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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#361

Post by klodolph »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #275
klodolph wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I split my time between Emacs, Rider, and VS Code these days. Of those, I spend the most time in VS Code. I have spent way more time fighting against the VS Code configuration than I would like, and even comparing it against all the time I've spent customizing Emacs over my lifetime, I don't think VS Code can come out ahead. All this because I'm not building my project with some build system that has a simple, easy i…

> My experience with C++ mode in VS Code is extremely rough. That's because you're supposed to use Visual Studio for everything VS can do at all.

Visual Studio can't do it at all, I'm afraid. That's why I'm not using it.

I'm fairly familiar with it, and how it's integrated with MSBuild, and what the limitations of MSBuild are, and whether I'm comfortable working within those limitations (and porting my code to Windows).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#362

Post by vidarh »

Zababa wrote: post #188
rich_sasha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim has a built-in tutorial too. As said elsewhere, you literally cannot get started in Vim without knowing a dozen command and grokking modes, in Emacs you can at least stumble around without knowing anything. Equally, there's a difference in target audience. Do you need a tutorial to operate a screwdriver? No. Power drill? Arguably yes. CNC mill? Dear God please yes. I don't think you expect a fork lift or nail gun…

> As said elsewhere, you literally cannot get started in Vim without knowing a dozen command and grokking modes You need i, escape, :w! and !wq. hjkl too if you're feeling fancy. But i, escape, :w! and !wq is all you need to use Vim. I know because I used it like that for two years in college.

Ctrl-z followed by killall -9 vim is how I usually exited vim.

I once pissed off dozens of customers by symlinking vim to emacs on one of our shell servers (back when isps gave you login access to a Linux/Unix box...

(Yes, it wasn't very nice, but it was funny)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#364

Post by jeromenerf »

randomstring wrote: post #253

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…

> There is a balance between …

Common mistake. The problem is procrastination and bike shedding, not emacs. It’s because some people love their tools, sometimes more than the craft. It’s the same with cars, photography and woodworking. Maybe because hacking emacs lisp, supercharging a Miata, retro-fitting lenses or Tuning a pre-war Stanley handplane feels as good as using them.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#365

Post by [deleted] »

cjauvin wrote: post #230

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#366

Post by User23 »

josteink wrote: post #330
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. 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…

You’re looking for the DAP[1], which is pretty much LSP for debuggers.

[1] https://github.com/emacs-lsp/dap-mode

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#367

Post by anamax »

When I started using Emacs, it was still written in teco. (I did use raw teco once.)

In all that time, I've NEVER customized or configured it. That was a huge advantage when I was working very closely with other people - they could use my Emacs session and (mostly) work and I could grab theirs and always work.

"Never" is not quite true. I borrowed someone's customizations for a year or two, but they weren't worth the hassle to move them to a new machine so I went back to "no customization."

Every few years, I ask "wouldn't it be nice if Emacs did {something}". I then find that someone implemented said something, and it's in the released version.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#368

Post by stjohnswarts »

krylon wrote: post #174
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.

I have not played with VS Code a lot, but I get the impression that, yes, they aim for something similar. I'm not qualified to judge, though, how successful they are so far. FWIW, when I hear people talk about VS Code, they appear to like it very much. But AFAICT, it has some way to go to catch up with all the functionality emacs has accreted over 30+ years. Also, there is an effort replace the old lisp engine inside…

Is that like what the GCC-emacs project is doing with libgccjit? They are working (and have a great start on it) version of compiling most (all?) elisp with libgccjit to speed things up a bit if I understand it correctly. I have compiled it myself and it is most certainly faster to load and do "intensive" tasks faster than stock emacs. I've loaded both DoomEmacs and SpaceEmacs successfully with it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#369

Post by a_e_k »

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…

Even better, I repurposed C-z as the prefix for all my custom bindings. That's got a couple of advantages:

1) I don't have to worry about finding free bindings under C-x, C-c, or at the top level. Those spaces are pretty crowded with out-of-the-box bindings.

2) C-z C-h automatically gives me a nice list of my custom bindings.

(For the very rare times when I actually want to suspend Emacs in a terminal, I don't mind typing out M-x suspend-emacs RET.)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#370

Post by stjohnswarts »

globular-toast wrote: post #102
xroche wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?" This. Used Emacs for fifteen years professionally, and I gave up when I had to reinstall my laptop, as having intellisense-like features and easy navigation in Emacs is a complete pain. I actually did not intent to switch to VSCode, but after a couple of hours…

My emacs setup takes minutes to install on a new computer. I use borg, but there are many other ways to do it.

It's also easy to sync your vscode setup between machines, although not quite as easy as vim and emacs (imho).
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