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IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

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Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#171

Post by frumplestlatz »

iLemming wrote: post #168
frumplestlatz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. I’ve spent 40 years in this industry. My work is in formal verification. My comprehension isn’t the problem here. I wrote a lot of lisp making Emacs work the way I wanted it to. VSCode has been a remarkable improvement. Writing extensions for it has been a breeze. I have zero interest in going back.

> I wrote a lot of lisp making Emacs work Share the Emacs packages you wrote. I'm saying this unironically - someone might be interested to keep improving them, maybe they'd find some interesting ideas to extract from them. Don't be like some ungrateful jerk who benefited from communal work for years when it suited them and then has nothing to leave but grumpy resentment when they're done.

That's genuinely wild, man.

Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#173

Post by iLemming »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #171
iLemming wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wrote a lot of lisp making Emacs work Share the Emacs packages you wrote. I'm saying this unironically - someone might be interested to keep improving them, maybe they'd find some interesting ideas to extract from them. Don't be like some ungrateful jerk who benefited from communal work for years when it suited them and then has nothing to leave but grumpy resentment when they're done.

That's genuinely wild, man.

In what sense? I apologize if I offended you. Just to be clear - don't share your config, experiments, packages or whatever with me specifically - simply consider making them public. Don't let the years of accumulated wisdom (whatever it adds up to) go waste. Emacs is not "a product", it's a "shared enterprise" and collective endeavor. Of course, it's not really "free" - just like everything, it has a price - it requires patience, dedication and time from every participant. You've mentioned using it for years, which means you've contributed to the cause. You've decided to move on - your reasons are your own. I'm not asking you to donate, volunteer, or speak about it either way. Do what you want. But for a moment, perhaps consider this with wonder: how many remarkable things have we humans collectively created that require no payment whatsoever, yet grant us the freedom to do things on our own terms? Projects like Emacs and Vim/Neovim are like free-for-all, unrestricted gardens. And that's why I get vexed seeing stuff like: "used it for years - getting tired of it...", etc. Reflections like that are akin to shitting all over the neck of those imaginary gardens, making them less desirable places for curious newcomers. I'm not telling you to not criticize, please do, but perhaps with consideration - tell it with constructivism. Allow those gardens to grow. They will most likely outlive your pondering - positive or otherwise, and mine and those of many more generations.

Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#174

Post by iLemming »

self_awareness wrote: post #170
iLemming wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For me, VSCode implements everything that I've always expected from Emacs/Vim. Good. For me, VSCode unlikely will ever become anything that I expect from my text editor. For coding, sure, Emacs may not be great for any specific language except some Lisps, but for plain text manipulation, OMG, Emacs still is the king. I just can't see it ever replacing it for note-taking - just yesterday I was showing someone "repro…

OKAY. I'll install it again. I hope you're happy. Having a text based Jira frontend seems attractive. (I've actually written myself a cmdline tool that uses Jira API so I don't need to visit the website)

> I hope you're happy

Not until you are happy, it makes me sad when Emacs makes people sad for whatever reason.

> Having a text based Jira frontend seems attractive

Yeah, I can't even start describing it, proly gonna make a video or something.

Like I would get the cursor on a plain text like "XYZ-34857" - it shows me the popup with the ticket description. If I ever would want to add the status - todo/done/etc., or assignee, or something else to the popup - that's a simple change. From there I can browse the ticket, I can convert the string to a url with the description - it's smart enough to recognize the mode I'm in and makes the proper markup. I can generate a branch name based on that ticket description, etc.

To clarify - anyone can do the same, I'm just delegating the task to go-jira - a cmd-line tool. You don't really need Emacs for that - it's doable in neovim and vscode and even in vanilla terminal. Yet the simplicity of making it work via Lisp is just unmatched experience. These days I would ask a model, it would build a prototype, I would iterate on it on the fly. It feels like playing a video game. I don't even blink - I see a problem - I'd start writing some Elisp in a scratch buffer. I keep hearing "I don't have time to tweak my config", but I'm not really tweaking anything - I'm just hacking solutions for the real problems that arise - I'm just being the definition of a programmer. And no need for sophisticated packages - my Jira requirements for now are satisfied with simple hacks in my config:

https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d/blob/main/modules/custom/ji...

Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#175

Post by iLemming »

ffaser5gxlsll wrote: post #76
Myrmornis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make it look modern: get rid of all menus and bars so that there is nothing on screen except for the text you're editing. (e.g. search for minimal.el) It looks indistinguishable from any other modern editor / IDE in zen mode. Menus and bars are not necessary in these sorts of applications if you use then daily -- more efficient and powerful to use the command palette and key bindings.

Second this. The "ui" is perhaps useful when learning to use emacs, but every emacs user I've seen after a while has all of it disabled. I've been using emacs with the "lucid" build since forever, as it's the leanest build that still gets a graphical window working on X11 and see none of the actual "toolkit". I guess the pgtk build is required nowdays for native wayland support.

Yup, just the other day I was talking about it on subreddit, will repeat here verbatim:

My comment is an honest reflection of long-time Emacs usage. When I started, years ago, I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that there were no tabs for every file anymore - the concept that was seemingly ingrained into my programmer's brain - almost in every IDE/editor I used before Emacs, I had tabs and a navigational panel on the side. I complained and demanded my tabs, asked on forums and called it "bullshit", when people calmly told me that I truly don't need them. Later I realized - they were right.

Slowly I learned that the wise choice is to remove any distractions - you don't need a minimap, side-panels, complicated modelines, and even line-numbers shown all the time. All that can be activated purposefully, on demand and then toggled off again. These "visual clues" are in fact not so much even distractions but micro-bombardments of your brain neurons - you think they are helping, while in fact they are slowly eating up your neural capacity, to the point that the brain just stops even paying attention to them and they become almost useless waste of your screen estate.

I'm not saying that this all generally true for every case and every user - some prefer certain ways, and it's great that we have a system that is able to satisfy any whim, but it's worth sometimes questioning yourself - am I enslaved by my own mental habits?

Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#176

Post by iLemming »

NoGravitas wrote: post #167
volemo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we all agree we need Emacs 2.0™, rewriting both the UI and the guts? /j

I don't agree with everything in their approach, but Lem ( https://github.com/lem-project/lem ) is a modern editor that has the Emacs Nature.

Lem looks great and I wish we all could simply move there, I personally, am not married to a concrete implementation of Emacs, I just love the idea of an editor built atop a Lisp REPL; I don't think I ever could use a computer without having it.

However, what then we'd do with nearly half-a-century history of Emacs? There are so many packages out there - it's insane to ever think we'd have to re-implement all that ginormous constellation of functionality in Common Lisp. Until we can find some quick way to translate them there, I honestly don't see any practical possibility for the migration.

Who knows, maybe agents will get so good and someone will eventually figure out a path; until then, Emacs is to remain - with all the good and bad parts.

Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#177

Post by iLemming »

setopt wrote: post #36
pama wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean something like which-key? It existed for a long time as an external package and was added to main emacs recently. https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/commit/fa4203300fde682...

As far as I know, which-key only helps with key sequences. If you press C-c in Org-mode it will show you keys like C-c C-e, but if you hold Ctrl down it won’t show you C-RET for example.

Emacs can't do that for historic reasons. It just can't distinguish between keypress and keyup events. It receives input events from the terminal/OS. Terminals are text-oriented: They evolved to transmit characters, not hardware events.

It's not some technical impossibility - I think it would make sense to make this possible, at least in GUI Emacs. I suppose there was never a strong incentive to tackle this problem.

Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#178

Post by iLemming »

koiueo wrote: post #30
tiffanyh wrote: post #2

I was always bummed OniVim v2 didn't take off. It was a native IDE but fully supported VS Code plugin system. https://web.archive.org/web/20210627210456/https://v2.onivim...

From a quick glance, I can't understand the target audience. Vim users would be annoyed by bizarre input lag of an electron application and perhaps by EULA. VS code users don't really care about Vim...

> VS code users don't really care about Vim

I disagree. vim-navigation is imperative for a huge number of devs. It's an amazing, practical, beautiful model. I would've never tried emacs if Evil-mode wasn't so fantastic. And that yet another reason for why vscode never is appealing to me - every one and each vim extension for it has tons of glaring deficiencies.

Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#179

Post by iLemming »

setopt wrote: post #95
yanhangyhy wrote: post #44

i still use emacs everyday, with the native UI. but i love the idea of this project. Personaly i never get used to the UI of VSCode. seems so hard to understand because in emacs you deal with functions not UI buttons.

> Personaly i never get used to the UI of VSCode. seems so hard to understand because in emacs you deal with functions not UI buttons. I prefer both Vim and Emacs over VSCode, but I teach intro programming at a university and use VSCode in the lectures. VSCode is actually quite decent if you use it as a keyboard-driven thing with a distraction-free interface. By the former, I mean that Cmd-Shift-P does the same as Em…

> Cmd-Shift-P does the same as Emacs’ M-x

Only superficially, but not even close in practice. In M-x you can run recursive commands; you have history; you can search through history back and forth; you can scroll the buffer, shrink and widen windows, browse files - all without leaving the M-x menu; you can yank current command or insert directly into the buffer; select multiple commands; act on them; inspect the source; enable tracing; - these are all built-in features.

With some packages you can - export the commands list into a fully functional buffer from which you can still run the commands; you can cycle annotations - show description of the command or keys they bind to; you can display commands in a grid or temporarily flatten the menu for unobtrusive view. You can enable full vim-mode in it - in Emacs, M-x is a fully functional buffer, not some dummy input - I can call the LLM and ask it to find me a command while it's still active.

Re: IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

#180

Post by t_mahmood »

iLemming wrote: post #130
t_mahmood wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IntelliJ shines when you use the command pallet, keyboard shortcuts, and IdeaVIM Double shift, to bring up the pallet, and start typing. Though it also have a ton of shortcuts, and shortcuts can be assigned for almost every command. Try this: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x/ Whenever you don't use keyboard shortcut for any action, this suggests you the available keyboard shortcut.

IntelliJ is an amazing feat of software engineering, there's no denying that. I'm not saying that to make you (or any other WebStorm/Pycharm/etc. user) feel better - I know that from years of dedicated use. I just want to share my anecdotal, personal story. I used IntelliJ professionally for almost a decade. I learned some advanced and undocumented features. I've collaborated with Jetbrains team members to help impro…

No issues here, except for you being an Emacs user :D

> IntelliJ is to blame for why my transition to Emacs took me two years ...

It was a bit opposite for me, I jumped around so many editors, and, then I fell in love with VIM, spent so many hours to get the config that meets my need, dissed many Emac users. And, now after many years, as I grew, I realized, these are tools, and at the end, it's all on the user who makes it click.

I use both IntelliJ and (n)vim almost side-by-side, every day, when I am on my main desktop, I am on IntelliJ, when I am connecting through ssh, I am on NVIM. I use NVIM, because it's LSP, and treesitter's highlight is really good. But in any other case I am using VIM. I even wrote this reply on VIM.

I could make VIM work like NVIM, sure, but does it worth the trouble, when I can just use LazyVim? nah ...

> Gary Bernhardt famously said - "There's no such thing as vim-mode ...

True, most of the software can't replicate how wonderfully VIM works. I have had my moments with IdeaVIM, and resorted to VIM, but, again, there are things that IntelliJ does so good, and IdeaVIM scratches a vim sized itch. IdeaVIM makes IntelliJ more useful for me.

And, with these tools together, I can get a lot done, where it would be too inconvenient if I was doing it in VIM, or too annoying if I was doing it in IntelliJ without IdeaVIM.

> In Emacs, you can bind keys to anything, conversely ...

Certainly, you can be faster with keyboard, and It is possible to do the same with IntelliJ + IdeaVIM. Additionally, with IntelliJ, I can quickly navigate my database, write queries, or manage Docker containers without going to another terminal or app. Not having to change window/app is extremely helpful for me to stay focused.

And, I have not found any cli based db tool that is as good as IntelliJ's one.

> Most devs, once they find their favorite tool would settle with it and don't even explore other options ...

True, I used to encourage people towards VIM, converted one or two, but at the end, I realized, it's their choice, and some might even have good reasons for their choice.

I can show them the magic, but it's always their decision to pick it up.

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