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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#301

Post by babypuncher »

ajross wrote: post #80
isolli wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing worse than reflexively typing ctrl+z to undo in Emacs and instead have the window disappear into the background!

In my .emacs since time immemorial: (global-unset-key [(control z)]) It's absolutely true that defaults are "bad" in many modern environments (though remember C-z to suspend in a terminal environment makes perfect sense!). But the nature of the editor is customization like this. People unwilling to do this just aren't ever going to be happy with emacs. And for those just learning, tricks like that (c.f. emacswiki.org…

I find this at least a little frustrating. I haven't used Emacs, but when using other apps that use non-standard defaults (or just defaults that I am not used to), changing one shortcut leads to a cascade where I have to change many shortcuts. I now have to spend a somewhat significant amount of time configuring a new piece of software before I even know if I actually like it.

Shipping with some easily configurable presets to mimic other popular tools would probably help new users a lot.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#302

Post by philsnow »

PaulHoule wrote: post #163

I used to be an emacs partisan, but line continuation characters killed it for me. With vi I can cut and paste into other applications on the desktop, with emacs I can't. I'm not going to accept the "just customize it" argument because if you do any administration at all you will sometimes log into a machine that you've never seen before. Sometimes you're going to log into a machine that is damaged. In that case you…

Emacs doesn't lend itself well to running on machines you've never logged into before, or ephemeral machines/containers/etc.

It's not a tiny sleek thing that you can start anywhere and have the same experience (that's nano or vi), but if you let your local Emacs eldritch horror reach out with its noodly appendage to whatever you're trying to edit, you'll have a much better experience.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#304

Post by bachmeier »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #222
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.

Nothing against the block cursor as long as it's not on by default. I'm having trouble thinking of other text editors that use it as the default.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#305

Post by Jtsummers »

canaus wrote: post #300
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.

Well, JSON is "just" a serialization format. I'd expect that to be much easier to teach someone than a programming language. That's a rather bizarre comparison.

If all you're doing is serializing the configuration, then lisp's s-expressions are just as intuitive as JSON (in the sense that both can be explained in a few minutes).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#306

Post by Mikeb85 »

criddell wrote: post #296
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.

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

Plenty of Emacs plugins invoke a compiler, language server, whatever to get information about the code. That isn't a feature unique to IDEs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#307

Post by Jtsummers »

bsder wrote: post #256
gorjusborg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That an emacs user holds that opinion is a bit surprising to me, as to me most of the reason for me using emacs is to develop in lisp-inspired languages. I think lisp development is the raison d'etre for emacs in the modern times. As someone who loves fennel, clojure, scheme, etc., I find myself drawn to emacs because the (repl driven) workflow is so good. That said, I've found that I can't give up vi-style modal edi…

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Lisp is, in fact, an albatross hanging around Emacs neck. Using Lisp (and especially elisp) is not okay. Lisp has some very sharp corners that simply are not acceptable in modern languages. I use Lisp when I'm very resource constrained but still need an interpreted language--otherwise I use anything else. Dynamic scoping is just stupid (fault of elisp). Not being to oper…

> Not being to operate on a sequence is stupid. cons pairs to build everything is stupid.

There are other sequence types than lists in elisp and pretty much every other lisp out there. And what do you mean with "Not being [able?] to operate on a sequence"? [0] contains a bunch of functions for operating on sequences, and it's notable they don't say list but sequence in their signature. They work on multiple types of sequences, not just lists.

I do agree on dynamic scoping by default, that's a major weakness in elisp.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Se...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#308

Post by passivate »

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…

I don't think your analogy holds up. If you race an F1 car alongside a commuter sedan, it is obvious to anyone observing the differences in performance, handling, traction, etc.

So going by results, if emacs was so awesome and if it gave such a huge boost, then we would see those results, and it would be trivial to convince anyone to switch to it.

Personally, I don't see editing text as a bottleneck for developer productivity. The vast majority of time is spent reading code, thinking about code, stepping through/debugging code, reading specs, etc. Yes, emacs can do those things to (as can any system that supports plugins), but my point is that we don't see a 'competitive edge' where all the most productive developers use X. What we see is productive developers using a wide variety of tools. Going back to your F1 analogy, there isn't a single sedan winning F1 races.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#309

Post by Bostonian »

I'm an experienced Emacs user but not an advanced one. What I like is the ability to have code in one or more buffers and a shell (CMD on Windows, bash on Linux) in another buffer. In that buffer I compile with `make foo` and see the output there.
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