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Use GNU Emacs

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Re: Use GNU Emacs

#151

Post by medo-bear »

charcircuit wrote: post #126
gpderetta wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market share is not a feature that helps me. A thriving ecosystem and active development is. Emacs doesn't lack either. Failing to implement UX fad of the moment means that you can rely on the GUI being consistent across years instead of having to relearn it every few months.

>Market share is not a feature that helps me. But it does show what software is generally better. >A thriving ecosystem and active development is. Despite being thriving it still is very lacking in code navigation abilities and has poor performance in general. Not to mention the editor grinds to a halt when working on big files due to extensions being poorly optimized. >Failing to implement UX fad of the moment means…

> But it does show what software is generally better.

Have you not been giving the pep talk, "if everyone jumped off a building...", as kid ?

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#152

Post by miroljub »

kreetx wrote: post #73
sn41 wrote: post #45

OK. Here's a usecase where I found emacs to be wonderful. I had to email the grades, together with totals, and class averages to many students in a class. I tried fiddling with Excel and Google spreadsheets and scripted mail merges. Then I realized I could do it emacs. Export the gradesheet into csv, and convert to an org table. Carefully record a macro where you copy paste the name of the student the mark columns in…

It's overkill if you ever only needed to do it once, but should the situation come up again the investment in time and effort will likely pay off.

It's not an overkill. He spent 12 minutes developing the solution and then 5 more minutes for actual sending of 125 emails. That's 17 minutes in total.

I assume doing the same task manually would take him at least a day or two, with the possibility of making numerous mistakes by doing it.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#153

Post by medo-bear »

charcircuit wrote: post #129
asoneth wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Emacs commits a number of unforced errors with regard to its user experience, especially for novice users. My guess is that with some usability studies they could flatten the learning curve substantially and significantly increase their market share with only minimal burden on existing users. Having said that, "market share" doesn't seem like a relevant metric since the community seems perfectly content…

>since the community seems perfectly content being niche. This is just admitting defeat. There is no reason Emacs couldn't be the number one editor right now. GNU projects in general all tend to fail to innovate and seem to ignore the last couple of decades of learnings.

seems like you have a bit of an agenda. are you sour about something ? for me emacs is probably the best piece of software i ever used and i use my hardware for everything :|

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#154

Post by bigbillheck »

charcircuit wrote: post #134
medo-bear wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

market share seems like a wrong term for a product that doesnt seem to give an f about it. nor does it seem to care about some mean reversing ui. what it does seem to care about is the users that keep using and loving it ;)

>product that doesnt seem to give an f about it. They should care about it. Losing market share means people are finding more value in other editors. Do the developers not want Emacs to give the most value as possible to users?

> Do the developers not want Emacs to give the most value as possible to users?

They clearly do not.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#155

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

chucksmash wrote: post #144
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Emacs for 25 years, and I use a stock install and I never even touch the .emacs file. It's just a text editor. For many tasks it has better usability than the competition. This is why I use it. (Not for everything, though, and that's okay.) I'd guess most people are like me. Configuring text editors is not our hobby.

> I use a stock install and I never even touch the .emacs file. Not even to centralize the `backup.foo~` and `#auto-save.foo#` files that emacs loves to litter the file system with? I can't wrap my mind around it.

I don't mind the backup files. And once in a blue moon they're useful.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#156

Post by II2II »

xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

> It requires investment, in many cases it is worse than competition and requires more energy to just be on par.

One way to think of it is any tool requires some investment. The big difference with Emacs is it has always been around and always will be around, so you are continuously building upon that investment. Contrast that more modern tools. The learning curve is nowhere near as severe to start out, yet one is far less likely to learn how to use it so the same depth in the long term since it is far less likely to exist for the long term.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#157

Post by tmtvl »

morjom wrote: post #74
amir734jj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is VSCodium?

In their own words: "binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing" https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium or alternatively: "VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code." https://vscodium.com/

I always find it odd that their main README says all the telemetry is out, but then their DOCS* says that:

> Microsoft will still track usage by default.

* https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#158

Post by dmd »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #155
chucksmash wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use a stock install and I never even touch the .emacs file. Not even to centralize the `backup.foo~` and `#auto-save.foo#` files that emacs loves to litter the file system with? I can't wrap my mind around it.

I don't mind the backup files. And once in a blue moon they're useful.

Yes, but they're more useful in a central location.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#159

Post by wrycoder »

sn41 wrote: post #45

OK. Here's a usecase where I found emacs to be wonderful. I had to email the grades, together with totals, and class averages to many students in a class. I tried fiddling with Excel and Google spreadsheets and scripted mail merges. Then I realized I could do it emacs. Export the gradesheet into csv, and convert to an org table. Carefully record a macro where you copy paste the name of the student the mark columns in…

I would think that a Python code using the csv and email modules would be as fast or faster, and be more robust against typos.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#160

Post by yaantc »

jmclnx wrote: post #131

I find Emacs is great for development and documentation. I tend to use vim only when I need to do a lot of column editing. I was almost 100% vim with a smattering of Emacs. But as time went on I now use Emacs (GUI) much more than vim. I really cannot explain why :) But I can say git, RCS, etc integration in Emacs is easy and a pleasure to use. I tried some IDEs a while ago, and they are way to busy for me and require…

M-x untabify ? ;)
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