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Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#391

Post by edanm »

zzzzzzzza wrote: post #378
edanm wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds good in theory. But if you're working with a more-than-30-year-old tool, you're either: 1. Missing out on "new innovations" (and using older gui/etc paradigms which don't mesh with anything else you are used to). 2. Finding ways to update your tool to take advantage of "new innovations", which costs time, and often gives you a worse outcome. I was a vim user for 8 years, then used spacemacs for another 2,…

i was looking into vscode/vscodium recently (i'm emacs user, but arguably more comfortable in javascript than emacs lisp). if you want to define a custom function do you have to write your extension? it seems like settings.json, is just that, a json file, as opposed to emacs config where you can drop a line into your config or even just eval some elisp in a buffer and have it modify your editor... basically it seems…

It's for sure less extensible than EMACs/Vim (you probably can write extensions but I've never done it, but it's not as easy as popping in some elips or whatever).

That said, you can configure a lot of things you care about, e.g. you can do remappings, including complex remappings from "sequence of keys" to "sequence of keys or existing commands". And since there are lots of pre-defined commands etc, there's a lot you can do.

(BTW I mean this espeically in vim mode for vscode, I don't have experience with using vscode without it).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#392

Post by edanm »

Kototama wrote: post #390
edanm wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds good in theory. But if you're working with a more-than-30-year-old tool, you're either: 1. Missing out on "new innovations" (and using older gui/etc paradigms which don't mesh with anything else you are used to). 2. Finding ways to update your tool to take advantage of "new innovations", which costs time, and often gives you a worse outcome. I was a vim user for 8 years, then used spacemacs for another 2,…

What is more innovative, a light IDE with plugins written in JavaScript and backed by a big company or a small Lisp machine disguised as a text editor where every key is bound to a Lisp command and every changes and extensions in its code or extensions can be tested interactively in a "live coding" environment, where the user is empowered to modify and extend what he wants?

I don't care about innovative in that sense, I care about features - what can my text editor actually do, and how well does it fit with how I use my computer in other cases.

E.g. the simplest example - intellisense and inline linting, debugging etc. are all really awesome features. I've set them up once or twice with vim and emacs, but it's always a pain, always takes a long time, breaks often, etc. With VSCode, I click a button and I have everything I need for Python installed in a second.

That's the difference between actually using a feature, and not. When I install a new computer, I will actually use e.g. Python linting with VSCode, but not with vim, cause I won't bother to set it up.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#393

Post by oblio »

globular-toast wrote: post #345
oblio wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but my toolkit, which I'm perfecting, is programming language paradigms, design patterns, algorithms, programming language SDKs, popular libraries and frameworks, etc. And there isn't enough time in the world to become as proficient as I'd like for those, let alone if I'd waste time to optimize tools to get 99.999% efficiency with them. At some point your hammer is good enough and your saw is…

> I don't know about you, but my toolkit, which I'm perfecting, is programming language paradigms, design patterns, algorithms, programming language SDKs, popular libraries and frameworks, etc. Well that's great but none of that gets anything done. You need to be able to write programs effectively. > At some point your hammer is good enough and your saw is sharp enough. Yeah. I don't regularly invest many hours into…

> Well that's great but none of that gets anything done. You need to be able to write programs effectively.

:-)) Of course it does. Most of my time isn't spent in actually writing the programs. It's in reading and understanding what they do, how to best modify them, debugging issues, etc.

I'd guess I spend about 10% of my time, at most, actually editing characters.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#394

Post by Kototama »

edanm wrote: post #392
Kototama wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is more innovative, a light IDE with plugins written in JavaScript and backed by a big company or a small Lisp machine disguised as a text editor where every key is bound to a Lisp command and every changes and extensions in its code or extensions can be tested interactively in a "live coding" environment, where the user is empowered to modify and extend what he wants?

I don't care about innovative in that sense, I care about features - what can my text editor actually do, and how well does it fit with how I use my computer in other cases. E.g. the simplest example - intellisense and inline linting, debugging etc. are all really awesome features. I've set them up once or twice with vim and emacs, but it's always a pain, always takes a long time, breaks often, etc. With VSCode, I cl…

For some of the IDE functionalities Emacs can be behind. Like debugging, or jumping to function definition (it depends of the languages and extensions).

For some other functionalities it is far more advance, like support for Git (magit) or very fast navigation inside the project (projectile, Helm etc), mass renaming things (grep, ag and wgrep) etc.

In general IDEs are very bad at text manipulation and good at structural manipulation, whereas Emacs is very good at text manipulation and okay at structural manipulation (or excellent for it but only for Lisp).

The set of functionalities in an IDE is fixed, whereas Emacs is extensible, by it users.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#395

Post by ho_schi »

NoGravitas wrote: post #142
ho_schi wrote: post #9

The complain about the weird and twenty year old issue in Gtk questionable[1]. Gtk2, X11 and disconnecting a display and Emacs calls abort(). I cannot speak about EMACS because I prefer VIM and NEOVIM. My requirements are usability - where VIM excels with your knowledge (learning curve) - and LSP-Support. The later is provided since NEOVIM '0.5`[2] nearly ready to use. A modern editor should know what the user is act…

Strongly agree that there should be a GCC LSP server, and that Stallman's objections to the GCC features that would be needed to make one are Not Helpful.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-04/msg00...

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-04/msg00...

I was surprised at that time, but Stallman is actually pushing a LSP interface within GCC. The sad thing is - it didn't happened until now.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#396

Post by todd8 »

jimmyvalmer wrote: post #388
todd8 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that replacing all of the eLisp with say JavaScript would be impractical because there are hundred thousands of lines of eLisp that would have to be replaced, but Emacs is never going to increase its appeal while requiring new users to learn its own, somewhat peculiar, extension language. Emacs out of the box is usable, but not as good as JetBrains tools or VS Code or Vim. Emacs is worth learning bec…

Again, you wave your hands as if such a transpiler falls within a man-year of effort when there is little expertise, much less funding, for work that is not only difficult to get right but also not guaranteed to achieve the desired effect of broader adoption.

So true! The dream of adding support for an additional extension language doesn’t fix the UI, the archaic defaults, unusual terminology, licensing restrictions, key bindings from keyboards used half a century ago.

It’s all very sad. The worlds best editor, one of my favorite tools, is now too big to renovate.

I used to toy with the idea of “fixing” TeX because I really liked using it, but again the fundamental problem that I wanted fixed was the extension language. I wanted something better than layers of macros on top of macros. Maybe I should stop musing about fundamentally transforming Emacs and go back to daydreaming of an improved TeX.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#397

Post by CJefferson »

gopiandcode wrote: post #116

I see many people on here (likely non-emacs users) claiming that Emacs is obsolete/outdated/dying by completely misunderstanding its position in the ecosystem. Maybe it's easier to understand via analogy. Let's consider cars. Of the global population of car users, relatively few of them are F1 racecar drivers. Furthermore, you can easily make the case that the particular features (aerodynamics, speed etc.) that make…

If you want to continue this analogy, I don't want a 30 year old F1 car. Also, as with old cars there is a bunch of people who are determined everything invented in the last 30 years is stupid, and we should stick with "good old reliable" things.

Most people want a newer car, that's picked up the improvements in safety and performance from the last 30 years.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#398

Post by coldtea »

Judging from the discussion in the Emacs lists, they are not going to go anywhere.

This needs a few people that (a) want to do it, (b) have a specific vision of what to do (as in, they don't fish for random suggestions), (c) have the power to do it (even if others disagree).

This is totally feasible in, e.g. VS Code. In Emacs? Not so much...

Instead, there's endless bikeshedding and "change by commitee" with momentum-killing vetoes...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#399

Post by coldtea »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #141

2021 and Emacs still my preferred editor (and I'm young enough, in my 30's). Yes it requires a bit more setup (not much more however, VSC also misses functionality out of the box). However that setup is saved forever, across machines in the form of your .emacs file, so whatever changes you make to make it personal stay with you. And it's really not much more difficult to setup, Emacs lisp is more intuitive than JSON…

>Yes it requires a bit more setup (not much more however, VSC also misses functionality out of the box)

Not even comparable. The functionality VSC misses you can get with installing some extension, which works out of the box, with hardly any configuration, and with a very simple way to find, select, install, enable, and disable it.

>However that setup is saved forever, across machines in the form of your .emacs file

Even that's something you need to do manually in Emaca. In VSCode it's automagically synced to GitHub, and indeed is "saved forever, across machines" -- and with smart ways to handle conflicts and such if you change it elsewhere, etc.

>And it's really not much more difficult to setup, Emacs lisp is more intuitive than JSON files

VS Code has a graphical UI that abstracts away the JSON configuration files, provides autocomplete of options, limits you to available enumerated options, picks up automatically the proper UI for the config of an extension, and so on.

And even when if you want to edit the raw JSON to change the configuration, it's of course vastly easier than Lisp (a full programming language), plus it also has autocomplete for key names and values, and so on.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)

#400

Post by edanm »

Kototama wrote: post #394
edanm wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about innovative in that sense, I care about features - what can my text editor actually do, and how well does it fit with how I use my computer in other cases. E.g. the simplest example - intellisense and inline linting, debugging etc. are all really awesome features. I've set them up once or twice with vim and emacs, but it's always a pain, always takes a long time, breaks often, etc. With VSCode, I cl…

For some of the IDE functionalities Emacs can be behind. Like debugging, or jumping to function definition (it depends of the languages and extensions). For some other functionalities it is far more advance, like support for Git (magit) or very fast navigation inside the project (projectile, Helm etc), mass renaming things (grep, ag and wgrep) etc. In general IDEs are very bad at text manipulation and good at structu…

So I think you're actually wrong on some of these. And again, I say this as a massive fan of vim and emacs.

Support for git is awesome in vscode. You install a plug-in and get great support for various commands. Another plugin and you can have every line annotated with a git blame (a faded text at the end of the line), as well as having a git blame annotation at the top of each function. These were game changers for me. Though full disclosure, I haven't used magit much - but that's part of the problem. The learning curve on the vscode stuff was zero.

Project navigation is dead simple in vscode, I don't think emacs has any advantage.

As for text manipulation, as a vim snob, I'll just point out that text editing is really only good with Vim. Luckily vscode has a vim mode that's decent. Not perfect at all, but decent.

As for extensibility - all the above are plugins. It is extensible.

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