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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#641

Post by erikbye »

adrianN wrote: post #506
enitihas wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can use 40% more cores when compiling than my CLion using colleagues because vim doesn't need 10GB of RAM. I tried using CLion, but it was just too slow. Maybe I was holding it wrong.

The last time I used a Jetbrains product, it took several seconds to simply open the IDEs Settings page. I'm not kidding, several seconds. Sometimes it would also completely freeze up for seconds when Java's GC kicked in. Great experience...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#642

Post by erikbye »

williamdclt wrote: post #640
erikbye wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think VSCode is a very mouse-centric experience. Using Emacs I don't touch my mouse. It's a far more efficient and comfortable (less straining) experience, for me anyway. I use both Emacs and VSCode but vastly prefer the Emacs experience. I also use Emacs for much more than simply writing code. Emacs is also more pleasant to use because it's simply faster. VSCode is slow compared. I'm not talking about application…

Never used emacs, so can't compare. But: > I think VSCode is a very mouse-centric experience I never touch my mouse in VSCode. There's many many shortcuts that are configurable, and keyboard navigation isn't not a "second-class citizen" > VSCode is slow compared Yeah, probably true. Never felt like it slowed me down though > And symbol fuzzy search is just for symbols, not all text cmd-t on vscode. Probably not stric…

> cmd-t on vscode.

Like I said earlier, that's just for symbols, so no, it's not the same.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#643

Post by rglullis »

leadingthenet wrote: post #591
rglullis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right you are. Using Emacs for 20 years and I still can't get to explain it to people properly.

That just proves OP’s point, imo.

Were this an actual conversation where someone wants to start with emacs, I would be showing the sequences (as in "see, Ctrl-x and Ctrl-f gives you a prompt to write a file. Now try Ctrl-x and Ctrl-s...") and I would show the part of emacs that gives the user feedback about the command.

Discussions about terminology are totally secondary, and honestly, I was just trying to find a polite way to show that I don't want to get into an argument about terminology.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#644

Post by erikbye »

cdrini wrote: post #636
erikbye wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think VSCode is a very mouse-centric experience. Using Emacs I don't touch my mouse. It's a far more efficient and comfortable (less straining) experience, for me anyway. I use both Emacs and VSCode but vastly prefer the Emacs experience. I also use Emacs for much more than simply writing code. Emacs is also more pleasant to use because it's simply faster. VSCode is slow compared. I'm not talking about application…

Although the mouse centric experience thing makes sense when _writing_ code, I don't think it makes as much sense for reading/refactoring code. I'm not an Emacs user, but watching some of my colleagues navigating a codebase with Emacs looks not only slow, but also very mentally taxing. They often switch to grep searching, then select the results in order to iterate over them in Emacs. Or they have to remember full pa…

These are exactly the things I find better and faster in Emacs. Watch video below and imagine searching that way but for all files in your project. Results in real-time, instantly taken to content when you highlight and browse results with arrow keys or further narrow down by typing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfasCCuCEgM

IMO VSCode's ctrl-shift-f doesn't come close. And its symbol search is just for symbols, not all text.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#645

Post by gmadsen »

dmortin wrote: post #28
Ataraxic wrote: post #25

Popularity is more of a marketing problem than an editor problem. At the same time, if we compare emacs to vscode, vscode simply requires less configuration to get going. Given how much tooling exists in the javascript ecosystem, I think having a few plugins "just work" goes a long way. Asking users to configure emacs from scratch to have a reasonable editing experience in their programming language of their choice i…

> if we compare emacs to vscode, vscode simply requires less configuration to get going True, but then why do more people uses Vim than Emacs? Is it becase it's installed on servers and stuff? I wonder what percent of desktop programmers use vim or emacs who don't need to do devops.

for simple edits vim works great and is fast. for serious development , something like vscode with vim keybindings is the best of both worlds

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#646

Post by williamdclt »

arexxbifs wrote: post #597
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…

VS Code has its pros and I use it daily, but I have to spend quite a bit of time configuring a fresh install of it. Probably not as much as I would Emacs, had I used it, but it's not insignificant. And that includes changing the theme.

There's a sync extension. I think it's making it into the core functionalities.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#647

Post by vvillena »

smt88 wrote: post #457
wglb wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used magit? How about slime? Org mode? Other editors don’t have those

> magit Lots of editors have git plugins. The question is, what can you do with magit that you can't do with those? > slime This is a pretty niche need, but sure. I would agree that people writing most Lisps (excluding Clojure) are better off using something like Emacs. > Org mode The fact that my editor doesn't have this is a feature for me. I want something with a clickable GUI that syncs to my phone, gives me remi…

> what can you do with magit that you can't do with those?

It's not the "what", it's the "how". Magit enables extremely fancy workflows with great simplicity, and its UI is self-discoverable and well laid-out. Magit has the best UX of any git tool.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#648

Post by Nashooo »

random_cynic wrote: post #618
adimitrov wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do one thing in JetBrains: edit code. That's it. In Emacs, I read my mail, I organise my agenda, I write technical reports, blog posts, I wrote my entire thesis in org-mode. I collect research notes in Emacs, and a journal. I do my bookkeeping and accounting in Emacs. I write Confluence articles, so I don't have to deal with Confluence's shitty interface. I edit remote files, I edit files via sudo on my machi…

>In Emacs, I read my mail, I organise my agenda, I write technical reports, blog posts, I wrote my entire thesis in org-mode. I collect research notes in Emacs, and a journal. I do my bookkeeping and accounting in Emacs. No one cares (other than Emacs users). There are better tools designed for those purposes. There's a reason the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing well is still so popular and widely used. Rather tha…

Which tool would you suggest for Org-mode? I have been reading up on it and it almost made me want to use emacs. But if there is a better tool designed for it's purpose..

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#649

Post by commandlinefan »

I've been a vi user for about 30 years. Once, a few years back, I decided to force myself to use emacs for a year to see if I could understand what people saw in it. Once I realized, 10 months in, that I was counting the days before I would "let" myself use vi again, I finally threw in the towel and bailed on emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#650

Post by commandlinefan »

ccktlmazeltov wrote: post #298
olivierestsage wrote: post #101

I hear a lot about the declining popularity of Emacs, but I always wonder how much it is overstating the case. As a tech enthusiast but (mostly) non-programmer, my perception has actually been that the "cool factor" of Emacs has been on the rise. Around 2011 or so, I hardly ever saw mention of it online. Now a day hardly go by on places like Reddit's "unixporn" board that someone doesn't post their slick setup with E…

My personal experience years ago was that there was a cool factor, and I learned it, and it's still a pain to use (compared to let's say VS Code), and I think that cool factor was just never a thing.

> cool factor

I agree there's a certain respect afforded to people who are adept with terminal editors, but there is a practical reason to master them: they're always there, no matter how many layers of SSH you've gone through to get where you are.

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