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Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

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Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#251
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't do any kind of graphical tooling. IDEs also don't waste CPU cycles displaying HTML. C is rightfully crictised, plenty of systems programming languages offer the same hardware access, without exposing the world to memory corruption and UB exploits, some of them about 10 years older than C. Unfortunately UNIX had more success than the OSes they were available on.

In spite of all your arguments even today most important software powering modern computing are written in C, this speaks volume about its simplicity. I am sure there will still be critical software powered by C 40 years later. Rust will take another decade or two to reach that level of simplicity and ease of use still not sure if it will cross the threshold to replace C, when an average developer needs to spend year…

> even today most important software powering modern computing are written in C, this speaks volume about its simplicity.

C code is simple in the sense that it closely matches the simple binary interfaces of the compiled code: plain symbols with simple calling conventions. Anything more complicated than this presents a seemingly insurmountable barrier to code reuse thats leads people to rewrite stuff in C.

The current situation is any code that's meant to be reused will be written in C so that every other language has access to the resulting functionality. The higher level languages either have much more complicated binary interfaces or are completely virtualized so code reuse is extremely difficult. C++ and Rust can export C interfaces but the benefits of those languages are not available to the users of the code because the interface has been reduced to C.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#252

I hope you excuse me for a shameless plug, but it seems like a relevant enough thread to share my podcast about Emacs: https://emacscast.org/ While it might seem strange to discuss a text editor in the audio format, I've been getting positive feedback on this project as I try to talk more about underlying philosophy and mindset, not specific details or settings.

It's nice to see you plug your podcast! I've been listening for a while, keep up the good work!

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#253
post #86
post #61

I have been using Emacs for about 20 years, and I love that you can use it on Windows and Linux and character mode and GUI. Love the programmability and the keyboard shortcuts. Where it sucks though is programming language smarts such as "intellisense" completion. Even something basic such as syntax coloring doesn't work reliably--depends on the mode implementation and most of them are buggy. I get by in other editor…

Intellisense was something I was missing for years. I contribute to a large C#/netcore project and it was a pain to use emacs until I discovered OmniSharp-Roslyn[0]. Auto code completion works pretty much flawlessly for me now. [0] - https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-emacs

I have never got omnisharp to work reliably- spent quite a bit of time on it, too. I'm wondering if I should try again or just give up...

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#254
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On other operating systems, alt+tab goes to through the list of least recently used windows. So when working between two windows, one hotkey switches between them. On Mac, that's not possible if the two windows are part of the same app (or also when windows are distributed across multiple work spaces).

Being able to switch between apps, windows, and tabs is different from just windows and tabs. I prefer the former because the hierarchy allows you to find arbitrary things with fewer keypresses overall (as opposed to mashing alt-tab through a long flat list).

Except there's no such capability.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgrading org-mode should count as tweaking the config. Is there any part of org-mode that stopped working suddenly?

I've been using org-mode for about a decade now, and while I know there were changes made, I don't think there was even a single thing that just stopped working under me during the upgrade. I have a somewhat nontrivial amount of org setup, and there was never a case I'd have to fix anything in it after upgrade.

Same here.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#257

I'm new to Emacs, but enjoying it very much. Just got mu4e working with Gmail XOAUTH2 (for a G Suite account that the administrators have implemented their own "delightful login experience"). Would there be any interest in reading a writeup?

Absolutely yes

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#258

I hope you excuse me for a shameless plug, but it seems like a relevant enough thread to share my podcast about Emacs: https://emacscast.org/ While it might seem strange to discuss a text editor in the audio format, I've been getting positive feedback on this project as I try to talk more about underlying philosophy and mindset, not specific details or settings.

It's nice to see you plug your podcast! I've been listening for a while, keep up the good work!

Thank you! Let me know if you have ideas or suggestions for future episodes (email in profile).

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#259
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some old fails that need fixed?

One thing I notice: too many things cause unresponsiveness. 8 cores in my laptop and I can't install a package in the background, and semantic parsing interrupts typing. There doesn't seem to be any concurrency at all, things I do every day like eval'ing forms to REPL cause stutters. I love that it allows makers to explore new ui paradigms (magit, lispy), but performance is its biggest downside.

Personally I don't see performance as a major issue, though some things can be a bit annoying. But note that the concurrency problem has been recognized by the devs and a recent version of Emacs introduced some kind of threads. So I think we can expext progress in the next coming years.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#260
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be much going on with emacs, but so far it fails to move ahead. The project is just improving the old strenghts, but not fixing the old fails. And as time moves, they start to hurt more and more and more until they break.

What are some old fails that need fixed?

The big ones, to me:

- No support for threads or any other concurrency model. Any I/O and the entire UI freezes, no matter how many cores you have idling.

- Even on a single thread, the runtime is generally several times slower than comparable modern scripting languages. The GC is not so great, either.

- The drawing model is archaic. Every mode seems to have its own kluge to work around such basic tasks as "I want to display a simple table".

- Elisp is the worst Lisp dialect I've ever used. No packages or namespaces. No bignums. Weak regexes, using a syntax completely incompatible with any other. It's improving but very slowly. It finally got support for lexical scoping a few years ago.

Except for the generous contribution of Unicode support, it feels like a system whose technical attributes were not even terribly impressive for the 1980's. Emacs is truly greater than the sum of its parts. It has to be, because each part is worst-of-breed.

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