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The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

emacsconf.org

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Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#41

Post by shadowgovt »

I think I fell in love with emacs when I realized that individual key presses could be scripted. Or possibly when I wrapped my head around macro injection. Hard to say, this thing grew on me from being an absolute space alien of an architecture to the first tool in the toolbox I reach for if I've got a new project to tackle.

My advice to people when editor wars come up is that going deep on something is more important than going deep on the right thing. emacs versus vi? No strong opinion. I happened to learn emacs first and would be repeating a lot of labor to go as deep on vi.

(... But I do tend to give a slight nudge in the direction of something of that ilk because relative to say, VS code... Those editors have already stood the test of time, they aren't beholden to one owner, and while past performance is not proof of future expectations, there's a lot of people heavily invested in keeping both of them alive and thriving).

Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#42

Post by evanriley »

dleslie wrote: post #19

It's weird to be building an Emacs clone nowadays. It's fairly clear that Vim and Emacs _both_ lost the editor wars, and VSCode has come out on top. That's not to say either Vim or Emacs are dead or will disappear, but building a clone of a niche editor is risking dooming the project to being a niche within a niche. If it's just because hacking is fun, then by all means have a blast. But if the goal is to compete wit…

Why do anything if there is already someone doing it?

Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#44

Post by Dariof4 »

whacked_new wrote: post #13

For anyone running nix/nixos, looks like there isn't a nix-shell-able package but `nix run github:dariof4/lem-flake` starts the ncurses version

The flake is unfortunately stuck on an old version (v2.0.0), since they changed how it's built with v2.1.0 and I haven't gotten around to fixing the flake, I'll try to see if I can get an update for it soon.

Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#45

Post by BeetleB »

digging wrote: post #40
BeetleB wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fairly clear that Vim and Emacs _both_ lost the editor wars, and VSCode has come out on top. Many (most?) Emacs enthusiasts don't use it primarily for SW development. VSCode simply isn't an alternative for their needs. Make two lists: - List of things you can do in VSCode that you can't in Emacs - List of things you can do in Emacs that you can't in VSCode The latter list will be 10-100x longer.

Since I only use VSCode (or Codium...), what sorts of things would be in the latter list?

Can I use VSCode to:

- Read and reply to my emails?

- Manage TODOs across domains (so e.g. I can make a TODO that has a link to a specific email)?

- Use it as a Mastodon client (read and write toots, boost them, favorite them, etc)

- Scrape a web site (several pages), getting only the relevant content[1]

- Bulk rename/copy lots of files with a custom naming algorithm

- Chat on IRC

- Use it as a spreadsheet

- Do numerical integration with it

- Have a literate document with code in several languages that talk to one another

- Annotate PDFs

This is a tiny list. In fact, you can browse past Emacsconf talks to see how people use it.

[1] https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/Mar/solving-a-scraping-pro...

Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#46

Post by f1shy »

dleslie wrote: post #19

It's weird to be building an Emacs clone nowadays. It's fairly clear that Vim and Emacs _both_ lost the editor wars, and VSCode has come out on top. That's not to say either Vim or Emacs are dead or will disappear, but building a clone of a niche editor is risking dooming the project to being a niche within a niche. If it's just because hacking is fun, then by all means have a blast. But if the goal is to compete wit…

This post MUST be pure irony. Big lol! Thanks for the fun.

Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#47

Post by chlorion »

dleslie wrote: post #34
Pr0ject217 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking from personal experience, I moved from VSCode to Doom Emacs a year ago, and the on-ramp wasn't nearly long or as tough as I thought. The defaults are good, and anything else that I customized I actually just used ChatGPT/GPT-4 to generate it. It took about a month to get used to the new setup. With LSP/Magit, it feels like I'm not missing out on much from what VSCode offered, and then whenever I want to pers…

I've been using Emacs for roughly three decades; it's my favourite editor. And for sure, LSP has been an absolute game changer. Worth noting is that LSP came from Microsoft as part of their efforts to build a better editor experience; and its integration with VSCode is largely unparalleled. For example: in VSCode the user doesn't have to understand how to install a language server, it just automagically suggests allo…

>For example: in VSCode the user doesn't have to understand how to install a language server, it just automagically suggests allowing it to install one for you. In Emacs, if you're using the official distribution you will have eglot, whose developers specifically refuse to add that functionality.

I can understand this not being friendly for some users, but on most systems that people are using Emacs on, software is installed through a system package manager and not downloaded and unpacked into ${HOME}. I do not want software that isn't the system package manager to install LSP servers.

Maybe this is more of an issue for people using Emacs on Windows, since there is no system package manager, and people are less likely to understand how to install stuff.

Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#48

Post by [deleted] »

dleslie wrote: post #19

It's weird to be building an Emacs clone nowadays. It's fairly clear that Vim and Emacs _both_ lost the editor wars, and VSCode has come out on top. That's not to say either Vim or Emacs are dead or will disappear, but building a clone of a niche editor is risking dooming the project to being a niche within a niche. If it's just because hacking is fun, then by all means have a blast. But if the goal is to compete wit…

[deleted]

Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#49

Post by cyrialize »

digging wrote: post #40
BeetleB wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fairly clear that Vim and Emacs _both_ lost the editor wars, and VSCode has come out on top. Many (most?) Emacs enthusiasts don't use it primarily for SW development. VSCode simply isn't an alternative for their needs. Make two lists: - List of things you can do in VSCode that you can't in Emacs - List of things you can do in Emacs that you can't in VSCode The latter list will be 10-100x longer.

Since I only use VSCode (or Codium...), what sorts of things would be in the latter list?

Apologies if this is do-able in VSCode, but for me the killer feature of Emacs is that configuration is literally just running code.

In VSCode, I don't think there's anything like "place code in this file, run it at startup, and code within this file can be present/applicable everywhere". Maybe you could do something as a plugin, but that is a big lift compared to Emacs.

For example, think about doing a "Hello World".

In Emacs, you just open init.el and place `(message "Hello World!")`.

In VSCode, you have to follow a whole set up for an extension [0].

[0]: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/get-started/your-first-ext...

Re: The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

#50

Post by kazinator »

dleslie wrote: post #19

It's weird to be building an Emacs clone nowadays. It's fairly clear that Vim and Emacs _both_ lost the editor wars, and VSCode has come out on top. That's not to say either Vim or Emacs are dead or will disappear, but building a clone of a niche editor is risking dooming the project to being a niche within a niche. If it's just because hacking is fun, then by all means have a blast. But if the goal is to compete wit…

I need an editor that starts up, cache cold, in a few hundred milliseconds at most. Thanks for playing.
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