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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#271

Post by bb88 »

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/

Remember when there was an embedded web browser in emacs? https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;oldid=EmacsWeb...

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#272

Post by kagevf »

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/

Is there a preferred way to do the equivalent of xref_find_definitions when using tramp?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#273

Post by kylestlb »

usefulcat wrote: post #248
BeetleB wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 communicatin…

wait a second, is this why i typically send 10 messages per 1 coherent thought? i learned how to type too well?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#274

Post by imp0cat »

jimbokun wrote: post #256
Scarbutt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just run emacs on the remote server (inside tmux), emacs works great on the terminal, in fact, I don't use GUI emacs. code, orgmode, magit are just text.

I even started baking emacs into docker images we use for running debugging tools in kubernetes environments. Can quickly edit and run little scripts to do admin and operations and debugging tasks.

You can also use docker-tramp to enter locally running containers and do quick edits without worrying about installing an editor. It can be suprisingly useful.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#275

Post by mbork_pl »

slashdev wrote: post #158

Why do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and intellij? I’ve heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be honest. They’re more like rationalizations for why they stick to what they know. I just don’t get it. Why use inferior tools? Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It’s nothing compared to your salary. Both may let you type slightly faster and move around faster. M…

How do you know Emacs is inferior? How much time have you spent using it?

How are you sure VSCode and IntelliJ will be around in 10 years? 20 years? Why invest in learning a new tool every couple of years? How do I know MS doesn't suddenly kill VSC?

Also, why would I want to use an editor which calls home every few minutes? How can I be sure VSCode does not send my password files etc. to MS or OpenAI or whatever?

Also, Emacs extensibility and flexibility is unparalleled. I can mold it to fit _my_ workflow instead of molding myself to fit the workflow of some guys at MicroSoft.

Also, Emacs is self-documenting and has ridiculous introspection capabilities. My favorite example: do VSCode/IntelliJ have a counterpart of `view-lossage` (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mi...)?

Also, the fact that Emacs is so keyboard-oriented (as others have mentioned) is not really about _objective speed_, but _subjective feeling of friction_ (and lack thereof).

Also, working with Emacs is so much fun. It's a piece of software so helpful that it almost feels like an A.I. assistant. ;-)

So, plenty of reasons for me.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#276

Post by remexre »

malodyets wrote: post #253
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…

The some reason is the (GNU) readline library that powers most command line editing.

Also, macOS seems to have copied many of them, so they're worth learning for that too IMO.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#277

Post by pcthrowaway »

Y_Y wrote: post #109
0zemp1c wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ok, it doesnt have a kernel full of hardware drivers or an implementation that runs on bare metal. That said, it covers a lot of userland and things otherwise covered by a Desktop Environment (which are often conflated with OSes). In terms of application hosting, window management, low-level system control, etc. and the fact that some brave souls have had success with running emacs as PID 1 means that it's not a mill…

> or an implementation that runs on bare metal

There's https://github.com/whily/yalo apparently

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#278

Post by elenaferrantes »

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?

You get the vi bindings and modal behaviour which I find better _plus_ all emacs functions and most of the emacs bindings. I’m often mixing the 2 modes while editing.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#279

Post by pjmlp »

I have used XEmacs for about a decade (1995 - 2005), to the point I still remember most stuff.

However that was only due to being in UNIX environments where IDE was a foreign word, and nothing compared to the likes of Borland offerings.

Nowadays there are plenty of IDE choices for UNIX like workloads, I don't miss Emacs, and basic VI knowledge is enough for editing configuration files on bare bones POSIX systems.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#280

Post by pabenson »

retrocryptid wrote: post #78

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 ;-)

My entire software dev career was using emacs nearly 100% of the time. Originally it was on tops-20 (about 1981) and it was the TECO based emacs. (someone will correct me but I think Stallman was involved in the TECO version at MIT) Then the unix version used an abomination called mlisp. I briefly used EINE on lisp machines. Once Stallman got gnu going in earnest the first thing seemed to be emacs and elisp. I've been retired for a few years now so I don't type at emacs nearly as much. I feel crippled typing this into a text box in the default UI on a chromebook. Once I found control and meta on the keyboard it was all finger macros.

Anyway, I didn't do much customizing and never got used to vi when I was forced to use it. I don't think I liked the modefulness of vi. Yeah, emacs isn't very unix-y, but the unix-y text editor is ed. You kids get offa my lawn.

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