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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#101

Post by hollerith »

zephyr9 wrote: post #59
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…

No! Emacs does not require the user to learn any code in order to use it. Unfortunately this is a persistent false narrative to which many new users fall victim (as I believe you have). I maintain several packages aimed at non-coding writers. I put a lot of effort into ensuring that writers never need to write or understand any code in order to get writing. Emacs has a built-in user-friendly options UI system that pr…

This is the first time in my 29 years of Emacs use that it has occurred to me that someone out there might like M-x customize enough to hold it up as a pro-Emacs argument.

I use it very occasionally in order to discover the name of one of Emacs's thousands of user options, which option I then manipulate with Emacs Lisp code added to a file. I much preferred the (recently completely removed from Gnu Emacs after 2 decades of being marked as deprecated) vastly simpler list-options command for doing that.

For me, easy modification of one's personal software environment by adding Emacs Lisp code to files is the central argument for Emacs and cancels out the negatives such as the fact that, e.g., C-z does not undo the latest editing action.

One of benefits of online discussion of things like editors and programming languages is that it is a constant reminder of the largeness of the diversity in cognitive styles and preferences among people.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#102

Post by globular-toast »

xroche wrote: post #79
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…

My emacs setup takes minutes to install on a new computer. I use borg, but there are many other ways to do it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#103

Post by vintermann »

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.…

I never claimed to be an emacs user. I've used Linux exclusively at home since 2001, and I've never "switched" to it or vim, though of course I have a passing familiarity with both from such things as certifications or working on other people's machines.

Of course I'm familiar with the "never leave emacs" meme, moon phase indicators and "what it needs is a good editor" etc. I even gave an example of it being used as a platform in my other comment here (proof general).

But this was about its popularity relative to other editors, not relative to other scriptable framework things.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#104

Post by e40 »

the_spacebyte wrote: post #94

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 cu…

> lisp.h

Wow. Been using and extending Emacs for 40 years and I've never had to even look at lisp.h or hack the C code.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#106

Post by NoGravitas »

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.

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

Almost, but not quite. VSC doesn't give you javascript access to the internals of the application, it just provides a fairly broad set of extension APIs. You can see this in how the VSC equivalent of rainbow-delimiters-mode (parentheses and brackets recolored based on their nesting depth) had to be rewritten as part of the core application for performance reasons. This wasn't necessary for emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#107

Post by vintermann »

kqr wrote: post #89
jimbokun wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

No, I do not go "Emacs plugins can do what now". I rather go, "and that is supposed to be a good idea?". If you want to use Emacs as an OS, doesn't protected mode seem like a desirable feature?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#108

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

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!

Actually, there is. Typing `C-x C-s` in a 'normal' Editor. Always happens to me :(

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#109

Post by johnisgood »

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…

I never had to read a book to use emacs well. Same with vim, VSCodium, and IntelliJ.

Sometimes I ssh into a machine that has only vim installed, so I use vim. Sometimes it is faster to open a file using vim, so I use vim. If I expect to spend a lot of time editing it, then emacs.

Currently I am using IntelliJ for a Java/Kotlin project.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#110

Post by gorjusborg »

the_spacebyte wrote: post #94

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 cu…

That an emacs user holds that opinion is a bit surprising to me, as to me most of the reason for me using emacs is to develop in lisp-inspired languages. I think lisp development is the raison d'etre for emacs in the modern times.

As someone who loves fennel, clojure, scheme, etc., I find myself drawn to emacs because the (repl driven) workflow is so good. That said, I've found that I can't give up vi-style modal editing. The interface matters to me. So neovim it is, for now.

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