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Use GNU Emacs

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Re: Use GNU Emacs

#71

Post by forty »

xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

I switched from VSCode to Doom Emacs with very little of my own customization (doing TS, Scala, Rust mostly) a few years ago. There is not one thing of VSCode that I miss, and I enjoy some of the most powerful features like wgrep & all, and a great vim emulation layer (the one I had in VSCode sucked).

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#72

Post by oblio »

thom wrote: post #42
adastra22 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Visual Studio Code now for pretty much this exact reason. The only configuration I need to do is to install the right language server extensions for the code I develop, but even this is mostly handled by the "It looks like you're writing Rust code. Do you want to install the extension to handle this file type?" dialog that pops up on first use. Everything is auto-updated, settings synchronized across devices, a…

You also get the benefit of everyone else’s hard work with Emacs. One of the differences is that it’s such an established ecosystem, that instead of individual extensions just getting better, with Emacs they’ve yielded shared abstractions that make _new_ extensions trivial and much more consistent than with VSCode (which is nevertheless still an excellent editor these days). I also don’t understand why people think s…

> If your time is so limited, eliminating toil seems essential.

The counter point to this is usually:

What exactly is your toil as a professional software developer (or associated profession) that is eliminated with a "better"[1] editor in 2023?

Refactoring is more powerful with an IDE, for mainstream languages. For non-mainstream languages 95% of what Emacs enables can be done using multi-cursors and a macro language built in to the editor, and we're in 2023. Those kinds of editors are a dime a dozen :-)

Editing data dumps or whatever is probably better with an advanced editor (I generally use Vim for that). But it's such a rare occurrence.

Writing code is super easy in an IDE.

Most of my toil is unnecessary meetings, unnecessary reporting, unnecessary social stuff. Emacs can't help with any of that.

* * *

[1] To note, "better" is strictly a claim. I'm quite sure there's no peer reviewed study that can prove conclusively that Emacs/Vim users are more productive than non-Emacs/Vim users, just due to their usage of Emacs/Vim.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#73

Post by kreetx »

sn41 wrote: post #45

OK. Here's a usecase where I found emacs to be wonderful. I had to email the grades, together with totals, and class averages to many students in a class. I tried fiddling with Excel and Google spreadsheets and scripted mail merges. Then I realized I could do it emacs. Export the gradesheet into csv, and convert to an org table. Carefully record a macro where you copy paste the name of the student the mark columns in…

It's overkill if you ever only needed to do it once, but should the situation come up again the investment in time and effort will likely pay off.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#74

Post by morjom »

amir734jj wrote: post #61
morjom wrote: post #40

I haven't stepped into the Emacs or Vim world yet (hopefully this year as I ditch Windows as my daily driver). Currently I just run VSCodium

What is VSCodium?

In their own words:

"binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing"

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

or alternatively:

"VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code."

https://vscodium.com/

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#75

Post by tmtvl »

sn41 wrote: post #45

OK. Here's a usecase where I found emacs to be wonderful. I had to email the grades, together with totals, and class averages to many students in a class. I tried fiddling with Excel and Google spreadsheets and scripted mail merges. Then I realized I could do it emacs. Export the gradesheet into csv, and convert to an org table. Carefully record a macro where you copy paste the name of the student the mark columns in…

You can do C-u 125 C-x e (or C-1 C-2 C-5 F4) to repeat a macro 125 times.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#76

Post by qwertox »

xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

When I open Android Studio I often think: "Man, how lucky we developers are, we have such great tools to do our work." I thought the same about Visual Studio with Whole Tomato's Visual Assist. And VS Code is not quite there, it has a chaotic keyboard navigation + highlighting issues, but it is a pretty good tool, for being a text editor.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#77

Post by mlatu »

oliverbennett wrote: post #65
mlatu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i get that, though i would rather compare it with chopsticks than vinyl records. you use emacs to do stuff, you dont just listen to/watch it do its thing. chopsticks might not seem like a good metaphor at first glance, as they are much more simple, but they are highly compatible with a lot of tasks and can be utilized in many ways that a fork, spoon, spork or colander just wouldnt handle as well. to my mind, the simp…

Both metaphors seem apt. One is leaning towards how a product makes a person feel when using it, one is about what the product offers. I hear arguments around what products can offer me all the time, they make sense, but I generally go with how a product makes me feel. Probably more than I even realise. I don’t use Emacs, I do whisk eggs and fish doughnuts out of oil with chopsticks, I couldn’t fully say why for eith…

oh i get it and i will contradict my own saying "you dont need GPU for handling source code" when i talk about my personal projects, but there is a time and a place for all the tools there are: some have janky handles, some have single-purpose nibs, others are as customizable as your regular homeowners house.

i am still a bit iffy about emacslisp, but less so than before i grokked CL (thanks for that goes to "practical common lisp" by peter seibel)

but: whatever floats your boat will keep your boat afloat :D

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#78

Post by teddyh »

Gah, yet another instance of people treating Emacs like it’s a terminal application. It can run in the terminal, if a terminal is all you have, but you don’t want to do that. Use its default, graphical mode:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

You get not only graphics and colors, but also better keybindings which aren’t limited to 1970’s ASCII control codes.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#80

Post by pmontra »

mlatu wrote: post #46
xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

i get that, though i would rather compare it with chopsticks than vinyl records. you use emacs to do stuff, you dont just listen to/watch it do its thing. chopsticks might not seem like a good metaphor at first glance, as they are much more simple, but they are highly compatible with a lot of tasks and can be utilized in many ways that a fork, spoon, spork or colander just wouldnt handle as well. to my mind, the simp…

As a westerner, chopsticks are much better than spoons or forks at getting that last grain of rice in the plate, or a small piece of salad.
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