI-Family will greatly improve through this. You don't need to like Microsoft because of LSP - but LSP is great.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/221#note_577021

[2] https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#10

Post by yakubin »

aww_dang wrote: post #2

Who is actually using the GUI elements mentioned in the article? Emacs is a comfort zone where I don't need the mouse. >...buttons could be improved with rounded corners...

I'm using GUI Emacs. There is one thing I use the mouse for: resizing windows. Apart from that, GUI is more visually pleasing, it doesn't try to emulate graphics by fitting characters into the grid. When it wants to paint a line, it paints a line, not a column of "|" characters; same with arrows and whatever. Another advantage is that it gets the key presses directly instead of through the terminal. In the terminal it can't distinguish between e.g. "C-/" and some other keys (I don't remember which).

However, I'm looking for a better editor anyway. Emacs is too unresponsive at times. I'll probably either switch to a GUI version of neovim when one of them gets good enough[1], or write myself a new editor, because I haven't really seen anything promising outside of neovim.

[1]: I think neovim folks might have abandoned this idea, so I'm not holding my breath.

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