Joining the Church of Emacs

#1

Post by zetaposter » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

Joining the Church of Emacs
fuzzypixelz.com

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#2

Post by kartoshechka » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 2:18 AM UTC

meow mode in linked article seems really well thought and effective, probably have to give it a try :)

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#3

Post by patrick451 » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 2:21 AM UTC

I found it amusing his example of badly formatted code

  one = 1
  fortyTwo = 42
  elite = 1337

is exactly how most modern linters want to format my code.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#4

Post by ohCh6zos » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 3:14 AM UTC

His alignment formatting example is harder for me to read than what he started with. I have an eye tracking issue so I'm not always the best person to judge this. Is it harder for everyone else?

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#5

Post by layer8 » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 3:20 AM UTC

patrick451 wrote: post #3

I found it amusing his example of badly formatted code one = 1 fortyTwo = 42 elite = 1337 is exactly how most modern linters want to format my code.

In IDEs that support refactor-renaming (Emacs probably does?), the column-aligned formatting also has the drawback that it breaks (unless the refactoring also auto-realigns all affected code).

For example,

  one      = 1
  fortyTwo = 42
  elite    = 1337

might become:

  one      = 1
  ultimateAnswer = 42
  leet    = 1337

This made me stop column-aligning in most cases. An exception is array initializers for two-dimensional tables with many columns, where the benefit is important enough.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#6

Post by layer8 » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 3:28 AM UTC

ohCh6zos wrote: post #4

His alignment formatting example is harder for me to read than what he started with. I have an eye tracking issue so I'm not always the best person to judge this. Is it harder for everyone else?

I was a bit surprised that the numbers didn’t get right-aligned:

  one      =    1
  fortyTwo =   42
  elite    = 1337

To answer your question, I tend to agree that it gets harder to read the wider the horizontal spacing is, unless the relation between the values in the same column is very important.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#7

Post by jerrya » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

Sigh, I am an alte kaker in the Temple of Emacs and what that has meant is early on I learned how to make a keyboard macro, and because of that I've never really memorized how to awk or sed. This has been a problem: I have to keep seeking out the info on awk and sed syntax.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#8

Post by lemper » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 5:27 AM UTC

used to use emacs (with spacemacs then doom) a while back. turned out i don't really care what kind of editor i use as long as it has modal editing mode and doesn't get in my way of editing text. for terminal, i enjoy neither eshell nor any other integrated term. perhaps i just am not that motivated to have a one-editor-to-rule-them-all kind of software.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#9

Post by rany_ » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 6:27 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #5

patrick451 wrote: post #3

I found it amusing his example of badly formatted code one = 1 fortyTwo = 42 elite = 1337 is exactly how most modern linters want to format my code.

In IDEs that support refactor-renaming (Emacs probably does?), the column-aligned formatting also has the drawback that it breaks (unless the refactoring also auto-realigns all affected code). For example, one = 1 fortyTwo = 42 elite = 1337 might become: one = 1 ultimateAnswer = 42 leet = 1337 This made me stop column-aligning in most cases. An exception is array initializers for two-dimensional tables with many colu…

It also makes git blame a lot less useful in these scenarios.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#10

Post by doix » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 7:26 AM UTC

ohCh6zos wrote: post #4

His alignment formatting example is harder for me to read than what he started with. I have an eye tracking issue so I'm not always the best person to judge this. Is it harder for everyone else?

I also dislike that style, I appreciate it looks nicer, but I definitely find it harder to process/read. That example isn't that bad, because all the variable names are pretty close to the same length.

But once you start mixing reallyLongVariableNamesLikeThisOne and shortOnes, the distance between the short variable name and the value is long enough that there's a chance I'll look at the wrong value or something.

I'm glad that automated formatters/linters pretty much all remove/complain about that stuff now days.