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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#411

Post by wglb »

dan-robertson wrote: post #123
dfabulich wrote: post #99

Emacs might never catch up to Visual Studio Code, which is actively funded by Microsoft, but intuitively, it seems like Emacs ought to be able to catch up to Vim. It's always been weird writing Emacs extensions in ELisp, but it's not like Vimscript is a top-tier language. Emacs is hard to learn, but so's Vim. I think it comes down to performance, especially startup time. Emacs developers have never cared much about i…

Emacs itself starts fast. Most people who use emacs have a lot of packages that load on startup or autoload files that need to be read and this makes startup slow. Maybe if saving an image were easier then things would be faster but I think most serious users don’t care because they start emacs once a week

If my emacs is a slow start, it is because I have a lot of previously opened files that it reads at startup. Otherwise, it is as quick as anything.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#412

Post by ggregoire »

MarcScott wrote: post #377
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #366

New employee 1 workflow at company X: 1. Install VS Code 2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin 3. Work New employee 2 workflow at company X: 1. Install emacs 2. Try to install some source code indexing tool 3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies. 4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documenta…

> The fact that everyone has to have a non-empty, non trivial .emacs file means it is maximally unsuitable - for everyone. The fact that I have a non trivial .emacs file ensures that when I switch machines, I only have to transfer a single file to enable an identical development environment. I can't speak for VS Code, as I've only ever played with it a couple of times, but can I do the same thing there? I don't want…

There is an integrated settings/extensions sync feature (not yet available on the main release, probably next month). [1]

Or there is a popular extension that does exactly the same thing. [2]

Or you can also do it manually, import/export your settings in JSON and generate a list of `code --install-extension x` that you run on your other machines. [3]

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/settings-sync

[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.cod...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/49398449/652669

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#413

Post by tiew9Vii »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #366

New employee 1 workflow at company X: 1. Install VS Code 2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin 3. Work New employee 2 workflow at company X: 1. Install emacs 2. Try to install some source code indexing tool 3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies. 4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documenta…

Wouldn't class myself as an experienced Emacs user.

Used it for 5 or so years. Learnt enough to get by and have my own config that works for me. Not got as far as writing my own elsip functions.

When I set up a new computer

1) Check out my emacs config from git 2) Start emacs 3) Wait for emacs to automatically download all the packages declared in my config using use-package.

If you never used Emacs before fair enough it's harder than VS Code. VS Code does let you get going knowing less by clicking buttons. It's the same as comparing any CLI app with a full blown point and click GUI.

My take on getting a new user setup... "use what ever IDE you are comfortable with, I do not care. This is the IDE I use, here is how I have it set up if you want to use it also. Person C uses this IDE instead if you want to use that, ask them for there setup. No one here uses your IDE? You are on your own setting it up but can help with any project specific questions you need to know to get your IDE of choice running".

As far as code searching goes I find myself often outside of any IDE using the silver searcher (ag) so use emacs projectile for the exact same functionality but within emacs. Sometimes the only feature I miss from a full blown IDE like InteliJ is find usages.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#414

Post by subsection1h »

gfxgirl wrote: post #326

I've used emacs for maybe 18 months solid. I never found it had a single feature that my other editors didn't have (not saying it doesn't, just staying I didn't run into them). My other editors can be extended via scripts. My other editors (mostly) have keyboard macros, repeat, etc.. My other editors can be used efficiently keyboard only. My other editors debug various languages. My other editors open shells in the e…

"I don't care about org mode"

Thanks for specifying this and confirming my observations. My experience has been that Emacs users are much more likely than users of other text editors to be researchers and other avid note-takers who do care about tools like Org mode. For example, I have a personal knowledge base that includes several thousand Org files containing my notes.

It's not a coincidence that the creator of Org mode is an astronomy professor[1]; whereas, the majority of the most popular VS Code extensions[2] that aren't from Microsoft seem to have been created by web developers whose portfolios include no research or non-web code repos.

My point isn't to disparage the users of VS Code, but to point out that a tool like Org mode is unlikely to be developed for editors like VS Code or appreciated by the users of such editors.

When TextMate was the flavor of the month editor that its users (web developers?) claimed was the best editor ever, I waited for an "Org mode for TextMate". It never happened.

Afterwards, when Sublime Text was the flavor of the month that its users (web developers?) claimed was the best editor ever, I waited for an "Org mode for Sublime Text". It never happened.

Now that VS Code is the flavor of month, I'm waiting for an "Org mode for VS Code". But all I've seen is an unmaintained extension[3] that provides roughly 1-2% of the features of Org mode[4].

[1] https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/c.dominik/

[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?target=VSCode&ca...

[3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tootone....

[4] https://orgmode.org/org.html

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#415

Post by Scarbutt »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #405
Osiris wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with emacs. Does that mean that you don't need to install any supporting software like indexers, linters, syntax highlighters, etc? Does the emacs file contain all that or tell it how to download all the plugins? If you could just copy one file and get all that, that's pretty cool.

No. It doesn’t. You still need to install and configure plenty of 3rd party packages and tools that are completely outside of emacs. For C++, things like cscope, ctags (or maybe etags or gtags), clang autocomplete tooling, etc. These, their dependencies and layouts, typically change from machine to machine, OS to OS, distribution to distribution and version to version. So placing it in your emacs config isn’t really…

Same for vscode? ex: if you want eslint, you install it from npm.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#416

Post by Cyph0n »

neutronicus wrote: post #128
josteink wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who really doesn’t “get” or care for Vim, why should I contribute to an alternate Emacs-“distro” entirely focused on an existing Vi user-base, using non-standard conventions and keybindings? I mean good for them having that option, but what’s in that thing for me?

If you ever start to develop Emacs Pinkie as I did you may come around

This is one of the main reasons why I stuck with Vim. The strain on my hands was very noticeable, even as I was just starting to learn the standard Emacs keybindings..

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#417

Post by Scarbutt »

jjoonathan wrote: post #406
voidfunc wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect an experienced emacs user to have a config already that more or less "works". Was this a junior developer that just decided to start using emacs one day? I'm not an emacs person myself, but every emacs person I have ever met already has it setup and customized and just brings their config. A new dev starting with emacs on a new job... just sounds like a bad recipe and misunderstood priorities.

> already has it setup and customized and just brings their config You might not have seen it happen, but if my experience was any indication, they spent a lot of time crafting that config file. I've spent less total time configuring TextMate, Sublime, IntelliJ, Atom, Jupyter, VS Code, and PyCharm than I spent back in the day trying to learn emacs lisp and get the emacs plugins for ObjC syntax highlighting and fuzzy…

You had to spend time learn a new set of keybindings for each one though, for editing and interacting with the interface.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#418

Post by downerending »

buzzkillington wrote: post #287
blihp wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a world of difference between releasing contributions under the same copyright (i.e. if you're contributing to a GPL'd project, release your code under the same GPL license) and assigning copyright to the FSF. I think that's the turn-off for many. It isn't a matter of 'what would you even do with' the contribution, it's a matter of recognition and making it much harder to change the licensing terms down the r…

What happens when the woke takeover of the SFS is finally complete and emacs is re-licensed under a new social justice license where you can only use it if you don't oppress minorities? I don't trust the FSF further than I can throw them and I don't trust them with my copyrights.

The existing code cannot just be "re-licensed". It's true that they might decide to make future versions available only under some weird license, but that wouldn't cause prior contributions to become unavailable. Continuing the code line under the original license would always be possible, given effort.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#419

Post by mafm »

If rms doesn't understand org-mode, that seems to be pretty indicative of what the real problems underlying emacs' lack of popularity are.

I suspect that org-mode is responsible for more people using emacs than any other package by a large margin. Not understanding org mode suggests to me that rms is no longer on the same page as most of the users.

I know there's a lot of other good stuff in emacs, but org-mode seems to be particularly key.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#420

Post by [deleted] »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #413
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #366

New employee 1 workflow at company X: 1. Install VS Code 2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin 3. Work New employee 2 workflow at company X: 1. Install emacs 2. Try to install some source code indexing tool 3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies. 4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documenta…

Wouldn't class myself as an experienced Emacs user. Used it for 5 or so years. Learnt enough to get by and have my own config that works for me. Not got as far as writing my own elsip functions. When I set up a new computer 1) Check out my emacs config from git 2) Start emacs 3) Wait for emacs to automatically download all the packages declared in my config using use-package. If you never used Emacs before fair enoug…

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