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Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

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Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#51

Post by kleiba »

vvillena wrote: post #29
kleiba wrote: post #5

Kinda strange. Emacs is so inherently keyboard-focused that I fail to see the point of this... nor the need for it?!

Why not? Some things make a lot of sense, like the context menu. The current right-click behavior just sets the text selection mark. This doesn't make much sense anymore: every other editor uses click and drag to select text using the mouse. This frees the right mouse button, and a context menu makes lots of sense. Emacs is a highly complex software, which is then customized with lots of modes. Making functions acces…

Emacs of course has long supported menus but I think every serious user would agree that it's not necessarily a love child. I agree with you that it is the strength of menus in general that they allow for easy discoverability of functionality. However, at the same time, Emacs provides other ways to the same end.

Simple interfaces are especially useful for newcomers, I agree to that point as well. At the same time, most power-users of Emacs do not use the mouse at all. While not everyone aspires (or even should aspire) to become an Emacs power user, the question might be asked at what point it would be wise to switch from mouse-based use to keyboard-based use as you progress? Does it even make sense to first learn an interface you're better off ditching at some point as your expertise raises?

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#52

Post by kleiba »

mrspeaker wrote: post #9
kleiba wrote: post #5

Kinda strange. Emacs is so inherently keyboard-focused that I fail to see the point of this... nor the need for it?!

I use Emacs as my primary... everything. But I totally see the point and need for mouse-driven functionality. Emacs only works if you have two functioning arms with hands on them. Put a coffee, a sandwich, a cat, a kid, a beer... in one of your hands, and Emacs is unusable. If my cat wants some attention, I can't keep typin' stuff. Though, not sure why the mouse-driven features are also wrapped up making shortcuts ma…

If you can't type, I'm not sure the mouse is going to get you much ahead either ;-)

But it's true that there might be a certain class of users with impediments for which a different input modality setup could be very beneficial. However, note that standard Emacs already provides menus and mouse support, it's just not what is commonly the focus of the editor.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#53

Post by kleiba »

trey-jones wrote: post #6
kleiba wrote: post #5

Kinda strange. Emacs is so inherently keyboard-focused that I fail to see the point of this... nor the need for it?!

Yeah, the main reason I started using Emacs was to try and eliminate (or reduce, I suppose) mouse usage.

Yes, I've been running Emacs in the terminal almost exclusively for pretty much the same reason.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#54

Post by thom »

kleiba wrote: post #50
kqr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Vim is inherently keyboard-focused. That Emacs is not, and instead focuses on the command as the fundamental unit driving everything, is its primary strength. This is what makes Emacs more flexible than Vim to the point where there's a very faithful reimplementation of Vim for Emacs. Couldn't do the opposite, even if you wanted to.

It is true that commands are at the heart of Emacs but as soon as you move beyond very basic use, invoking commands in ways other than through the keyboard becomes impractical. I'm not only talking about keyboard shortcuts but also about the fact that a lot of these commands actually take parameters that would be difficult to provide by mouse. Emacs out of the box comes with a menu system. This is very good and usefu…

I too turn off the menu and toolbar in Emacs, and I'm not saying the setup in the article sounds good to me for that or any editor. But to give you an example of why I think it's an important point, I would absolutely love to be able to issue commands by speech, for example, for things I don't use very often, or just never remember what I've bound them to (or even for stuff I don't remember the name for). Some people _have_ this setup, I've just never invested the time. But it's possible because fundamentally Emacs is a platform first and an editor second. I doubt it would be a very popular platform without the ability to make keybindings, but you nevertheless you could still build useful apps on top of it, and I find that quite interesting.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#55

Post by kleiba »

thom wrote: post #54
kleiba wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that commands are at the heart of Emacs but as soon as you move beyond very basic use, invoking commands in ways other than through the keyboard becomes impractical. I'm not only talking about keyboard shortcuts but also about the fact that a lot of these commands actually take parameters that would be difficult to provide by mouse. Emacs out of the box comes with a menu system. This is very good and usefu…

I too turn off the menu and toolbar in Emacs, and I'm not saying the setup in the article sounds good to me for that or any editor. But to give you an example of why I think it's an important point, I would absolutely love to be able to issue commands by speech, for example, for things I don't use very often, or just never remember what I've bound them to (or even for stuff I don't remember the name for). Some people…

There's still a difference though between a setup that uses keyboard + speech vs. one that mixes keyboard and mouse. For instance, you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard to issue a speech command. Also, there's a fundamental usability difference between voice input and mouse input in that the strength of menus+mouse lies in the fact that a user does not have to remember the exact command, it can be looked up / navigated to. For speech, you have to remember the command just as you do when using M-x in Emacs right now -- unless you're thinking of a fully fledged spoken dialog system type of interface that would allow interactive descriptions.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#56

Post by MobileVet »

This seems like a nice extension to Emacs for folks that want to use it but are stymied by the steep learning curve.

Personally I think the learning curve is worth it... especially with an aid like Spacemacs. It gives you the context and quick access without requiring a mouse and thus results in faster and more efficient interaction in the long run.

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#57

Post by vaxman »

abrowne wrote: post #47
murgindrag wrote: post #11

I think this is solving several different problems: 1) I would love to have a better way to manage tabs and multiple files in emacs. This piece seems awesome! 2) Good context menus aren't as important, but a definite win! emacs is useless here. But I'm not sure your context menus are the ones I want. 3) As someone who's used emacs for a long time, I would hate to have my emacs shortcuts replaced by standard ones. I d…

> 3) As someone who's used emacs for a long time, I would hate to have my emacs shortcuts replaced by standard ones. I don't want to remap my brain. As someone who's used Mac for a long time (and now Linux desktop, with similar shortcuts, plus spending most of my time in a browser like Chromium or Firefox), I chose other editors like Sublime and now VS Code partly because they use shortcuts that feel normal on those…

Don't talk about politics, religion or text editors at work, son.

They used to ban people for starting rWars on USENET (that is, outside of the forums specifically for rWars) back in the day.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#58

Post by mrspeaker »

cobbzilla wrote: post #45
sn41 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Emacs pinkies - I see the value in similar efforts. I will try this out for some time to see if it actually helps. But muscle memory is a thing for me, it is hard to undo 20 years of Emacs habits.

I always remap Caps-Lock to be an extra Control key; this has really helped me avoid repetitive stress injuries over the years.

A weirder one for me that I like now: my RIGHT pinky has been hurting recently. Not sure if it's emacs fault, but I've been using "Enter/return key as CTRL when held"... When you hit return it's normal return key, but if you just hold down return it acts like control! It was weird at first, but now it's awesome - especially useful on a Mac lappy that has no right ctrl key.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#59

Post by waluigi »

Koshkin wrote: post #33
melling wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is an editor construction kit. Use your imagination and build a different editor.

Building and maintaining an “emacs distribution” (even for a single user like yourself) is a huge effort which is rarely worth it.

I would push back against this. There is definitely a pretty steep learning curve, but once you are over it you really start to reap the benefits of being able to rapidly add niche functionality that exactly fits your workflows.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#60

Post by morelisp »

kleiba wrote: post #50
kqr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Vim is inherently keyboard-focused. That Emacs is not, and instead focuses on the command as the fundamental unit driving everything, is its primary strength. This is what makes Emacs more flexible than Vim to the point where there's a very faithful reimplementation of Vim for Emacs. Couldn't do the opposite, even if you wanted to.

It is true that commands are at the heart of Emacs but as soon as you move beyond very basic use, invoking commands in ways other than through the keyboard becomes impractical. I'm not only talking about keyboard shortcuts but also about the fact that a lot of these commands actually take parameters that would be difficult to provide by mouse. Emacs out of the box comes with a menu system. This is very good and usefu…

> a lot of these commands actually take parameters that would be difficult to provide by mouse.

Those that take interactive strings, maybe - but for those that take buffer positions or regions, which seems to me like a plurality if not majority, I would love to be able to invoke a command and then click+drag somewhere I want to apply, rather than having to set the point there and pop it back when done.

Or the other way around, select a region, right-click to get a choice of commands that work on regions - this could even be auto-generated by looking at the keymap stack for commands that work on regions.

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