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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#491

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

michaelmrose wrote: post #432
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a programmer, just a tradesman who’s worn a few different hats over the eons, but I’ve noticed something as I’ve gotten older and lazier: I am equally as unproductive regardless of my setup. My productivity has way more to do with all the other factors at play than it does the fine-tuning of my setup.

In order to be more productive of 10s of thousands of hours one only needs to be slightly more productive to justify spending a handful of hours. 1% per 10k hours is worth 100 hours.

Yeah, to some extent, maybe.

I appreciate what you’re saying, and I do hate being slowed down in the moment.

I’ve got a handcrafted AutoHotKey script and a 22 button gaming mouse fine tuned for 2D CAD / CAM software at work, so while I am definitely in to this sort of customisation...

If I’m honest with myself I don’t really get more work done because I end up using the time being unproductive elsewhere.

There’s definitely a certain intellectual curiosity-satisfaction to be had from customisation.

I’m just not convinced it’s a net time saver in the long run?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#492

Post by zelly »

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…

> this mode or that mode don’t matter because the slowest part of the creative process is the creativity and not your typing

Exactly, the bottleneck is thinking, so why do I need the slick point-and-click tools in an IDE?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#493

Post by zimablue »

Not to be divisive but I see a parallel here with what happened in the gaming industry. As it became more popular and socially acceptable, the quality of games went down, from the perspective of people who played games when they were unpopular. Eg. baldurs gate vs fortnite. Development is now fueled by an insatiable industry demand and fairly high salaries, and a lot of offshoring to desperate countries where it’s a way out. The taste of people who only write software in the context of cultural cache and a salary is always going to be different from that of people attracted to something for its own sake.

This conversation even reflects that- Too comment how many days before I can be productive for X company in JavaScript from scratch? That’s not a question I’m interested in but it’s been accepted as the most interesting question here.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#494

Post by enitihas »

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…

Or even better

New employee workflow at company Z

1. Install the Jetbtains toolbox

2. Have IDEs for several languages with consistent features and semantics.

3. Minimal to no configuration needed

4. Profit.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#495

Post by a1369209993 »

tome wrote: post #467
a1369209993 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A need has been identified that can't be met by v3, it's time to start working on v4. Software-as-a-service under GPLv3 isn't required to provide source code to remote users (AGPL acommplishes exactly nothing in this regard), so there definitely is such a need, but I don't know if RMS is actually working on that.

I thought that's exactly what AGPL was for. Is there something flawed about it?

Well, the biggest problem is that the AGPL isn't the GPL, so the existence of the AGPL doesn't actually help with the large number of existing GPL projects, even if they're licenced as "GPL version N or later" (which v4 would help with).

However, the problem I was actually thinking of ("exactly nothing"), was that last time I looked into it, the consensus appeared to be that you could copy code between a AGPL project and a GPL one, which obviously makes the AGPL useless. But, on checking, I can't actually find a citation for this, and the licence text doesn't seem to support that interpretation.

So I have to retract my previous statement and amend it to: the AGPL does very little to help with SaaS attacks on open source software, primarily because almost noone uses it, and because the FSF continues to recommend the known-broken non-affero GPL as its default copyleft licence.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#496

Post by mbeex »

_bxg1 wrote: post #444
indogooner wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't contest that VSCode has achieved better out of the box functionality than emacs but it still needs a lot of configuration. My experience is only with C++ extension where intellisense update just goes on indefinitely. Navigation to a function takes ages. Then I exclude some source directories and restart VSCode. And not to talk of resource hog that it is. When it works it is pretty good and that's why I stick…

The experience varies widely by language. TypeScript support is top-notch. Clojure support used to be bad and then got good. Rust support has been bad for a long time but the nascent rust-analyzer project makes it fantastic. Python support is decent but only if you get an optional, poorly-advertised extension on top of the default one. C# support is quite solid. Etc. Only a couple of languages get first-party support…

> Python support is decent but only if you get an optional, poorly-advertised extension on top of the default one.

Which one?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#497

Post by madhadron »

dfabulich wrote: post #331
tsimionescu wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a regular emacs user, I can tell you that start-up time is one of the lowest things on my priority list of things that I wish would be improved. Emacs is not vim. Emacs is not designed to be a program you open for every file. Emacs is and IDE. You open it every time your computer starts, and then you go to Emacs and find files from there. Occasionally, you'll have a file and want to look at it, and then you'll use…

We agree completely. Neither Emacs users nor developers care about start-up time or size on disk. And that's why Vim is installed by default on Linux distros (and macOS and WSL) and Emacs isn't. And that's partly why people learn Vim before they learn Emacs.

Not quite. vim is installed because vi is required by the POSIX standard and vim is the GNU version of vi. For the same reason, ed is still installed by default. It has nothing to do with popularity.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#498

Post by madhadron »

dfabulich wrote: post #211
dan-robertson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Out of the box, Emacs is slower than vim, and this is part of the reason why Emacs isn't installed by default on distros. Serious users don't care about startup performance, but that helps to explain why Emacs isn't gaining new users. Emacs isn't the quickest and easiest way to edit a file.

You're repeating this in several places, and it's not true. See my comment about POSIX above.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#499

Post by helsinkiandrew »

I still consider myself an emacs user even though I haven't used it for over a decade (or 2?).

For me emacs is from a time where text was king - the productivity to use Emacs for my entire work process - latex docs, coding and debug in multiple languages, reading email, accessing remote systems (gdbserver, scp, ftp, even gopher and the web) from within emacs without using the mouse was astounding.

But as things become more graphical - rich text email was the first, then the web, UML, word/excel etc it became less useful.

Emacs feels like a long lost lover - sweet memories from a distant past, but you can't go back.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#500

Post by _peeley »

dmortin wrote: post #60
superbaconman wrote: post #50

Honestly the hardest part about emacs for me has always been documentation. Like how do I build a plugin. What function do I call to set a custom key binding? This stuff has always been so hard to find despite it being so important to the underlying experience. Now that I've used it for a while I know these things, but they didn't come easily.

These days you can just google to get answers quickly, just like for any other tool. Stackoverflow, etc. has tons of content for emacs too.

It's ridiculous that end users should rely on third parties for reliable documentation. For any other tool, if you wanted to know this kind of builtin functionality it'd be readily accessible in --help, the man page, or first-party online docs. Why should Emacs be an exception?
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