Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 420 posts

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#91

Post by AlanYx »

p2t2p wrote: post #40
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…

Exactly that, plus it doesn't really serve well as platform. I mean VSCode renders Markdown previews correctly, not some ASCII based approximation. It renders images if I happen to click on one. Extensions can actually provide decent UI, thank's to that CSVs never looked better in my text editors.

Both the examples you give seem kind of arguable; I'd almost say they demonstrate the opposite.

The problem with VSCode's built-in Markdown previews is that they're not extensible, so there are a variety of alternate Markdown renderer plugins, for example to better work with the various wiki-like Markdown plugins. Emacs also has Markdown previewing, but it is extensible by design.

I'm not an expert in either VSCode or Emacs (I use both off and on), but inline image handling seems like it works better in Emacs. I've never figured out how to show Markdown images inline in the actual text editor part of VSCode (as opposed to the preview), whereas that's super easy in Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#92

Post by teddyh »

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…

> for Undo to be on control _ as on control z.

Well, Ctrl-_ is three keys; control, shift and _. However, Undo in Emacs is actually designed to be on the two-key combination Ctrl-/ and the fact that this key produces the same ASCII control code as Ctrl-_ is incidental.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#93

Post by SauciestGNU »

rich_sasha wrote: post #62
deworms wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stuff like electric pairs, rainbow delimeters, rjsx-mode, prettier, and neotree are really all I use. I started using emacs because of auctex writing my master's thesis, and ended up switching from vim because of the experience. Once you know the basics about packaging (enabling melpa) and setting a comfortable theme you're pretty much ready to roll.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#94

Post by the_spacebyte »

As an Emacs user for ~10 years the greatest deterrent is it being single-threaded and lisp. I just can't understand the love for it. I've spent countless hours customizing my own configuration and I just can't enjoy lisp. Emacs's source code is also hard to understand and contribute to (let's not talk about lisp.h).

I'd rather have a new editor (or emacs fully re-written) with the same mindset as emacs - near-full customization via a modern scripting language (lua?) and/or c/cpp plugins, and text-centric. I don't care for fancy UI or buttons it could even have the same look and feel which I love

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#95

Post by azeirah »

wirrbel wrote: post #48
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…

Emacs' user base is probably larger than any time before. Granted, market share dropped because many people are never exposed to Emacs (or vim), directly start with PyCharm, VSCode, etc. The question is: Can emacs increase its market share by becoming more approachable? Probably yes, on the other hand since Emacs is so different to the User Interface expectations of 2021, it will always have a hard time. I myself hav…

I just find it a little saddening although very understandable that at this point Emacs just simply isn't better for writing code than any Jetbrains product.

Yes I'm very aware that there are plugins, stand-alone terminal tools to integrate, language-server-protocol and all that... But it's just that Jetbrains tools have far deeper intelligence about your code. By default.

I tried hard to like Emacs, and I did end up liking it, I just don't know for what workflow.

Knowledge work? Obsidian

Working on large coding projects? Jetbrains IDEs

Working on scripts or quick edits? Sublime Text or sometimes vscode

Need to make a change to bla.config from the terminal? (n)vim

I think the only advantage Emacs really still has to offer nowadays is that it's general enough to be able to do all of the above very well to quite well. None of those tools comes close enough to be able to do all of those workflows. Yes you can force sublime or vim into becoming a workstation for all of the above, but then it will become very bloated and slow.

It also doesn't help that Emacs is very archaic. I can teach you Obsidian, Sublime and vs code in a day, I can teach you jetbrains IDEs in a month, but it will take me years to teach you to use emacs effectively.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#96

Post by wayoutthere »

vintermann wrote: post #73
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…

I personally love Vim because once you know how to work it, you can code extremely quickly. You don’t really even need any macros (though they can make you even faster) — I find the default commands to be fast enough that I consider vim to be an “expert interface” for text editing.

Also love the VS Code vim plug-in.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#97

Post by teddyh »

ajross wrote: post #80
isolli wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ctrl-z for suspend is useful in the terminal, though, so maybe something like this?

  (if window-system
      (global-set-key (kbd "C-z") 'undo))

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#98

Post by p2t2p »

underatree wrote: post #60
p2t2p wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly that, plus it doesn't really serve well as platform. I mean VSCode renders Markdown previews correctly, not some ASCII based approximation. It renders images if I happen to click on one. Extensions can actually provide decent UI, thank's to that CSVs never looked better in my text editors.

I use Emacs's markdown mode for syntax highlighting. I have never used live export, but looked for it in its dropdown menu, found it, and clicked it: https://i.imgur.com/0LG6nnS.png It renders images and doesn't rely on ASCII for its rendering. I agree Emacs could benefit from some polish, on the whole.

I compared it two what I see in my VSCode (https://imgur.com/a/u9naqVi) and fair enough, it got way better since I tried it last time.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#99

Post by azeirah »

jdblair wrote: post #69
rjrodger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I used to be a heavy Sublime Text power user a couple years ago. I found out at some point that while Sublime does market itself as supporting macros, many commands were one of these four

- extremely basic (ie, move left or right)

- poorly thought out

- Straight up not implemented as a recordable macro command

- Buggy

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#100

Post by tom_ »

ajross wrote: post #80
isolli wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Suggested tweak:

    (when window-system
      (global-unset-key (kbd "C-z")))
Post reply on HN