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Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

hongchao.me

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Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#121

Post by pjmlp »

rakoo wrote: post #117
pjmlp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

On Oberon, Mesa/Cedar and Lisp Machines, the experience extends to the whole OS and any application, or REPL, not just a plain text editor.

Althought I haven't mentioned, Smalltalk also provides a similar experience.

Here are some videos that try to convey it, from my playlists,

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

"Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP4hRUEIuxo

"SymbolicsTalk28June2012"

"SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU

"Symbolics Lisp Machine demo Jan 2013"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

The Native Oberon demos available at

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw6NbzmjW-wLvqVbxOXj7Ug/vid...

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#122

Post by TeMPOraL »

Hedepig wrote: post #97
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…

As usual it boils down to the right tool for the job. Emacs hits the mark a great deal and it is a very versatile and adaptable tool, but of course it will have it limitations. As much as one truly desires to find the silver bullet, one will be always disappointed. Having said that, I do often wonder what emacs could be been if it saw the adoption levels Vim has seen.

I thought about it a lot, and realized there's one big obstacle for Emacs to be as close to a silver bullet as you can get - reconciling the following needs:

- Everything - especially any GUI element - having a fallback to text, so that you can get equivalent workflow for terminal and GUI.

- Everything being kept "in the open", in easily parseable data structures, from the POV of Elisp, so that things can easily interoperate with each other.

- Rendering arbitrary fonts and graphics, which is super useful for more advanced UI elements, and about any time you need something from the Web.

The usual "next step" for an editor to suddenly gain a lot of functionality would be, "embed a webview". Except this fails the first two points. But on the other hand, there's only so much you can do with text if you want to use more complex tools for the mind - like graphs. Or even if you want to pack data more densely (overlapping icons, semi-transparent or pixel-aligned popups, whatnot).

Perhaps what we need to advance Emacs is to first standardize on terminal emulators, and associated protocols, that can render pixel and vector images - and some kind of mental framework to make them seamlessly work with text, in a way that doesn't turn into DOM.

(And also threading. If we could just get proper multithreading to work reliably in Emacs, things would improve greatly.)

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#123

Post by sodapopcan »

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'm a Vim user, not Emacs and don't know anything about the ecosystem, but I just wanted to say I've never ever convinced myself that the hundreds of hours I've put into hacking on my Vim setup is "productivity". It's all recreational. I really enjoy it and it comes with a nice shot of adrenaline when you're able to tweak your environment just how you want it. I imagine it's the same for many Emacs users.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#124

Post by hellothrow4418 »

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…

A heads-up that VSCode's remote extensions and Python LSP (pylance) are proprietary. So they can't be used in forks like VSCodium. Pylance is set to replace the current Python LSP.

So, it's like android - touted as open source but with gotchas that you stumble upon once you are invested in the software, and that creates a lock-in effect. Also, the VSCode binaries released by Microsoft are non-FLOSS licensed and contain telemetry. That's why VSCodium exists, but they are crippled due to at least 2 core extensions being proprietary.

Possibly more core extensions could become proprietary.

PS: I know MS created LSP, so no need to remind in reply.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#125

Post by b0afc375b5 »

agumonkey wrote: post #114
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.

Magit was the emacs killer app for me. I'm now slowly learning other parts of emacs, such as org-mode.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#126

Post by b0afc375b5 »

sooheon wrote: post #120
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.

If you don't mind sharing, what is your current default editor?

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#127

Post by mplanchard »

jolux wrote: post #57
d0mine wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode will likely get you to 80% productivity compared to Emacs pretty fast. The question how easy is to get from 80% to 100%. It is like a prototype vs. polished code: you can create something that provides 80% of the result over a weekend and then spend 2 years polishing it, to get remaining desired functionality. For example, I'm sure VSCode does git but does it as well as Magit? Everyday things can be done on mu…

>VSCode is much more popular today. Emacs is GPL -- I expect it to be there in 20 years too. I won't trust Microsoft long term. VSCode is open source, too. There are forks with the Microsoft IP removed from it. I believe Eclipse and RedHat maintain one now as well. Other than that I basically agree with you. I much prefer Emacs to VSCode, but there are annoying things about it that mean I don't want to use it full ti…

Many of the popular extensions developed by Microsoft (pylance for example), which are installed by default when you’re working on a given language, are proprietary.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#129

Post by gpanders »

sodapopcan wrote: post #123
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'm a Vim user, not Emacs and don't know anything about the ecosystem, but I just wanted to say I've never ever convinced myself that the hundreds of hours I've put into hacking on my Vim setup is "productivity". It's all recreational. I really enjoy it and it comes with a nice shot of adrenaline when you're able to tweak your environment just how you want it. I imagine it's the same for many Emacs users.

> I really enjoy it and it comes with a nice shot of adrenaline when you're able to tweak your environment just how you want it.

This is so true. I too enjoy tweaking my Vim setup recreationally. It’s fun for me. Sometimes my wife will ask what I’m doing on the computer, and I have to try and figure out a way to explain that I’m customizing a text editor...

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#130

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Personally, I miss Notepad++'s tab and shift-tab behavior with multiple selected lines on nearly everything, but except for that, I don't usually miss a tool behavior on another tool.

It helps that I set tooling based on language, so if I decide to use Pycharm for Python¹, I will expect Pycharm's behavior on every Python file. But I won't expect it on C, or Haskell, or SQL.

1 - I do change my opinnion over "a specialized IDE is best than emacs when it exists" a lot, currently I'm liking the interaction-free emacs interface more.

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