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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#111

Post by varjag »

vintermann wrote: post #103
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.…

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…

Thing is the difference between Emacs undo tree and …other editors undo is way more than the key binding. Your comment barely scratches the surface of the issue.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#112

Post by NoGravitas »

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…

I've used Emacs for 30 years, and I have no intention of ever giving it up, but IMO this is somewhat accurate. The package installation and configuration story on Emacs has gotten a lot better over the last ten years or so, but there really ought to be a kind of meta package installer and configurator that does exactly what VSCode does: when it finds a file that it doesn't handle specially but for which there is an existing package or set of packages, install those packages and configure them with reasonable defaults.

Spacemacs does this, which is the main nice thing about it. Unfortunately, it also carries a lot of other baggage rather than just doing this.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#113

Post by Mikeb85 »

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?

For the most part, except for the fact VSCode is owned by MS and has just enough proprietary code to break a lot of functionality if you try to use it without the proprietary bits.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#114

Post by ajross »

tom_ wrote: post #100
ajross wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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")))

Nope. Again, context matters here. I never use emacs in a terminal; all editting of files on remote systems is done in a local X11 emacs over ssh. And this is not because of circumstance but because making that choice opens up more doors. I can have keybindings not just on C-z but ones that aren't representable in the terminal at all (e.g. I like to put end/beginning-of-buffer on C-. and C-,)

Would I submit my choices as good defaults for new emacs users? Hell no. But they remain good choices nonetheless. That's the essence of my point, not the minutiae.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#116

Post by gopiandcode »

I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem.

Maybe it's easier to understand via analogy. Let's consider cars. Of the global population of car users, relatively few of them are F1 racecar drivers. Furthermore, you can easily make the case that the particular features (aerodynamics, speed etc.) that make the F1 a good racecar, would not be useful for the average driver - the time they spend honing their skills to handle such a beast, you could argue, would be better spent on other things. But, at the same time, the F1 car has and will continue to have a place in the car ecosystem.

In the case of developers, you might be right that, for the average developer, working on your run of the mill, mundane, forgotten-in-a-few-years, CRUD web apps, a normal _average_ car (M$ vscode) would be a better investment, but no matter what, you will never be as fast or flexible as an F1 car (GNU Emacs).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#117

Post by convolvatron »

NoGravitas wrote: post #106
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.

> 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…

I'm doing a highly integrated language environment for a research language and faced this decision recently.

elisp and javascript are both pretty iffy lisps, but at this point I think I'd prefer javascript.

however VSCode presents an API around a specific notion of what a language is and how it interacts with the editor. emacs comes in at lower level and presents a model with just buffers and text.

I remember elisp debugging as being a joy - not really finding that to be true. but I really don't want to be limited by what the VSC designers thought I should want to do with source files - actually I don't want to use source files at all.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#118

Post by NoGravitas »

hollerith wrote: post #101
zephyr9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deca…

I'm actually in-between on this. What I normally do is write short bits of code (generally `use-package' forms) to install and load packages and set options that are essential to the operation of the package, are not private information, and don't vary between my different machines. Then I use `customize-group' to set any remaining options.

Customize could stand improvement in terms of widgets and layout, but it's not bad. Other than a coat of paint, it's pretty similar to VS Code's preferences interface.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#119

Post by Arubis »

I understand why there's all this concern about making Emacs popular--as software professionals, we've all seen a few tools that we use and love wither at the vine and die slow deaths. But the concern for _overall_ popularity is a little misplaced. There's more developers than ever, and the pie continues to grow; Emacs just needs a sufficient total userbase to stay maintained, and that seems already to be in place.

The greatest threat to Emacs, as to any other fairly well-liked open-source editor, is a paradigm change in how software gets built or run, not whether it has 7% or 9% mindshare.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#120

Post by diegocg »

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…

There is something weird about projects that choose a functional programming language as one of their pillars. When I read nixos documentation, there are constant references to how awesome and pure and functional their language is.
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