281–290 of 420 posts
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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.
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Maybe helm ( https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/ ) should be installed and preconfigured by default. This solves a lot of the shortcomings of vanilla emacs.
Helm is a little heavy-weight. Ivy is lighter, but also does a lot of NIH stuff it doesn't need to. I personally like selectrum, ( https://github.com/raxod502/selectrum ) because it provides the features of Ivy and quite a bit of extensibility, while still only using the built-in extension points in emacs (completing-read-function, etc.). I do wish the emacs developers would bless something and include and configure…
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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 edit…
2. Why would I want to put a tooltip over an emacs window?
3. The things that contemporary IDEs can do that Emacs may be clunkier at are mostly things I'm not interested in doing. They are also often addressable in totally different ways. The speed of tools like ag(1) and their integration into Emacs changes the need for Emacs itself to be able to take me to special places in a codebase, for example.
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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.
I love writing elisp, obviously! It wasn't some drudgery for me, it was the whole reason I even got into coding (from using R in emacs) in the first place. I got into a habit (obsession?) of automating as much as possible everything I repetitively do on a computer by writing elisp. It's essentially my operating system.
I've been using emacs as my primary editor since 1989. It has for that entire time been a PITA to configure. My first customization was to map backspace to ^H and map the insert key to 'nil. I used to dedicate a couple days every January to investigate new emacs tools. Read about the latest features or new modes, often from my org-mode TODO list where I bookmarked them. I have learned to never update emacs mid-projec…
I’m not sure it was ever alive to begin with. Not in the classical sense. I mean, I don’t think elisp ever got good (or any) use outside of emacs configuration and extension. There weren’t any popular web frameworks, numerical libraries etc. written in elisp.
Inside its target space, though, it seems as vibrant as ever. New, helpful packages keep appearing that are written in elisp. For better or worse, the extension ecosystem is not nearly as fragmented as some other editors.
That’s not to say that elisp doesn’t need serious improvements, though. Making it natively multi threaded alone will advance the story quite a bit imo.
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…
Emacs is more like a car from a Mad Max film than it is an F1 racer: each instance of Emacs has been so heavily modified (often in haphazard, kitbash fashion) that it's only ever supposed to be driven by one person: its owner.
Some of us want a car that any of our relatives can just jump in and use.
Both goals make sense.
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I'm thinking about converting to a modern IDE away from emacs-nox. What can they do that emacs can't?
There's very little that they can do that Emacs can't. It's just that if you're on the easy path, the IDE will give you a pretty high-quality experience with very little time spent configuring it. The "easy path" supports more and more use cases each year, but my experience is still that the more custom your build system is, the more likely it is that you'll not get your nice IDE integrations. That's was true in the…
I'm curious to know what people think about elisp as a extension language. Would Emacs be better if everything was implemented in elisp including the core data structures (assuming elisp was very fast)? Do people suffer from lack of static typing?
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.…