Making Emacs Popular Again (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#71

Post by vintermann » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:14 PM UTC

Emacs' fundamental problem is that in text editing, there are many equally good ways to do things.

It's equally good for Undo to be on control _ as on control z. It's equally good for scrolling to move the cursor as to not move it. It's equally good to have Lisp as a scripting language as JavaScript. No, really, I mean it. It's not a big deal in the big picture.

And Emacs choose perfectly good, perfectly sensible defaults on all these things back when it came. (That can't be said about all editors from that time.)

It's just that in the 30+ years since, the world has converged on other defaults. Every little thing is done different than you're almost certainly used to - yet not different enough that anyone can claim it's somehow superior (unlike its modal cousins from the same period. I think their claim is dead wrong, but at least it's different enough that they can persuade some).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#72

Post by gaganyaan » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

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.

This is kind of an odd attitude. I haven't used VS Code, but I have used PyCharm extensively before. There's a) so many buttons everywhere, with hovertext that doesn't help unless you already know what you're doing, and b) so many things buried in random configuration screens.

I recently started using Doom Emacs and really like it. There's a learning curve, but in contrast to what you're asserting, every other IDE has at least a similar learning curve. Unless by "text editor" you mean no IDEs, but then VS Code is out too, and I'm not sure what we're talking about.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#73

Post by vintermann » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

CJefferson wrote: post #65

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 sta…

Vim is different enough that when its fans say it's superior, at least some people think it's plausible enough that it's worth learning. And even if they don't become appreciably more productive by it, at that point it's sunk cost and they might as well keep using it.

The last time I had any reason to consider getting into emacs, was when I came across a proof assistant many years ago that basically required it - it used emacs to provide an interactive interface. Not unlike how everyone uses electron/chrome these days to quickly provide a familiar interactive interface. It was like an exotic artefact from a parallel universe where emacs' conventions became dominant instead of IBM and Microsoft's.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#74

Post by isolli » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #71

Emacs' fundamental problem is that in text editing, there are many equally good ways to do things. It's equally good for Undo to be on control _ as on control z. It's equally good for scrolling to move the cursor as to not move it. It's equally good to have Lisp as a scripting language as JavaScript. No, really, I mean it. It's not a big deal in the big picture. And Emacs choose perfectly good, perfectly sensible def…

There's nothing worse than reflexively typing ctrl+z to undo in Emacs and instead have the window disappear into the background!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#75

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

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 I have to read a whole book or learn an entire new programming language, I'm not going to put the time in.

If I actually believe that the time will be well spent, I'm willing to spend it. Having gone through the effort of learning emacs (yes, reading a whole book about it) and forcing myself to use it as my primary editor for a year, I have to say... I don't think it was time well spent. vi, however, was. It was (at least) as hard to learn initially as emacs was, but for most text-editing tasks, it's still a lot faster than any GUI editor both to start up as well as to actually perform text editing tasks. Plus, it's always there, no matter how many jump boxes you've ssh'ed through.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#76

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

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…

> mold into an IDE sort of thing

Emacs would be a great operating system if only it came with a decent text editor...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#77

Post by AQuantized » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:38 PM UTC

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.

I'm relatively young and for me Emacs isn't a fossil just because there isn't a better alternative I've found for taking notes than Org mode. This is especially true if you want to embed LaTeX or code into your notes (and even execute it).

As I've gotten into learning Lisp and using Magit occasionally I can't think of a an editor that's more versatile in its extensibility or offers a Git interface on Magit's level (although I still mostly use command line).

I did rebind a lot of stuff to more common shortcuts, with the exception of C-c just because it was too much work.

This may be more of an argument for Emacs as a general editor than IDE specifically however.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#78

Post by kqr » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #71

Emacs' fundamental problem is that in text editing, there are many equally good ways to do things. It's equally good for Undo to be on control _ as on control z. It's equally good for scrolling to move the cursor as to not move it. It's equally good to have Lisp as a scripting language as JavaScript. No, really, I mean it. It's not a big deal in the big picture. And Emacs choose perfectly good, perfectly sensible def…

This sounds like it's not written by an actual Emacs user... and the fact that I can tell points to the real fundamental problem of Emacs: it's not a text editor but the real thing it is is so complicated it finds it easier to market itself as a mere text editor.

What is Emacs really? It's a virtual Lisp machine with a standard library for writing graphical text applications. It's more like the JVM than like Notepad.

It just happens to come bundled with a text editor (and a file manager, and a calculator, etc) as example applications. You're free to install a better text editor than the bundled example, and many people to (see the popularity of Evil, for example).

But of course, this is a much more complicated point in space to sit in, so Emacs markets itself primarily as a text editor and we get confusion like yours as a result.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#79

Post by xroche » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

CJefferson wrote: post #65

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 sta…

> 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?"

This. Used Emacs for fifteen years professionally, and I gave up when I had to reinstall my laptop, as having intellisense-like features and easy navigation in Emacs is a complete pain.

I actually did not intent to switch to VSCode, but after a couple of hours of scratching my head with list configuration files, I ended up "trying" VSCode, and after a couple of _minutes_, everything was working (completion, navigation etc.)

After a couple of tweaking, clangd was plugged, and I had direct visual compiler feedback in realtime while typing code in the window.

VSCode is not "better". It's just another world.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#80

Post by ajross » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

isolli wrote: post #74

vintermann wrote: post #71

Emacs' fundamental problem is that in text editing, there are many equally good ways to do things. It's equally good for Undo to be on control _ as on control z. It's equally good for scrolling to move the cursor as to not move it. It's equally good to have Lisp as a scripting language as JavaScript. No, really, I mean it. It's not a big deal in the big picture. And Emacs choose perfectly good, perfectly sensible def…

There's nothing worse than reflexively typing ctrl+z to undo in Emacs and instead have the window disappear into the background!

In my .emacs since time immemorial:

     (global-unset-key [(control z)])

It's absolutely true that defaults are "bad" in many modern environments (though remember C-z to suspend in a terminal environment makes perfect sense!).

But the nature of the editor is customization like this. People unwilling to do this just aren't ever going to be happy with emacs. And for those just learning, tricks like that (c.f. emacswiki.org) are a very reasonable entryway into a world of possibilities.

I mean, look, Emacs isn't ever going to be VSCode. If you want VSCode, use VSCode. It's a great editor, and frankly at this stage I think nothing is going to do VSCode better than VSCode already has. Emacs is something different, and we might as well embrace that.

(Not that I'd object to switching some of the dumb defaults around, of course. I just don't think that's going to help very much if your goal is "displace VSCode").