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Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

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Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#101

Post by iLemming »

skeezyjefferson wrote: post #100
iLemming wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, before Emacs, it never occurred to me to even think of trying to control my browser from my editor. I never thought that I can type just about any text, not in the input box of some app, but in my editor - with Emacs, if I need to type anything longer that three words - in Slack app, Zoom chat, browser window, etc., I'll do it in my editor, why have I never thought about this before? Emacs has no business of ta…

> Non-Emacs folk often don't see the "actual use cases" because their minds operate on a different plane. youve just listed a bunch of scripts launched from emacs. with your logic, you can take the lisp interpreter out of emacs, stick it into say mspaint, and have an equally powerful program.

Yes, it may sound like that to someone unacquainted with it. But have you ever thought about the reasons why Emacs remains relevant and triumphant even half a century later?

Here's really fascinating stuff: I can start a fresh new instance of plain, vanilla, clean-slate instance of Emacs; then open a scratch buffer and piece-by-piece rebuild my entire configuration, consisting of a dozen thousand lines of customizations; install third-party packages that bring hundreds of thousands of their own code; I can do that by evaling every expression one-by-one without not only having to restart Emacs even once, but even not needing to save that code anywhere. How many applications can you name that are capable of pulling a trick like that?

Sure, that may sound impractical, let me give you another, real-life example: I needed to change how Google Translate [extension] works - I wanted it to translate year denominations (to learn exactly how they spelled in a foreign language). Did I have to dig through the Google API docs? Nope. Did I have to write my own custom extension? Nope. Did I even have to re-implement the function that sends the payload? Once again, nope. I just had to precisely advise a single function and convert digits to words before sending the payload, something like eleven lines of code. And it took me no longer than fifteen minutes. Good luck trying something like that in pretty much any other editor.

So, yeah, getting exposed to that kind of power does change your mindset.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#102

Post by iLemming »

billfruit wrote: post #2

While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration. Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in. If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find…

Emacs in its half-a-century existence afaik never had "batteries included" narrative. Whatever comes bundled in Emacs, either practical or not so much (e.g. tetris) - are recipes and guides for extending it.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#104

Post by iLemming »

skydhash wrote: post #79
alyandon wrote: post #44

They say there’s no Emacs — only your Emacs. This hit home for me. I spent about 6 months working exclusively with emacs to get past the "this is weird/hard because it is unfamiliar to me" stage. At the end of the experiment, I went back to using vim and IDEs. My take personal takeaways from the experience: 1) capslock/ctrl switching is helpful in so many other areas - so I kept that 2) emacs is something you want to…

2) I have eshell bound to a keybind, but I've never use it. I prefer shell-mode and shell-command. They make it easy to use cli utilities. TUI is something that I find myself no longer needing. And I've become so accustomed with the cli that the only two I'm using in a terminal is `less` and `top`. 3) I think the best way is to find some vanilla base config that will smooth out the rough parts, then, once you underst…

> I have eshell bound to a keybind, but I've never use it

For years, I had a similar feeling about it. And then I learned that in eshell you can pipe in and out of buffers. So you can for example grep the content of one buffer and pipe results into another. Or pipe the output of a command to a buffer, and you even can chain them pipes. That often comes extremely handy.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#105

Post by DonHopkins »

ubermonkey wrote: post #74
DonHopkins wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only proves nothing if you didn't bother reading it (which you words "wall of text" imply) and didn't check any of the links proving what I said. Instead of dismissing everything by handwaving, please tell me which specific points I made that you disagree with, and what is your evidence? How long have you been using Emacs, yourself? If you just got started a few years ago, then that excuses your ignorance of histo…

The point is that you came in here with a pasted wall of text with a whole bunch of urls claiming emacs users on MacOS are somehow 3rd class citizens because ... of things from long ago, I guess. My point, Don, is that these long-ago issues are now irrelevant. Your position here runs utterly counter to the lived experience of Mac emacs users. I don't care what RMS did in 2005. It's not relevant to using emacs on a Ma…

My sweet summer child.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#106

Post by ubermonkey »

DonHopkins wrote: post #105
ubermonkey wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you came in here with a pasted wall of text with a whole bunch of urls claiming emacs users on MacOS are somehow 3rd class citizens because ... of things from long ago, I guess. My point, Don, is that these long-ago issues are now irrelevant. Your position here runs utterly counter to the lived experience of Mac emacs users. I don't care what RMS did in 2005. It's not relevant to using emacs on a Ma…

My sweet summer child.

This isn't much of an argument, Don. Just being condescending may be charming somewhere else, but here it just looks like you're being a jerk -- and a jerk without much that's relevant to add to the conversation.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#107

Post by eadmund »

skeezyjefferson wrote: post #100
iLemming wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, before Emacs, it never occurred to me to even think of trying to control my browser from my editor. I never thought that I can type just about any text, not in the input box of some app, but in my editor - with Emacs, if I need to type anything longer that three words - in Slack app, Zoom chat, browser window, etc., I'll do it in my editor, why have I never thought about this before? Emacs has no business of ta…

> Non-Emacs folk often don't see the "actual use cases" because their minds operate on a different plane. youve just listed a bunch of scripts launched from emacs. with your logic, you can take the lisp interpreter out of emacs, stick it into say mspaint, and have an equally powerful program.

> with your logic, you can take the lisp interpreter out of emacs, stick it into say mspaint, and have an equally powerful program.

Yes, that would be pretty awesome. The GIMP tries to be something like that.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#108

Post by eadmund »

skeezyjefferson wrote: post #88
frou_dh wrote: post #16

To me the charming thing about Emacs is how introspective a program it is. This goes beyond all the documentation being built-in, and being able to redefine things on the fly. For instance, it's easy to define a keybinding that does "Take me to the source code of the command that's bound to the next keybinding I type". When you use that and land at a destination, it will probably be Elisp code, but in some cases will…

I have never once thought Visual Studio needs some way to edit its own source code on the fly... whats the actual use case?

> I have never once thought Visual Studio needs some way to edit its own source code on the fly... whats [sic] the actual use case?

Writing Visual Studio, for example. Debugging Visual Studio. Extending Visual Studio in more than the ways it has already provided.

It means not being constrained to do only those things someone else had seen fit to permit you to do. It means freedom.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#109

Post by sexyman48 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #105
ubermonkey wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you came in here with a pasted wall of text with a whole bunch of urls claiming emacs users on MacOS are somehow 3rd class citizens because ... of things from long ago, I guess. My point, Don, is that these long-ago issues are now irrelevant. Your position here runs utterly counter to the lived experience of Mac emacs users. I don't care what RMS did in 2005. It's not relevant to using emacs on a Ma…

My sweet summer child.

Your litany of butthurt actually bolsters my opinion of the bozos at emacs-devel, who I've long criticized for hypocritically advancing emacs on proprietary os's despite their ostensible mission to destroy them.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#110

Post by DonHopkins »

ubermonkey wrote: post #106
DonHopkins wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sweet summer child.

This isn't much of an argument, Don. Just being condescending may be charming somewhere else, but here it just looks like you're being a jerk -- and a jerk without much that's relevant to add to the conversation.

Do you really believe that RMS has suddenly done a 180 and changed his core beliefs and philosophy about Apple and Macs and non-free operating systems?

Do you even know him, have you ever talked with him about free software or copyleft, have you ever even read anything he's written? Are you brand new to this whole "free software" thing, and it's a total shock to you that RMS has a long standing opinion about supporting Macs and other non-free operating systems?

It's obvious you haven't read any of the links to evidence I posted, or even anything RMS has written about the subject, but you really should do some research before jumping to such historically uninformed conclusions.

Parading your self cultivated ignorance and unwillingness to read, enumerating things you don't care about, and refusing to indicate what I wrote that you disagree with or provide any evidence to the contrary after I asked you to, just isn't a good look, and won't win any arguments that I have nothing to add to the conversation.

One more time: what evidence I gave do you disagree with, and what evidence do you have than RMS has done a 180 and abandoned his long held principles? Do you even know what those principles are?

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