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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#371

Post by kamaal »

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.

Time.

Other editors save you play time you need to spend with emacs to get it to anywhere close to usable.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#372

Post by kamaal »

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…

>>everyone "believes" it dead. Same goes for Perl.

This week I did with Python what I used to generally do with Perl. Write big throwaway programs, written quickly. I realise this was possible because Python has been heavily Perlified over time.

That way we just managed to write Perl in Python, by converting Python to Perl.

Python is Perl 6.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#373

Post by kamaal »

kqr wrote: post #78
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…

This sounds like it's not written by an actual Emacs user... and the fact that I can tell points to the real fundamental problem of Emacs: it's not a text editor but the real thing it is is so complicated it finds it easier to market itself as a mere text editor. What is Emacs really? It's a virtual Lisp machine with a standard library for writing graphical text applications. It's more like the JVM than like Notepad.…

>>What is Emacs really? It's a virtual Lisp machine with a standard library for writing graphical text applications. It's more like the JVM than like Notepad.

Well then in that case, ship a better Lisp than emacs lisp?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#374

Post by zephyr9 »

hollerith wrote: post #101
zephyr9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No! Emacs does not require the user to learn any code in order to use it. Unfortunately this is a persistent false narrative to which many new users fall victim (as I believe you have). I maintain several packages aimed at non-coding writers. I put a lot of effort into ensuring that writers never need to write or understand any code in order to get writing. Emacs has a built-in user-friendly options UI system that pr…

This is the first time in my 29 years of Emacs use that it has occurred to me that someone out there might like M-x customize enough to hold it up as a pro-Emacs argument. I use it very occasionally in order to discover the name of one of Emacs's thousands of user options, which option I then manipulate with Emacs Lisp code added to a file. I much preferred the (recently completely removed from Gnu Emacs after 2 deca…

I don't see it as either/or. I just set `custom-file` to something else to keep options settings out of the way, while I still have plenty (too much) of my own init code.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#375

Post by edanm »

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…

That sounds good in theory. But if you're working with a more-than-30-year-old tool, you're either:

1. Missing out on "new innovations" (and using older gui/etc paradigms which don't mesh with anything else you are used to).

2. Finding ways to update your tool to take advantage of "new innovations", which costs time, and often gives you a worse outcome.

I was a vim user for 8 years, then used spacemacs for another 2, but have lately switched to VSCode (with vim mode, obviously). The ease of just downloading vscode and having it work with almost no tinkering, having it look good, and being able to, for the most part, double-click an extension name if I need it... that ease of use means that whatever learning curve I do have to pay sometimes, it's worth it.

(And the learning curve for making VSCode have the vim/emacs features I need was tiny compared to managing my vim/emacs config).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#376

Post by 1ark »

m45t3r wrote: post #130
kqr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't personally used VS Code much, but from what I understand, it still runs in two castes that don't, generally, mix: there's its core code, and then there's plugins, and the latter exists on a separate plane from the former. You can't write a plugin that redefines some core behaviour. The functions internal to the core are not all automatically accessible for any plugin. Plugins don't become fully integrated w…

Yeah, exactly. For example, evil-mode is still miles better than VSCode Vim plugins just because it works everywhere. Any buffer that my Emacs opens I can still use my Vim shortcuts (so it doesn't change that I open a text, a binary, file manager, a fuzzy search or PDF). Compared to this, on VSCode I basically need to explicitly say "make vim commands do this in this context" for everything I need.

This is the main reason I changed and do most of my work in Emacs, keyboard only. Using it in terminal is a bit of a bonus. Onivim2 seems promising in bridging the gap, but we'll see.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#377

Post by 1ark »

the_spacebyte wrote: post #94

As an Emacs user for ~10 years the greatest deterrent is it being single-threaded and lisp. I just can't understand the love for it. I've spent countless hours customizing my own configuration and I just can't enjoy lisp. Emacs's source code is also hard to understand and contribute to (let's not talk about lisp.h). I'd rather have a new editor (or emacs fully re-written) with the same mindset as emacs - near-full cu…

There is a some effort in Nim, called moe[1]. Nim has a lot of features similar to a Lisp, and is both compiled and scriptable. Of course, it requires contributions to make it usable as a daily driver, but I guess that is somewhat the point. The vision is sound imo.

1. https://github.com/fox0430/moe

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#378

Post by zzzzzzzza »

edanm wrote: post #375
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…

That sounds good in theory. But if you're working with a more-than-30-year-old tool, you're either: 1. Missing out on "new innovations" (and using older gui/etc paradigms which don't mesh with anything else you are used to). 2. Finding ways to update your tool to take advantage of "new innovations", which costs time, and often gives you a worse outcome. I was a vim user for 8 years, then used spacemacs for another 2,…

i was looking into vscode/vscodium recently (i'm emacs user, but arguably more comfortable in javascript than emacs lisp). if you want to define a custom function do you have to write your extension? it seems like settings.json, is just that, a json file, as opposed to emacs config where you can drop a line into your config or even just eval some elisp in a buffer and have it modify your editor...

basically it seems less hackable, is that a wrong impression?

(and json files don't allow for comments right?)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#379

Post by musicale »

> We need to figure out why VSC is so popular, and then fill in the areas that Emacs is missing

Great support and built-in IDE for Microsoft platforms.

And the fact that it isn't a relic of the 1980s (well, 1970s in terms of text UI, and perhaps 1990s in terms of GUI.)

Also (horrifyingly enough), VSC can be more responsive.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#380

Post by guantanamo_bob »

hosh wrote: post #358

I didn't start using emacs until (1) hardware became fast enough to run evil-mode with low keypress latency (because vim uses key sequences rather than chords and I type fast), and (2) Spacemacs. I switched to Spacemacs before there were a neovim, and if it weren't for spacemacs, I would have ended up with neovim instead. I have not had time to really dig into the code and customize my editor. I installed Spacemacs,…

I recently switched from emacs to spacemacs. I love the key bindings, but the Emacs GUI with spacemacs is so slow it’s unusable, keeps my laptop running burning full speed.
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