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Emacs is Dead (2010)

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Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#101

Post by tkf »

prewett wrote: post #74
tkf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I am Japanese and I am almost sure my translation is right. But I hope calling the s/he "Eccentric" is not very rude. I just thought it is better than "unusual"... or not? Ah, I just notice "unique" fits the context very well. Perhaps I will change that later.

I personally think that "eccentric" is more polite than "unusual," which could be either positive or negative. It's also better than "unique"; I mean, everyone is unique... Given Steve Yegge's hilarious, insightful, and somewhat cheeky rants (after learning Java for a few months, "Kingdom of Nouns" [1] expressed my nascent thoughts exactly), I think he would qualify for "eccentric." I bet he'd even like the term :) […

Thanks for the explanation. It is hard feel this kind of nuance as my English is not that good. It's also good to know that he'd like that :)

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#102

Post by TylerE »

nahreally wrote: post #26
TylerE wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why guile, which has exactly zero usage outside a few GNUtoys. Why not, e.g. Racket? If you're going to go the trouble, _get it right_.

Because it's been years in the works, it's finally about ready, and Racket only now is in everyone's mouths? Guile is now also able to run other languages as well, like Javascript, or at least so their maintainers claim. Besides, I know that among users of fringe languages like us (you too are, I presume) this is a bit of a taboo question... but who uses Racket so much as for it to make a difference here?

Racket (Formally PLT Scheme) has been the dominant scheme for serious use for years. It's not "the n3w hawtness" by any means, but the established leader.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#103

Post by taylanub »

regularfry wrote: post #98
Ma8ee wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is Emacs inefficient for humans?

Try this task for an example: underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations, possibly less if there's a shortcut I haven't thought of. How many keypresses does emacs take out of the box? Emacs, especially with paredit, is fairly well optimised for editing s-expressions and the like. Vim is very well optimised for line-based editing, but I don't get on with it…

Came up with this in 10 seconds: C-a C-k C-k C-y C-y C-p C-SPC C-e M-x repl RET reg RET . RET = RET

You can't really count key-presses the same way in Emacs because e.g. Ctrl+x is not the same as "x, y", and especially "Ctrl+x, Ctrl+y" is not the same at all as "x, y, z, t" because you can hold Ctrl then press x then y. Also, in the M-x repl RET reg RET bit, the "repl" and "reg" can be touch-typed naturally, which will probably be faster than hitting individual command keys, due to mental over-head and what-not (bring in the neurologists!). It's probably still a bit more finger movement than Vim's 11 keypresses, but I'd invite everyone to stop mast*rbating and be as fine with this ~20 key-press solution which came to mind in 10 seconds and takes less than 10 seconds to execute. If you want to use it often, record it as a macro and bind it to a key.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#104

Post by ajross »

irahul wrote: post #76
ajross wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title is linkbait, but I think (as a two-decade emacs user, mind you) that the technical points are actually pretty sound. Emacs absolutely is crufty when you try to stretch it beyond its original paradigm. Elisp, as an environment, is woefully primitive compared to the kind of elegance and integration you can achieve with more modern languages. The example of code completion is actually pretty informative -- thi…

> The example of code completion is actually pretty informative -- this is something that IDEs were doing routinely 15 years ago that emacs still doesn't do well, Isn't the point of the article that emacs shouldn't do it but call upon something which does? I use gocode for go completion in vim. gocode has support for a number of editors and there are instructions to make it work with editors which aren't supported ou…

Sure. But even then you're stuck with using elisp as an extension language (though frankly vimscript isn't much better), and relative to other tools (perl, say) elisp kind of sucks as a tool integration language. To get to what I was saying earlier, if you were to design an editor able to easily integrate (for example) third party syntax highlighting and code completion plugins for arbitrary languages, it wouldn't look like GNU emacs.

Again, to be clear: I use emacs every hour of every day. I used it to type this post. I'm not giving it up any time soon. But it's important not to delude ourselves about its shortcomings.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#105

Post by intractable »

regularfry wrote: post #98
Ma8ee wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is Emacs inefficient for humans?

Try this task for an example: underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations, possibly less if there's a shortcut I haven't thought of. How many keypresses does emacs take out of the box? Emacs, especially with paredit, is fairly well optimised for editing s-expressions and the like. Vim is very well optimised for line-based editing, but I don't get on with it…

    > underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations
Sounds like a vimgolf challenge to me. Here's my entry:

YpVr=

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#106

Post by jsw97 »

erikcw wrote: post #36
monkmartinez wrote: post #25

TKF is an awesome (world class?) python and emacs/elisp developer. His projects have helped tune my emacs into a decently powerful python development vehicle. However, the level of effort required to get the basic functionality of a modern IDE like Pycharm has been daunting and required hours upon hours of fiddling.

Will you post links to some of these packages? I'm building up my Emacs Python toolkit after many years of being a Vim user (with liberal use of Evil mode of course! :-)

TKF's Emacs IPython Notebook is definitely worth checking out. Allows you to create and edit IPython notebooks in emacs, with inline graphics.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#107

Post by NotOscarWilde »

jlgreco wrote: post #80
yarrel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The screeching brakes sound of context switches in Vim is not more "efficient" than just pressing a key combination to perform whichever transformation on text you wish to effect in Emacs. I use Emacs to edit text, and I have limbs I'd rather lose than have to perform that task with Vim's airbag in my face.

> Vim is not more "efficient" than just pressing a key combination Vim and Emacs both use key combinations... Vim's just require fewer fingers at once. You type Vim key combinations as you would type words in a language with a latin alphabet.

I think a lot of features -- especially if you want them accessible inside INSERT mode -- are accessible through CTRL+letter, no? At least omni-completion, the most useful one, used to be when I last tried it. (Has that changed? I'm not doing much editing in vim these days, so I may be wrong.)

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#108

Post by jlgreco »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #107
jlgreco wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vim is not more "efficient" than just pressing a key combination Vim and Emacs both use key combinations... Vim's just require fewer fingers at once. You type Vim key combinations as you would type words in a language with a latin alphabet.

I think a lot of features -- especially if you want them accessible inside INSERT mode -- are accessible through CTRL+letter, no? At least omni-completion, the most useful one, used to be when I last tried it. (Has that changed? I'm not doing much editing in vim these days, so I may be wrong.)

Any command that I can think of can be mapped to work while in insertion mode.

The key however is understanding that if you are insertion mode, then key sequences start with the escape key, or, insertion commands are completed with the escape key. There is no "context switching". No more-so then having to press ctrl along with the rest of your key sequence in Emacs is "context switching".

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#109

Post by smrtinsert »

joshAg wrote: post #31
bitwize wrote: post #20

This article's "philosophy of Emacs" runs counter to the conventional wisdom that "Emacs is a good operating system, it just needs a decent text editor". If anything what the author describes is a "philosophy of Acme" -- do as much as possible by piping in and out of external processes. While Emacs can do this, there is no guiding principle to favor it over elisp extensions. I think the philosophy of Emacs, if it has…

> the wisdom that "Emacs is a good operating system, it just needs a decent text editor". that's not wisdom; that's a sarcastic quip by the vim side of the emacs-vim/vim-emacs religious war.

its arguable there are far less emacs commands to learn to get started coding compared to vims modes and key combinations.

Re: Emacs is Dead (2010)

#110

Post by swah »

intractable wrote: post #105
regularfry wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try this task for an example: underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations, possibly less if there's a shortcut I haven't thought of. How many keypresses does emacs take out of the box? Emacs, especially with paredit, is fairly well optimised for editing s-expressions and the like. Vim is very well optimised for line-based editing, but I don't get on with it…

> underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations Sounds like a vimgolf challenge to me. Here's my entry: YpVr=

I'm wondering now that the creativity to come up with those things might actually be beneficial to coding.
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