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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#241

Post by cvdub »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #197

For the EMACS guru's in this thread I have a question. How practical is EMACS for a non-programmer? My preferred environment is FreeBSD + i3WM. I'm a sysadmin, I have no programming skills so anything beyond tweaking the odd configuration file is of no interest to me. I know that being able to write elisp is a major component of using emacs, but how usable is it without being able to write your own programs?

As a sysadmin you’re probably very tech savvy, so Emacs should be very usable for you without ever learning elisp.

This video by a self professed non-programmer about using Emacs in the broader Unix ecosystem might pique your interest enough to give it a try:

https://youtu.be/qTncc2lI6OI

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#242

Post by matheusmoreira »

Blackthorn wrote: post #240
matheusmoreira wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilarious, huh? For a free software project whose literal philosophy is the freedom to read and study the source code, they sure don't make it easy. They should improve that if they don't want people to thank god for the existence of musl. Whatever understanding of libc that I've got is thanks to musl.

Your own issues comprehending the source code do not change that the source code is free to read, free to study, and free for many other things. And also quite easy to find. Or, as the kids these days like to put it, "skill issue tbh".

So? Musl is still lightyears ahead of glibc in terms of being easy to understand. You can actually open up the git repository, find a random function definition and actually understand what it's doing. In seconds. Even the makefile is easy to understand. I was even able to understand the musl-gcc machinery and adapt it for my needs. Musl is so good it makes GNU stuff like GCC startfiles easier to understand than GNU's own documentation.

Skill issue? I have no doubt I could understand glibc if I was willing to pour enough time into that task. That's just the thing: I'm not willing. I have better things to do. Mercifully, I don't have to. Because musl exists.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#243

Post by throwawaysalome »

veilrap wrote: post #227
pmoriarty wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you surf the web in vim? How do you read email, RSS news, and usenet with vim? Does vim have a chat client as powerful as ERC? Mainly, though, is vim programmed in and extended through a lisp, and does it have an entire lisp ecosystem built around it? Don't get me wrong, I love vim, and used it and vi for 25 years before switching to emacs. But my emacs can do far, far more than vim ever did... and there's no…

I think this sort of defense of EMacs misses a key point: most people have no interest in running a browser, email, chat, etc. from within their text editor. Generally people prefer to do those sorts of things with specialized applications that are more tailored towards those individual use cases.

Alas, living in emacs can't be appreciated until you get good at emacs. More than the "one-stop-shop" aspect of it, there's the "everything is a buffer of manipulable text" aspect which, again, can't be appreciated until you make the leap of faith.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#244

Post by School-Cotton »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #185
School-Cotton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Just wrote this today to prettify all the tables in a Markdown file: (while (not (eobp)) (while (not (markdown-table-at-point-p)) (forward-char 1)) (markdown-table-align) (goto-char (markdown-table-end))) I'd have no idea how to do this in vim!

A macro and a plugin installed with the markdown-table-align equivalent? Though you could also use this approach with emacs macros too.

In vim I wouldn’t know where to find that markdown-table-align exists nor how to write a macro (and I used vim for much longer than emacs). In emacs I just had to notice that pressing tab in markdown mode aligned tables (among other things), then press C-h k to see what function that key invokes, jump to the code for it and start reading.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#245

Post by School-Cotton »

0zemp1c wrote: post #91
juped wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Emacs is an operating system, not an editor what does it take for this tired and false meme to die?

Emacs is neither an OS nor an editor, but it’s closer to the former than the latter. It’s probably most accurate to describe it as a framework (and bundled programming language) for building custom IDEs.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#246

Post by School-Cotton »

kentosi wrote: post #129
pmoriarty wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they're not even aware that it was an option. Many people don't realize that emacs' default keybindings can be changed to be modal in exactly the same as vim, by using evil.

Sorry for the naive question, but if you're changing all your bindings to vim, then why use emacs at all? Is there any extra functional difference?

The reason people like emacs has nothing to do with the default key bindings, which are basically arbitrary. Emacs is a framework and programming environment for building custom IDEs.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#247

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

cvdub wrote: post #241
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #197

For the EMACS guru's in this thread I have a question. How practical is EMACS for a non-programmer? My preferred environment is FreeBSD + i3WM. I'm a sysadmin, I have no programming skills so anything beyond tweaking the odd configuration file is of no interest to me. I know that being able to write elisp is a major component of using emacs, but how usable is it without being able to write your own programs?

As a sysadmin you’re probably very tech savvy, so Emacs should be very usable for you without ever learning elisp. This video by a self professed non-programmer about using Emacs in the broader Unix ecosystem might pique your interest enough to give it a try: https://youtu.be/qTncc2lI6OI

Thanks, that's just what I was looking for!

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#248

Post by usefulcat »

BeetleB wrote: post #132
LastNevadan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials. I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi. After I had been programming professionally for about ten years, I decided that my harsh judg…

> why would a professional programmer not want to invest the time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your productivity significantly. I have not found typing speed to correlate well with productivity. I spend quite a lot of time thinking while coding.

This is true, but from what I've seen, not being able to touch type may also be a serious impediment to written communication. Maybe not so much for email, but very much so for anything ~real time like slack/chat.

I once worked (mostly remotely) with a guy who I'm pretty sure couldn't touch type. He wrote pretty dense code and used very abbreviated class/variable/method names. But the real clue came from communicating with him via slack. It often felt like talking to someone much less intelligent than I knew him to be. His messages were so terse that I was constantly having to make a lot of guesses about what he was trying to say. Needless to say, it was not a great working relationship.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#249

Post by bitwize »

softirq wrote: post #23
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…

I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…

Vim is pretty much the best of both worlds: the ease of use of vi combined with the small footprint of Emacs!

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#250

Post by School-Cotton »

softirq wrote: post #41
kqr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, my experience is the other way around. The "killer" of vim is the control scheme, and evil mode ports that over very faithfully to emacs. Then you get the best of both worlds. Why would you use vim other than in very barebones environments where you cannot access your own config? (I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)

Why would I want to run an emacs layer adding more latency to my work to turn Emacs in to Vim when, as I said, I can do everything in Emacs I can do in Vim. > (I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!) Because it will randomly freeze and it's single threaded, it's slow, and it's also not novel. Vim can also edit files over SSH, VSCode can run itself re…

> I can do everything in Emacs I can do in Vim

Can you immediately jump to the source code associated with any key binding, read it, debug it, modify and reload it, etc., regardless of whether it comes from the base distribution or a plug-in?

For me that’s the killer feature of emacs.

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