Live data from Hacker News

Emacs 29 is nigh

blog.phundrak.com

101–110 of 267 posts

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#101
post #50

Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…

What I tell my programming friends is that if you can see yourself molding your computer user-interface as sort of a hobby, then emacs is most definately for you. If you don't see that as a fun past-time activity, then I would not recommend emacs. For instance, (in my emacs email client) I just made a change where if I want to search the subject I am looking at, and it has a #XXX in it, then the subject search is jus…

> Makes me able to quickly load up all emails related to that ticket. This makes me happy.

Yes, I love this.

Relatedly emacs is good if you find small annoyances or imperfections hard to "just deal with" and have the time and skill to customize or "craft" your emacs.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I tell my programming friends is that if you can see yourself molding your computer user-interface as sort of a hobby, then emacs is most definately for you. If you don't see that as a fun past-time activity, then I would not recommend emacs. For instance, (in my emacs email client) I just made a change where if I want to search the subject I am looking at, and it has a #XXX in it, then the subject search is jus…

> [...] if you can see yourself molding your computer user-interface as sort of a hobby, then emacs is most definately for you. > If you don't see that as a fun past-time activity, then I would not recommend emacs. If you don't see that as a fun past-time activity and still want to use emacs, then I would recommend spacemacs.

And if you find yourself between the two extremes, perhaps https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#103
post #98
post #63

I really want to use Emacs but I can't get Company + any LSP to come close to vs code or coc.nvim. When I configure company to trigger instantly on a single keystroke, Emacs completely locks up pretty much every time I hit a key.

You can use Emacs for things other than programming :-) Although I mostly use Emacs for my Python work, I still would use other IDEs for C++ work.

Emacs can and should be a good choice for programming though!

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I tell my programming friends is that if you can see yourself molding your computer user-interface as sort of a hobby, then emacs is most definately for you. If you don't see that as a fun past-time activity, then I would not recommend emacs. For instance, (in my emacs email client) I just made a change where if I want to search the subject I am looking at, and it has a #XXX in it, then the subject search is jus…

> [...] if you can see yourself molding your computer user-interface as sort of a hobby, then emacs is most definately for you. > If you don't see that as a fun past-time activity, then I would not recommend emacs. If you don't see that as a fun past-time activity and still want to use emacs, then I would recommend spacemacs.

As a guy that has used both spacemacs and doom emacs (which I would recommend over spacemacs), I disagree - you still will be mucking around with things. Emacs out-of-the-box 2022 leaves a lot to be desired, configurations makes it easier, but it is still not the vscode experience, even though it helps you a LOT on the way.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#105
post #71
post #50

Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…

I do think that keyboard optimized workflows are not for everyone; you should use what works best for you! However, Emacs distributions like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs are definitely more approachable and featured OOTB than vanilla Emacs. For me, the benefit of Emacs is that it's a single environment I can do everything in. I also am the type to enjoy messing with my workflow. IMO most of that can be replicated with VS…

> VS Code remote editing blows TRAMP out of the water

One place emacs has a huge advantage is it doesn't use hardly any resources in the docker container.

The vscode remote server instance uses a constant 15%-30% however.

In real world terms this means a compile that takes 1 minute for me takes 2 minutes for my coworkers that use vs code.

There are many potential confounding factors that could affect the performance discrepancy of course, but I think it's still useful given I can't think of many other plaform differences and that it's consistent amongst my coworkers.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is compelling! But I ended up abandoning Emacs in previous attempts to switch to it. In case anyone can help solve the pain points I remember: 1. Which project management tools do you recommend? (I think I was using Projectile in the past, but from what I recall it left buffers from previous projects open when switching to other projects, which ended up being kind of annoying.) 2. Any advice about automatic whit…

1. project.el and tabspaces 2. I think you'll want to write some elisp for this. I use apheleia though, maybe it does this? 3. async-shell-command or... hmm... there is a emacs binding to a go library for managing async processes I can't recall the name of. 4. vterm is best in the sense of most support for ncurses things. I personally try to use eshell for everything. As far as different tabs/splits emacs should be a…

Thanks for these tips! I'll explore tabspaces, apheleia, async-shell-command (and the Go lib) — all of those are new to me.

> Can you give a specific example of something you had trouble with?

I hoped to recreate multiple long-running terminal sessions in splits and tabs, similar to functionality I now use from:

Neovim (plugin): https://github.com/akinsho/toggleterm.nvim

VS Code (built-in): https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/basics#_managing...

I just found “popper”, which didn't exist the last time I looked. It seems like a pretty close substitute:

https://github.com/karthink/popper

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#107
post #50

Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…

Emacs was a great editor just like Nirvana was a great band. It’s influenced every other editor after it. People are always going to love it. But I think all the best ideas from that era have been taken. I like Vim but EMacs won the editor wars

I like vim but emacs won the editor wars

It's hard to imagine a definition of "win" that goes from roughly 50% popularity to less than 5%.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me its been the questionable stewardship of vscode ( https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276 ) driving me away from vscode and the Emacs from Scratch videos from the System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs. When I was looking for alternatives I stumbled on those videos and they blew me away. Also Emacs 28/29 has been way more welcoming and easy to get started with than when I fi…

System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself.

> I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself.

Because it's a lot scarier to struggle alone. Plus as his videos progress and his knowledge progresses he frequently teaches you things that come up and practice a lot as a matter of course.

It's kind of like when you start programming you have to build up your endurance for feeling like you're always in a dark room feeling around... and you convince yourself that it won't be like this one day.

A decade or two later you realize you've become accustomed the darkness...

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#109
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is compelling! But I ended up abandoning Emacs in previous attempts to switch to it. In case anyone can help solve the pain points I remember: 1. Which project management tools do you recommend? (I think I was using Projectile in the past, but from what I recall it left buffers from previous projects open when switching to other projects, which ended up being kind of annoying.) 2. Any advice about automatic whit…

1.projectile-kill-buffers or the built-in project-kill-buffers will do that for the current project. You could run that before switching projects. 2. https://github.com/radian-software/apheleia 3. There might be a way to do this but I'm not sure. Emacs being inherently single threaded probably makes this difficult. But yes, I use M-x (re)compile. 4. libvterm is the best still imo. You can definitely do multiple insta…

Thank you for the kind reply and pointers!

Apheleia in particular was new to me — I don't think it even existed last time I looked. So good to see the Emacs community continuing to thrive and invent.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs was a great editor just like Nirvana was a great band. It’s influenced every other editor after it. People are always going to love it. But I think all the best ideas from that era have been taken. I like Vim but EMacs won the editor wars

I like vim but emacs won the editor wars It's hard to imagine a definition of "win" that goes from roughly 50% popularity to less than 5%.

No, because I said influence. You are thinking adoption. That actually boosts my point
Post reply on HN