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Use GNU Emacs

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Re: Use GNU Emacs

#81

Post by rahen »

uhtred wrote: post #48
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 love the vinyl or paper books comparison. I have a strange nostalgia for the old Unix days that I was too young— perhaps not even alive yet— to experience the first time around. It's what draws me to learning and using things like vim, Perl, awk, sed, etc. Those tools feel arcane and mystical.

I've been there too. Installing, trying, running older and older Unixes in SIMH. 4.1BSD, 32V, V7, V6, all the way down to V0 on the PDP-7 with the help of tutorials on gunkies.org. I still keep a neatly organized folder of primitive Unix systems with their (tiny) disk images and SIMH boot scripts.

But going all the way back to the Big Bang at V0, a funny thing happened.

The essence was still missing. Because indeed the open-source foundations weren't really born from Unix and the PDP-11. I only had focused on the technicalities.

No. The missing half of the puzzle is ITS and the PDP-10.

This is where the hacker movement, GNU and the free software philosophy were born. The world of Stallman versus the world of Thomson. The root of emacs, LISP, TeX, and many more. Which interestingly, are both older and more timeless than the Unix part of the puzzle.

After the demise of the PDP-10 in the 80s, Unix (and ultimately Linux) just happened to be a convenient hardware abstraction layer to carry the torch, to run what really mattered. Unix had been the tool but not the essence.

This is where I reached the end of my journey: ITS, emacs, and the birthplace of the hacker and free software spirit. I was enlightened, and the words "GNU's Not Unix" finally made sense!

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#82

Post by Kwpolska »

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…

The "Excel wizard" (not really) solution is to use Mail Merge in Word: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-mail-merge-to...

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#83

Post by tmtvl »

adastra22 wrote: post #32
mlatu wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how can u live with it using the gpu so much? thats actually my reason for switching away from vscode as im mostly working on machines without a discrete gpu AND utilize the gpu in my projects.. i cant have my code editor use 30% of gpu just to scroll text up and down (without any plugins installed) it's just silly XD

Get better hardware? Don't go cheap on your development system. I'm on an Apple M1 device and have barely noticed it.

That's kinda like a traffic engineer saying "I always get stuck in a massive traffic jam while driving back home. I know, we'll add another lane to the highway."

If a tool runs poorly on commodity hardware the solution isn't "get better hardware," but "improve the tool."

...okay, unless the tool absolutely requires specialized capabilities, like a neural network which needs a dedicated GPU for number crunching.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#84

Post by eequah9L »

dnh44 wrote: post #59

If you haven’t yet developed your emacs muscle memory I would suggest remapping your keyboard to swap the left-control and caps-lock keys. Your pinky will thank you. In macOS you can do this by going to Settings->Keyboard->Keyboard Shortcuts->Modifier Keys.

If you haven’t yet developed your Emacs muscle memory, consider taking a look at Evil. I switched about 7 years ago after well over a decade of using the default Emacs text editor. It was the right move. VIM IMHO just is a better editor. Emacs is the better everything else, but thanks to Evil, you can both eat this cake and have it, too.

For me, a good stepping stone to Evil was God mode. It strips away the need to mash modifier keys, but retains all the Emacs keyboard bindings. It gives you a glimpse of what using a modal editor is like, roughly, with a tiny cognitive effort investment.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#85

Post by geysersam »

tzhenghao wrote: post #33

I'm more of a vim guy, but "I get it". I started using these "serious" editors back in college and eventually settled with vim over emacs. I don't wanna get into the whole editor wars - it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game. I went through the whole phase of adding a bunch of plugins, custom macros and have a huge .vimrc file that, once in a while, would break if I was using the wrong vim variant {vi,…

I'd love to use VSCode for the completion and other polished conveniences that just work. I detest having to manually configure anything.

But vim moves and keybinds are just too good.

If there was a combination that actually worked well, I'd switch in a heartbeat. But so far I haven't encountered an option with all of:

* vim bindings (no compromises)

* great completion / IDE experience

* no configuration

Currently my "pick 2 out of 3" is low config nvim, with bad completion as a result...

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#86

Post by gpderetta »

xlii wrote: post #41
kqr wrote: post #3

The Ingebrigtsen quote is meaningful. One should think of "using Emacs" not like "using Vim" but like "using the JVM." Emacs is a powerful platform for building hackable, command-and-ui driven applications. You may not like the text editor that ships with a default Emacs install, but you don't have to use it! There are others (e.g. evil.) There are also other applications. Some of my favourites are - calc (desktop RP…

I recommend calc, I fell in love with RPN and can’t use normal calculators anymore. Never heard about sunrise commander though.

I occasionally need a calculator, but I just evaluate elisp expressions in *scratch*. What am I missing by not using calc?

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#87

Post by phonebucket »

tzhenghao wrote: post #33

I'm more of a vim guy, but "I get it". I started using these "serious" editors back in college and eventually settled with vim over emacs. I don't wanna get into the whole editor wars - it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game. I went through the whole phase of adding a bunch of plugins, custom macros and have a huge .vimrc file that, once in a while, would break if I was using the wrong vim variant {vi,…

I started down the same path, but ended up somewhere else.

I decided to allow myself as many extra features as I wanted with one caveat: all plugins had to be pure vimscript.

Reproducing an exact dev environment is just a git clone away, because there are no external dependencies outside of vim itself.

This is not very restrictive: you have fuzzy search with Ctrl-P, get full-featured language server support with vim-lsp etc.

This is possible because Vim8+ (released 6 years ago) has a native plugin manager which is very easy to manage via git submodules.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#88

Post by mtzet »

forty wrote: post #71
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).

I agree. Emacs out-of-the-box is terrible, but my Doom Emacs config is all 50 lines of code. For that I get:

- IDE-like features via LSP

- The best git porcelain out there: magit. Even when I'm not using emacs, I come back to magit for code-browsing (recursive blame) and staging hunks.

- Emacs/vim's fantastic buffer/window concept, where open files are not owned by their windows. I miss this whenever I use anything else.

- project support to quickly grep across all files or jump to files

- Very mature vi keybindings, with their infinite composability

I still sometimes find that it's either too rigid or too manual at certain things, but I could say the same for CLion and VSCode. I still come back to CLion for its refactoring tool, the 3-way merge window and the debugger integration.

It is a bit messy though. It's very well done for what it is, but it's cobbled together from many disparate components. It seems that it should be possible to create the same type of experience from a simpler, more coherent system. I rarely update the base system, but when I do, I've occasionally had to google for some exotic elisp error and add a fix here or there.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#89

Post by gpderetta »

sbuk wrote: post #22
Barrin92 wrote: post #17

What sets Emacs apart for me is that it, unlike a lot of "unix philosophy" tools, it deliberately takes a sort of systems approach. The often used analogy is that an architect never just designs rooms in isolation, but only changes a room in the context of the house. It's the whole arrangement that matters, not its parts. And you can't infer the performance of the former from the latter. The minimal approach to have…

In short, it’s the antithesis of the UNIX philosophy.

I'm not sure there is such a big divide: emacs is the OS in a way (in the same way a browser is one these days) and the tools are all the extensions (including those built in). The union of all extensions is more than the sum of all the parts. The difference is that the interface between tools in emacs is usually much richer than in UNIX (for example a buffer is a more complex abstraction than a file).

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#90

Post by soraminazuki »

adastra22 wrote: post #32
mlatu wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how can u live with it using the gpu so much? thats actually my reason for switching away from vscode as im mostly working on machines without a discrete gpu AND utilize the gpu in my projects.. i cant have my code editor use 30% of gpu just to scroll text up and down (without any plugins installed) it's just silly XD

Get better hardware? Don't go cheap on your development system. I'm on an Apple M1 device and have barely noticed it.

Also get a portable power station too, to deal with battery life. ... or just don't run dozens of browsers on battery-powered devices.
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