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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#201

Post by Ologn »

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I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem.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

> claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying > run of the mill, mundane, forgotten-in-a-few-years, CRUD web apps, a normal _average_ car (M$ vscode)

With regards to obsolete and outdated - I started using vi and emacs back in 1989 (I currently use vi more). The keybindings and such I learned back then are still relevant.

In my day job, I mostly program Android. Before 2014, I programmed with Eclipse and an Android plugin, which is what Google suggested. Then Android Studio was released, which is what Google suggested. As I haven't used Eclipse at all since around 2014-2015, Eclipse, to me any how, has become "obsolete/outdated". Yet I'm still using vi (and emacs) as I have since the 1980s. They have not become outdated, I still use them as I always have.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#202

Post by oblio »

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.

I've read a bunch of articles where long time Emacs users are put into a position where they have to achieve something on a tight deadline. Many of them try to muddle through their Rube Goldberg contraption of a local config and under time pressure or advised by someone else they try a modern IDE and suddenly realize why many professional developers use them.

They realize that despite the potentially subpar text editing experience, a highly polished modern Integrated Development Environment is a power tool and a productivity machine for the environment it's aimed at.

One simple example, maybe Emacs can do this. Can Emacs through a press of a button, show a tooltip or a hovering window, directly over the text where my cursor is? Not another window to the side of the editing window or below it. I want my eyes to be stationary and I want the tooltip to be easily dismissable.

Plus, IDEs have professional developers writing integrations so I don't have to, and they're paid to do that for tens of thousands of paying customers, so they pretty much are guaranteed to work. They are also pretty much guaranteed to work well with other advanced integrated features.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#203

Post by WalterGR »

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…

The biggest problem for me is the constant context switching between those defaults chosen 30 years ago and the defaults converged on by every other app I use.

Of course, no context switching is needed if you do everything in Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#204

Post by [deleted] »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #141

2021 and Emacs still my preferred editor (and I'm young enough, in my 30's). Yes it requires a bit more setup (not much more however, VSC also misses functionality out of the box). However that setup is saved forever, across machines in the form of your .emacs file, so whatever changes you make to make it personal stay with you. And it's really not much more difficult to setup, Emacs lisp is more intuitive than JSON…

[deleted]

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#205

Post by oblio »

Steltek wrote: post #195
eadmund wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a joy. When writing code in the ivory tower :-)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#206

Post by b3morales »

foobarian wrote: post #147
ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You guys both got nothing on pressing Cmd-W on a MacOS terminal when you intend to copy a selection. :-( I swear whoever designed that UI must have been a vi partisan.

I found it better to make Option (rather than Command) be Meta for this reason.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#207

Post by rollcat »

deworms wrote: post #177
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…

There's that condescending attitude again. In your fantasy land Emacs is an F1 race car, and everyone else is a CRUD-writing code monkey that drives a cheap sedan. In reality though, Emacs is a subpar editor for both everyday and specialized tasks that's fallen into obscurity as its maintainers refuse to implement anything that would make it keep up the pace with superior editors.

With 15+ years of daily Emacs usage, I couldn't agree more. It's 50% force of habit, and 50% the few commands (align-regexp! kill-rectangle!), packages (magit! tramp!), or custom Lisp snippets that make every other editor feel inadequate...

Until your Emacs process is hung again, waiting for IO, or can't process a "jump to definition", or chokes on a file with extremely long lines, or the stitched-together macOS dark mode switcher daemon has crashed, ad infinitum.

Yes, it's a race car, but from 1987, and in total disrepair.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#208

Post by oblio »

krylon wrote: post #174
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.

I have not played with VS Code a lot, but I get the impression that, yes, they aim for something similar. I'm not qualified to judge, though, how successful they are so far. FWIW, when I hear people talk about VS Code, they appear to like it very much. But AFAICT, it has some way to go to catch up with all the functionality emacs has accreted over 30+ years. Also, there is an effort replace the old lisp engine inside…

Isn't the Guile effort practically dead? I remember hearing about it 10 years ago.

It was actually started in 2000 and doesn't seem to have progressed since 2014: https://emacsninja.com/posts/state-of-emacs-lisp-on-guile.ht...

Plus, even if it's finished, will it get any traction in the ecosystem? Will the ecosystem start moving to it to take advantage of its unique benefits? Who knows?

Bonus: Have you heard of GNU Hurd? :-)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#209

Post by f00zz »

dagw wrote: post #200
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…

> F1 cars aren't even the fastest design for racing on F1 race tracks.

I found this a bit confusing. Why is that, do F1 races have a speed limit? I openly admit my ignorance about F1.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#210

Post by vidarh »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #166
NoGravitas wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I gave up emacs by writing my own editor... I realised I could write one in fewer lines than my emacs config...
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