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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#151

Post by pkulak »

kqr wrote: post #134
gopiandcode wrote: post #116

I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem.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

It sounds like you know very little about either F1 cars or Emacs. Emacs is more like an older Toyota pickup truck – been around for a long time, ubiquitous, flexible, can carry a load, simple, there's an abundance of spare parts, and there's no problem with it that a good mechanic cannot fix – most problems can be fixed even by improvisation in the field.

I still like the idea that professional tools, while too much work for most, are worth the effort to master, in a professional setting.

Your analogy works too, but it's parallel.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#152

Post by sleibrock »

I have worked at a number of jobs where it sometimes required me to use coding. I was not treated like a programmer ever. I was given very old hardware and expected to do my work. The worst computer I had was a Dell machine which had an i3 CPU and 4GB of RAM. Opening VS Code on this machine brought it to it's knees.

I solved this issue by simply using Emacs instead. It uses far less memory, didn't cripple my system, and it is after all my preferred text editing environment for the last few years. I eventually got fed up with Windows bluescreens that I switched to Linux, and then I spent more time fixing other people's older Windows machines than doing my tasks.

Emacs has me sucked in and I don't see myself going anywhere else. Now I'm using Emacs on another old Dell with Linux in another workplace, and it's fantastic to use as always.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#153

Post by kwhitefoot »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #108
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!

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

Done that about a dozen times today!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#154

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

klodolph wrote: post #139
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but no matter what, you will never be as fast or flexible as an F1 car (GNU Emacs). The massive flaw in your analogy being that Emacs has more to do with an old and crumbling collection racing car than a F1. Its users constantly need to tinker it to make it somewhat run like a normal car. It’s still slower and less ergonomic but they are blinded by their love and habit to its obvious flaws. The amount of IDE and ed…

I would love to meet this mythical Emacs programmer which is blinded to its flaws, I don't think they're common.

There are people in this thread talking positively of ELisp (a shameful language even by the low standards set by other Lisp) and who thinks the emacs GUI experience is acceptable in 2021. Some are even arguing that having to write 1000 lines of the previously cited terrible language to get the UX behaviours everyone has been expecting from a text editor in the past three decades is a worthwhile time investment. I would argue that apparently they are numerous.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#155

Post by pxc »

azeirah wrote: post #95
wirrbel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Working on large coding projects? Jetbrains IDEs

IME language support and a desire for intellisense type features is a bigger factor. JetBrains generally has excellent support for that across the board, and it's sometimes lacking for some languages with Emacs

but size of the codebase doesn't really matter. At work we have a sizeable PHP codebase, and it's just as fast, if not faster, to navigable with ripgrep and fzf or editor plugins based on them as with a JetBrains IDE

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#156

Post by the_spacebyte »

e40 wrote: post #104
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.

That was mostly a "tongue in cheek" joke : ) What I meant was that the code base is overwhelming both because it has some years on top and I don't like/understand lisp that much

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#157

Post by mjh2539 »

gopiandcode wrote: post #116

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…

I think a better analogy would be comparing a Mercedes W123 (Vim/Neovim) with a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord (VSCode/Jetbrains) with a Jeep Wrangler (Emacs).

Yes, the Jeep Wrangler will topple over while trying to go through a ravine (which no other mass-produced four-wheeled vehicle would ever be capable of going through), but that's what after-market rollcages are for.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#158

Post by didibus »

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…

Actually, ounce I got used to Emacs choices I ended up liking them better. Hard to say why, I think it's that when you start adding more and more shortcuts, the choices Emacs made start to make sense in terms of maximizing all the various bindings.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#159

Post by klodolph »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #154
klodolph wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to meet this mythical Emacs programmer which is blinded to its flaws, I don't think they're common.

There are people in this thread talking positively of ELisp (a shameful language even by the low standards set by other Lisp) and who thinks the emacs GUI experience is acceptable in 2021. Some are even arguing that having to write 1000 lines of the previously cited terrible language to get the UX behaviours everyone has been expecting from a text editor in the past three decades is a worthwhile time investment. I wo…

It sounds like you are saying that people who don't share your opinion on ELisp are blinded to its flaws... but that doesn't make sense. Are you saying that?
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