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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#181

Post by FredPret »

mnd999 wrote: post #123
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I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem.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…

That’s a terrible analogy. An F1 car isn’t flexible, it’s highly specialised. And there are roughly 20 F1 drivers on the planet at a given time, are you suggesting the total audience for emacs is about 20?

I know right, are there actually 20 people who want to use Emacs!?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#182

Post by deworms »

cpach wrote: post #43
deworms wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need a dedicated tutorial for a text editor it's a great sign that something is very wrong with its design, particularly concerning discoverability. Emacs has no user-friendly command names (you need to memorize function names which are often meaningless abbreviations), no autocomplete, and doesn't show available functions.

Emacs was founded in the 1970s. There is a lot of legacy in there, but IMHO it still holds up as a very powerful and nice text editor. “If you need a dedicated tutorial for a text editor it's a great sign that something is very wrong with its design, particularly concerning discoverability.” I don’t agree. If it was a mass-market product for users who just wants something convenient, then I would agree. Those users a…

There already exists better power tools for power users, that are easy to use and easy to customize, yet still more powerful than Emacs. It's a common misconception that if it's arbitrarily hard to understand, it must be something for power users. Bad design is not a feature.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#183

Post by skytreader »

bch wrote: post #165
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I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem.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 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.

I wouldn't waste keystrokes on the classic religious war being waged in this thread so I'm gonna throw my hat in this arena instead. I agree with you---that analogy sucks.

Being able to drive an F1 car comes with excellent financial opportunities. Even if I'm not "on the grid" (i.e., actively competing in the GPs), I can be a test driver. Heck the license required to drive an F1 car opens other doors in itself (maybe in other motorsports, but also allegedly the range of vehicles you can drive).

In contrast, if I am proficient in emacs I am...proficient in emacs. I edit code in a manner that is visually impressive to maybe three persons in the CS department. I'd have an ever-so-slightly deeper connection to RMS than your average CRUD-slinger. I am out of advantages to enumerate and I'm trying very hard.

Maybe text editors are about as similar to cars as apples are to buildings.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#184

Post by deviaan »

m45t3r wrote: post #130
kqr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, exactly. For example, evil-mode is still miles better than VSCode Vim plugins just because it works everywhere. Any buffer that my Emacs opens I can still use my Vim shortcuts (so it doesn't change that I open a text, a binary, file manager, a fuzzy search or PDF). Compared to this, on VSCode I basically need to explicitly say "make vim commands do this in this context" for everything I need.

My current client wants all of us to standardize on VS Code at some point, and this is by far the most annoying thing for me. I hate that if I leave the editor, it goes back to a mouse-driven design. I'm glad to hear you can change the behavior, so I guess I'll just have to do that at some point to make it work for my needs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#185

Post by Zababa »

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.

Not exactly, VSCode is more of an editor that can accept very advanced plugins. The "virtual JavaScript machine with a standard library for writing graphical (text) applications." is a web browser.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#186

Post by Zababa »

eadmund wrote: post #133
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.

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.

What do you find profoundly terrible about JavaScript?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#187

Post by medo-bear »

FredPret wrote: post #181
mnd999 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a terrible analogy. An F1 car isn’t flexible, it’s highly specialised. And there are roughly 20 F1 drivers on the planet at a given time, are you suggesting the total audience for emacs is about 20?

I know right, are there actually 20 people who want to use Emacs!?

21

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#188

Post by Zababa »

rich_sasha wrote: post #63
deworms wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need a dedicated tutorial for a text editor it's a great sign that something is very wrong with its design, particularly concerning discoverability. Emacs has no user-friendly command names (you need to memorize function names which are often meaningless abbreviations), no autocomplete, and doesn't show available functions.

Vim has a built-in tutorial too. As said elsewhere, you literally cannot get started in Vim without knowing a dozen command and grokking modes, in Emacs you can at least stumble around without knowing anything. Equally, there's a difference in target audience. Do you need a tutorial to operate a screwdriver? No. Power drill? Arguably yes. CNC mill? Dear God please yes. I don't think you expect a fork lift or nail gun…

> As said elsewhere, you literally cannot get started in Vim without knowing a dozen command and grokking modes

You need i, escape, :w! and !wq. hjkl too if you're feeling fancy. But i, escape, :w! and !wq is all you need to use Vim. I know because I used it like that for two years in college.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#189

Post by Azsy »

Arubis wrote: post #119

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. T…

I was nodding along with the first paragraph. But then,

> The greatest threat to Emacs, [..] is a paradigm change in how software gets built or run

Is a little to far into scify land.

First it requires software to no longer be text based, and then it requires virtually all software to switch to this non-text based solution.

In that world a single user can keep Emacs up to date and compatible by asking our AI overlords to do it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#190

Post by Zababa »

deworms wrote: post #53
nverno wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it takes work, it's like learning how to dance, draw, or paint. My emacs config is literally 64183 lines of elisp + 2356 snippets (just checked), so I'm not really considering a major editor switch at this point. I've used VS code as well, it's fine for what it does and certainly much more beginner friendly.

Imagine what you could have accomplished if you didn't have to spend all that time writing an entire large codebase just to make it usable. It's a false assumption that it should require pointless busywork to be useful. You're never getting back the time you've wasted on writing a config for an obsolete editor.

> Imagine what you could have accomplished if you didn't have to spend all that time writing an entire large codebase just to make it usable. It's a false assumption that it should require pointless busywork to be useful. You're never getting back the time you've wasted on writing a config for an obsolete editor.

Isn't this precisely the kind of "protestant work ethic" that you mentioned just before? If someone enjoys writing ELisp for Emacs, what's wrong with writing 61k lines of it?

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