Live data from Hacker News

Let's just use Emacs

beastwithin.org

161–169 of 169 posts

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#161
I'm pretty excited about this post. I first began using vi in 1983 and Emacs in 1986, and have switched back and forth between the vi/emacs families of editors as my needs have changed and their capabilities have changed. I've been on gvim for the last few years because of it's superior GUI integration, but it is not good for writing prose, which I do more and more of these days. I have not found something I really like for writing, and end up using MS Word by default, which does not make me happy. I had not heard of visual-line-mode, so I'm ready to give emacs a try again. I just installed Aquamacs, and I'm using it to write this comment in full-screen mode. I will also give org-mode a try because I'm always looking for better ways to organize my writing.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#162
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above goes for me as well. You might not have meant for it to be that way, but you just happened to use a pattern of sentences used by people with hidden criticism quite frequently.

Now I'm really worried. My comment received 36 upvotes. How many were from people who (a) think think that Lisp and Emacs users are brain-damaged and (b) Upvote what they perceive as an insult as a kind of social bullying rather than to signal a contribution to the discussion?

I upvoted it because I found myself agreeing that the arguments for both are kind of similar, whether those arguments are correct or not on their own merits aside.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#163
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoting without explanation? Fine, I love my competitors using lesser tools.

* Being needlessly argumentative * Borderline trolling. You _know_ how these arguments go. * Fallaciously arguing that tools cannot be compared based on how well they get the job done (IDEs vs 'editors') rather than their implementation * Getting pissy about downvotes and posting multiple times instead of editing You've been here a year. You should know better.

Thank you for your clarification. I don't understand why I have been perceived as argumentative.

I've been using Emacs for quite some time now, and before immersing myself into it, and even after, I've compared it to other major editors. Eventually, I realized that no other editor can stack against it, if you are really serious about getting the most out of your editor, and reaping the highest return of investment out of the time you spent learning it.

Maybe some people don't like the idea, but just like there are superior languages, as PG as neatly demonstrated, there are superior tools. Things you can accomplish with Emacs, you really can't with other Blub editors.

Oh, and when I talk about Emacs, I'm not talking about its editing model, which I agree, is somewhat cumbersome. Vim's editing model is way superior, and it's my editing model of choice, but Emacs' implementation is better. Vim enthusiasts are aware of the limits of their editor. For a story, read here: http://bradbeveridge.wordpress.com/2007/06/21/how-a-vim-user...

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use ctags, they're garbage. --- Emacs user that uses a lot of "IDE esque" features

What do you use instead? I used to use pymacs and ropemacs with python, but it broke in hard to determine ways, and then on my latest project it was horribly slow, so I stopped. I still live in emacs

I use pymacs/ropemacs, but for generalized search I use ack-mode.

If I know what I'm looking at, go-to definition is perfectly fast even in huge projects. (My day-to-day project is quite large.)

I know the generalized search sucks/is slow, I've been meaning to fix it myself for some time.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#165
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't see what namespaces would achieve. The way it is I can look at something and explicitly see which module it belongs to (e.g. dired-next-line, image-next-line vs. org-agenda-next-line). In my experience namespaces only introduce notation to distinguish modules but so does a simple convention.

Namespaces are nice when the language lets you name a space at the top of a file or a block and then not repeat the name prefix on every identifier inside. They are not just used to add dots to identifier names, although that would often be NSNice in NSItself.

Should be nc-nice, we are talking lisp here.

Although this looks like a regular prefix. How does the namespaced elisp propose to refer to entities from other namespaces?

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#166
post #161

I'm pretty excited about this post. I first began using vi in 1983 and Emacs in 1986, and have switched back and forth between the vi/emacs families of editors as my needs have changed and their capabilities have changed. I've been on gvim for the last few years because of it's superior GUI integration, but it is not good for writing prose, which I do more and more of these days. I have not found something I really l…

Keep in mind that while Aquamacs is better visually integrated in MacOs, some features may not work as well as in the standard (gnu) emacs.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#167
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't see what namespaces would achieve. The way it is I can look at something and explicitly see which module it belongs to (e.g. dired-next-line, image-next-line vs. org-agenda-next-line). In my experience namespaces only introduce notation to distinguish modules but so does a simple convention.

Namespaces are nice when the language lets you name a space at the top of a file or a block and then not repeat the name prefix on every identifier inside. They are not just used to add dots to identifier names, although that would often be NSNice in NSItself.

This is exactly my point: It isn't nice. I want to grep a file for a name and exactly that name, maybe I even want to replace it.

I just can't do that without any fancy tools as soon as namespaces introduce ambiguity that I can't resolve when I look at a narrow region of a file.

Re: Let's just use Emacs

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The take-away I got from your post is if I need to deal with "enterprise-size" crapware I'm better off using IDEs. That is certainly an interesting niche, but why would I ever want to work on "enterprise-size" crapware? I've used JBuilder, Eclipse, NetBeans, and Visual Basic 6. None of them address a fraction of the things I actually need or like to do on a regular basis (edit files remotely, browse directories, use…

> That is certainly an interesting niche, but why would I ever want to work on "enterprise-size" crapware? Because it pays the bills, and pays them quite well. > it's just that grep and dired and search-replace are universal tools that are good enough for all occasions. omething else it's easy enough to use macros or write elisp code to do it Extract a superclass or an interface with them. Automatically and contextua…

"Because it pays the bills, and pays them quite well."

Why don't you just go into investment banking or law or medicine instead? All those careers pay a lot more than doing copy-paste on millions of lines of crap Java code, which I highly doubt you like doing anyway.

I pay the bills by doing things I'm interested in.

Post reply on HN