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Use GNU Emacs

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Re: Use GNU Emacs

#231

Post by marcosdumay »

jll29 wrote: post #179
loup-vaillant wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One gripe I have with Emacs is that it doesn't boot instantly enough. Annoys me every time I edit a Git commit message. Though it's not horrible enough that I found the courage to set up an Emacs server, as easy as it is… Anyway, it would be nice if it could just boot instantly by default.

> One gripe I have with Emacs is that it doesn't boot instantly enough. You must have accidentally closed it. Closing Emacs or your Web browser are common mistakes, and as you will surely have realized almost immediately, you needed to re-open either program within minutes.

I don't get the important people put on that.

Emacs takes 10 seconds to open. Firefox takes 15. Yes, those are wasted seconds, but it's not like they are anywhere close to the largest wastes of my day. (Hell, I'm writing a comment in HN right now!)

It's different for things like VS, Pycharm, VSCode, or Eclipse. But emacs isn't there.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#232

Post by pxc »

> [Emacs is] a Lisp Machine with several compatible user interface modalities. Which is just amazingly helpful to [blind] people like me […] who are typically forgotten about these days. […] Emacs is a shining beacon in a dark age of canvases and decorative user interface design.

This. Even with my fairly correctable visual impairments, the way Emacs' text-driven interfaces and amazing search capabilities spare me from having to do any visual scanning is a blessing. I can always bring everything I need to see right in front of me, the whole interface scales perfectly, and I can easily ensure high contrast on everything I need to read, even with limited color vision.

The way that buffers can just live in the background and projects can simply be inferred from version control directories similarly free me from the entire spatial metaphor for open files, windows, projects, etc. No matter what window I'm in, I have the option to just list some open buffers, fuzzy filter as I type, and bring them directly into view. I run Emacs as a daemon so I can super easily pull up old buffers, complete with their contexts and undo histories and everything even if I close the Emacs frame (the application window) entirely.

I never have to scan or squint or interpret some tiny, inscrutable hieroglyph with Emacs. Every damn thing is searchable and filterable. And when I need documentation on some function or keybinding, it's the same story. I don't have to switch to another app and mouse around or toggle a browser extension to fix some dumbass website's choice of gray-on-gray text. It's just right there in my editor, clean and searchable and resizable/reflowable in the exact same way as my own code, in the fonts that I've chosen because I find them readable and pretty.

Emacs spares me from so much navigation effort while I'm editing, even without using any truly fancy features.

It's also a comfort knowing that if I should go blind before I reach old age, as is common in my family, I will still have access to that power and convenience through Emacspeak. I'd better start practicing!

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#233

Post by crabbone »

submeta wrote: post #107

I have been a faithful Emacs user for more than fifteen years now, even using a version of Emacs on my Amiga back in the 80s when I was just a kid. Over time, I have ported almost every aspect of my computational life to Emacs, including my editor, IDE, git-client, writing, documenting, and workflow automation. While I love the tool and enjoy tinkering with it, I have come to realize that there are dedicated tools ou…

> VS Code is unbeatable for the overall experience.

What is this shilling for VSCode? It's awful. But, somehow everyone who says positive things about it either turns out to not know how those things work, or just saying something vague, never pointing at any concrete feature that makes it better than something else...

But, the reality of it is that all there is to it is a crappy CUA text editor with nothing special going on for it. There were dozens like it before.

So far, over the years of working with other people using this average-at-best editor the only remarkable thing I found about it is that it has a plugin that allows some Jenkins integration, which may be useful if you are in DevOps, but... I can live without it, not a deal-breaker, not by a long shot. The awfully lacking text editing abilities of this editor completely erase any benefit I could get from that plugin. Stuff like modal windows, mouse-only navigation, missing most useful commands of structured text navigation and proprietary nature make this tool a complete non-starter for me.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#234

Post by throwawaysalome »

crabbone wrote: post #226
worldsayshi wrote: post #13

I used Emacs for a while and now I use Intellij. Now I don't understand the appeal of customizing the editor to such degree. I'm not that unique. I just want stuff that works. Give me the same setup as everyone else so that when issues arise everyone will push for them to get fixed and everyone can help each other.

Intellij out of the box offers such a crappy text editor, I feel like programming with one hand behind my back... well, actually even worse, because I'm forced into using mouse and a crappy text editor at the same time when touching this stuff... This has nothing to do with extending the editor. People making Intellij editors simply don't know how to make editors, they don't have a good understanding how a profession…

It's your responsibility to know this stuff, if you don't, you are a liability for your team.

The fuq? I feel sorry for your spouse.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#235

Post by crabbone »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #121

I love Emacs & it's my go-to editor, but I struggle to offer a solid, logical reason why. I only use a handful of packages, a smidge of Org mode, minimal customisation, & run Emacs in the terminal, so switching to something more modern should surely give me everything I need & many more features in spades. But nothing else scratches the itch despite my best efforts to move to something else. Perhaps for me Emacs is l…

I'll help you with the reason: people who make Emacs are professionals at editing text. They understand what tools a good professional needs when working with text. The only editor that can complete with that is Vim. IntelliJ / MS / Eclipse products don't hold a candle to that, their authors simply don't know how to edit text well, and consequently don't know how to make tools to that end.

It's the same reason why anyone would buy Hasselblad camera over, say, Canon. Canon is fine for a person who simply wants to take pictures of things they want to remember. Maybe even for a student in photography class. But, if you are going to earn your money as a photographer... well, you want a tool that you can rely on. If you go to the Moon and want your camera to work, you'll choose Hasselblad etc.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#236

Post by pxc »

anthk wrote: post #192
rahen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GUIX as the OS it's the ultimate GNU system witht he spirit of ITS+Emacs. Not everything open and insecure, but hackable up to the last bit.

You can even run Guix System with the Hurd kernel. It really feels like a forgotten dream renewed.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#237

Post by marcosdumay »

medo-bear wrote: post #151
charcircuit wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Market share is not a feature that helps me. But it does show what software is generally better. >A thriving ecosystem and active development is. Despite being thriving it still is very lacking in code navigation abilities and has poor performance in general. Not to mention the editor grinds to a halt when working on big files due to extensions being poorly optimized. >Failing to implement UX fad of the moment means…

> But it does show what software is generally better. Have you not been giving the pep talk, "if everyone jumped off a building...", as kid ?

What is most annoying in development is how often people just decide to all jump off a building for no good reason.

Usually that talk is nonsense, but not here.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#238

Post by pxc »

jll29 wrote: post #179
loup-vaillant wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One gripe I have with Emacs is that it doesn't boot instantly enough. Annoys me every time I edit a Git commit message. Though it's not horrible enough that I found the courage to set up an Emacs server, as easy as it is… Anyway, it would be nice if it could just boot instantly by default.

> One gripe I have with Emacs is that it doesn't boot instantly enough. You must have accidentally closed it. Closing Emacs or your Web browser are common mistakes, and as you will surely have realized almost immediately, you needed to re-open either program within minutes.

> You must have accidentally closed [Emacs]. Closing Emacs or your Web browser are common mistakes, and as you will surely have realized almost immediately, you needed to re-open either program within minutes.

Thank you for this! This cracked me up.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#239

Post by crabbone »

ziotom78 wrote: post #112

For code, I use JetBrains IDEs (CLion, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Rider). They are incomparably better than any editor on Earth. To edit large text files, I use Vim, as it is one of the fastest editors I've ever tried. For anything else, I use Emacs: scripts, programs written in languages with no good IDE support, personal notes (Org mode is awesome!), handling of Git repositories (Magit is better than JetBrains IDEs),…

You remind me of that anecdote by, I think, Tyson (the astrophysicist), who gave an example of a person going to the ocean shore with a cup, poring some ocean water into it and swiftly concluding that there aren't any whales in the ocean based on what they saw in the cup.

I mean, you are in no position to judge about good editors on Earth... you haven't worked with good editors yet.

This is evidenced by your gripes about editing large files. Emacs may be configured to be used as a pager for Christ's sake! It can work with whatever file size you have. If you don't know how to do that, that's a you problem, not the editor's problem...

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#240

Post by lispm »

bachmeier wrote: post #128
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Emacs for 25 years, and I use a stock install and I never even touch the .emacs file. It's just a text editor. For many tasks it has better usability than the competition. This is why I use it. (Not for everything, though, and that's okay.) I'd guess most people are like me. Configuring text editors is not our hobby.

> It's just a text editor. I'll never understand comments like this. There's a full Lisp implementation available in there. Other text editors don't come with org-mode, either.

For him it's a text editor, that's how he sees it, since the Lisp underneath is not touched by him.

True, some extensive modes written in Lisp by users are a work of art. That's a layer a non-programming-user may not see.

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