The new people don't even know the joke about the email!
I teach them, and then every time they mention Sublime, I ask them whether you can read email with Sublime.
Toward a “modern” Emacs
221–230 of 539 posts
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#222I love org-babel (executing code blocks with a text document, like jupyter notebooks) for technical documents. I know of nothing comparable. The rest is a messy pile of possible frustration.
I would happily trade emacs modernization for a standalone Babel like system, that could be used with whatever editor. Maybe like LSP to vscode.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose rms can't understand why anybody would think anything could be better than what he chose to do 40-something years ago.
A lot of things are different without being better. Before ctrl-x/Ctrl-v became the standard for Cut/paste, it was Ctrl-del/Ctrl-insert in many dos and early Windows editors - which makes a lot more mnemonic sense. It’s better to standardize on something, but that something isn’t necessarily better and is often worse.
ctrl x/c/v is best because you can do it with your left hand while your right hand is using the mouse.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#224Emacs is really fun. Edit files remotely: `/ssh:bird@bastion:/path` Edit files two hops away: `/ssh:bird@bastion|ssh:you@remotehost:/path` Edit files two hops away, also in a docker container: `/ssh:bird@bastion|ssh:you@remotehost|docker:container:/path`
oh, I have used ange-ftp to edit remote files in the days such functionality was not upstream (and nobody considered ftp being dangerous...) But I missed that it supports docker. Not that I particularly like docker, it's ActiveX, use random executable code from unknown sources and give it too many privileges all again, but sometimes I use it.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's over 40 years old but it has fewer and fewer users younger than that. VS code is rapidly taking over it's niche and without modernization, of many kinds, emacs will die out in a generation.
In a generation, vim and emacs will still be around with their minuscule but loyal user bases of tinkerers and VS code will have long been replaced by something newer and flashier.
Well, Eclipse has had practically two decades of vi/emacs users shitting on it and yet it is still popular enough to warrant an entire conference.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emacs users are probably more likely to unsubscribe to newsletters that they did not sign up for :) (On a side rant, I really dislike how a lot of websites have normalized “create an account on a website” to mean “Sign up for receiving a plethora of emails about everything the website and its creators are up to these days”)
>On a side rant, I really dislike how a lot of websites have normalized “create an account on a website” to mean “Sign up for receiving a plethora of emails about everything the website and its creators are up to these days” Hear, hear. If I get an email from a company whose newsletter I didn't sign up for, I immediately unsubscribe... but I really shouldn't have to.
One of the greatest parts about owning my own domain is using different email addresses for these random websites that want to blast me with newsletters. That way, I can just redirect spambotscrapinghn@snazz.xyz to the trash if they sold my email address or I start getting spam to that address.
You can do the same thing in Gmail with the +, but some websites filter those out or don't allow them.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have used emacs since I was an undergrad, 25+ years ago and I have no plans to switch. That does not stop me from recognizing the fact that VS Code does almost everything that emacs does, often better, has orders of magnitude more users, is much more approachable and is being improved at a much faster rate. As they say, "this time its different".
I will check it out in 10 years if it's still around. In the mean time I have actual work I need to get done.
> In the mean time I have actual work I need to get done.
That's probably how most VS Code users feel about learning Emacs after reading about it on HN :)
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#228I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.” Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It…
> It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks. Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and industry experience I've never seen anyone use emacs for anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions online. Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but…
I've used emacs ever since college. I've tried a bunch of IDEs, VSCode, Sublime, Atom, even vim. They just never felt as comfortable as emacs in the terminal.
I'm probably in the minority since, despite a decade-plus of use, I'm by no means a power user. I use a little bit of org-mode and babel here and there. I can hack around in elisp if I want to tweak a mode. But that's about it. To be honest, I don't even compile code or navigate the directory tree from inside emacs.
That being said, two reasons I don't think I'll ever switch. One, the key bindings and commands just feel more elegant. Don't know if that's because they're locked into my muscle memory, or they're genuinely better. Two is that I live in the terminal. IDEs are great, but I much prefer just piping find to grep to sed or similar bash-fu, when I need to do something fancy.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#229After using Emacs for 10+ years, I've switched to VSCode for a really simple reason: fuzzy matching a file in a project. I've tried so many different plugins and hacks to get it to work, but it never did quite work. Searching for a filename either matches the wrong file, or new files that were freshly added are no longer there.
I’m a vim user, but I imagine there’s a similar way to do this in emacs... The secret is piping fd into fzf and opening the selected value from fzf. You can probably write a 2-liner in elisp that shells out. In my experience, this pipeline provides a faster and better matching experience than any IDE. Once I got this working, I never went back to VS Code. :)
If it’s so simple why don’t they build it into emacs?
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#230I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.” Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It…
>I’m not saying the editor can not be improved.
Just not on your lifetime.