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Use GNU Emacs

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271–280 of 301 posts

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#271

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…

> Intellij out of the box offers such a crappy text editor

Looks like you need to :git gud with Intellij if you really believe it has a crappy text editor.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#272
post #37

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…

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Re: Use GNU Emacs

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone want to recreate VSCode in Emacs? It's like asking a philharmonic orchestra to play Country Roads... Yeah, they probably can do a very good job at it, but they are there to play some more interesting music, wouldn't you think? > get used to emacs buffer and tab handling This clearly shows you've never used the program you are so confidently talking about... What tabs?

> This clearly shows you've never used the program you are so confidently talking about... What tabs? lol, quick to go for the jab mister crab. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ta... Specifically I use https://github.com/mclear-tools/tabspaces

What's the connection?

There are plenty of ways of managing multiple buffers, and tabs is... just one of them, and, it's just not good... Complaining about it just means you don't understand how to use the editor you are complaining about. These tabs are for people who come from another editor and think they need tabs. Similar to how you can have scrollbars or panels with buttons to do things in Emacs, but they aren't there to improve editing experience, they are there to help the inexperienced to transfer their experience from other editors onto the new one.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Intellij out of the box offers such a crappy text editor Looks like you need to :git gud with Intellij if you really believe it has a crappy text editor.

No, I don't. it's the people who use Intellij need to try other things, expand their horizons to understand how awful their editor is.

This is usually very visible when an editor tries to have something they call "Emacs keys" or "Vim editing" etc. Where once you try it, you instantly realize that the editor trying to mimic a decent editor is just so far behind, they, in principle, are incapable of implementing anything like Emacs or Vim.

Intellij products are targeted at amateurs, they aren't meant for people who are professionals at text editing. Similar to how you can buy sporting equipment, for example, designed for people who just want to stay in shape / have something comfortable to go to the gym in, and equipment meant for professional athletes. Eg. bicycles, where a typical city bicycle isn't even trying for the niche of being used in Tour de France.

Pretending that there's some kind of competition between Intellij products and Emacs is like thinking that you'd do just fine taking your average Home Depot 200 Watt drill to a concrete wall.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#275

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.

I use vanilla Emacs for everything. For me customisation isn't what matters, it's having an editor that will never lag, requires barely any ram, and can be used over SSH on pretty much any machine.

Is that not the description of vi

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#276

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.

Setting up emacs server is as easy as: alias emacs='emacsclient -c -nw -a ""' Seriously, that's it!

Why is an emacs server needed

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

She's not on my team and doesn't need to be a professional text editor. She can be very bad at editing text, and still be productive at what she needs to do. And so are most people, even in IT.

I also had to work with a mostly Java shop (a branch within HP) where I was on the ops team. A significant portion of my day was spent walking between cubicles and "fixing" Maven builds. I wasn't really fixing the builds though. Every time it was because another Java dummy couldn't figure out how to do something trivial in Intellij or Eclipse and were blaming the ops for that.

No matter how much I despise Intellij products, the average Java programmer at the time seem to be incapable to internalize even the bare minimum these editors require to function. I call this "the race to the bottom", a situation where technology encourages its users to be dumber, where, in turn, the dumber users make technology worse by requesting dumb features. And this is how Intellij is. It tries to cushion the fall, to put a fence around every useful but potentially "dangerous" operation by limiting what users can do to a fixed number of choices, where free-form input would've been appropriate, by creating layers of renaming of basic stuff the users need to work with in a failed attempt to "make it easier to understand", by hiding things that it perceives as being "out of scope", giving no easy way to reveal the hidden features.

So, yeah, these programmers were a liability to the company. So much so they needed to payroll a dedicated person to do their work for them. And, of course, a dedicated person could only service single Java dummy at a time, while the rest were taking a break downstairs playing table tennis or socializing in cafeteria. Good times!

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#278
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Emacs Lisp doesn't feel super accessible to most software developers under 40. Or over 40 (I'm 42) :) > Almost all its conventions come from a small little island, it's like marsupials in Australia, their own little parallel evolution. This is a great analogy. And people forget that to program any system effeciently you need to know that system. Not necessarily inside-out, but good enough. A brief look at any e…

The worst part for me is that I wanted a few "simple" UI tweaks with Emacs. I really wanted to use it. But I wanted it to have a native tab bar and I wanted to move the command bar at the top, with dropdowns instead of "expand-ups" (turns out, I read right-to-left, top-down, not right-to-left, bottom-up. You can't have either of those, in the world's most extensible editor :-(

Emacs has had tab-bar-mode since 27.1 and tab-line-mode since 27.2. As for the drop-down minibuffer (I suspect that's what you mean by "command bar"), you can use something like vertico-posframe* and put it at the top like so:

  (setq vertico-posframe-poshandler #'posframe-poshandler-frame-top-center)
* https://github.com/tumashu/vertico-posframe

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intellij out of the box offers such a crappy text editor Looks like you need to :git gud with Intellij if you really believe it has a crappy text editor.

No, I don't. it's the people who use Intellij need to try other things, expand their horizons to understand how awful their editor is. This is usually very visible when an editor tries to have something they call "Emacs keys" or "Vim editing" etc. Where once you try it, you instantly realize that the editor trying to mimic a decent editor is just so far behind, they, in principle, are incapable of implementing anythi…

I am actually a Neovim terminal user myself and I am smiling at this. The Intellij text editor for a power-user who has actually done their research is ridiculously full-featured out of the box without needing a PhD in elisp and several hundred (more like a thousand) hours of config time.

Comparing it with emacs is like comparing a smoothly running Tesla (Intellij) with a bullock cart of misc automobile parts (emacs). Sure you can build your Frankenstein car after a lifetime of effort, but most folks want a better quality of life. The vast majority of people don't want to build their own automobile (or washing machine).

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#280
post #230

I’ve started to use emacs in my computer sciences school 30 years ago (EPITA in Paris). The Lab was surrounded by Mips, Sun, Alpha, … great time. The only weakness of Emacs (according to me) was the lack of a good major mode (module) to edit web template : imagine editing a php block inside a javascript part embedded inside html. After testing many modes, I started to develop web-mode ( http://web-mode.org ) that is…

I'm not even sure about the state of this in other editors: Emacs allows syntax highlighting of different languages to be used correctly in nested regions. For example in org-mode you can have source blocks of any other language and you can see them syntax highlighted correctly. Maybe some other editors manage this for markdown's tripple backtick syntax, but do they add syntax highlighting of various mainstream languages to their markdown "modes", or do they actually have that use their separate "mode" for that language, possibly recursively?

Would be great, if anyone could comment on that. I think Emacs using Elisp has natural potential to do it recursively and therefore easily correctly, instead of cramming other modes with syntax, that does not belong there.

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