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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#311

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

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.

Hmm, refactoring, fixes of Flycheck errors (if the checker/LSP provides them), a Tramp mode that actually works. Oh, and I would like to be able to continue editing my file while Emacs is doing something else ;)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#312

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #306
criddell wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>Plenty of Emacs plugins invoke a compiler, language server, whatever to get information about the code.

Yes, but Emacs (at least the LSP-modes of the languages I use) doesn't offer the same refactorings and code fixes like the same LSPs do with e.g. Code. Treesitter doesn't work with many languages, so syntax highlighting is also lacking for many languages.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#313

Post by foldr »

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.

Elisp arguably has worse warts than Javascript. For example, non of Javascript's legacy 'var' scoping nonsense compares to elisp's archaic model of using dynamic scope for everything by default. On top of that, modern Javascript implementations are of extremely high quality, whereas Elisp is stuck with an interpreter of mediocre performance.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#314

Post by donio »

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.

Not the OP but yeah, it's definitely up there for me.

BUT the big difference is that the decades old portions of my .emacs are still very relevant and in use every day while basically all the work I've sunk into configuring some long forgotten GUI junk has rotted away long ago and has to be redone over and over again.

We all spend an enormous amount of time tinkering with things but unlike Emacs most of it is so ephemeral that it's forgotten the next day.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#315

Post by sigzero »

drumhead wrote: post #180
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 used Emacs, its a lot more than just a simple text editor, its more powerful than a text editor or even many IDEs. But the learning curve is too steep for most people. With VScode I can just install it and start working straight away, I cant really do that with Emacs. I dont want Emacs to die out or fade away, but lets be honest its for a much smaller group of users. It they want it to be be popular it would have t…

That about sums it up.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#316

Post by oblio »

globular-toast wrote: post #281
oblio wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Countless hours. How long do you think a carpenter spent learning and developing t his tool kit?

I don't know about you, but my toolkit, which I'm perfecting, is programming language paradigms, design patterns, algorithms, programming language SDKs, popular libraries and frameworks, etc.

And there isn't enough time in the world to become as proficient as I'd like for those, let alone if I'd waste time to optimize tools to get 99.999% efficiency with them.

At some point your hammer is good enough and your saw is sharp enough.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#317

Post by oblio »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #283
oblio wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1. I'm a long time Emacs user (30+ years) and a professional developer. Trying to contrast one of these versus the other as you do twice in your comment isn't really helpful or useful. 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 wa…

> 2. Why would I want to put a tooltip over an emacs window?

Why would you want to? I don't know.

But >'d want to :-)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#318

Post by donio »

FredPret wrote: post #181
mnd999 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a terrible analogy. An F1 car isn’t flexible, it’s highly specialised. And there are roughly 20 F1 drivers on the planet at a given time, are you suggesting the total audience for emacs is about 20?

I know right, are there actually 20 people who want to use Emacs!?

Yeah, that sounds about right. And not to mention that with the 5K+ packages currently on MELPA we each had to write 250 of them. It's rough.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#319

Post by krylon »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #191
krylon wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I wish someone had told me 20 years ago when I first started using emacs. The whole "it's a text editor, but also it's not really a text editor"-thing was very confusing initially. ... Although, now that I think about it, being told this mind-blowing revelation about the emacs nature might have confused me even more. What I love about emacs is that I have a variety - an extensible variety! - of prog…

You just succinctly described why my annual attempts to learn Emacs never actually go anywhere. As much as I like the idea of an all-purpose text processor construction kit, even with "starter kits" I spend a week trying to configure various languages to a point that I'm happy, find myself copying, pasting and tweaking Lisp code, invariably find weird conflicts that lead me to do web searches (which may find more Lis…

sigh

I cannot blame you. And if vi makes you happy, I want you to enjoy the heck out of it. Between discovering emacs and making it my editor of choice I spent a few years using vi heavily, and to this day, I reflexively use it for quickly editing config files.

Regarding emacs, all I can say is that, in my experience, it gets better if you really stick with it for a while. The payoff is huge if you put in the time. But time is limited resource, vi gives you a payoff much faster, so ... like I said, if it works you, don't fix what ain't broken.

I love Emacs, but I also love the variety of editors programmers can choose from. With programmers' editors, as with society as a whole, I consider diversity an advantage.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#320

Post by avgcorrection »

skytreader wrote: post #183
bch wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just love that for a moment here we’ve put aside our differences about emacs vs vi and focused our efforts on bike shedding which car analogy best fits. Peak computing culture.

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…

My eyes roll so hard at mentions of the “religious war” that my eye doctor has had to put them back in their sockets multiple times.

The Vim vs. Emacs “war” meme has far surpassed the supposed rivalry itself; the two programs are so different that you might as well be comparing a, I dunno, a megaphone to a woodchipper. (What, the analogy doesn’t make sense, you say? Well exactly.)

The two programs attract not only people with different temperaments but also people with completely different needs and wants.

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