Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Emacs Popular Again

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 782 posts

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#101

Post by olivierestsage »

I hear a lot about the declining popularity of Emacs, but I always wonder how much it is overstating the case. As a tech enthusiast but (mostly) non-programmer, my perception has actually been that the "cool factor" of Emacs has been on the rise. Around 2011 or so, I hardly ever saw mention of it online. Now a day hardly go by on places like Reddit's "unixporn" board that someone doesn't post their slick setup with Emacs/Doom Emacs/Spacemacs on display.

I know that that Reddit board is sort of ridiculous and the jokes about it write themselves, but I nonetheless feel that Emacs has attained a certain counter-cultural "cool"/cachet in recent years that it lacked a decade ago. In my opinion, this is a good sign for its future, all things considered. These threads are always full of comments about how vscode has surpassed it, etc., but I don't think anything can change that--Emacs will ever truly satisfy those for whom vscode is presently the superior tool, and conversely, vscode is unlikely to satisfy the Emacs user.

Like vscode, Emacs is in every sense a practical tool; it is simply that it is practical in service of different needs. It is a practical tool for someone who takes active pleasure in the cultivation of a practical tool, in the process of learning and discovery involved. Because this will never describe a majority of users, I don't think Emacs will ever capture a majority of developers or whatever, but it seems poised to continue to attract very dedicated ones who find the cultivation of a personal work environment in a ridiculously powerful 40-year-old program appealing in and of itself.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#102

Post by josteink »

simias wrote: post #93

I wish Vim users and Emacs users would unite to improve Spacemacs. It's really a great idea IMO, have the editing power of Vim with the flexibility and elegance of the Emacs environment. Unfortunately when I tried Spacemacs (coming from Emacs) I kept bumping on rough edges with vim command emulation which ended up with me switching directly to the real vim. It's been about a year now and while I still think I was rig…

As someone who really doesn’t “get” or care for Vim, why should I contribute to an alternate Emacs-“distro” entirely focused on an existing Vi user-base, using non-standard conventions and keybindings?

I mean good for them having that option, but what’s in that thing for me?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#103

Post by plafl »

sdegutis wrote: post #13

There is a human aspect to software, and when you forget that, and try to force people to adapt to software instead of adapting software to people, you come up with software that naturally is difficult and unpleasant for people to use. Emacs is built on a philosophy of human nature that deemphasizes the subjective personal experience in favor of (a limited group of people’s theory of) the objective ideal experience.…

It has taken much more than 30+ years to create, mostly by people on their free time. Isn't it amazing? I think it says a lot about perseverance and good engineering. How many editors have you already seen to rise and fall?

Emacs tries very hard to be helpful. It's software by the people, for the people. It's the very core ideal of free software. But yes, it doesn't resonate with most people because it takes time to learn.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#105

Post by jwdunne »

superbaconman wrote: post #84
jwdunne wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, I moved from Emacs to VS Code about a year ago. I’d used Emacs for years but I was spending a large amount of time fixing package upgrade problems. I guess I’d got into some kind of dependency hell. Maybe I wasn’t experienced enough with Emacs to use it professionally. But that’s the kicker, I haven’t had that problem switching to VS Code. Having all of Elisp and all of Emacs available, including packages, i…

What did you do about key bindings? The default vscode ones rely heavily on arrow keys, but those things are just so far away from the home key. I can't seem to find a move up/down paragraph shortcut to map either. I've tried some of the emacs plugins but they all introduce weird behavior; I keep ending up in some random menu vs just moving my cursor around.

In effect, gritted my teeth and got used to it. I mean, the basic movement commands still work (or you can configure it so) so that helps.

But the benefits out weigh the sluggishness I feel at the keyboard. It was easier to get the rest of the team on VS Code and then I could start looking at extensions that bring things as close to what’s in Emacs as possible. That’s improved team productivity as whole (and my own when they do the same).

But there are somethings I long for. Magit was hands down the best thing for projects versioned in Git. I’ve not seen anything like it in VS Code. The other thing is macros and Elisp but as above that’s a double edged sword. I’ve actually thought about bringing some of those ideas over to VS Code at least for my own team.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#106

Post by celeritascelery »

simias wrote: post #93

I wish Vim users and Emacs users would unite to improve Spacemacs. It's really a great idea IMO, have the editing power of Vim with the flexibility and elegance of the Emacs environment. Unfortunately when I tried Spacemacs (coming from Emacs) I kept bumping on rough edges with vim command emulation which ended up with me switching directly to the real vim. It's been about a year now and while I still think I was rig…

I always find it interesting that the thing people really want from vim is the keybindings. Almost no one uses vim for the software.

Also, The vim emulation has gotten much better due to evil-collection[1]. You might want to give Spacemacs or doom-emacs[2] another try.

[1]https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection [2]https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#107

Post by throwaway8941 »

dfabulich wrote: post #99

Emacs might never catch up to Visual Studio Code, which is actively funded by Microsoft, but intuitively, it seems like Emacs ought to be able to catch up to Vim. It's always been weird writing Emacs extensions in ELisp, but it's not like Vimscript is a top-tier language. Emacs is hard to learn, but so's Vim. I think it comes down to performance, especially startup time. Emacs developers have never cared much about i…

Startup performance problems can be sidestepped with emacs daemon mode, at least in some cases.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Em...

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#108

Post by dmortin »

sachdevap wrote: post #80
dmortin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity means more users and more contributors. I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them?

> I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them? What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. Not among the package maintainers anyways, and also of note here is remacs - I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. And popularity does not always mean more contributors, not when they are just t…

> What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. Not among the package maintainers anyways

I was talking about the "core developers" who work on the emacs core, not packages. AFAIK most of them has a long history with emacs, using it for decades, so they can't be that young.

But of course I know mostly about the maintaners and stuff. It's possible there are lots of younger contributors.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#109

Post by pwinnski »

dmortin wrote: post #46
kick wrote: post #32

I think a large part of the issue is the default keybindings (the GUI is also bad, but I think it's bad in a way that's not going to be impossible to fix without screaming from people who like what's already there). It's truly only lacking a decent text editor. This isn't to say that the keybindings never made sense; in the stage of computing before X, where Space Cadet-like keyboards were common, it was more than fi…

> You launch the tutorial/tour/whatever it's called and immediately it yells at you to use C-v to jump to the next page. And then M-v to go backwards! If you're a normal user, your response is probably something along the lines of, "Like, why?" The hardcore emacs users think these keys are better. And don't want to change them, because then they had to rewrite the whole manual which uses these keys. The user don't ha…

Right? And yet I just typed 'emacs tutorial' into DDG, and the first three results all hit you right away with descriptions of keys that don't physically exist on a modern keyboard.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

http://www.jesshamrick.com/2012/09/10/absolute-beginners-gui...

https://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/tcl-course/emacs-tutoria...

I've never tried emacs in large part because I've been convinced over the years that the various combinations of keys I would need to memorize are too complicated. I just did that search thinking that maybe I'd been mis-remembering, but no, that's still the impression that I have.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#110

Post by mongol »

How much can Emacs change while still being Emacs? Is it worthwhile to start building a new editor on the core Emacs "idea"? Because I think minor changes will not move the needle. Someone compared it with the birth of Firefox, scrapping Netscape Mozilla Communicator or whatever it was called. I think that is what it would take but even that would be uncertain.
Post reply on HN