51–60 of 191 posts
I would really like to see this kind of work be done upstream. Emacs still looks the same as it did decades ago despite other editors advancing and becoming more user friendly.
That’s a good thing. I don’t want to change my habits every time a designer of whatever product I use decides that he deserves a raise and breaks my workflow in some subtle way.
I would really like to see this kind of work be done upstream. Emacs still looks the same as it did decades ago despite other editors advancing and becoming more user friendly.
A huge portion of the emacs community seems resistant to any UI improvement. I think it's a counterculture thing.
I've spent years to configure emacs/vim to be a good programming editor. Years, multiple configurations, vanilla configs, space/doom emacs configs, multiple predefined configs for vim/neovim. Something always was broken, something was missing, something was non-optimal just below the tolerance line. Missing features, discontinued packages, initialization errors, bad versions, "known issues", LSPs not starting, packages replaced by some newer shinier package with different usage, cryptic setups that are wrapped in "convenience layers" that obscure details, making it completely incomprehensible.
Then VSCode came and it had everything. Remote development is trivial through ssh. Completion simply works without any setups. Massive number of languages supported. It's a mess inside, but the UX is more stable and more consistent than anything I've ever seen in emacs/vim. Sometimes something breaks, but I can restart the window backend without closing the app easily.
This is really telling. Despite dedicating years to configure an "infinitely configurable" system, I wasn't able to achieve anything stable. I've given up and i just use VSCode daily. This way, I have more than I ever had with emacs/vim.
The only thing I have from vim that's left is the keyboard layout. For this, I'm thankful to Vim, but the editor itself for me is just for editing config files. I don't even have Emacs installed anymore.
I would really like to see this kind of work be done upstream. Emacs still looks the same as it did decades ago despite other editors advancing and becoming more user friendly.
Emacs is probably the most user-friendly editor. Its just not very beginner-friendly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at the same level. TRAMP is way behind feature-wise.
You mean like the way VSCode does by installing a whole mini version of itself on the remote computer?
For me, VSCode implements everything that I've always expected from Emacs/Vim. I've spent years to configure emacs/vim to be a good programming editor. Years, multiple configurations, vanilla configs, space/doom emacs configs, multiple predefined configs for vim/neovim. Something always was broken, something was missing, something was non-optimal just below the tolerance line. Missing features, discontinued packages,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A huge portion of the emacs community seems resistant to any UI improvement. I think it's a counterculture thing.
There is no better UI for text editing that I have ever come across. I'm not sure why so many people are resistant to the idea that emacs has the correct answer to most UI issues. More programs would stand to take lessons from emacs. Emacs is, in its own right, a very successful piece of software. When eclipse was a thing everyone was saying how great it was vs emacs. But eclipse is gone (I think?) and emacs is still…
The 2024 stack overflow developer survey [0] puts Eclipse at over double Emac's market share. If Eclipse is gone, then Emacs is double gone. Emacs struggles to attract and retain new users. This advice is not calling existing Emacs users deprived. It's rooted from the bad defaults giving new users a bad impression of Emac's viability because the default is so bad. If emacs built out proper telemtry they could actually track how the defaults they provide affect the new user experience in order for them to optimize it and figure out what users are looking for.
I would love to see a project that rebuilds the Emacs UI but keeps the underlying core to give it a modern facelift, some things in emacs blend together and are a pain for my eyes to figure out whats what. It would be nice if the UI was modernized but the core was left as-is. I'm reminded of some of my favorite editors that are niche being Lisp related ones, where if you held down ctrl it would show you shortcuts in…
I'd argue the opposite. UI is ok, it can be configured to look timeless (not modern). But the core with its single thread processing and constant hangs, requiring you to repeatedly hit C-g at least once a day, is first in line for "facelift".
This would have been great when I was learning Lisp in school! I tried emacs but due to joint issues the keybinds were painful to use, so I gave up and did the course in vim+SBCL's REPL instead.
I personally switched to emacs for more than just Lisp when I started developing early signs for RSI. Switching to a purely KB driven interface has saved my wrists.