Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Emacs Popular Again

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 782 posts

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#651

Post by wainstead »

alpaca128 wrote: post #553
01100011 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I might give that a shot. I just installed vim-orgmode to see if I could get a little emacs goodness in vimland. I usually use a custom markup language and vim syntax definitions to keep track of my notes, so this may get me to convert my notes to org mode. The thing I'm most excited about is shell-mode. For years I've wanted to be able to drop to a shell in vim and visually cut/paste the window. From what I…

> For years I've wanted to be able to drop to a shell in vim and visually cut/paste the window. NeoVim is 100% compatible and has a pretty decent terminal buffer with full (read-only) Vim controls. Nowadays I prefer running it in a terminal multiplexer though. Emacs' terminal mode doesn't have ncurses support which leads to pretty much all interactive terminal applications to break.

There are a few shell modes in Emacs. I think ansi-term might do what you want for a full screen interactive terminal application.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#652

Post by jonnypotty »

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…

Trying vscode even in comparison to eclipse made me want to kill myself especially when everyone was saying how great it was.

Did exactly what you're describing here. 4 hours of fucking about to achieve nothing.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#653

Post by commandlinefan »

jmoss20 wrote: post #67
jrimbault wrote: post #4

> "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things." I'm sorry to react to first quote, but as I kept reading I kept coming back to it. My thoughts on that : how you present yourself is how you want (and are going) to be judged. In general I think Emacs has been user-hostile, as said here, just by its terminology. Nobody outside a minority…

I don't think emacs is "user-hostile" on purpose. You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing. Today's users expect different things than users did in the 70s (who expected different things than users in the 80s, 90s, so on). Emacs has been relatively consistent through time, which has been a huge boon to emacs users. The tradeoff is against current user's intuitions…

> "user-hostile" on purpose

I seem to recall reading that the keyboards that emacs was originally developed for had the CTRL key in the middle left (where the modern, useless, "caps lock" key is). The awkwardness of the CTRL key on modern keyboards makes emacs seem unnecessarily user-hostile as well, but that's also not something that Stallman could reasonably have predicted.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#654

Post by jonnypotty »

michaelmrose wrote: post #431
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…

New employee 3 workflow at company X: 1. Install Emacs 2. Sync existing config via git 3. Work New employee 4 workflow at company X: 1. Install Emacs 2. Spend 2 hours learning default Emacs 3. Work New employee 5 workflow at company X: 1. Install Emacs 2. Spend 1 - 2 hours learning default Emacs 3. Spend 2 - 4 hours googling interesting Emacs packages, in each case going to their GitHub repo to read the directions, a…

Think they key here is you read a book whilst the prev op just assumed reading random guides on the Internet would be an appropriate way to learn a piece of software for professional use.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#655

Post by brlewis »

timmy-turner wrote: post #575
Scarblac wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to switch to VS for that reason and then I discovered Tide, which works grest as a React Typescript mode for me. But to be honest I only use Emacs because 28 years of using it has made it feel like home, I don't usually recommend it to new people.

Tide + https://github.com/jscheid/prettier.el + projectile + helm work wonders. Been using this for +3 years now and its one of the bigger productivity improvements in my recent years of emacs and programming practice. At work, I actually try to get ppl away from Jetbrains IDEs because they are slow and their typescript and prettier support seems pretty buggy to me. Unfortunately, most developers I meet these times a…

> prettier support

I use emacs/tide/prettier-js, but the prettier formatting only happens on save. Do you have settings that make emacs adhere to prettier formatting as it goes along?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#656

Post by u801e »

101404 wrote: post #559
diffeomorphism wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that everyone has to have a non-empty, non trivial .emacs file means it is maximally unsuitable - for everyone. The fact that you don't have one for VS Code shows that any modifications to make it better are too difficult and that you just have to make do with how it comes out of the box.

In reality, it is very easy in vscode. The difference is, that in vscode it is a easily readable json. Much, much! better than in both emacs and vim. Edit: downvoting doesn't change reality

In vim, configuration is either through running commands you could run in normal mode in vim, or through vimscript functions. I assume emacs is similar in that regard.

JSON isn't really that easy to read unless it's pretty formatted, and it's somewhat difficult to write (making sure you have every double-quote, every comma, every closing and opening bracket/brace, etc. I always have to run a JSON linter to make sure I didn't miss anything when writing JSON by hand.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#657

Post by bitwize »

shultays wrote: post #519
quadrifoliate wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This view is obviously biased against Emacs, but I don't disagree completely with the premise. As an Emacs user, being "immediately productive" (whatever that means) is not your topmost priority. You mold your Emacs to a workflow unique to you, notice things you are doing often, add elisp functions to change it to make those things easier, and carry them with you from job to job. As your job evolves and changes, you…

I think most emacs user are overestimating the gain they are having by mastering art of emacs. Sure, it sounds useful to copy every 5th character in all lines that fits a certain regular expression but how many times you actually need it on your active development time and how much time you lose by doing that manually or using more traditional tools? The coding is mostly typing and debugging. Visual studio (most ides…

> Visual studio (most ides really) is good enough at that.

No. It's not.

Emacs's electric-indent is so close to the Right Thing when you're coding it's incredible -- getting almost perfectly formatted code as you type. Other editors have autoindent, but it never seems to do the right thing. Other editors also see fit to insert closing brackets/parens/quotes, and then miss detecting when I typed the closing punctuation so now I have three brackets/parens/quotes. It throws me off. Just highlight the opening punctuation mark when I close it, the way Emacs (and vim) does.

I've given Visual Studio Code a chance. Lots of chances really. Each time I find myself struggling with it more than I should, and needing that Emacs flexibility much more than I anticipated going in. Initially I feel more productive, but the more I worked with it the more it gets in the way, inducing friction and slowing me down. And then I want Emacs back.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#658

Post by tick-tock »

smt88 wrote: post #429
quadrifoliate wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This view is obviously biased against Emacs, but I don't disagree completely with the premise. As an Emacs user, being "immediately productive" (whatever that means) is not your topmost priority. You mold your Emacs to a workflow unique to you, notice things you are doing often, add elisp functions to change it to make those things easier, and carry them with you from job to job. As your job evolves and changes, you…

> You mold your Emacs to a workflow unique to you, notice things you are doing often, add elisp functions to change it to make those things easier, and carry them with you from job to job. As your job evolves and changes, you maintain and grow your Emacs files over decades, and borrow from someone else's workflows. I've been writing software for ~24 years, and I can understand the need for this in the past. Now, I ju…

I just wrote a small function to convert Unix epoch timestamps to date-time strings. Just to be able to make sense of timestamps in some log files I was looking at.

I find this kind repetitive thing frequently comes up in the course of one's work. Not a big deal to copy and paste in a web site to convert the first few (or few hundred) times, or firing up the python interpreter. But once it becomes apparent that I will have to do this again and again it is great that Emacs gives me a way to add that small function to it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#660

Post by mplanchard »

celeritascelery wrote: post #106
simias wrote: post #93

I wish Vim users and Emacs users would unite to improve Spacemacs. It's really a great idea IMO, have the editing power of Vim with the flexibility and elegance of the Emacs environment. Unfortunately when I tried Spacemacs (coming from Emacs) I kept bumping on rough edges with vim command emulation which ended up with me switching directly to the real vim. It's been about a year now and while I still think I was rig…

I always find it interesting that the thing people really want from vim is the keybindings. Almost no one uses vim for the software. Also, The vim emulation has gotten much better due to evil-collection[1]. You might want to give Spacemacs or doom-emacs[2] another try. [1] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection [2] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Thanks for the evil-collection link! I hadn’t seen this before, but the sudden switch out of having vim bindings in various buffers has been one of the pain points in starting to learn emacs.
Post reply on HN