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IRC and Emacs all the things

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Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#71

Post by Koshkin »

iLemming wrote: post #26

> Not having a general text editor at your disposal for when you have to input/manage loads of text is like being a carpenter and only having a hammer in the toolbox. Once I learned Emacs to the sufficient level, I felt that. Today, I can't even imagine typing any text in anything else but Emacs. Having all the tools you need at your disposal - spellchecking, thesaurus, dictionary, word lookup, translation, etc., fee…

> simple - to copy existing text, call emacsclient, it invokes a function that opens a buffer and pastes the text into it ... press dedicated key-sequence

Doesn't sound simple at all (compared to Notepad, anyway).

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#72

Post by Koshkin »

omaranto wrote: post #57
clarry wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs OOTB sucks and some of the most useful packages will never be built-in, because developers don't want to deal with license assignment and locking themselves to the slow release cycle of Emacs. Also the community can be discouraging.

"Emacs OOTB sucks" People say that, and those people are entitled to their opinion. (A word of warning: I think many people who say that are not actual Emacs users.) I'll keep happily using vanilla Emacs while people complain about it, though. Of course, I don't really use it OOTB, I mean, I do have a configuration. My 700 line init file installs some 20 third party packages from MELPA, and changes a lot of defaults.…

> 700 line init ... written about 1200 more lines

"happily using vanilla Emacs" indeed.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#73

Post by omaranto »

Koshkin wrote: post #72
omaranto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Emacs OOTB sucks" People say that, and those people are entitled to their opinion. (A word of warning: I think many people who say that are not actual Emacs users.) I'll keep happily using vanilla Emacs while people complain about it, though. Of course, I don't really use it OOTB, I mean, I do have a configuration. My 700 line init file installs some 20 third party packages from MELPA, and changes a lot of defaults.…

> 700 line init ... written about 1200 more lines "happily using vanilla Emacs" indeed.

Well, you're right, it's not so vanilla anymore. :)

But that has accumulated over the course of about 10 years, so its really not a lot. And the possibility of having everything just the way I like is what drew me to Emacs in the first place! A shorter config would be an indication that either (1) I happened to like everything exactly the way it was by default, or (2) annoyances can't actually be fixed. I don't think any software could fall into (1) (right?, there's always something you wish were slightly different, or something you want to automate) and Emacs, unlike most programs, does not fall into (2).

Also if you saw my configuration and compared it people who use Doom or Spacemacs, or even just Helm or Ivy, you'd think my Emacs is very vanilla.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#75

Post by rrix2 »

hpfr wrote: post #22
vector_spaces wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of a Matrix emacs client, but it doesn't support E2EE and probably won't ever, so it's a non-starter for me.

Luckily, the good folks at Matrix have thought of the client support issue: https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon

I can confirm that it takes a bit of elbowing around, but you can get matrix-client.el to work with pantalaimon in its current state. extending the client to "know" it needs to talk to localhost rather than the server half is most of the stuff I had to hack on to make it work.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#76

Post by groovy2shoes »

thiht wrote: post #67
_hardwaregeek wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I legitimately don't know how people can code without using some emacs or vim commands. Even the simplest stuff like M-f/M-b or C-a/C-e are so ingrained in how I use a computer. Do people genuinely not use them? Do they just navigate with the mouse and arrow keys? I suppose there's alternatives like Cmd- and Cmd- or Alt- and Alt- .

Not using emacs, I could answer, but I have no idea what "M-f/M-b or C-a/C-e" means

M-f/M-b = Meta-f/Meta-b (the Meta key is usually mapped to the Alt key on typical PC keyboards): move forward/backward a word. In vim, the equivalent is normal mode w/b.

C-a/C-e = Control-a/Control-e: move to beginning/end of line. In vim, normal mode 0/$.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#77

Post by dilap »

useragent86 wrote: post #70
dilap wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No argument that emacs is getting better. But I'm not sure it will ever be what I would consider high-quality! I think it's just the nature of a huge system implemented (mostly) in a dynamically typed, dynamically scoped (!) (though, happily, more and more less and less) language to be partly broken all of the time. And, to be fair, most of the bugginess is not emacs per-se, but in the various packages and their inte…

> I think it's just the nature of a huge system implemented (mostly) in a dynamically typed, dynamically scoped (!) (though, happily, more and more less and less) language to be partly broken all of the time. To be clear, Elisp has had lexical-binding for about 8 years now. > After I run a python shell for a while, bash shells stop asynchronously showing command output; the shell just hangs until the command complete…

Thanks, I do appreciate the tips.

Like I mentioned, these are just a couple problems from a longer list. Occasionally, I pick one and (try) to solve it. If I tried to solve them all, I wouldn't have much time left for anything else. :-)

My more general point is Emacs is pretty janky.

I also don't think it's inevitable -- it's possible to make something that offers the awesome flexibility of emacs, but w/o the quality issues. Who knows, maybe Emacs itself will eventually evolve in this direction.

(Re a couple of your specific points:

- I just checked, and 36% of the files in my site-lisp directory are using lexical scoping.

- Dynamic scoping can be handy! Here's (incredibly nasty) my fix for the hard-coded 1-second delay in shell mode:

  (flet ((sleep-for (&rest args) ())) ;; redefine sleep-for since shell calls it on purpose, guaranteeing a 1s startup time...
The fact that such a fix is needed, on the one hand, and that such a fix is possible, on the other, are emblematic of the both cultural and technical reasons that emacs is not more robust.)

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#78

Post by clarry »

useragent86 wrote: post #69
clarry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hardest part of Emacs is to learn what Emacs can do, what it offers. Nah, for me the hardest part is finding out about all the things it doesn't do. Unless you code it. Maybe you find some half-arsed packages, but they might just make you more frustrated. For example, I still haven't found a way to do vim-like completion. I still haven't got a good cscope interface that doesn't crap all over my windows (a commo…

> I still haven't found a way to make my custom keybindings just work everywhere; every so often I happen to end up with focus in a window where, for example, my normal window navigation bindings don't work and I'd have to go out of my way to fix it. The easiest way to do this is to use `bind-keys' (specifically, the one with an asterisk after it, which HN markup won't seem to let me use without creating italics inst…

My bindings need to be state-aware, because they are evil. So a simple global override is actually not quite enough..

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#79

Post by iLemming »

Koshkin wrote: post #71
iLemming wrote: post #26

> Not having a general text editor at your disposal for when you have to input/manage loads of text is like being a carpenter and only having a hammer in the toolbox. Once I learned Emacs to the sufficient level, I felt that. Today, I can't even imagine typing any text in anything else but Emacs. Having all the tools you need at your disposal - spellchecking, thesaurus, dictionary, word lookup, translation, etc., fee…

> simple - to copy existing text, call emacsclient, it invokes a function that opens a buffer and pastes the text into it ... press dedicated key-sequence Doesn't sound simple at all (compared to Notepad, anyway).

Troll me moar....

You think I was talking about doing all that manually?

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#80

Post by pabs3 »

saagarjha wrote: post #37
pabs3 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers should make Reader mode the default.

That would be nice, except it must rely on heuristics to get around the shenanigans that websites pull and it doesn't always get it right.

Sure, there could be a button to revert back to the normal web when you want it though.
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