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Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

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Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#141

Post by oblio »

bachmeier wrote: post #16
jolux wrote: post #6

I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code, which is vastly more popular. I think what made VSCode popular was the availability of many high-quality extensions for major languages. Unfortunately, my experience with Elisp packages is that they tend to be much less stable. This is changing some with LSP mode, of course, but I think the Emacs community would do well…

> I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code I actually find the opposite. As much as I dislike the clumsy GUI, I just keep coming back to Emacs for some things, for the sole reason that it's easier in Emacs. I find Emacs to be the easiest way to customize my text editor, and that's what makes it easy to get my work done. I've tried VS Code many times and I just d…

1. How long have you been using Emacs?

2. Did your journey into computing start with CLIs, TUIs, GUIs?

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#142

Post by neutronicus »

mplanchard wrote: post #53
jonnycomputer wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of these problems aren't really Emacs's fault. Jetbrains puts a lot of money and effort into its IDEs. If some commercial or nonprofit entity was actually committed to developing and maintaining elisp packages providing superb language support, then Emacs would have it. Maybe language support will get better with LSP; anyone know how that is going in the emacs world?

I’ve used lsp-mode for python, go, typescript, rust, and haskell. Had to do a little bit of fiddling with settings and trying different servers to get something performant for a very large python codebase, and I did some more fiddling to adjust some delays and whatnot to get everything feeling snappy with the way I edit text. I still find that it feels faster on Linux than on Mac, but I don’t use the latter much anym…

It doesn't really work for C++

Like it can, but not on our codebase

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#143

Post by xxpor »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #115
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 w…

TRAMP used to be my reasons to use emacs too, but VS code's ssh remote plug in is amazing.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#144

Post by jonnycomputer »

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 lot of IDEs have options to enable emacs-like key bindings. But the mapping is imperfect, and sometimes it gets frustrating. But I tend to work in one environment at a time, so after the initial frustration, I'm fine.

I also find myself using emacs short cuts when using Excel, which doesn't work, at all, of course.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#145

Post by jonnycomputer »

wildermuthn wrote: post #137
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…

Same experience here, but as a Vim and IntelliJ user. I can edit a single file or a few buffers in Vim maybe twice as fast as I can in IntelliJ. However, I can navigate through a codebase 5x as fast, which means that when I’m doing anything that requires an understanding of parts of the codebase I haven’t memorized (95% of it), my IDE is speeding up my development by nearly 5x. I used to try out Vim binding plugins e…

That's an insightful comment, thank you, and one that mirrors my own experience.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#146

Post by jonnycomputer »

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.

its funny, I still haven't tried. I almost always use git on the command line

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#147

Post by rakoo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #132
rakoo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Emacs is your system. You can't integrate all that well in the other direction, because host OS platforms don't let software interop as well. Even the Unix family. The deep interop of course comes at the expense of security. There's no sandboxing or restrictions in Emacs world. One day somebody will release a piece of elisp malware, and a lot of people - myself included - will lose their crown jewels. But until then,…

Actually you can interop in the Unix family, that's what ACME is doing: write specific text to specific files and the content of your editor windows change. That allows the editor to implement any command you could find elsewhere, such as indent, put the contents of a directory, display compile errors...

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#148

Post by Scarbutt »

xxpor wrote: post #143
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

TRAMP used to be my reasons to use emacs too, but VS code's ssh remote plug in is amazing.

He meant running Emacs on the remote server which IMO is even better than using vscode's remote plugin.

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#149

Post by colordrops »

mattl wrote: post #118
samatman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, vim is a superset of vi

Re: Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface

#150

Post by jonnycomputer »

Scarbutt wrote: post #148
xxpor wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TRAMP used to be my reasons to use emacs too, but VS code's ssh remote plug in is amazing.

He meant running Emacs on the remote server which IMO is even better than using vscode's remote plugin.

Yeah, I do use Tramp mode, but have, at times, had problems with it and actually found an smb mount to be more reliable (ha!) when editing files. But often what is the case is that I'm using a variety of bash tools while ssh'd in, and then quickly find I need to edit a file and so launch the server's copy of emacs. Theoretically, I could do everything in Emacs terminal mode, or eshell, either using Tramp, or in the remote instance of Emacs, but I never seem to find that it works hassle free, which is too bad, because I really like being able to move about the terminal field as if it were a text file (e.g. doing a regex on already existing output, etc.).
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