Making Emacs Popular Again (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#81

Post by heartofgold » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

underatree wrote: post #37

deworms wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to use a specific dialect of lisp most people won't be familiar with, it does a poor job at it. Lisp is not a language many people use today. NeoVim lets you use any language you want for writing extensions. VS Code uses javascript which is easy to learn and most developers already know it.

It's a great strength that NeoVim supports many languages, and VS Code uses Javascript. Lisp is not widely used, and this is an impediment to Emacs' popularity. However, when people speak about Emacs customizability, they are referring to a deeper level of customizability than most programs (even NeoVim/VS Code), in which its innards and UI are all subject to modification, at runtime, within the beast itself. This is…

> Lisp is not widely used

This is so unfortunate. Lisp has so many good things to teach us.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#82

Post by justsomedood » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

thom wrote: post #5

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…

This is the exact issue I have with VSCode. I don't particularly like the keybinds in emacs, but the killer feature for me is that everything is a text buffer. Eshell, magic, lsp, I interact with them all in a similar way from the keyboard. It was the terminal in VSCode that brought me back to emacs

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#83

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

kqr wrote: post #78

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.…

> What is Emacs really? It's a virtual Lisp machine with a standard library for writing graphical text applications.

If you substitute Javascript for Lisp, doesn't that describe Visual Studio Code pretty well?

So now there's a product that leverages the architectural advantages of Emacs, with modern defaults across the board.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#84

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:49 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…

> 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.

I actually don't think these are very hard from a technical perspective.

The first has been done in the past. Aquamacs was a version of Emacs for Mac OS that supported conventional Mac keyboard shortcuts, in addition to the Emacs ones.

The second should really just be a matter of matching certain file extensions and prompting to download the most popular mode for that file type. The Emacs package manager is very good, so it's a simple change to just include a mapping from file extension to Emacs package and trigger the prompt when opening a file of a given type for the first time.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#85

Post by hollerith » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #83

kqr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> What is Emacs really? It's a virtual Lisp machine with a standard library for writing graphical text applications. If you substitute Javascript for Lisp, doesn't that describe Visual Studio Code pretty well? So now there's a product that leverages the architectural advantages of Emacs, with modern defaults across the board.

Unless I was very unlucky in my decisions about what and how to learn about vscode or my ability to learn has dropped more than 10-fold between the time I learned to modify Emacs and the time I tried to learned to modify vscode (which is unlikely but not impossible: it was an interval of 28 years) emacs is much easier to learn to modify than vscode is unless one is already a web dev.

Of course, if one does learn how to modify vscode, one has a skill (namely, web dev) in much higher demand on the labor market than knowledge of Emacs Lisp.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#86

Post by d0mine » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:53 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…

To understand why emacs is great, think of it not as an editor but as a platform. Killer apps for me are:

- magit :: everyday things are just a key away, less common things are visible, complex things are possible

- Org-mode :: whole life in plain text (for some brain types it enables almost impossible to achieve otherwise + Org-Babel + emacs-jupyter

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#87

Post by SirensOfTitan » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

I’ve used emacs for years, and then vim before that for several years. I maintained my own config for a while, then moved to doom.

…while I eventually ended up abandoning notes in org for a dedicated tool, I love using emacs. My only issue is perf: on an M1 Max I get multiple freezes from LSP per day when working with typescript. I’m currently on the latest emacs-mac build (plus with native comp doesn’t seem to be that much better). The perf issues in a large typescript project are so severe that I’ve considered looking at other editors. A modern UI should just not lock up while waiting for a command to finish.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#88

Post by gjvc » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:58 PM UTC

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #87

I’ve used emacs for years, and then vim before that for several years. I maintained my own config for a while, then moved to doom. …while I eventually ended up abandoning notes in org for a dedicated tool, I love using emacs. My only issue is perf: on an M1 Max I get multiple freezes from LSP per day when working with typescript. I’m currently on the latest emacs-mac build (plus with native comp doesn’t seem to be th…

Emacs 28 with native compilation is much faster for me on Linux. :-/ though there are hints of the GUI stuttering here and there.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#89

Post by kqr » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #83

kqr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> What is Emacs really? It's a virtual Lisp machine with a standard library for writing graphical text applications. If you substitute Javascript for Lisp, doesn't that describe Visual Studio Code pretty well? So now there's a product that leverages the architectural advantages of Emacs, with modern defaults across the board.

I haven't personally used VS Code much, but from what I understand, it still runs in two castes that don't, generally, mix: there's its core code, and then there's plugins, and the latter exists on a separate plane from the former. You can't write a plugin that redefines some core behaviour. The functions internal to the core are not all automatically accessible for any plugin. Plugins don't become fully integrated with the core code to the point where the source file location is your only hint as to whether behaviour comes from a plugin or core functionality.

(A non-Emacs user might very well go "Emacs plugins can do what now?" at the description of a plugin re-defining a core function. That's a fully understandable reaction. That level of hackability is not for everyone. But as far as I can tell, it's unique to Emacs and very small set of other software.)

But I could be misunderstanding this. Maybe VS Code actually does have Emacs-level hackability, in which case I'd probably want to try it out more than I have!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#90

Post by SauciestGNU » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

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

Prefacing with that I don't think iq is the best way to measure intelligence, but I wonder what the intelligence distribution of tinkerers is. The sort of person who might sit down to learn emacs because it's a blank functional canvas that you can customize to meet your particular needs.