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Two Years of Emacs Solo

rahuljuliato.com

71–80 of 147 posts

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#71

This article shows how Emacs remains a beautiful, relevant project several decades after it was first created. The core design and implementation’s ability to evolve into something still useful today and competitive with modern tools is an amazing achievement. Also, with LLMs driving so much of current development it potentially makes Emacs even more competitive relative to modern IDEs. Development can be driven prim…

It’s interesting how your comment did not talk about anything that’s unique to emacs.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#72

If I was going to reimplement Emacs it wouldn't be with Lisp. Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing? I'm skeptical because to my knowledge, Emacs is the only major text editor written in Lisp.

The Lem editor[0] and LispWorks IDE's[1] are implemented in Common Lisp.

Still, the reason for choosing a language for whatever are always more social and path-dependent than technical (reason 1: initial developer of whatever really likes the language, reason 2: language is seen as hip within some crowd, reason 3 (later in the game): management feels language is safe). Technical reasons for choosing a language typically tend to be post-hoc rationalizations. (I mean, no sane person would choose Javascript for an editor based on technical reasons alone, yet here we are.)

[0] https://lem-project.github.io/ [1] https://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#73
post #3

Is Eglot on par with emacs-lsp for C++? Specifically thinking about pointing it to a compile_commands.json and all of the usual C++ nonsense required for code navigation and autocomplete.

I use it that way. It requires less setup than lsp-mode. Just try it – add `:disabled t` to your use-package lsp-mode, restart emacs and type `M-x eglot` in a C++ buffer.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#74
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "w" to select what Vim considers a lowercase-w word ?!? Wtf does this mean and how did vi come up

vim has two "word" motions, w and W, the lowercase w motion will see punctuation as a word boundary (as well as whitespace ) W only considers whitespace

Mind blown. Now I'm wondering if swapping `w` and `W` in the config is worth the penalty of diverging from the defaults. Decisions decisions.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#75
This was a beautiful article; the joy of tinkering just shines through everywhere :-) I'm glad Rahul did the work to upstream some of the changes, I hope some of the maintainers read his post and are inspired to change a few defaults too (with that init.el vs `lisp/` refactor it should be easier for them to see what wants changing). Maybe some of the packages might provide for inspiration too; I'd love to see vc-mode provide builtin gutter support, for example. And viper extensions sounds like something that should just be upstreamed. (Less so exchange rates and weather.) Emacs is so close to being quite good out-of-the-box.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#76
post #69
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would fault nginx here instead. Tilde-suffixed backups is an old convention used by vim and emacs among others. Definitely older than nginx.

The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard. Using hidden files is a stronger convention, e.g. .foo.swp or .foo~. But nginx's sites-enabled also doesn't filter those. It's a very simple mechanism that assumes what you put in that directory is a website configuration. Adding backup files here and there is considered spam, no matter how old it is. It's the second thing I fix in either Vim or Emacs: Put ba…

> The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard.

Emacs does foo~ by default, not ~foo.

In either case, you're not really supposed to edit files in sites-enabled. That directory is expected to contain symlinks to files in sites-available. I'm not going to say with any certainty that one of the reasons for this indeed is that the pattern (which was used by apache as well - and perhaps other things before it) protects against accidentally reading backup files, but it's not impossible.

So there's definitely a case of holding it wrong if you end up with backup files in that directory.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#77
post #69
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would fault nginx here instead. Tilde-suffixed backups is an old convention used by vim and emacs among others. Definitely older than nginx.

The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard. Using hidden files is a stronger convention, e.g. .foo.swp or .foo~. But nginx's sites-enabled also doesn't filter those. It's a very simple mechanism that assumes what you put in that directory is a website configuration. Adding backup files here and there is considered spam, no matter how old it is. It's the second thing I fix in either Vim or Emacs: Put ba…

> The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard. > [...] > It's the second thing I fix in either Vim or Emacs: Put backup files in a central location. (The first is proper indentation/spacing rules.)

Perhaps not a standard, but you yourself admit it's the default behavior.

Though I agree that the simple mechanism acts ... er,... simply, shouldn't it be at the very least aware of the default behavior of common editors?

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#78
post #69
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would fault nginx here instead. Tilde-suffixed backups is an old convention used by vim and emacs among others. Definitely older than nginx.

The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard. Using hidden files is a stronger convention, e.g. .foo.swp or .foo~. But nginx's sites-enabled also doesn't filter those. It's a very simple mechanism that assumes what you put in that directory is a website configuration. Adding backup files here and there is considered spam, no matter how old it is. It's the second thing I fix in either Vim or Emacs: Put ba…

There was no mention of ~foo

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#79
post #68
post #31

> — Sensible file handling: backups and auto-saves in a cache/ directory, recentf for recent files, clean buffer naming with uniquify It's crazy to me how out of the box when you edit nginx file at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/foo it creates another file foo~ there and nginx tries to load that too When I tried to ask emacs reddit community they started attacking me for changing the default that only I need and fits every…

Surprised to hear people told you not to change that - one of the earliest bits of advice I got on using emacs is to set the location of those files to a hidden directory in your home folder.

I was proposing to make default where those files are not created, since Emacs is actually surprisingly great out of the box with no configuration, except for this "little" thing. Apparrently, some people believe it's perfect as it is

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#80

If I was going to reimplement Emacs it wouldn't be with Lisp. Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing? I'm skeptical because to my knowledge, Emacs is the only major text editor written in Lisp.

This article isn't about reimplementing emacs.

BTW emacs is written in C.

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