Not possible until they simply suck it up and pander to plebs. I can have a development environment setup in VSCode in under 5-10 minutes in most cases; you cannot even begin to understand Emacs configuration (let alone what you need to google). You need to go heavy into the language itself.
Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
161–170 of 420 posts
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#162Earlier 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.
Ah, but Javascript is a profoundly terrible language to do anything in, while Lisp is a joy to write in. Being a Lisp machine is core to the value of Emacs. Emacs-without-Lisp is just another editor.
> Javascript is a profoundly terrible language to do anything in
Makes it really hard to take anything you say seriously when you reveal just how ok with extreme hyperbole you are
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#163I used to be an emacs partisan, but line continuation characters killed it for me.
With vi I can cut and paste into other applications on the desktop, with emacs I can't.
I'm not going to accept the "just customize it" argument because if you do any administration at all you will sometimes log into a machine that you've never seen before.
Sometimes you're going to log into a machine that is damaged.
In that case you should be facile with whatever editor is already installed on the machine.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#164I've used Emacs for about 5 years now, exclusively in Evil mode. One of my biggest complaints is that my big complex configuration setup seems to break every time I migrate to a new version of Emacs, or a new computer. This last time, I had to install VS code to get my work done quickly because I didn't have time to mess around with my configuration (yet again). It was surprisingly easy to get up and going on vscode. If it wasn't based on Electron, I just might consider sticking with it. Tweaking Emacs consumes a lot of time and seems to never end.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#165I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem.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 just love that for a moment here we’ve put aside our differences about emacs vs vi and focused our efforts on bike shedding which car analogy best fits. Peak computing culture.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 e…
- I've used Emacs for 30 years, and I have no intention of ever giving it up -
why? I hear it is much easier to quit then vim :)
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Emacs has [...] no autocomplete, and doesn't show available functions My impression is that you are not familiar with Emacs.
I have been using emacs for 7 years prior to switching to VS Code. Never looked back. It's better in all regards.
> I have been using emacs for 7 years prior to switching to VS Code.
Based on what you've been claiming I doubt that.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#168Emacs' 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.…
This is something I wish someone had told me 20 years ago when I first started using emacs. The whole "it's a text editor, but also it's not really a text editor"-thing was very confusing initially.
... Although, now that I think about it, being told this mind-blowing revelation about the emacs nature might have confused me even more.
What I love about emacs is that I have a variety - an extensible variety! - of programs under one roof, so to speak, sharing the same - customizable! - keyboard shortcuts that comfortably integrate with each other.
I think the main problem in "proselytizing" emacs to potential new users is that it is kind of the C++ of text editors, in the sense that it takes a very big up front investment that does pay off in a big way if you persist, but getting to that point took - at least for me - a multi-year commitment. It is hard to sell someone on that unless they want to do it anyway. I did it out of fun and curiosity, but if you view it as an investment in purely transactional terms, it's hard to sell.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#169If anything I see more love for Emacs over the years, not less. From Spacemacs to DoomEmacs to all the vim users switching to Emacs+evil-mode. There's LSP support since a while too.
The Emacs ecosystem is alive and very well. It's in much better shape than it used to be.
I used to live inside JetBrains' IntelliJ IDE, starting at IntelliJ version 4 (yup, I'm that old) and I'd probably use IntelliJ again if I was forced to work in a nonsensical Java codebase, full of boilerplate, impossible to navigate because it became a gigantic mess of spaghetti code. But that is my vision of hell.
Emacs is something else. My custom config is about 3 000 lines of elisp code, written over the years.
About anything I want Emacs to do, I can have it do it.
Dunno, last thing I did was configure my 3-ways merge/diff environment: didn't like the default, didn't like the layout, didn't like the colors. Dived into some elisp code and I changed the layout to better match my very wide screen.
Another quick hack: when asking for the list of recent buffers/files opened, I wanted, for those in version control, to see how many commits they had (to quickly find hot spots)... Some elisp code to modify "counsel", one shell script. Boom, done. I've done that years ago. Still working flawlessly.
I've written a plug-in for IntelliJ back in the days. It's horrible.
Also if we compare Emacs to IDEs, it's the most lightweight, and by very far. It was "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" and it was funny joke in the 90s but today 8 MB fits in the L1 cache or so. It's not swapping anymore (even if it's a bit more than 8 MB, granted).
I'm using the native-comp branch of Emacs since it came out and stuff like burntsushi's ripgrep directly integrated in Emacs. It is not just a bit fast, but incredibly fast.
Sure there are gotchas. You have to dig a bit into elisp to fix the usual suspects (like long lines making it slow: it's all configurable).
But you're in control of absolutely everything.
You have the source code, use it when you need it.
Now I know some are using Emacs with the default setup and the default keybindings and without knowing / using any elisp. I'm no elisp guru but I think Emacs only begins to show its power once you being to use elisp to tailor Emacs to your way of working.
That's the thing: you adapt Emacs to your way of doing things, not the other way around.
I don't think there's any need to "make it popular again". It is popular enough and it is thriving.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#170I love Emacs, but you need to be a retro minded programmer to enjoy it, that means you have to prefer code as your user interface, because in Emacs, code is the main UX, you're basically living inside a running Lisp command shell.
Now honestly, I don't think it needs to become more popular, I think it just needs to continue to attract enough people that are smart enough to work on future versions and maintain the popular extensions, and that's all.