Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

916 Days of Emacs

sqrtminusone.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 309 posts

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#71

Post by cyrialize »

adamc wrote: post #36

I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange. I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.

I'm in the same boat - I've used it almost daily for 7ish years at this point. It's so much fun to use and customize, but there are easier options out there.

When people find out I use Emacs I always caution them against using it. It's taken me a long, long time to be productive in Emacs. VSCode, JetBrains tools, etc. don't have the same requirement and start up time to productivity.

Buying into Emacs does give you a lot though! Emacs way of splitting panels, going through buffers, going through files, always feel better than other applications for me.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#72

Post by circuit »

outworlder wrote: post #64
circuit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for the readline movement commands. > to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. Most of vim is written in C w…

Why don't you SSH _from_ Emacs? If you are editing a remote file there's usually no need to SSH and then invoke an editor. https://willschenk.com/howto/2020/tramp_tricks/

I used to, and I probably would if I had to work with remote files more often. But in my experience I found it faster to just build emacs on the remote server and run it as a daemon there, since all the machines I was working on remotely had /home on an NFS mount. TRAMP took just a little too long to load remote directories for my liking.

But in case I am plopped in front of an unknown terminal/have to do something on someone else's machine ... at least I can rely on using the default vim to do basic editing.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#73

Post by jamespo »

softirq wrote: post #58
EnigmaCurry wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Over SSH? Did you turn on ssh connection sharing in ssh config? > ControlMaster auto > ControlPersist yes > ControlPath /tmp/ssh-%u-%r@%h:%p massive speedup when you do this, otherwise it starts a new connection for every operation.

Yes, and it's not that it's just slow, it also freezes Emacs completely when it borks (and it does bork). I also found that none of the emacs terminals could correctly display my prompt and I ended up writing a bunch of bash conditionals to make my prompt dumber to work in Emacs. Just worked out of the box with Vim's :term.

Are you using tramp on a LAN or halfway round the world with 200ms latency and poor bandwidth?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#74

Post by all2 »

velox_neb wrote: post #56
leephillips wrote: post #20

I like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn’t respond instantly I don’t want to use it.

I'm an emacs fan but there's no excuse. It's insane that an editor from the 1970's is perceptibly laggy on the latest Macbook Pro. This is a good article about the problem https://discourse.doomemacs.org/t/why-is-emacs-doom-slow/83/...

It's still single threaded.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#75

Post by juped »

commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

Emacs is an operating system, not an editor; I'm really not sure why Stallman constantly promoted the "emacs vs. vi" meme.

You might as well try to switch from Notepad to Linux. It's just a type error, and you'll have a bad time.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#76

Post by tpmx »

adamc wrote: post #36

I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange. I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.

I've used emacs for 25+ years. I was never into LISP; I just really liked the interface. And muscle memory goes deep.

Two months ago I switched to VSCode. The "Awesome Emacs Keymap" extension by Yuichiro Tachibana made it possible:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee...

It's not 100% perfect, but close enough. I'm quite enjoying using VSCode now. It's fantastic having a wealth of actually user-friendly features/extensions to choose from.

VSCode is so annoyingly cluttered/blinking/animating/popup-infested by default though. There are a lot of things to disable in the default config.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#77

Post by [deleted] »

outworlder wrote: post #64
circuit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for the readline movement commands. > to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. Most of vim is written in C w…

Why don't you SSH _from_ Emacs? If you are editing a remote file there's usually no need to SSH and then invoke an editor. https://willschenk.com/howto/2020/tramp_tricks/

[deleted]

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#78

Post by retrocryptid »

Oh man. I'm embarrassed to say I've been using emacs for almost 40 years and it probably accounts for 80% of my screen time.

I wonder how many people know emacs predates gnu-emacs? I remember being skeptical of open source until I saw what gnu emacs could do. Then I got slightly more skeptical when I looked at the code ;-)

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#79

Post by bloopernova »

commandlinefan wrote: post #46
taeric wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default cursor movement commands probably predate emacs. Such that you are used to readline defaults. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24083753 is the first post I'm finding on that. That said, I'm curious what the weight of emacs was on you? If it was that you were wanting to be in the other editor, than it makes sense that you should stay in the other editor. But this is no different than a lot of things. I…

> what the weight of emacs was on you What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. I did start to looking into all the ways to customize it, but at that point, I couldn't really see much benefit over just using an IDE. But that's j…

Yeah I adore picking at my config to solve some small issue. Or implement a cool feature or customization.

I don't really use Emacs for the editor! It's more because it's a very configurable language runtime/vm with an editor interface.

And org-mode is great too.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#80

Post by schemescape »

softirq wrote: post #57
erksa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use both heavily. Vim is fantastic for editing one off files. Emacs on the other hand is fantastic to work on a computer for a long period of time. I do use evil mode, as I do think it's a much better way to work in a file. Project management, magit, org-mode, being able to edit functionality of the editor within couple of mins to adjust for an temporary change/or indefinitely is what keeps me coming back to emacs. I…

Vim has terminal support, gdb support built in. We have vim plugins maintained by the top Vim plugin specialist for git and project management. We have vimwiki, markdown, org mode support. We have fuzzy finding, autocomplete, lap support. I really don't think you can reasonably tell me you can't live in Vim, when I have had the same session open editing the linux source tree for like two months now.

Maybe a Vim expert can help me out. I’ve used Vim for a long time, but never with any plugins, and only a few lines in my .vimrc.

My problem is that the syntax highlighting, specifically for TypeScript is pretty bad. I have a regular expression (for parsing front matter) that seems to cause Vim’s syntax highlighting to go haywire (it stops and sometimes crashes).

Is anyone aware of a way to get more reliable syntax highlighting in Vim, ideally with a minimum of fuss?

Post reply on HN