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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
321–330 of 420 posts
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#322Emacs groks my soul. I can't defend it's flaws. But if I'm reborn a developer in a thousand years I sure hope it will still be around. Otherwise I'd rather be a shrimp or a dolphin or something (I hope those will be around too)
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
That is true of any editor: they will only seeem intelligent if you ask them about the languages they have support for.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#324Emacs' 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…
I would be very happy if I could use Emacs’ text editing and text manipulation/navigation everywhere. Things like a real IDE with an Emacs editor. Or the IDE being controlled by Emacs. Or a desktop manager controlled by Emacs.
That Emacs lets you design a great user interface is exactly why some people want to “live in Emacs”. (Similar to how some misguided souls prefer to “live in the terminal”...)
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#325I have realized recently that a value that is gaining a lot of importance for me is the stability of my cognitive investments, in terms of tooling, across a time frame that goes beyond my "current project", and more into the "my entire career" territory. In that sense, I feel more and more that the choice of learning and owning Emacs, more than 20 years ago, while in school, has paid off tremendously, in the sense th…
This is the reason I left the whole app ecosystem. Apps are cool, and sometimes really great, but there’s no sense of permanence, no guarantee that your data will survive for long, that the app will be maintained, or that future devices will be able to run the app or access the data.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#3262021 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 ;)
Fix-it and renames work with lsp+clangd. More complex refactoring would be nice, but in the end what is supported depends on the lsp-server capabilities.
Emacs hanging at times has unfortunately been the reality for a looong time. There is extensive async support, but it is not always used were needed.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#327I 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 think a better analogy would be comparing a Mercedes W123 (Vim/Neovim) with a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord (VSCode/Jetbrains) with a Jeep Wrangler (Emacs). Yes, the Jeep Wrangler will topple over while trying to go through a ravine (which no other mass-produced four-wheeled vehicle would ever be capable of going through), but that's what after-market rollcages are for.
In my opinion Jetbrains products are vastly superior to VSCode in every metric except price.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#328Earlier 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.
For example, in C++ in Visual Studio I can click on a class member variable or method and rename it and the IDE will rename all uses of that variable or method and not get confused about other classes with the same name.
struct Foo
{
std::string name;
int age;
};
struct Bar
{
std::string name;
double weight;
};
Foo f1 = ...;
Foo f2 = ...;
Bar b = ...;
std::cout Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#329Earlier 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.
> Why is that, do F1 races have a speed limit?
F1 cars are mostly optimised for massive aerodynamic downforce and lightness, which allows for unholy levels of braking, acceleration, and cornering speeds, but eventually the downforce hobbles top speed.
The LMP (Le Mans) formula of a couple of years ago has heavier cars with higher peak outputs, but lower downforce. They're slower around an F1 style track because their cornering and acceleration suffers due to the extra weight, but they have a higher top speed if they're on a long straight.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)
#3302021 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.
I like Emacs, have an extensive personalised config and use it as my primary editor across OSes.
That said, I wish its debugging-support was better. Some simpler “just click to start debugging” options for a few popular platforms would be nice (Node, Python, .NET, Rust, whatever).
I’ve heard there are similar efforts like LSP, except for debugging. Maybe they can help out Emacs’ debugging-support, just like LSP helped improve Emacs’ auto-completion and refactoring support?