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Two Years of Emacs Solo

rahuljuliato.com

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Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#21

Post by spudlyo »

bananamogul wrote: post #19

If I was going to reimplement Emacs it wouldn't be with Lisp. Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing? I'm skeptical because to my knowledge, Emacs is the only major text editor written in Lisp.

It's a product of its time. In the mid 70s when Emacs was originally created, the MIT Lisp Machine Project had already been going for a few years, and Lisp was kind of a big deal at MIT's AI Lab, where it was created. When Stallman started GNU Emacs in '85 or so, he took lots of inspiration from Lisp and those systems.

You can think of Emacs as a kind of software Lisp machine with an emphasis on editing. Although that analogy only works well if you squint or if you don't know a lot about Lisp machines.

As someone who first learned Lisp through Emacs Lisp, I found it fun, well-documented, and powerful. Once you grok the basics of how the system is dynamically glued together, infinitely hackable, and self-documenting it's kind of mind-blowing.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#22

Post by beepbooptheory »

bananamogul wrote: post #19

If I was going to reimplement Emacs it wouldn't be with Lisp. Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing? I'm skeptical because to my knowledge, Emacs is the only major text editor written in Lisp.

Lisp calls c in emacs. What would be a better language? The code-as-data, data-as-code paradigm fits nicely imo with everything-is-a-buffer. Things like global namespace, hooks, defadvice, would all feel very wrong in other interpreter, and yet seem to make sense in elisp.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#23

Post by throwaway27448 »

keithnz wrote: post #9
throwaway27448 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "w" to select what Vim considers a lowercase-w word ?!? Wtf does this mean and how did vi come up

vim has two "word" motions, w and W, the lowercase w motion will see punctuation as a word boundary (as well as whitespace ) W only considers whitespace

Sure. how was that relevant to explaining their keymapping? Why would you not simply directly describe the behavior as you did rather than sending the same amount of energy to route people through an entirely unrelated editing paradigm?

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#24

Post by jimbokun »

This article shows how Emacs remains a beautiful, relevant project several decades after it was first created. The core design and implementation’s ability to evolve into something still useful today and competitive with modern tools is an amazing achievement.

Also, with LLMs driving so much of current development it potentially makes Emacs even more competitive relative to modern IDEs. Development can be driven primarily by an agent like Claude Code from the command line, then navigating and tweaking the code, handling Git commits, etc with Emacs.

I imagine an LLM would be very good at writing Elisp to leverage EMacs’ strong core functionality to make Emacs work exactly how you want. This author managed to do it by hand, but I imagine someone starting now with an LLM could get there much faster.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#25

Post by jimbokun »

bananamogul wrote: post #19

If I was going to reimplement Emacs it wouldn't be with Lisp. Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing? I'm skeptical because to my knowledge, Emacs is the only major text editor written in Lisp.

But if you were implementing it in 1976 you would have.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#26

Post by amake »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #10

The "why" is kinda sketchy. The difference between what is shipped in Emacs and in ELPA is somewhat arbitrary. In fact, there are many built in packages that have their updates shipped in ELPA, meaning if you aren't using ELPA then your builtin packages might have unpatched bugs. There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to…

> The "why" is kinda sketchy

It seems pretty clear that the "why" is "because it's there"

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#27

Post by NetOpWibby »

I’m always impressed by people who are hardcore EMacs or Vim devs, their setups are impressive af.

I’m a GUI guy though. As soon as I try delving in, I abort when I see things like “just type c-C dingle bob to do x thing.” I’m happy these people found something that works with their brains. I just want a GUI that works like what they use.

I recently saw a Zed fork stripped of AI stuff but there’s no binaries yet (you gotta compile and get an Apple dev account and I don’t care enough). Zed and Sublime Text are the closest to my stylistic sensibilities but I’m always on the lookout for something better.

If you’re one of these EMacs freaks who also love GUIs, sign me up to your app!

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#28

Post by thunfischbrot »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #27

I’m always impressed by people who are hardcore EMacs or Vim devs, their setups are impressive af. I’m a GUI guy though. As soon as I try delving in, I abort when I see things like “just type c-C dingle bob to do x thing.” I’m happy these people found something that works with their brains. I just want a GUI that works like what they use. I recently saw a Zed fork stripped of AI stuff but there’s no binaries yet (you…

The Zed fork sounds interesting!

What was the Apple Dev account needed for? Previously I remember it was only needed for submitting apps to the App Store, not running Dev builds locally.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#29

Post by yoyohello13 »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #27

I’m always impressed by people who are hardcore EMacs or Vim devs, their setups are impressive af. I’m a GUI guy though. As soon as I try delving in, I abort when I see things like “just type c-C dingle bob to do x thing.” I’m happy these people found something that works with their brains. I just want a GUI that works like what they use. I recently saw a Zed fork stripped of AI stuff but there’s no binaries yet (you…

> I just want a GUI that works like what they use.

I don't think this is really possible. The thing that makes it special is that there are key binds for all the 100s of things you could want to do. So it becomes sort of like playing a instrument where you use your muscle memory instead of thinking specifically about the keys. If you make a bunch of menus and buttons to do the things it would be a mess and probably not very nice to use. Emacs actually has buttons and GUI controls for lots of the functionality, but it kind of sucks to use it that way.

These setups are impressive specifically because the creator has put in the time and effort to become an expert at using their editor. There is just no way to hand that over to someone else as-is without any investment from the recipient in skill development.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#30

Post by bitwize »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #10

The "why" is kinda sketchy. The difference between what is shipped in Emacs and in ELPA is somewhat arbitrary. In fact, there are many built in packages that have their updates shipped in ELPA, meaning if you aren't using ELPA then your builtin packages might have unpatched bugs. There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to…

You have to sign the FSF's CLA (and clear your contributions with your employer) to contribute to Emacs itself. To ship a separate package to ELPA you need not do this.
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