Making Emacs Popular Again (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#221

Post by pfortuny » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

d0mine wrote: post #86

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…

To understand why emacs is great, think of it not as an editor but as a platform. Killer apps for me are: - magit :: everyday things are just a key away, less common things are visible, complex things are possible - Org-mode :: whole life in plain text (for some brain types it enables almost impossible to achieve otherwise + Org-Babel + emacs-jupyter

mu4e has simplified my life enormously.

I can do things no other would let me do easily. Namely: create automatic exams with latex, each for a different address and send each to its corresponding pupil, all in a single script.

Attaching is a breeze, by the way.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#222

Post by MonkeyClub » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #214

Emacs is not just for programming. Given the popularity of other uses (org-mode being the obvious big example) it's likely that text editing is the bigger potential market than programming. There's a market for a customizable text editor. Look at what non-programmers are doing with Obsidian. The outdated defaults Emacs uses kills off their chances of getting into that market. Weird default shortcuts for no reason, a…

> a block cursor by default

Hands off the block cursor, it's very helpful with astigmatism.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#223

Post by oblio » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

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…

Neovim?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#224

Post by motomoto » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

underatree wrote: post #37

deworms wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to use a specific dialect of lisp most people won't be familiar with, it does a poor job at it. Lisp is not a language many people use today. NeoVim lets you use any language you want for writing extensions. VS Code uses javascript which is easy to learn and most developers already know it.

It's a great strength that NeoVim supports many languages, and VS Code uses Javascript. Lisp is not widely used, and this is an impediment to Emacs' popularity. However, when people speak about Emacs customizability, they are referring to a deeper level of customizability than most programs (even NeoVim/VS Code), in which its innards and UI are all subject to modification, at runtime, within the beast itself. This is…

So does neovim. As an example:

https://github.com/rktjmp/lush.nvim#readme

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#225

Post by skytreader » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

f00zz wrote: post #209

dagw wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll defer to someone better informed than me but I understood that as a reference to the rules and regulations around F1 cars.

The "Formula" in "Formula 1" means there are certain constraints (i.e., the formula) to how you can design your car. Very quick illustration, check out the buzz on the new F1 car spec for next year. It is already touted to be faster than this year's cars mostly because of aero changes.

Even easier illustration: the current (and I assume all future) spec has this halo whose sole purpose is to protect the driver. It's a ~7kg frame that's basically dead weight to the car. You can remove that and instantly gain maybe a few seconds of laptime at the expense of safety (I am in favor of the halo's presence, btw.).

The spec aside, the rules and regulations also try to enforce a competitive line-up so they regulate budget and, next year, wind tunnel testing time. So in theory if teams had carte blanche for car R&D we can have faster cars. But they won't be F1-compliant so they lose by default.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#226

Post by vzaliva » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

Emacs distributions I think is a good way to make it more popular. Out-of-box emacs install is very dry and unappealing. There are many packages which could be installed to make it much more modern and user-friendly. Emacs distributions which pack emacs with a list of packages and default customizations is the right direction. I've seen many new emacs users who started using spacemacs but would probably be put off by learning curve of standard bare-bones emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#227

Post by lgrialn » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

I fully expected there would be a fair amount of discussion of RSI here.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#228

Post by sleepycatgirl » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

pxc wrote: post #135

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…

> 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 standard Java plugins?" Spacemacs also does this, and it's a big part of why I stuck around long enough to discover some of the plugins that make the Emacs world really special, like Org mode and Magit. I'm still no Emacs hacker, but I know enough to get by, and that a good starter…

Yee, very similar here, Though for me, Doom Emacs, very simple to set up, and was more or less just work for me.

Though one day I will bother to configure emacs from scratch, but that day is not today.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#229

Post by throwaway2331 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

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…

I'm thinking about converting to a modern IDE away from emacs-nox.

What can they do that emacs can't?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#230

Post by cjauvin » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

I have realized recently that a value that is gaining a lot of importance for me is the stability of my cognitive investments, in terms of tooling, across a time frame that goes beyond my "current project", and more into the "my entire career" territory. In that sense, I feel more and more that the choice of learning and owning Emacs, more than 20 years ago, while in school, has paid off tremendously, in the sense that it has always constituted a solid and consistent backbone from which I can always start a new project, no matter what the context is (corporate or personal). I feel this would have been harder to achieve with a tool which is asking me to update it every 3 days, and which periodically introduce important paradigm changes forcing me to reconsider the way I work. In short, I value Emacs' stability and consistency across time and tech fashions more than anything else, as I grow older.