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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#131

Post by NoGravitas »

jsilence wrote: post #38
deworms wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need a dedicated tutorial for a text editor it's a great sign that something is very wrong with its design, particularly concerning discoverability. Emacs has no user-friendly command names (you need to memorize function names which are often meaningless abbreviations), no autocomplete, and doesn't show available functions.

Maybe helm ( https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/ ) should be installed and preconfigured by default. This solves a lot of the shortcomings of vanilla emacs.

Helm is a little heavy-weight. Ivy is lighter, but also does a lot of NIH stuff it doesn't need to. I personally like selectrum, (https://github.com/raxod502/selectrum) because it provides the features of Ivy and quite a bit of extensibility, while still only using the built-in extension points in emacs (completing-read-function, etc.). I do wish the emacs developers would bless something and include and configure it by default, though.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#132

Post by hollerith »

NoGravitas wrote: post #118
hollerith wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time in my 29 years of Emacs use that it has occurred to me that someone out there might like M-x customize enough to hold it up as a pro-Emacs argument. I use it very occasionally in order to discover the name of one of Emacs's thousands of user options, which option I then manipulate with Emacs Lisp code added to a file. I much preferred the (recently completely removed from Gnu Emacs after 2 deca…

I'm actually in-between on this. What I normally do is write short bits of code (generally `use-package' forms) to install and load packages and set options that are essential to the operation of the package, are not private information, and don't vary between my different machines. Then I use `customize-group' to set any remaining options. Customize could stand improvement in terms of widgets and layout, but it's no…

I agree that M-x customize is not horrible at what it does.

On reflection, what inspired me to chime in on this thread is amazement that there exists at least one person who is enthusiastic about the fact that Emacs has thousands of customizable settings. (M-x customize exists solely to make persistent and ephemeral changes to those settings.)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#133

Post by eadmund »

jimbokun wrote: post #83
kqr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like it's not written by an actual Emacs user... and the fact that I can tell points to the real fundamental problem of Emacs: it's not a text editor but the real thing it is is so complicated it finds it easier to market itself as a mere text editor. What is Emacs really? It's a virtual Lisp machine with a standard library for writing graphical text applications. It's more like the JVM than like Notepad.…

> What is Emacs really? It's a virtual Lisp machine with a standard library for writing graphical text applications. If you substitute Javascript for Lisp, doesn't that describe Visual Studio Code pretty well? So now there's a product that leverages the architectural advantages of Emacs, with modern defaults across the board.

Ah, but Javascript is a profoundly terrible language to do anything in, while Lisp is a joy to write in.

Being a Lisp machine is core to the value of Emacs. Emacs-without-Lisp is just another editor.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#134

Post by kqr »

gopiandcode wrote: post #116

I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem. Maybe it's easier to understand via analogy. Let's consider cars. Of the global population of car users, relatively few of them are F1 racecar drivers. Furthermore, you can easily make the case that the particular features (aerodynamics, speed etc.) that make…

It sounds like you know very little about either F1 cars or Emacs. Emacs is more like an older Toyota pickup truck – been around for a long time, ubiquitous, flexible, can carry a load, simple, there's an abundance of spare parts, and there's no problem with it that a good mechanic cannot fix – most problems can be fixed even by improvisation in the field.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#135

Post by pxc »

CJefferson wrote: post #65

Speaking as someone who sees a lot of students start using text editors for the first time, VSCode has two massive advantages over Emacs: 1) Most students already basically know their OS's graphical interface -- the "basic keys" like cut/copy/paste/load/save all work as expected. 2) The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of sta…

> 2) The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?"

Spacemacs also does this, and it's a big part of why I stuck around long enough to discover some of the plugins that make the Emacs world really special, like Org mode and Magit.

I'm still no Emacs hacker, but I know enough to get by, and that a good starter kit can make me productive in Emacs in just a few minutes.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#136

Post by servilio »

tom_ wrote: post #100
ajross wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my .emacs since time immemorial: (global-unset-key [(control z)]) It's absolutely true that defaults are "bad" in many modern environments (though remember C-z to suspend in a terminal environment makes perfect sense!). But the nature of the editor is customization like this. People unwilling to do this just aren't ever going to be happy with emacs. And for those just learning, tricks like that (c.f. emacswiki.org…

Suggested tweak: (when window-system (global-unset-key (kbd "C-z")))

The recommended way to do this now seems to be:

  (when display-graphics-p
    (global-unset-key (kbd "C-z")))
Also, though this works with Emacs running as a server, I find it better to just quit emacsclient instead of learning to do something different depending on what environment it is running.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#137

Post by NoGravitas »

rmadriz wrote: post #58
deworms wrote: post #34

If you need to install a dozen plugins (helm, projectile, company/autocomplete, flycheck, whatever else) to match something that's installed by default in any modern text editor, Emacs will never be remotely popular. Even something as simple as theming doesn't work by default; each theme needs to be implemented separately for every mode. 99% of people will see how fruitless it is to try to configure it and move on. W…

your argument that a text editor is not going to be popular because you need to install a dozen plugins to match what would be considered "modern" doesn't add up. I can see a thousand reasons why emacs is not popular but having to install plugins is not one of them. VSCode itself needs a bunch of plugins for certain languages, and even if you used it for the out the box languages (e.g. JavaScript) there's a couple of…

Agreed about plugins. The main nice thing about VSCode is that it installs and reasonably-configures needed plugins as needed (though Spacemacs does this, too).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#138

Post by tharne »

aj7 wrote: post #105

This was super valuable as it showed me conclusively why Emacs is dead, except for a relatively small group of persons who were exposed to it very early in their careers.

> Emacs is dead, except for a relatively small group of persons who were exposed to it very early in their careers

This is false. There are plenty of new users. https://emacssurvey.org/2020/

Emacs is not now or in the future ever going to have "mass appeal" and that's okay. It caters to a niche, intellectually curious developers who like tinkering for its own sake.

If programming is just a job to you, that's totally fine. For a lot folks, programming is like accounting, a safe path to a decent paycheck. These folks will likely use VS Code and that's OK.

Not every piece of software needs to "eat the world". Some software, like Emacs, can just be enjoyed by a community of dedicated users.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#139

Post by klodolph »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #127
gopiandcode wrote: post #116

I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem. Maybe it's easier to understand via analogy. Let's consider cars. Of the global population of car users, relatively few of them are F1 racecar drivers. Furthermore, you can easily make the case that the particular features (aerodynamics, speed etc.) that make…

> but no matter what, you will never be as fast or flexible as an F1 car (GNU Emacs). The massive flaw in your analogy being that Emacs has more to do with an old and crumbling collection racing car than a F1. Its users constantly need to tinker it to make it somewhat run like a normal car. It’s still slower and less ergonomic but they are blinded by their love and habit to its obvious flaws. The amount of IDE and ed…

I would love to meet this mythical Emacs programmer which is blinded to its flaws, I don't think they're common.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#140

Post by agentwiggles »

wayoutthere wrote: post #96
vintermann wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim is different enough that when its fans say it's superior, at least some people think it's plausible enough that it's worth learning. And even if they don't become appreciably more productive by it, at that point it's sunk cost and they might as well keep using it. The last time I had any reason to consider getting into emacs, was when I came across a proof assistant many years ago that basically required it - it…

I personally love Vim because once you know how to work it, you can code extremely quickly. You don’t really even need any macros (though they can make you even faster) — I find the default commands to be fast enough that I consider vim to be an “expert interface” for text editing. Also love the VS Code vim plug-in.

The fact that vim-style modal editing can be implemented in other editors is huge. I use console vim frequently, but when I need to bump up to something more IDE-like (VSCode or a Jetbrains IDE), I can carry 99% of the vim functionality I use, and be up and running with a minute or two of config.
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