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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#291

Post by pvaldes »

oblio wrote: post #202
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.

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…

> Can Emacs through a press of a button, show a tooltip or a hovering window, directly over the text where my cursor is?

Let me check...

Yes, it can do it. In org mode at least.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#292

Post by b3morales »

okasaki wrote: post #36
ho_schi wrote: post #9

The complain about the weird and twenty year old issue in Gtk questionable[1]. Gtk2, X11 and disconnecting a display and Emacs calls abort(). I cannot speak about EMACS because I prefer VIM and NEOVIM. My requirements are usability - where VIM excels with your knowledge (learning curve) - and LSP-Support. The later is provided since NEOVIM '0.5`[2] nearly ready to use. A modern editor should know what the user is act…

Emacs does support LSP: https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode

Eglot is another excellent LSP client implementation: https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot

I slightly prefer Elgot's interface, which feels a bit more restrained, but both are excellent.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#293

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

oblio wrote: post #274
klodolph wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90-95% of my time is spent working in at least two languages. Usually JavaScript and some backend language, like Go or Python.

And modern IDEs support 2 languages at the same time. Heck, they support dozens if not hundreds of languages at the same time. Eclipse has Javascript and Python plugins, for example so you can code in Java, Javascript, Python at the same time. VS Code has a ton of language plugins you can use all at the same time. IntelliJ has a ton of language plugins you can also use all at the same time.

> And modern IDEs support 2 languages at the same time. Heck, they support dozens if not hundreds of languages at the same time.

No, they don't. Show me the IDEs with Common Lisp, Coq, Ocaml, Haskell, Elm, ... support. That's actually the reason Code is a real alternative to Emacs and Intellij isn't.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#294

Post by Mikeb85 »

warkdarrior wrote: post #280
Mikeb85 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you substitute Javascript for Lisp, doesn't that describe Visual Studio Code pretty well? For the most part, except for the fact VSCode is owned by MS and has just enough proprietary code to break a lot of functionality if you try to use it without the proprietary bits.

> For the most part, except for the fact VSCode is owned by MS and has just enough proprietary code to break a lot of functionality if you try to use it without the proprietary bits. That's a personal policy choice, not a technical concern.

Let's face it, the fact it's free software is the reason it's used at all, the reason it's been hacked on by so many people, etc... It's always relevant to discuss it's free nature, especially when discussing it's popularity.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#295

Post by hvasilev »

I fell for the "text editor only" meme 8 years ago. I'm actively a vim user that uses tons of plugins just to be able to do simple things that IDEs do by default. I would not recommend it to anyone.

I work primarily with embedded systems (ST and NXP MCUs). Not working with the respective IDEs that have been specifically designed for this type of work and using a text editor instead (of any type) would be objectively a bad choice.

There is just so much value in being able to visually configure pins, peripherals, clocks, etc. that just the text editor makes no sense. Also the debugging experience is probably order of magnitude better.

What you can do and what does make sense is vim emulation inside of the IDE. It is not perfect, but it is what it is.

There is A LOT of ideology in the software world. DO NOT FALL for it. Take things at face value. Be a pragmatic, not an ideologue.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#296

Post by criddell »

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…

> But there's literally nothing I don't have with Emacs that other editors provide.

Some IDEs that can semi-compile the code (to something like an AST) can provide a lot more support for refactoring correctly.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#297

Post by gjvc »

Jtsummers wrote: post #219
gjvc wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Em…

Not always with those two languages, but in many CS curricula in the US there is a "programming languages" course that covers between 4 and 10 [0] languages in different language families. Prolog and Common Lisp (or Scheme) are typically included, you may get Smalltalk in there depending on the school. It's brief, because it's one course, but it's usually a 3rd year course so students should be competent programmers…

You'd certainly want to avoid spreading yourself too thin, which is why I specifically limited my hypothetical first-year module to these two languages, as they would provide the (IMHO) ideal context for learning the rest.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#298

Post by babypuncher »

WalterGR wrote: post #203
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.

Clearly this is just how Emacs cultivates vendor lock-in.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#299

Post by rement »

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…

Nvim has some plugins and features that do some of the things you might be interested in. Telescope[0][1] which is a fuzzy finder for anything you can think of (files, symbols, color themes, etc.[2]). The LSP and Treesitter stuff in nvim 0.5+ is also pretty cool. If you want to just try it without much work the Lunarvim[3] project comes with sane defaults and included plugins (including Telescope).

Lua as the default configuration language makes things simple to configure as well.

Having said all that...if someone told me [insert-text-editor] had everything I would want I would probably check it out and go home to vim (but I do enjoy learning about new stuff and features).

[0] https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65AVwHZflsU -- demo video

[2] https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim#vim-pickers

[3] https://www.lunarvim.org/

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#300

Post by canaus »

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…

VSCode allows you to export settings and keybinds via JSON files.

Also, saying EMacs Lisp is more intuitive than JSON is quite absurd. You could give a 15 minute presentation on how to read JSON to someone who knows how to use Word and they’d at least be able to read it. The same wouldn’t be possible with any subset of lisp.

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