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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#411

Post by CRConrad »

worksonmine wrote: post #406
bachmeier wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

In Emacs, you mean?

> a block makes perfect sense.

In Emacs. As it is now, i.e for existing Emacs users. Do you think this discussion, "How to make Emacs more popular", is mainly about that tiny minority?

> Especially as a beginner being used to normal text editing,

"Normal text editing for beginners" has been defined more by Windows Notepad than by Emacs since about five minutes after Windows Notepad was first released, which is over thirty (thirty-five?) years ago now.

> 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.

Your reasoning, and perhaps most other already-existing Emacs users'. Which, in the larger picture, equals practically nobody. What was this discussion about again; something like "How to make Emacs more popular"?

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

The more relevant question is: What's your reason for wanting to confuse everybody else with this weird behaviour?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#412

Post by CRConrad »

bsder wrote: post #256
gorjusborg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That an emacs user holds that opinion is a bit surprising to me, as to me most of the reason for me using emacs is to develop in lisp-inspired languages. I think lisp development is the raison d'etre for emacs in the modern times. As someone who loves fennel, clojure, scheme, etc., I find myself drawn to emacs because the (repl driven) workflow is so good. That said, I've found that I can't give up vi-style modal edi…

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Lisp is, in fact, an albatross hanging around Emacs neck. Using Lisp (and especially elisp) is not okay. Lisp has some very sharp corners that simply are not acceptable in modern languages. I use Lisp when I'm very resource constrained but still need an interpreted language--otherwise I use anything else. Dynamic scoping is just stupid (fault of elisp). Not being to oper…

> Sure it meant they missed out on the collective brain damage that was design patterns and object oriented--but it also meant that it missed out on good things, too.

The "collective brain damage" and other similarly derogatory epithets that OOP regularly gets slammed with is AIUI actually Java "collective brain damage"; it doesn't necessarily apply to all forms of OOP.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#413

Post by CRConrad »

iLemming wrote: post #347

I think the only way to make Emacs popular is to get more users. And in any of the over six thousand human languages in use today: "Emacs user" typically means "a programmer". Emacs desperately needs more programmers. Unfortunately, many of the core Emacs developers are also FSF advocates. Some of them have very radical and uncompromising views. It sometimes feels like they have little understanding of the real world…

> Nope, we shouldn't do it because: "it would allow editing Emacs Lisp in non-free programs like VSCode". Seriously?

Emacs supports copy-paste, doesn't it? So you can already edit Emacs Lisp in non-free programs. Just paste it in from any JetBrains editor, or from MS Word for that matter.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#414

Post by CRConrad »

PaulHoule wrote: post #163

I used to be an emacs partisan, but line continuation characters killed it for me. With vi I can cut and paste into other applications on the desktop, with emacs I can't. I'm not going to accept the "just customize it" argument because if you do any administration at all you will sometimes log into a machine that you've never seen before. Sometimes you're going to log into a machine that is damaged. In that case you…

> ...cut and paste into other applications on the desktop, with emacs I can't.

You can't?!? Inconceivable! Well, no, not quite -- I think I know what that word means -- but pretty darn incredible.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#415

Post by bsder »

CRConrad wrote: post #412
bsder wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Lisp is, in fact, an albatross hanging around Emacs neck. Using Lisp (and especially elisp) is not okay. Lisp has some very sharp corners that simply are not acceptable in modern languages. I use Lisp when I'm very resource constrained but still need an interpreted language--otherwise I use anything else. Dynamic scoping is just stupid (fault of elisp). Not being to oper…

> Sure it meant they missed out on the collective brain damage that was design patterns and object oriented--but it also meant that it missed out on good things, too. The "collective brain damage" and other similarly derogatory epithets that OOP regularly gets slammed with is AIUI actually Java "collective brain damage"; it doesn't necessarily apply to all forms of OOP.

Well, there are two levels to this:

1) It was in fact mostly C++ brain damage. "Design Patterns" predates Java by quite a bit.

2) OOP isn't a unified thing. There was a paper way back that mentioned something like two dozen "characteristics" of "OOP". And then proceeded to point out that "Smalltalk" chooses these, C++ chooses those, Java chooses these, and that there was a lot of disjointed-ness between the definitions.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#416

Post by JetSpiegel »

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 already configured something philosophically similar using Unite. Is it worth it to migrate to Lua?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#417

Post by akho »

CRConrad wrote: post #408
olivertaylor wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Few of us would call Emacs an “app”.

I’m pretty sure they are referring to mobile/Web stuff. You do have to be very careful there…

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#418

Post by CRConrad »

bsder wrote: post #415
CRConrad wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure it meant they missed out on the collective brain damage that was design patterns and object oriented--but it also meant that it missed out on good things, too. The "collective brain damage" and other similarly derogatory epithets that OOP regularly gets slammed with is AIUI actually Java "collective brain damage"; it doesn't necessarily apply to all forms of OOP.

Well, there are two levels to this: 1) It was in fact mostly C++ brain damage. "Design Patterns" predates Java by quite a bit. 2) OOP isn't a unified thing. There was a paper way back that mentioned something like two dozen "characteristics" of "OOP". And then proceeded to point out that "Smalltalk" chooses these, C++ chooses those, Java chooses these, and that there was a lot of disjointed-ness between the definitio…

Yup. So the vaunted "brain damage of OOP" is more a matter of the "brain damage" of C++'s / Java's choice of which of these traits to implement and call the result "OOP".

(Personally, I largely agree -- and I say that as a fan of a basically very similar OO language, Object Pascal [as seen in Delphi and Free Pascal / Lazarus], which could also be seen as an imperative language with bolted-on inheritable templates of records with method pointers called classes. It just made a slightly different, and better [IMO], choice of exactly which of these traits to implement, and that makes a all the difference to me.)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#419

Post by CRConrad »

akho wrote: post #417
CRConrad wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

Few of us would call Emacs an “app”. I’m pretty sure they are referring to mobile/Web stuff. You do have to be very careful there…

Yeah, I still use the boomer vocabulary: there is system software, and application software. The first category is called "operating system", and everything that runs on top of it is an "application". And outside of the old quip ("Great OS, shame about the editor") Emacs is AFAIK not an operating system but runs on top of one, so it's an application.

Lazy young whippersnappers should come up with their own damn terms for new concepts in stead of just trying to co-opt and redefine existing ones.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#420

Post by akho »

CRConrad wrote: post #419
akho wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few of us would call Emacs an “app”. I’m pretty sure they are referring to mobile/Web stuff. You do have to be very careful there…

Yeah, I still use the boomer vocabulary: there is system software, and application software. The first category is called "operating system", and everything that runs on top of it is an "application". And outside of the old quip ("Great OS, shame about the editor") Emacs is AFAIK not an operating system but runs on top of one, so it's an application. Lazy young whippersnappers should come up with their own damn terms…

I’m fine with “application” and “app” having different meanings.

E. g.: there was recently a post here promoting some group making “an app ecosystem for your terminal”. That’s very convenient — you immediately know you need to close the tab.

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