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My Emacs eye candy

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Re: My Emacs eye candy

#61

Post by distcs »

illiarian wrote: post #29
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extensibility and customizability of Emacs typically means that bad UX is user error. There is a barrier to entry, but if you don't want to go past that, it's no big deal. I'm not sure that's the editor's fault though.

If you need to overcome a barrier and extend/customize to reach a good UX, that is the program's fault (applies to any program, not just emacs)

Good UX is very subjective though. I mean for me the way Emacs looks by default and how it allows me to customize it the way I see fit is good UX. Others don't see it as good UX.

Can I customize the status bar to include my contextual information with a single line of code in VS Code? Perhaps not. So VS Code has bad UX for my needs. But many consider VS Code to have good UX.

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#62

Post by illiarian »

3836293648 wrote: post #50
illiarian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did say "a bunch of tweaks". 150 lines of tweaks for the theme alone: https://github.com/xenodium/dotsies/blob/790465b1824481b81bf...

I tried the tweaks too. It still looks nothing like it

The other add-ons, changes and additions probably play a role, too.

On a personal note this is one of the things I disliked about emacs, too: its configs are non-deterministic :) You find a nice config somewhere, or do the same changes,... and your emacs still looks and behaves differently.

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#63

Post by natrys »

illiarian wrote: post #62
3836293648 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried the tweaks too. It still looks nothing like it

The other add-ons, changes and additions probably play a role, too. On a personal note this is one of the things I disliked about emacs, too: its configs are non-deterministic :) You find a nice config somewhere, or do the same changes,... and your emacs still looks and behaves differently.

Sounds like all these starter packs need to use purely functional package managers like straight.el (or the newer elpaca) who has the ability to pin to exact commit hash of the third party packages. Afaik, Doom Emacs does exactly that, and it doesn't have such reproducibility issues?

Theoretically, another source of deviation might be different distros shipping different builds of Emacs using different flags, resulting in things like different graphics backend (like GTK vs pure X11). I am not sure if this is a legitimate concern in practice, but using something like Nix or Guix might eliminate even that.

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#64

Post by govolckurself »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #56
llasse wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially regarding org mode I am always surprised about how most users use so little typography. Using the same settings for writing and coding seems counterintuitive yet most org modes I see in screenshots look pretty code-editorisch to me, and the styling options you mentioned are pretty much the only ones I know (missing Olivietti mode [1]) Most other note taking apps surpass here… [1] https://github.com/rnkn/ol…

The last thing I want when editing my diary in org-mode is distraction. I don't need lots of fancy rendering.

Same. Like a moron, apparently, I just use my text editor to get work done.

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#65

Post by govolckurself »

illiarian wrote: post #29
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extensibility and customizability of Emacs typically means that bad UX is user error. There is a barrier to entry, but if you don't want to go past that, it's no big deal. I'm not sure that's the editor's fault though.

If you need to overcome a barrier and extend/customize to reach a good UX, that is the program's fault (applies to any program, not just emacs)

Are our expectations so low now that developers can't be expected to put in a little effort to learn a text editor? Look, I promise I'm not the smartest guy, but I ground out a few weeks of memorizing key bindings like ten years ago, and that was basically it. M-x apropos and Google fill in the rest of the gaps. I truly don't understand why stuff like this seems to be so hard for people. My hunch is that they just don't want to put in the effort. Which is fine! But please just be honest about it.

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#66

Post by drbaba »

dan-robertson wrote: post #55
imiric wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went the opposite way. Used Spacemacs to introduce me to Emacs, and then got rid of it once I got the hang of things, and noticed all the extra packages I don't need that were just impacting (the already poor) Emacs performance. A few years later, I'm still using my config and wouldn't go back. It's what allows me to make Emacs _mine_, after all. It requires a minimal amount of maintenance, mostly whenever I decide…

Is base Emacs performance actually poor? I’ve generally found it to be pretty quick and it performs well in environments that other programs totally fail in, eg in a terminal or over X forwarding.

Well, it depends on your system. In my experience, Emacs without native-comp is way snappier on Linux than on Mac and Windows -- and getting native-comp working is also much easier on Linux, which has a big impact. Large numbers of pixels (high-DPI / Retina displays) can increase stuttering and flickering in the GUI version, in which case performance can improve by using `emacs -nw` in a GPU-accelerated terminal (Kitty/Alacritty), or maybe by switching to a different GUI frontend (e.g. the NS Port vs. Mac Port on MacOS, or the X11 vs. PGTK version on Linux).

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#67

Post by softirq »

My approach to my terminal tools is to avoid eye Candy as much as possible. It distracts and complicates without adding value. Eye candy often is not easily portable, and it can break.

I use color very intentionally to mean something. The only time I theme something is if it’s already themeable and I can set the theme to use 3 bit terminal colors so I can drive all themes from one place (my terminal profile).

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#68

Post by xenodium »

3836293648 wrote: post #50
illiarian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did say "a bunch of tweaks". 150 lines of tweaks for the theme alone: https://github.com/xenodium/dotsies/blob/790465b1824481b81bf...

I tried the tweaks too. It still looks nothing like it

OP here. The linked tweaks are straight from my config. I can try help work out why it doesn’t look the same for ya. Would need to see your elisp snippets. May be easier to discuss on GitHub. Maybe open an issue on https://github.com/xenodium/dotsies

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#69

Post by theboywho »

tincholio wrote: post #26

Without meaning any offense to the OP, I think this is a pretty low bar for Emacs eye-candy... Nicolas Rougier's "Nano Emacs" [0], or his previous "Elegant Emacs" [1] are better examples. You can also get pretty far using variable-pitch mode for mixing fonts (for example in org-mode [2]). [0]: https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs [1]: https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs [2]: https://github.com/minad/org-modern

The title is "my emacs eye candy", not "my emacs eye candy is the best emacs eye candy", there are definitely better "eye-candy" emacs setups out there than OP's, but it doesn't matter as it's not a competition, OP's emacs is still eye candy, good enough for some people. Thanks for pointing the others though

Re: My Emacs eye candy

#70

Post by arnsholt »

llasse wrote: post #43
tincholio wrote: post #26

Without meaning any offense to the OP, I think this is a pretty low bar for Emacs eye-candy... Nicolas Rougier's "Nano Emacs" [0], or his previous "Elegant Emacs" [1] are better examples. You can also get pretty far using variable-pitch mode for mixing fonts (for example in org-mode [2]). [0]: https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs [1]: https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs [2]: https://github.com/minad/org-modern

Especially regarding org mode I am always surprised about how most users use so little typography. Using the same settings for writing and coding seems counterintuitive yet most org modes I see in screenshots look pretty code-editorisch to me, and the styling options you mentioned are pretty much the only ones I know (missing Olivietti mode [1]) Most other note taking apps surpass here… [1] https://github.com/rnkn/ol…

As a group, programmers do seem quite attached to monospaced fonts. For my IDE I have actually gone (I think) even further than you: I use a proportional (serif even!) font for all my programming, not just prose writing. It took a bit of getting used to, but now I've come to much prefer it over monospaced fonts.
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