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Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

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Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#111

Post by pjmlp »

rakoo wrote: post #37

The author is definitely right in saying that Emacs is an OS, because it runs "programs" that interact with a common datasource. The issue is that those "programs" are not the ones of your baremetal host. The sequel that makes sense would be a text editor that allows host programs to be run seamlessly on the text. Once again the geniuses behind Plan 9 have shown how novel their system was by creating acme ( https://w…

There is nothing genius about ACME.

Just like Emacs is a poor imitation of the developer experience on Lisp Machines, ACME is a poor imitation of developer experience on Oberon and Mesa/Cedar.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#112

Post by rerx »

wodenokoto wrote: post #101
jonnycomputer wrote: post #43

Sometimes I think people trick themselves into thinking that all their fiddling with Emacs counts as part of their productivity. Don't hate on me. I use Emacs just about every day. I used to use Emacs as my go to editor for writing code ... and it almost worked. But it was never hassle free, and things often worked more poorly than I would have liked, or ended up requiring too much fiddling to get it to work right, o…

Don't you miss having the same keyboard shortcuts across programs? Or the tiny things, like, does backspace at the beginning of text delete one space, back to the nearest indentation (e.g. 4 spaces) or back to the beginning of the line? Moving between sublime on MacOS and VSCode on windows is death by a thousand needles to me. I can only imagine what moving between 3-4 editors must be like.

A sizable portion of the Jetbrains IDE functionality can be accessed by the keyboard. Moreover, the keybindings can be configured very similar to Emacs quite easily (I don't want to live without C-x C-2 etc. for splits for instance). There's a couple of helpful plugins, too. And for hardcore, straightforward editing I've bound Cmd-e to launch emacsclient right at cursor position. This goes quite a long way, IMHO.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#113

Post by ywei3410 »

jolux wrote: post #68
BeetleB wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code Emacs discussions on HN are always unsatisfying, because everyone seems to want to compare it with IDEs or other programming editors. Only a small portion of the article is about SW development. The fraction of Emacs users who use it primarily for things other than programming is a lot bigger than most HN readers think…

>Only a small portion of the article is about SW development. The article, is, however written by a software developer. >The fraction of Emacs users who use it primarily for things other than programming is a lot bigger than most HN readers think it is. Do we have any hard data here? Or is this just an anecdote? Sure, Emacs is usable for a lot of stuff outside programming. I personally use it for org-mode and as a ge…

> Do we have any hard data here? Or is this just an anecdote?

55% according to the Emacs survey 2020 (obviously, take it with a pinch of self-selection bias due to the survey being self selecting).

[1] https://emacssurvey.org/2020/

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#114

Post by agumonkey »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #43

Sometimes I think people trick themselves into thinking that all their fiddling with Emacs counts as part of their productivity. Don't hate on me. I use Emacs just about every day. I used to use Emacs as my go to editor for writing code ... and it almost worked. But it was never hassle free, and things often worked more poorly than I would have liked, or ended up requiring too much fiddling to get it to work right, o…

Everything except magit. magit is life magit is love.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#115

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #43

Sometimes I think people trick themselves into thinking that all their fiddling with Emacs counts as part of their productivity. Don't hate on me. I use Emacs just about every day. I used to use Emacs as my go to editor for writing code ... and it almost worked. But it was never hassle free, and things often worked more poorly than I would have liked, or ended up requiring too much fiddling to get it to work right, o…

I was fully down the path you're talking about, and would have agreed with you... until COVID happened and I've been stuck working from home on a fairly low bandwidth (rural) Internet connection with source code that can't (because of BigCorp policy) be on my local machine. So it's SSH for most things, and suddenly my 25+ year old emacs skills (such as they are) have come back to be a big help.

That and even when I was able to do development locally, it has been on a massive codebase (Chromium) that CLion literally cannot index (freezes, fails, lags etc.) and yet somehow clangd & lsp etc. don't have problems.

So hoorah for the continued excellence of emacs and assorted related open source tools. They may not be slick or well packaged but they are on the whole resilient because they're flexible.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#116

Post by rakoo »

michael-ax wrote: post #90
rakoo wrote: post #37

The author is definitely right in saying that Emacs is an OS, because it runs "programs" that interact with a common datasource. The issue is that those "programs" are not the ones of your baremetal host. The sequel that makes sense would be a text editor that allows host programs to be run seamlessly on the text. Once again the geniuses behind Plan 9 have shown how novel their system was by creating acme ( https://w…

Its also a daemon that does a lot of work for me from the shell! I meta-click to capture xterm output, call dired, make it give me popup-windows to edit short scripts and long command lines, i query the feed-reader, get my backup-schedule, have it popup for debrief when new voice notes are downloaded, serve as an emergency window manager, capture into multiple bins while browsing, turn into a presentation tool, creat…

Can you do all of those without emacs ? My point is that yes Emacs can do so many things, but 1) it's all accessible from Emacs only and 2) it uses Emacs-only components. This is fine if you live inside Emacs, but it doesn't really integrate with the rest of your system

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#117

Post by rakoo »

pjmlp wrote: post #111
rakoo wrote: post #37

The author is definitely right in saying that Emacs is an OS, because it runs "programs" that interact with a common datasource. The issue is that those "programs" are not the ones of your baremetal host. The sequel that makes sense would be a text editor that allows host programs to be run seamlessly on the text. Once again the geniuses behind Plan 9 have shown how novel their system was by creating acme ( https://w…

There is nothing genius about ACME. Just like Emacs is a poor imitation of the developer experience on Lisp Machines, ACME is a poor imitation of developer experience on Oberon and Mesa/Cedar.

How is it a poor imitation ? What is lacking ? (I've never used any of those predecessors)

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#118

Post by mattl »

samatman wrote: post #33
mattl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs was 21-ish when vim came along

vi and emacs were released in the same year. The fact that vi iMproved became the dominant implementation isn't particularly relevant here.

Are vim users going to be able to use vi? Genuine question. I’ve barely used either.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#119

Post by bmillare »

dmortin wrote: post #65

Emacs is a text UI (though it can show images too) on top of a cross OS programming platform where you can create quick UIs for any kind of task you have (interfacing with APIs, command line programs, editing tasks, etc.). Once you learn how Emacs works and how it can be programmed, you can create interactive tools extremely quickly to make lots of tasks you encounter day to day easier. I do this all the time.

Do you have any references/tutorials/examples on how to do this?

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#120

Post by sooheon »

wqsz7xn wrote: post #93

I'm surprised to find no discussion about the fact that emacs is single threaded. You can achieve a lot but at some point (eg: running it as a window manager) it becomes a little less snappy.

This is the only reason why emacs is no longer my default editor. I value customization, but I learned I value snappiness more.
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