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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#771

Post by josteink »

cdrini wrote: post #752
burning_hamster wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are your favourite features about magit? For a similarly complex task, there is no program with a better UI. Magit manages to optimize for both, speed and discoverability: 99% of all actions are 2-3 keystrokes away, and at each stage of that process, magit will tell you your options. For example, invoke magit, press 'b' brings up the branching menu, basically a keymap for letter -> action. Pressing 'c' for che…

> All cli tools should have a magit interface. World peace and happiness would ensue. :) Ahhhh, I think I understand! So magit is like an autocompleting wrapper/reorganization around the git cli. That does sound great! There are some git commands which would be super annoying to do via a UI (not to mention if you add _all_ of git's features to a UI, good luck making anything discoverable :P), but in the CLI they're k…

> Ahhhh, I think I understand! So magit is like an autocompleting wrapper/reorganization around the git cli

It's a complete git "porcelain", in that it provides more or less full access to all git offers.

I daily rewrite git history in my feature-branches, cleaning up my commits, to provide fully atomic and clean merges back into dev.

Using magit, it's just seamless and feels immensly rewarding wrt doing a good job. Without magit? I wouldn't even bother.

Magit is not "just" a wrapper around the git CLI. It's a complete replacement, enabling you to fully exploit all of Git's power without ever leaving your editor of choice, nor exposing you to complex internals.

It's an amazing product, and I've seen people ask for a Magit-only Emacs-distro, just to replace their existing Git client.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#772

Post by josteink »

smt88 wrote: post #673
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…

> You can do one thing in JetBrains: edit code. That's it. You can also takes notes in markdown docs and/or code comments (it has a built-in TODO detector and organizer). > they use an unholy mix of JetBrains, GitKraken and the command line on Linux, and Tortoise, SourceTree, JetBrains and the command line on Windows I just use SmartGit for git. It's configurable with workflows (or custom commands), navigable with a…

> This is good info. These are all things I really, really don't want to do in my IDE

The point of Emacs is that it's a text-editor, and as someone editing text all day (code, documentation, etc) I want the best, most consistent text-editing and text-process possible, without having to jump from tool to tool.

With Emacs, you can mold everything you do to be consistent across all dimensions you can imagine. Once you get used to it, it is very weird (unthinkable?) to go back to other tools.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#773

Post by josteink »

jjoonathan wrote: post #406
voidfunc wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect an experienced emacs user to have a config already that more or less "works". Was this a junior developer that just decided to start using emacs one day? I'm not an emacs person myself, but every emacs person I have ever met already has it setup and customized and just brings their config. A new dev starting with emacs on a new job... just sounds like a bad recipe and misunderstood priorities.

> already has it setup and customized and just brings their config You might not have seen it happen, but if my experience was any indication, they spent a lot of time crafting that config file. I've spent less total time configuring TextMate, Sublime, IntelliJ, Atom, Jupyter, VS Code, and PyCharm than I spent back in the day trying to learn emacs lisp and get the emacs plugins for ObjC syntax highlighting and fuzzy…

> You might not have seen it happen, but if my experience was any indication, they spent a lot of time crafting that config file.

Yes. I've spent 10 years crafting this file I'm using now. One bit at a time, every time I found something which could improve my productivity and editing experience.

And I can now bring that with me anywhere at literally zero cost.

I'm not sure why anyone would frame that as a bad thing?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#774

Post by wglb »

tome wrote: post #470
wglb wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my emacs is a slow start, it is because I have a lot of previously opened files that it reads at startup. Otherwise, it is as quick as anything.

Interesting. How did you get it to store the list of previously opened files?

What 'yaantc and 'rataata_jr said in this thread.

Not only does the desktop session remember and re-open the files, but it also remembers what frames you had open, what position on the screen and which screen the windows are on.

It is a huge convenience.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#775

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

snazz wrote: post #184
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) There is GUI Emacs (what you should probably use). (2) There's no better environment available for dealing with text (including notes, papers, slides, email, &c.) than Emacs. Why do you hate future programmers so much?

GUI Emacs is a very thin GUI skin on TTY Emacs. As an example someone brought up elsewhere in this thread, you can't scroll (with the mouse) in Emacs without bringing the cursor with you. Scrolling without moving the cursor doesn't make sense in a TUI environment, so it doesn't exist in the GUI version either. Your second point is very subjective and most people are bound to disagree with it. You certainly can't argu…

It's not really so thin: there's plenty of graphics-related things that don't work in TTY Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#776

Post by erik_seaberg »

Torwald wrote: post #769
erik_seaberg wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry has been trying to write C and then C++ for decades, but it all blows up randomly. Buffer overruns, use after free, shared mutable state. Apparently tooling exists that tries to make Rust-like guarantees, but it's so costly I've literally never seen it used.

I don't get it. What about the JVM or ObjC or C#? How is it that only with Rust the things you stated are coming to us?

Much as Elisp is written in C, the JVM and CLR are each written in C++ and assembly, hosted on an OS written in C and assembly, and I've seen all of these crash.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#777

Post by gfxgirl »

ddavis wrote: post #336
gfxgirl wrote: post #326

I've used emacs for maybe 18 months solid. I never found it had a single feature that my other editors didn't have (not saying it doesn't, just staying I didn't run into them). My other editors can be extended via scripts. My other editors (mostly) have keyboard macros, repeat, etc.. My other editors can be used efficiently keyboard only. My other editors debug various languages. My other editors open shells in the e…

I think it really comes down to having the patience to learn how to extend your personal Emacs setup with the built in programming language: Emacs Lisp. From personal experience I can say that learning the basics of Emacs Lisp turned my relationship with Emacs from "preferred" to "nothing else measures up"

Ever other editor has a programming language for modifying it. What makes emacs special? couldn't you script all those other editors to do the same things?

I'd certainly feel my editor was amazing if I scripting 50 custom features but I wouldn't consider my editor better if I can script those same 50 features in any editor. I'd just consider the cost of switching high and not confuse that with whether one editor is better than another.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#778

Post by Torwald »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #776
Torwald wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. What about the JVM or ObjC or C#? How is it that only with Rust the things you stated are coming to us?

Much as Elisp is written in C, the JVM and CLR are each written in C++ and assembly, hosted on an OS written in C and assembly, and I've seen all of these crash.

Thanks, I know see better what you mean. But, wasn't that achieved prior to Rust by realtime OSs like QNX?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#779

Post by cstork12 »

Reelin wrote: post #762
cstork12 wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain your rationale for this configuration?

Unfortunately I didn't notice your reply earlier (the consequence of being productive). Rereading my previous comment I've realized there are some slight inaccuracies - keybindings are conceptually a bit complicated (at least under the historical X11 model). My Alt keycap actually just produces the corresponding Alt keysym, which maps to mod1. My confusion was due to the Meta keysym also mapping to mod1 (this is the…

Thanks! I like the underscore idea. First time I've seen it. (As you can see I'm not the fastest replier myself. ;-)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#780

Post by erik_seaberg »

Torwald wrote: post #778
erik_seaberg wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much as Elisp is written in C, the JVM and CLR are each written in C++ and assembly, hosted on an OS written in C and assembly, and I've seen all of these crash.

Thanks, I know see better what you mean. But, wasn't that achieved prior to Rust by realtime OSs like QNX?

I don't know much about QNX, but I haven't heard anything about seL4-type rigor going into it, so I wouldn't bet on it working a lot better than Linux or Windows.
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