201–210 of 301 posts
Why would I switch to something that does everything and has an entirely different workflow? If emacs works for people, good for them, but it isn't for everybody.
Gah, yet another instance of people treating Emacs like it’s a terminal application. It can run in the terminal, if a terminal is all you have, but you don’t want to do that . Use its default, graphical mode: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/ You get not only graphics and colors, but also better keybindings which aren’t limited to 1970’s ASCII control codes.
https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2016/12/29/don-t-use-terminal-e...
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…
There is an odd aggression against Emacs that typically does lead to people having to go to extra effort to justify why they use it. And I can agree many of the justifications can feel like a stretch. They aren't false, though. Nor are we working on some archaic thing that only we can appreciate.
I'm also always amazed at how we think Emacs is somehow more archaic than anything else in a computer. Getting my kids into computers. It is Scratch to start, than probably crippled Python environments. That they are almost certainly going to break and wonder what happened. We even got started on some Arduino stuff, and their IDE is not bad, necessarily, but don't pretend like it is easy and quick in ways that Emacs isn't. Want to make a small game? Good luck, as there are no other environments for that anymore. (Used to, the computer booted into a BASIC shell in ages past.)
And this is avoiding the environments for content creation. Blender is amazing. And amazingly hard to use/explain. Fusion? TinkerCAD is at least easy to explain. But again, very easy to screw up in. (And I'm growing rather tired of all of the times I come back to a computer with hundreds of tabs in a browser all convinced they need to save data.)
All of that is to say, computers are tough. Period. I hope people can find a comfort zone for creation. But I am not convinced there is a single answer there. And more than happy to share what has worked for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and comes with a walled garden. look, you go and support apple, and thats fine, but i really dont see the point in choosing hardware that is looking at locking its users in somehow.
Which walled garden you are talking about? You can install any programs you like, just like on Windows or Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the vinyl or paper books comparison. I have a strange nostalgia for the old Unix days that I was too young— perhaps not even alive yet— to experience the first time around. It's what draws me to learning and using things like vim, Perl, awk, sed, etc. Those tools feel arcane and mystical.
I've been there too. Installing, trying, running older and older Unixes in SIMH. 4.1BSD, 32V, V7, V6, all the way down to V0 on the PDP-7 with the help of tutorials on gunkies.org. I still keep a neatly organized folder of primitive Unix systems with their (tiny) disk images and SIMH boot scripts. But going all the way back to the Big Bang at V0, a funny thing happened. The essence was still missing. Because indeed t…
Use an IDE, you filthy barbarians. There is no substitute for a real IDE when it comes to seamless transition between writing code with full autocomplete support and using the debugger to step through and examine the behavior of that code. And yes, God damn it, you need a debugger. You need edit and continue. You really need structured editing and it's a crime that this isn't available for every programming language, everywhere, in 2023. Modern IDEs give you all these things except for maybe the last in a smooth integrated fashion, and this has been the case for decades now. Using anything else when this is available is like breaking your legs in preparation for the 50m dash. For God's sake, Visual Studio got you 90% of the way to a Lisp machine type dev experience. In the early 2000s, for C++ and other languages people actually use. And Unix weenies still insisted on their stone-knives-and-bearskins tooling, to all our collective detriment.
For languages without robust IDE support, Visual Studio Code will get you most of the way there with the click of a button. Releasing VSCode support including LSP for your language is now table stakes if you want to introduce a new language people will actually use.
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…
You seem to be living in a very remote area where no programmers can reach you, beside those using Emacs. Yeah, people using VSCode talk about it a lot, given an opportunity.
In an average programming company, programmers might talk more about Emacs because for the overwhelming majority it's a mystery. It's the same how others might be driven to discuss UFOs or weird cultural kinks found in distant lands. But, really, it's not an indication of anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people don't care about that as a qualification.
I would assume that many people here do some work on free software. If people producing free software are not able to comfortably develop free software using only free software , then we have lost something important.
It's the same thing with free software. I care, but not enough to stop me from using the easiest thing out there to use regardless of whether or not it's free.
Emacs is the only software I've ever loved . People use the word love a lot, but I really mean it. You know it's love when you can't stop thinking about it. You're so excited you want to tell everyone about it, but you can't really articulate what exactly it is that makes you feel that way.
Agreed. It's because Emacs truly respects the user. It is the embodiment of Free Software ideals. Those ideals center around community. Emacs helps us understand how capable we are.
Emacs lost the editor wars ~15 years ago. Use an IDE, you filthy barbarians. There is no substitute for a real IDE when it comes to seamless transition between writing code with full autocomplete support and using the debugger to step through and examine the behavior of that code. And yes, God damn it, you need a debugger. You need edit and continue. You really need structured editing and it's a crime that this isn't…