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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#191

Post by chipotle_coyote »

krylon wrote: post #168
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.…

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 prog…

You just succinctly described why my annual attempts to learn Emacs never actually go anywhere. As much as I like the idea of an all-purpose text processor construction kit, even with "starter kits" I spend a week trying to configure various languages to a point that I'm happy, find myself copying, pasting and tweaking Lisp code, invariably find weird conflicts that lead me to do web searches (which may find more Lisp code, which may be a decade out of date), and so on. I don't doubt that if I kept at it I'd eventually reach nirvana, but I frequently find myself thinking "this was just so much easier in Vim" -- and any time anything can be described as "easier in Vim", it feels like a sign of a UX problem. :)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#192

Post by salamandersauce »

deworms wrote: post #23
cpach wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I set out to learn Emacs in the year ~2001 or so, I just did C-h t in order to launch the builtin tutorial. IMHO that can still be a viable way to get started. Spacemacs might be nice but it’s in no way required in order to be productive with Emacs. My personal .emacs file is only 32 lines long (28 lines of comments are not counted).

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 has user friendly command names, functions in Emacs have a full command name. Can you guess what "comment-region" does? That's right it comments out the currently selected region. Or "switch-to-buffer"? That's right, it's used to switch buffers. Obviously if you use these things regularly typing all that gets tedious so you can use keyboard shortcuts like C-x-b to switch buffers instead. Sometimes these have relation to the command they call but sometimes they don't, but neither does something like Ctrl-Z (What does Z have to do with undo?).

Emacs doesn't have autocomplete built in but it does have tab completion and if you press tab it will show you possible functions that start with what you typed if there is more than 1 option available.

I think most of the trouble people have with Emacs is that it doesn't use standard terminology or conventions mainly do to its age. There is nothing more discoverable about Ctrl-Z vs. Ctrl-/ other than that Ctrl-Z became the defacto standard. If you took two novice computer users that have never used a computer in their life I think they would have just as much trouble with VS code as Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#193

Post by gjvc »

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…

Computer Science students would greatly benefit from an introductory-level course in the two of the most historically influential languages -- LISP and Smalltalk.

Emacs as an editor does take effort to learn, and it's a different type of effort from all the other editors you mention, because they are all quite different beasts.

In the end, it comes down to pedagogical considerations and how each individual learns.

Emacs has suffered by having an awfully austere default installation, and Linux distributions have refrained from delivering a version with something like Doom or Prelude to make it more approachable. (Prelude is my favourite.)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#194

Post by deltarholamda »

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 agree with this. I used emacs in the late 90s through early 00s, and it worked great. I pretty much stick with BBEdit these days, because it works great for my personal workflow. I never got into vim: I only learned enough of it to edit config files and the like when I shell into a computer.

The modern paradigm of running npm/brew/composer/webpack/whatever gimcrack tool that gets shoehorned into the build process has led a lot of people to the VSCode-ish side of things that make integrating these things easy. emacs tends to look like a well-appointed workshop with lots of good, sharp tools and a stack of raw lumber, whereas VSCode looks like a finished Chesterfield. It takes a certain sort of person to prefer the workshop over the finished piece, and I'm not sure you could ever change that.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#195

Post by Steltek »

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.

eLisp? Where lexical scoping is this brand new feature that generates compiler warnings? Where the UI thread is the same as your eLisp thread? Where multiprocessing is a super clunky fork-exec with a weird side buffer? Where a simple regular expression works differently between what the user invokes and how you'd write it in a function?

Yeah, it's a super joy to write.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#197

Post by srcreigh »

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.…

It's an early web browser. Elisp is an early JS. Viewing documents is just a little more complicated (download packages, sync stuff down using Git, etc)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#199

Post by b3morales »

convolvatron wrote: post #117
NoGravitas wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> VSCode presents an API around a specific notion of what a language is and how it interacts with the editor

I would say Emacs has this as well, in its syntax tables. They are its schema for "what a language can be" and especially "how the editor can interact with it".

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#200

Post by dagw »

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…

you will never be as fast or flexible as an F1 car

F1 race cars are literally the least flexible cars available. They are designed for exactly one type of racing and there is hardly anything you are allowed to configure the way you want. There are cars with higher top speeds than F1 cars, and cars that accelerate faster. A $2k second hand Honda Civic will beat the crap out of an F1 car around a gravel track. F1 cars aren't even the fastest design for racing on F1 race tracks. F1 cars are only good for one thing, and that is winning F1 races.

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