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How I am deeply integrating Emacs

joshblais.com

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Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#141

Post by seanw444 »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #45
omnicognate wrote: post #7

Re EXWM and: > Emacs is single threaded, therefore if anything in the system hangs, the whole system hangs For development work I haven't found this to be an issue. Generally when coding I use very few X apps - pretty much just a web browser and maybe occasionally a PDF preview or docs browser. I don't think I've ever had a problem with the single-threaded behaviour blocking window management there. (And as an aside,…

I don’t imagine I’d want to use my general emacs as my window manager, I imagine the sanest way would be to run two instances of emacs.

I absolutely love Emacs, but I can't understand why people want it to be their window manager, of all things. Emacs can be many things, but high performance it is not. And WMs definitely are a high performance area.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#142

Post by skydhash »

pjmlp wrote: post #126
rml wrote: post #124

This is a very good feature/workflow based intro As the years go by one realizes that even these “features” like Org, Dired, etc are just illusions in some sense. They’re just Elisp code someone else wrote and put a name on. You can take or leave them or write your own code that changes/advises/customizes them. It’s all up to you. You don’t need a blessed “plugin” architecture, some PM at IntelliJ’s permission etc At…

I used it between 1995 and 2006 as replacement for not having proper IDEs on the UNIX systems I had to work on. With that requirement going away, I left Emacs behind.

I’m perfectly happy woth IDEs for some projects, especially at work. But I tinker with enough ecosystems and OS and sometimes you just don’t have any IDEs. On almost all systems, I can copy my init.el and have my tools replicated in a few minutes.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#143

Post by 295fge »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #133
amatecha wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it a bit differently: if the tool is getting in the way, this will hamper the effectiveness and raise the barrier for skilled individuals to do their best. Yeah, the absolute top-tier max-talent people can do well regardless, but if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction.

> if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction. I think YuukiRey's point is that this is not true. The bottleneck for people to do their absolute best is almost never tool-induced friction, until you've already built a strong pre-existing skillbase. Overwhelmingly it's motivation, interest, time, energy, etc. In theory to…

It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#144

Post by skydhash »

robenkleene wrote: post #128
fhd2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless, the keyboard vs mouse thing always struck me as one of the many dumb flamewars that tech people engage in. Certainly. I wouldn't argue that text editing speed is a relevant bottleneck in software development, actually. To me it's enjoyable and that's a big factor in my productivity, but that's just me. My point was mainly that the keyboard (efficient use is difficult to learn) vs mouse (arguably easier…

> My point was mainly that the keyboard (efficient use is difficult to learn) vs mouse (arguably easier to learn) is just one example of why the current desktop metaphor won over something I'd say is designed for heavy keyboard use (even if usable without it). This comparison of the mouse and keyboard seems to have programmer tunnel vision. Anything involving layout, graphs, media editing (audio, video, image), 3D mo…

There’s the acme editor for a truly nice usage of the mouse. Even emacs make a better usage of the mouse than most editors.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#145

Post by kstrauser »

295fge wrote: post #143
dwohnitmok wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction. I think YuukiRey's point is that this is not true. The bottleneck for people to do their absolute best is almost never tool-induced friction, until you've already built a strong pre-existing skillbase. Overwhelmingly it's motivation, interest, time, energy, etc. In theory to…

It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools

It’s a poorer carpenter who uses a can of beans as a hammer. Pros are responsible for choosing appropriate tools.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#147

Post by tom_ »

douglee650 wrote: post #8
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #6

I like eMacs but I feel the whole workflow is wrong. Buffers are a stacked tiled window manager inside your window manager. Your browser is a tabbed window manager, and many other applications are also window managers. I wish any sub buffer of any application was for all intents and purposes a dedicated window, so the WM can take care of the rest. Maybe it’s an adjustment that I could make in my workflow, but a globa…

Doesn’t emacs slow down on really long files? I mean like 8,000 lines

In general, no... but also maybe yes. It's usually fine, but you may get extra unlucky in specific situations with specific major modes.

I've always found line length the biggest problem. Emacs has never done a fantastic job of handling long lines. If truncated, you can't see most of the content; if not truncated, the performance gets worse with length, and visual-line-mode (essential for dealing with non-truncated long lines IMO) doesn't make it any better.

Performance with large numbers of mostly shortish lines is ok. I've had no serious problems loading 2+ GByte log files (average line length <200 chars) in literal mode. The general performance suggests that Emacs isn't really tuned for editing enormous files, but I've never found things so bad as to be worth switching text editor over.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#148

Post by m463 »

YuukiRey wrote: post #86

> I have seen what people are capable of doing when their tools get out of the way, and they are free to just create. This is how world class athletes, musicians, artists, writers, and of course programmers take what is in their mind and translate it into reality. I think this is a fallacy. If you approach the question of how these people achieve the things they do with a bias towards tooling then you'll come to the…

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax."

"If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution."

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#149

Post by tom_ »

tmtvl wrote: post #46
adlpz wrote: post #37

A question for the heavy Emacs users: What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs? I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there. However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe…

My petty opinion is that distributions which disable the menu bar are bad, distributions which use an edgelord dark theme are bad, and distributions which do both are terrible. Where Doom in particular is concerned I dislike the fact that it starts with Vi keybindings by default (I quite disfavour modal editing, there's a reason I switched away from Vim after 5 years) and that it changes the 's' binding so I can't ev…

One tip I read somewhere (possibly from Steve Yegge?) was that it's a good idea to disable the Emacs menu bar - and I agree. The Emacs menu bar is this kind of weird uncanny valley thing. It looks like a normal menu bar, but any time you click one of the items on it, you'll find that you're doing something that actually only makes sense if you're into Emacs already. It won't help you when you're starting out, and once you're up and running you won't need it (but you can ctrl+right click on the buffer to get if you ever feel like you do...) - and, meanwhile, it's taking up space on the screen that you could use for more lines of text.

(macOS users are stuck with the menu bar generally, and that means they're stuck with the Emacs menu bar too. Just ignore it.)

While you're there, get rid of the scroll bars too. They never work properly, and this way you get an extra column or two of text per window.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#150

Post by pama »

miguel_martin wrote: post #146

Not one mention of SSH or remote development. Life must be nice to do development on a single machine. Tramp on Emacs is not ideal.

You start an emacs server on each machine you might use. Then ssh and emacsclient -nw. You need a decent terminal but life is simple.
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