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…
Two Years of Emacs Solo
71–80 of 147 posts
Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo
#72If 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.
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
#73Is 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.
Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo
#74Earlier 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
Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo
#75Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo
#76Earlier 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…
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
#77Earlier 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…
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
#78Earlier 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…
Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo
#79> — 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.
Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo
#80If 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.
BTW emacs is written in C.