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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#401

Post by hosh »

guantanamo_bob wrote: post #380
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.

That sucks.

I use spacemacs remotely on a terminal with mosh and tmux, so I don’t notice. But back in ‘10, evil mode wasn’t usable for me on the terminal. I imagine spacemacs on 2010 era hardware would suck, let alone GUI.

I wonder if the new chips like the M1 would make a difference.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#402

Post by dang »

qwerty2021 wrote: post #178
deworms wrote: post #18

Emacs should have been what VSCode is now - a powerhouse of customizability that offers unmatched functionality by default. Instead it's a toy for some old people who are still holding onto the remnants of an age that passed a long time ago. Emacs is basically useless compared to VS Code, and its authors are what's holding it back. I don't see it bouncing back to popularity any time soon. Anything you can do in Emacs…

evidently, some people do deserve being talked down to.

Hey, could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN? We're trying for a different sort of internet discussion here—one that's different from the default, so we need everyone to expend a certain amount of effort avoiding that.

You're welcome here as long as you post thoughtful, substantive comments. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#403

Post by iso1631 »

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…

I agree with you, I like my tools to just work. I last changed my windows manager when I started using wifi regularly over a decade ago.

Vim 8 broke this philosophy though - it changed defaults and broke workflows - changing how search works by default, breaking copy-paste by including some mouse support so when I click a line, it moves the cursor.

These aren't security improvements, these aren't transparent improvements (like allowing arrow keys as well as hjkl was way back), and they're not even odd workflows like xkcd.com/1172. Search is presumably one of the most used functions in vim, and I'm sure that clicking and highlighting text to copy into a different application isn't unusual. Changing the default behaviour is a choice that the developers made, presumably to "make vim better". I don't want vim "better", I want it stable, if I wanted "better" I'd use something that redesigns itself every 5 years.

What's worst though, is while I can adjust my workflow to automatically copy a fixed .vimrc onto any machine I ssh to, it leaves me wondering "what will change next". It's unsettling.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#404

Post by klodolph »

throwaway2331 wrote: post #288
klodolph wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's very little that they can do that Emacs can't. It's just that if you're on the easy path, the IDE will give you a pretty high-quality experience with very little time spent configuring it. The "easy path" supports more and more use cases each year, but my experience is still that the more custom your build system is, the more likely it is that you'll not get your nice IDE integrations. That's was true in the…

Any recommendations for one that runs on Linux?

VS Code and JetBrains (various products) are my top recommendations for Linux. MonoDevelop is ok. It is hard to give a general recommendation because your needs will vary.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#405

Post by chipotle_coyote »

hosh wrote: post #359
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does that include Spacemacs? It didn't take me a week to get up and running from switching from vim.

It does, although I've gathered that I managed to try my last attempt during a period when the released version was unusually buggy around the margins. What I'd frequently find was variants of what usually happened to me with Emacs: (1) find something that wasn't enabled that I wanted to do that could (apparently) be solved by enabling a layer (or installing a package or two), (2) enable that layer (or install that package or two), (3) immediately be confronted with unexpected error messages, (4) go on a bug hunt in which at least half the web search results were variants of "I ran into these unexpected error messages, how can I fix this".

My impression -- obviously as an outsider! -- is that Emacs' immense flexibility comes at the cost of providing a lot more surface area for packages to get in one another's way. When that happens, you need to be willing and able to untangle things -- and while each individual tangle is rarely a big ask, they can add up, especially when you're coming from VSCode or Sublime Text or what have you.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#406

Post by worksonmine »

bachmeier wrote: post #304
MonkeyClub wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The block cursor serves a very specific purpose. Since you can insert either before or after the cursor a block makes perfect sense.

Especially as a beginner being used to normal text editing, but even now after years of using it my reasoning is still "do I need it before or after the cursor" and looking at the block.

What's your reason for not wanting it by default?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#407

Post by finder83 »

rement wrote: post #299
finder83 wrote: post #242

I use Emacs (with Evil) daily, and despite having tried to move to other editors I'm locked into Emacs. Not so much because of the functionality of Emacs itself but because of plugins... First, Emacs has the best Vim compatibility I've seen outside of Vim itself. Visual Studio is probably "good enough" for me on this with the vim plugin, but that 5% difference in compatibility makes a difference in practice. But the…

Nvim has some plugins and features that do some of the things you might be interested in. Telescope[0][1] which is a fuzzy finder for anything you can think of (files, symbols, color themes, etc.[2]). The LSP and Treesitter stuff in nvim 0.5+ is also pretty cool. If you want to just try it without much work the Lunarvim[3] project comes with sane defaults and included plugins (including Telescope). Lua as the default…

I do need to try nvim again, I'm sure there's a lot of new amazing plugins.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#408

Post by CRConrad »

olivertaylor wrote: post #325
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…

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.

> This is the reason I left the whole app ecosystem.

How... Uh, how do you use computers then? Isn't everything we do with them in some way through "an app"?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#409

Post by CRConrad »

Zababa wrote: post #179
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 want to sound rude but I've never seen a well executed car analogy, especially when they use F1 racecars. Your analogy doesn't make the position of Emacs easier to understand at all.

> I've never seen a well executed car analogy, especially when they use F1 racecars.

An F1-analogue editor would be incredibly fragile, narrowly focused, and demand a huge amount of maintenance.

For the last, both this HN discussion and IIRC TFA offer widely varying estimates as to how much people need to tinker with their configuration files. For the others, only being able to run on one kind of track (absolutely flat ones) would be for an editor to only work for one programming language; spinning and flying into bits at the slightest touch would be for the editor to crash as soon as you type in bad syntax or misspell a variable name; and needing the engine rebuilt after each race and replaced every third or fourth would be... I'm not sure, needing to update to a new version of your editor every three or four weeks?

If Emacs is like any sort of car, it's certainly not an F1 one.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#410

Post by CRConrad »

indymike wrote: post #124

I've been using Emacs for the better part of 30 years. Right now, I use it less than ever. I've switched to using JetBrains IDEs for programming. JetBrains replaced VS Code which was nice, but required a lot of time dealing with plug-ins that the JetBrains IDEs don't. The full IDE with tightly integrated deployment, language tools, really advanced code completion, documentation, source control, debugging (and remote…

> You can't even resize an emacs window with the precision you can every other app on Linux and MacOS (no idea on Windows) because it forces resizes based on line height and character width (or something that approximates that).

Well, so does PuTTY, the (AIUI overwhelmingly most) popular remote terminal emulator on Windows. Which AFAICS is quite appropriate for a text-based program in a GUI window. So if there are problems with Emacs, I don't think that is among the biggest ones.

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