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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#61

Post by rich_sasha »

lgrapenthin wrote: post #29
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…

Its quite similar percentages to about a 10-15 difference of IQ points at end of the distribution curve. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_distribution.svg

You made my day! :)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#62

Post by rich_sasha »

deworms wrote: post #52
lgrapenthin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its quite similar percentages to about a 10-15 difference of IQ points at end of the distribution curve. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_distribution.svg

You'd expect more intelligent people to prefer a tool that doesn't require days of tuning to start being remotely usable though

Jokes aside, definitely not a day's worth of tuning.

My minimal set-up is mostly hiding all the GUI elements. Though I also make a semi-virtue out of trying to use as much vanilla Emacs as possible, for this very reason.

If you know your way around it, there's a lot of power in unmodded Emacs still.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#63

Post by rich_sasha »

deworms wrote: post #23
cpach wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I set out to learn Emacs in the year ~2001 or so, I just did C-h t in order to launch the builtin tutorial. IMHO that can still be a viable way to get started. Spacemacs might be nice but it’s in no way required in order to be productive with Emacs. My personal .emacs file is only 32 lines long (28 lines of comments are not counted).

If you need a dedicated tutorial for a text editor it's a great sign that something is very wrong with its design, particularly concerning discoverability. Emacs has no user-friendly command names (you need to memorize function names which are often meaningless abbreviations), no autocomplete, and doesn't show available functions.

Vim has a built-in tutorial too. As said elsewhere, you literally cannot get started in Vim without knowing a dozen command and grokking modes, in Emacs you can at least stumble around without knowing anything.

Equally, there's a difference in target audience. Do you need a tutorial to operate a screwdriver? No. Power drill? Arguably yes. CNC mill? Dear God please yes. I don't think you expect a fork lift or nail gun to be accessible with zero runway by anyone, or for their features to be discoverable by trial-and-error.

You could argue that this is not a worthwhile niche, and maybe that's right (at least for you and like-minded people) but it's just what it is.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#64

Post by sidr »

lgrapenthin wrote: post #29
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…

Its quite similar percentages to about a 10-15 difference of IQ points at end of the distribution curve. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_distribution.svg

Any probability distribution of any attribute can be aribtrarily cut off at the 90th or 85th percentiles to make this point. Are you claiming there's something special that relates integer multiples of standard deviation of the IQ distribution to emacs usage?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#65

Post by CJefferson »

Speaking as someone who sees a lot of students start using text editors for the first time, VSCode has two massive advantages over Emacs:

1) Most students already basically know their OS's graphical interface -- the "basic keys" like cut/copy/paste/load/save all work as expected.

2) The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?"

Both points are really useful for getting started quickly, but would I imagine be really hard for emacs. The first would require changing default behaviour on first startup, the second would need accepting some set of people to decide the "default" sets of plugins.

For those who say "emacs is worth learning", that might be true, but when students can choose between Emacs, Vim, VSCode, nano, Intellij, pycharm, Eclipse, Atom, Sublime Text or Notepad++ (that's all the editors I think I've seen in the last year), they need a special reason to give emacs all that extra work needed to understand it.

Vim/Neovim had a bump a few years ago and got really popular (although that might be over now, at least on my limited experience). I think that was because there were obvious improvements going on, which attracted students to take a look.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#66

Post by tincholio »

deworms wrote: post #34

If you need to install a dozen plugins (helm, projectile, company/autocomplete, flycheck, whatever else) to match something that's installed by default in any modern text editor, Emacs will never be remotely popular. Even something as simple as theming doesn't work by default; each theme needs to be implemented separately for every mode. 99% of people will see how fruitless it is to try to configure it and move on. W…

> each theme needs to be implemented separately for every mode

I am not sure whether you're trolling or just completely clueless about Emacs (despite your claims of using it for many years).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#67

Post by rich_sasha »

deworms wrote: post #21
underatree wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a daily Emacs user, and happily use a 100 line init.el, mostly composed of "enable this mode". Emacs supports customization needs to the nth degree, but I've found that this is a false economyy. I agree Emacs needs to be easier to get started with.

You would probably be more productive in VS Code with an empty config.

Emacs fits so nicely into my workflow. I can use it, feature-rich, from terminal, within tmux, and easily switching from the editor (where I write code) to other terminal panes (where I run the code). I can also use Emacs without any mouse input at all, have a rich set of keyboard shortcuts, and where I find myself doing something repetitive, I can easily automate it. While I'm at it, I can use the very same environment for a ton of other things - note-taking, editing more file types than I could care about etc.

I can see that with different priorities, perhaps VS Code might be a better fit. But does it work in the terminal? Can I edit LaTeX and have equations rendered in-place? Can I easily switch layouts from having 3/4 panes of code and nothing else on the screen, to having various other bits around? Does C&P trivially support multiple "buffers" (registers in Emacs lingo; can copy & paste persistently to different places). Can I easily record rich keyboard macros - ones that, dunno, search second and third word on a line, replace first instance of second word with third word, then return to the starting point?

I suspect the answer is yes to some of these questions, but no to most. And this is barely scratching the surface of what Emacs can do.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#68

Post by agumonkey »

jstx1 wrote: post #13

To be more popular Emacs needs to be easier to get started with and easier to extend. If I have to read a whole book or learn an entire new programming language, I'm not going to put the time in. If any time I search for "how to do x", I get a disjointed mess of "but spacemacs...", "in prelude...", "this custom elisp snippet..." where every piece of advice can be potentially incompatible with any past or future modif…

If you find emacs hard to extend then i hope you never use eclipse, more on that later.

Part of the problem you raise kinda comes from the newfound popularity of emacs, people started more projects on top of emacs and now we have a paradox of choice.

That said emacs core is pretty stable, even though there an acceleration in new ideas there too, it's not breakage inducing.

About ease of extension, in emacs you can add functions, menus, buttons, libs in 15 seconds. That's less time than it takes Eclipse to "create" an empty plugin project.

emacs is not the easiest (or the neatest or any -est) but relatively speaking, it's still a good thing.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#69

Post by jdblair »

rjrodger wrote: post #49
jdblair wrote: post #20

I've been using emacs for approximately 30 years. Every once in a while, someone ask me what editor or IDE I suggest they learn, and I never suggest emacs. It's incredibly powerful, but it's a fossil. I keep using emacs mostly because of muscle memory.

That's it. That's the reason. You can usually get Emacs key bindings (or a shallow approximation thereof) in most editors. But yeah, we're stuck, so I guess we just gotta double down. It is fun when the young 'uns do a double take after you execute a particularly fancy macro. I do love that.

The macros are always the deal-breaker. I tried sublime text, set up emacs keybindings, then tried to ctrl-x-( to start a macro and... switched right back to emacs. (and then proceeded to modify me emacs config so it approximated many sublime text features)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#70

Post by mark_l_watson »

jdblair wrote: post #20

I've been using emacs for approximately 30 years. Every once in a while, someone ask me what editor or IDE I suggest they learn, and I never suggest emacs. It's incredibly powerful, but it's a fossil. I keep using emacs mostly because of muscle memory.

Same situation for me, but much longer than 30 years. I still use Emacs with SBCL Common Lisp (but use VSCode if I am exploring someone else’s large codebase) and for routine non-programming editing, but otherwise I use IDEs: LispWorks, PyCharm for Python, IntelliJ for Java and Clojure, XCode for Swift, and Racket IDE for Racket Scheme.

I like having Emacs key bindings for other editors and IDEs.

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