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Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

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Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#61

Post by reality_czech »

tjradcliffe wrote: post #28
gnuvince wrote: post #9

As an Emacs guy, I really like mg(1). The one missing feature is Unicode support.

I'm an mg guy who uses Emacs when he has to. Unlike Emacs, mg is an editor. I don't know what tool-class Emacs properly falls into, but as many people here have pointed out, it's closer to a general-purpose scriptable environment than an editor. Editing is a side-effect of the other capabilities, very nearly. I know at least one person who uses Emacs as their shell. For those of us who just want a clean, fast, light-…

"I just want an editor" is the vi philosophy, and has been since olden times. Emacs users tend to write a lot of emacs modes and lisp macros, whereas vi users generally use external programs or the shell.

The thing is, vi is much better at being "just an editor" than emacs is. The key bindings for vi are highly ergonomic and let you keep your fingers on the home row almost all the time. With emacs, you're playing "twister" with your fingers, often pressing 3 or 4 keys simultaneously just do to some simple task like quitting or indenting a paragaph. vi also supports things like deleting to the end of the line, going to the end of the file, or even appending to the end of a line with a single keypress.

If you're using something with emacs key bindings but no emacs-like extensibility, you're really getting the worst of both worlds. You really should just be using vi. And you will find a lot of people with your philsophy who use it, and it is installed on nearly every system out there.

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#62

Post by Peaker »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #20
philsnow wrote: post #19

> Since it is written completely in C, there is currently _no language in which extensions can be written_; however, keys can be rebound and certain parameters can be changed in startup files. mg seems almost, but not quite, entirely unlike emacs. the thing that makes emacs emacs is not the keybindings or the so-called "modeless" editing (which is a misinterpretation by vim folks, emacs is way more modeful than vim),…

Not when I'm on some tiny VM or computer and want something nicer than Nano that has something remotely close to Emacs keybindings. Then it's the keybindings, not the scriptability. I just want a reasonable editor.

It's a bit funny, the most unreasonable thing about emacs are its default key bindings...

Some of the most frequent operations, like switching between buffers or windows takes 3 key strokes!

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#64

Post by josteink »

oskarth wrote: post #56

Did it ever occur to people that less can be more in terms of features? There might be a reason why people like Torvalds (Linux and de Raadt (OpenBSD, OpenSSH) specifically don't use the stock Emacs. Here are some other data points: Hickey (Clojure) uses the stock Acqumacs with zero customization and Graham (creator of HN and the first real web app) uses plain vi to edit Lisp. If you want to use a text editor to get…

> Did it ever occur to people that less can be more in terms of features?

It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes more is more.

As for your examples...

> Here are some other data points: ... Graham (creator of HN and the first real web app) uses plain vi to edit Lisp.

And you can tell the great amount of effort that makes him put into this very fine website, can't you?

This is probably the worst website I frequently visit in terms of features, design, technical basis and mobile readability. It sucks in all respects except community.

If this is the pinnacle of websites which vi can get us, please move everyone everywhere to anything else, notepad included. I've created better websites than this in Notepad (during my early university years), and that's not a joke.

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#65

Post by boomlinde »

vidarh wrote: post #57
philsnow wrote: post #19

> Since it is written completely in C, there is currently _no language in which extensions can be written_; however, keys can be rebound and certain parameters can be changed in startup files. mg seems almost, but not quite, entirely unlike emacs. the thing that makes emacs emacs is not the keybindings or the so-called "modeless" editing (which is a misinterpretation by vim folks, emacs is way more modeful than vim),…

A lot of us only cares about the very basics, and pick emacs (or variations) only because when the choice between editor families that are "always" available it stands between vi/vim and emacs. Microemacs and derivatives like MG or uemacs dates back to the mid 80's, and has been ported to pretty much any platform and OS you can think of (first time I came across one of them was on the Amiga in the late 80's), so they…

In what sense is Emacs (or emacs-likes) "always" available? In most operating systems it is something will have to be installed explicitly, while I haven't seen a unix-like without a vi-clone or nano in a while. Hopefully the lack of emacs-likes can be addressed with something like mg, but so far I don't see it a lot in the wild.

I believe that Workbench 2+ for the Amiga came bundled with MicroEMACS, though!

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#66

Post by oblio »

sebastianavina wrote: post #52
retr0h wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shouldn't your config management system be doing this ;P

I don't even know if there is an IDE to edit a crontab file. I mean, it's not even remotely difficult.

I think his point is that on most systems, except localhost, you shouldn't be touching the config files with an editor. Those files should be managed by an automated system (config management system). Such as chef, puppet, ansible, salt, cfengine & the lot.

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#67

Post by eloisant »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #20
philsnow wrote: post #19

> Since it is written completely in C, there is currently _no language in which extensions can be written_; however, keys can be rebound and certain parameters can be changed in startup files. mg seems almost, but not quite, entirely unlike emacs. the thing that makes emacs emacs is not the keybindings or the so-called "modeless" editing (which is a misinterpretation by vim folks, emacs is way more modeful than vim),…

Not when I'm on some tiny VM or computer and want something nicer than Nano that has something remotely close to Emacs keybindings. Then it's the keybindings, not the scriptability. I just want a reasonable editor.

Or use VIM keybindings on Emacs, so you still benefit from all the extension and scriptability but when you're on a tiny VM you can comfortably use VIM.

Re: Mg: an Emacs-like editor in 160 kb

#70

Post by agumonkey »

philsnow wrote: post #19

> Since it is written completely in C, there is currently _no language in which extensions can be written_; however, keys can be rebound and certain parameters can be changed in startup files. mg seems almost, but not quite, entirely unlike emacs. the thing that makes emacs emacs is not the keybindings or the so-called "modeless" editing (which is a misinterpretation by vim folks, emacs is way more modeful than vim),…

Which begs the following question: what is the smallest programmable editor ?

A Forth REPL ?

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