Making Emacs Popular Again (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#241

Post by convolvatron » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

b3morales wrote: post #199

convolvatron wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

yes - but those are completely optional

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#242

Post by finder83 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

I use Emacs (with Evil) daily, and despite having tried to move to other editors I'm locked into Emacs. Not so much because of the functionality of Emacs itself but because of plugins...

First, Emacs has the best Vim compatibility I've seen outside of Vim itself. Visual Studio is probably "good enough" for me on this with the vim plugin, but that 5% difference in compatibility makes a difference in practice.

But the largest reason I can't get away from Emacs is Ivy/Counsel. Being able to fuzzy search on the current file or entire project, see results, jump around to each one to see context, make changes to the results in an occur buffer to selectively mass edit search results...all of that I just haven't found a replacement for. Search/replace just doesn't cut it.

So effectively if I move to another editor, my code navigation time increases by 5-10x. Things like better autocomplete might fill that gap, but just even understanding how things go together is so much more difficult when you're fighting with your editor.

Add on other things like org-roam, buffer fuzzy searching in Ivy, fasd tie-in, the customization options, etc, and Emacs is just an amazing experience. There are definitely things I would change, like inline debugging (which I use VS Code for instead), setting up languages and autocomplete, etc. Getting things just right takes a long time for a new language.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#243

Post by User23 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

Ignore the hater's comments. Emacs is Lindy[1], will be around for another 40+ years, and no amount of ankle-biting will change that. Having used it off and on for a couple decades, I can say with confidence that the Emacs community and ecosystem has never been stronger. And thanks to the LSP, it's comparable in IDE features to other LSP capable editors. With the new in version 28 type-inferencing JIT compiler[2], performance has also never been better.

Emacs outshines all other editors in two major respects: discoverability and extensibility. These are two sides of the same coin. When I say discoverability, I mean how the editor actually functions, not just reminders for what the keybinds are. The internal calls can be instrumented, advised, and even rewritten. And this ties into extensibility. In other editors writing an extension is a full blown project. Let's say you identify a need while you're doing your real work. In most editors you now have to create a new plugin project and set up a bunch of boiler plate before you can even get started. By then I've already discovered what I need to do and hacked a solution in the scratch buffer without getting dropped out of my flow for my real work.

There's no denying that Emacs has its warts and that Elisp has a lot of historical baggage. Those who don't grok the Lisp approach to interactive development will never be able to understand why even an admittedly mediocre Lisp is a more frictionless development experience than anything they've ever used.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

[2] https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html#orge596749

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#244

Post by rurban » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

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…

Having worked in F1 that's entirely wrong. A Honda Civic will not even beat a F1 car in the first gear, which goes up to 180km/h. With an unlimited engine of ~24k rpm and a chassis which sucks around each curve nothing can be compared to a F1. If there are curves. On a straight track there are faster cars for about 4 seconds, but then the F1 overtakes. Our usual estimate was that everything in a F1 car was about 1000x better than in other cars. Gearbox? Engine? Chassis? ECU, TCU, tires, you name it

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#245

Post by anonuser123456 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

I’ve been an emacs user for 10 years. Before that, vi for another 10.

This year I switched to VSCode and I will probably not go back.

I like emacs, but the modes I depend on are just too brittle, and there is no easy way to discover that your old favorite mode for some particular feature set has been surpassed by a new one in popularity. VS Code plug-in search gives you ranked options.

Also, there is something to be said for having everyone on your team / company on the same editor; you get economies of scale w.r.t. setting and configurations. As someone that personally invests in tooling, it’s nice to then be able to scale that tooling out to 50 people and have everyone get the benefits.

I can’t do that with emacs, because the learning curve is too steep. But I’ve been able to switch dozens of people with VSCode.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#246

Post by goohle » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

nextos wrote: post #239

skytreader wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the right POV is that Emacs is a text-mode Lisp VM, or at least the remains of one. Whereas vi is just a (great) modal editing interface. They are not comparable. Actually, vim is not a very good implementation of vi's principles. Concerning Emacs, as a heavy user I think it needs 4 things to stay relatively popular. I don't think it will be ever super popular, and that's fine: * Get popular workflows to work…

VI is modal text editor (think JEdit). Emacs is IDE (think Eclipse).

Vim can be upgraded to IDE with plugins, and Emacs can be downgrade to a plain text editor, so they are comparable, but their primary goals are different: Vim focus is on editing of text, while Emacs focus is on integration of editor with tools.

If you need a development environment, then forget about Vim, JEdit, nano, pico, etc. If you need just a text editor, then forget about Emacs, Eclipse, Idea, VSCode, etc.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#247

Post by edgyquant » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

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.

I disagree, I like JavaScript

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#248

Post by convolvatron » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #215

globular-toast wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My emacs setup takes minutes to install on a new computer. I use borg, but there are many other ways to do it.

How long did it take you to assemble your setup? Wall time, not fuzzy memories à la "it takes 5 minutes to cook this". My bet? Tens, if not hundreds of hours.

my setup is 200 line long. on a new machine I just scp it over. many years ago they dropped support for automatically decoding files with a 'Z' extension, so I had to change that sometime in the 90s.

total time invested over 40 years - less than 4 hours.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#249

Post by skulk » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

finder83 wrote: post #242

I use Emacs (with Evil) daily, and despite having tried to move to other editors I'm locked into Emacs. Not so much because of the functionality of Emacs itself but because of plugins... First, Emacs has the best Vim compatibility I've seen outside of Vim itself. Visual Studio is probably "good enough" for me on this with the vim plugin, but that 5% difference in compatibility makes a difference in practice. But the…

The diversity in the emacs ecosystem has a hand in this I think. There are so many different ways to switch buffers: vanilla, Ido, Helm, Ivy, and all of the other ones I haven't heard about. This kind of diversity is unseen in other consolidated, centrally managed software ecosystems.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#250

Post by AtNightWeCode » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:18 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.

There are a lot of rules to reduce cost, assure safety and to make it more competitive. You can not for instance have moving parts. If you could the top speed would increase a lot.