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Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

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Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#71

Post by rjeli »

Nice, but this doesn't go far enough imo. I love emacs but keep using Sublime on a daily basis because it has real, native[0] mouse handling and UI. My dream editor would be a Sublime UI on top of embedded emacs. That means:

- Native mouse selection of text, proper copy/paste, ideally with a "narrow caret" instead of block cursor everywhere

- Native graphical file tree with drag and drop

- Native tabs with pretty drag and drop

- Pixel-fine resizing of panes

- Pixel-fine scrolling!!

[0]: Everywhere I say "native" above, I don't really care if it's GTK or electron (provided it's snappy) or whatever. I mean the nebulous feeling of having text areas work like every other text area on my desktop.

VimR (https://github.com/qvacua/vimr) on mac was the closest to this I ever got, and I love that editor, but I'm not on macOS anymore.

edit: Oh g-----, I'm literally describing aquamacs. I wonder if anyone has tried to run it on linux with GNUstep or something ;__;

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#72

Post by sgillen »

acomjean wrote: post #67

Mac has "Aquamcs" which is mac native emacs with a wierd blending of MacOS key commands and emacs commands. It works better than expected. Its not perfect but maintains the recording/playback of macros I use all the time. The fact that mac shortcuts use "Command" which emacs doesn't use natively helps. https://aquamacs.org/about.html Look forward to trying mousemacs out. -A

The official Emacs.app also supports using the Command shortcuts while keeping all the normal emacs commands the same. In general I find that the app plays nicely with MacOS and I prefer it over aquamacs since emacs.app is newer (right now version 27 vs 25.) And I think looks nicer once I've removed the menu bars.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#73

Post by murgindrag »

vaxman wrote: post #57
abrowne wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure anyone is actually fighting. We both like what we're used to, and neither of us is claiming it's better. We're both just agreeing we don't want to change.

People are allowed to like different things (except vi, obviously -- I hope we can all agree to that).

As a footnote: I'm comfortable with mainstream keyboard shortcuts too, but not in emacs. Those things do specific things in emacs, and would be a mess. If you remap ctrl-k, I won't have a way to cut a line anymore! I need that.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#74

Post by solarkraft »

rjeli wrote: post #71

Nice, but this doesn't go far enough imo. I love emacs but keep using Sublime on a daily basis because it has real, native[0] mouse handling and UI. My dream editor would be a Sublime UI on top of embedded emacs. That means: - Native mouse selection of text, proper copy/paste, ideally with a "narrow caret" instead of block cursor everywhere - Native graphical file tree with drag and drop - Native tabs with pretty dra…

> Pixel-fine scrolling!!

I don't see why software not having this is apparently acceptable. It's just disorienting to have line jumps. That's not how the real world works.

Modern Linux software is pretty good at it (GTK, Qt) as is much Windows software. However the only git GUI I otherwise enjoy using that has it is Sublime Merge.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#75

Post by gumby »

yourapostasy wrote: post #32
gumby wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Better way to manage multiple files”? I just asked Emacs and I have over 700 files open. Not sure what is inconvenient about editing multiple files.

And in case someone reading is wondering, "how do I count the number of buffers": https://stackoverflow.com/questions/350526/how-do-i-count-th... I recommend using the desktop feature also mentioned there. Now, if I can only get emacs daemon mode to maintain state so if I abruptly disconnect and reconnect with emacsclient over X11 I get the state restored exactly where I left off, so that even the screen is painted e…

Just do c-x c-b to get the list of buffers and c-x l to count the lines. Like everything in emacs it’s an editable buffer which is quite handy.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#76

Post by philsnow »

morelisp wrote: post #62
jolmg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hit `C-h b` you get a list of all the current keybindings. `C-h m` lists the keybindings focused on the active modes. You can search either for the functionality or binding you're looking for. Also, `C-h k` followed by any keybinding will describe the keybinding. If you get the documentation of a function or command with `C-h f`, it'll also mention the keybindings it's bound to, if any. All these `C-h` help ke…

Discovery of functionality is lacking, not the keybindings. Most of the time I want an answer to "how do I do...?" not "what happens if I press this key?", and even isearching the help buffer I have to guess did they suffix `at-point` or not? did they call it `swap` or `transpose`? `forward` or `next`? did they make a `sexp` do something useful in this mode, or will it just pick something between parens, or some awfu…

Emacs suffers somewhat here for its ancient-ish heritage, because it was conceived and developed in the depths of university computer lab precursors, when people had different names for everything.

Try explaining "yank-pop" to somebody who's only ever used sublime/vscode.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#77

Post by BeetleB »

Koshkin wrote: post #30
timonoko wrote: post #2

This is the first step only. I remember in 1995 Stallman wanted Emacs to be "like Microsoft Word" with varying fonts and other formatting shit with hidden Tex-coding. Do it.

I do not understand the want to stick with fixed-width fonts in this day and age. We do not use the editor to punch cards anymore, nor do we type text on a character-cell terminal or a typewriter. With the high-resolution displays, code we write should look more like one that is found in some nice programming books - complete with bold-faced reserved words, italicized comments, and even some mathematical typesetting.…

> I do not understand the want to stick with fixed-width fonts in this day and age.

Usually it involves alignment issues. Some people neatly align array entries, etc, and variable width fonts makes this look ugly. Also, people often put ASCII diagrams, etc in the comments, which are screwed up by non-monospace fonts.

> This could even (re)open the path to the Holy Grail of literate programming!

The Leo Editor[1] is your friend. It's the only such editor that seems to do it well. And by well, I mean "poor experience, but better than all the others."

[1] https://leoeditor.com/

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#78

Post by BeetleB »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #70
fluffything wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> may as well not exist if it is not easily discoverable. But it is easily discoverable ? I literally just do M-x and can I get a buffer open with _all_ emacs commands and their explanation, and can do a fuzzy search on that, e.g., so if I type "M-x align re" I get only one command highlighted that can just execute "align-regexp". That's the main thing I like about emacs. I don't have to remember a million shortcuts,…

That's cool if you can remember roughly what the command is called. For example, I wanted to format some XMl in a buffer. In a GUI, I'm fairly sure I could find this easily, in emacs it is "go to google" and find out that you want sgml-petty-print or whatever. So a bunch of M-x searching for "format" is hopeless. Emacs tends to have its own names for many concepts, making things even more obtuse.

In about 70-80% of the cases, using ido or helm, with some guesses on what the command name may contain, is enough to find me what I need.

But yes, to be frank, my productivity in Emacs really took off once I started memorizing things with flashcards. I currently have 603 cards for Emacs (including elisp).

(And telling a newbie that would cause a lot of despair!)[2]

The other thing that really helped is I started using/making hydras.[1] So now when I encounter a new, interesting mode, instead of memorizing lots of command names or keybindings, I just build my own custom menus.

[1] https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra

[2] But it really shouldn't. Emacs, with all its packages, and modes, is like a language with all its libraries, and not just the standard ones. Remembering all the commands/keybindings is akin to expecting someone to know all the APIs in all the libraries. It's OK if you don't. Most people don't.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#79

Post by BeetleB »

gumby wrote: post #75
yourapostasy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in case someone reading is wondering, "how do I count the number of buffers": https://stackoverflow.com/questions/350526/how-do-i-count-th... I recommend using the desktop feature also mentioned there. Now, if I can only get emacs daemon mode to maintain state so if I abruptly disconnect and reconnect with emacsclient over X11 I get the state restored exactly where I left off, so that even the screen is painted e…

Just do c-x c-b to get the list of buffers and c-x l to count the lines. Like everything in emacs it’s an editable buffer which is quite handy.

Ah, but this will be incorrect if you have multiple buffers pointing to the same file.

Re: Mousemacs – A mouse-driven Emacs

#80

Post by Koshkin »

kanox wrote: post #69
Koshkin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not understand the want to stick with fixed-width fonts in this day and age. We do not use the editor to punch cards anymore, nor do we type text on a character-cell terminal or a typewriter. With the high-resolution displays, code we write should look more like one that is found in some nice programming books - complete with bold-faced reserved words, italicized comments, and even some mathematical typesetting.…

> nor do we type text on a character-cell terminal Yes we do. Command line interfaces are as popular as ever and all terminal emulators rely on a fixed-width fonts.

Well, then, the question is, why on Earth we are still emulating ancient character-cell terminals? What purpose does this serve? (I think I just might know the answer: so we could run fixed-width font based text editors in them!)
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