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Even more batteries included with Emacs

karthinks.com

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Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#81

Post by gpderetta »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #48
gnulinux wrote: post #5

My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024. > This is largely a discoverability problem In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all . Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinati…

My guess is, that writing Emacs packages requires a lot of discipline, to only use the minimal surface one needs from Emacs. And that is, because of the huge amount of mutable global state in Emacs. An actual design flaw, that is sometimes super useful, but at other times super annoying.

I'm often amazed how things do not break more often than they do[1] given how deep a package can alter emacs intenrals.

[1] and they do break!

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#82

Post by jr_isidore »

kqr wrote: post #62
jr_isidore wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

appears to receive stable funding from the FSF No, about ten underemployed or semi-retired graybeards on the emacs.devel mailing list burn most of their waking hours futzing with emacs. That's not an exaggeration. They receive no remuneration.

That's sad. Is there a way I can fund them without going through FSF? I tried looking into it before but it seemed like FSF was the only alternative, so I assumed it was well-managed.

Bro, the FSF is an unchecked post office box somewhere in Kendall Square, and besides, do you really think $10 per month makes a difference? I don't know what these guys feed off of, but it's not food or anything else that money buys.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#83

Post by rk06 »

noelwelsh wrote: post #31

The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a den…

rest of the world is ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctrl-v. but emacs is in completely different world.

for emacs to gain mindshare, it needs to meet people where they are, not where emacs was 30 yrs ago.

of course, emacs does not work reliably in windows, so that is another issue

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#84

Post by jr_isidore »

tapete1 wrote: post #61
Paradigma11 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are a godsend in fixing emacs problems.

I have asked LLMs several Emacs-related questions and _never_ got a reply that works. And at generating elisp code they are especially awful.

Try asking it a coding question, one that doesn't diminish your self-worth.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#85

Post by m463 »

tptacek wrote: post #2

I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired.

I think 's' is sort.

More seriously, what I would like to do is ediff files (only the differences) in two directories (have the changed files together one line after the other)

or, ediff two arbitrary lists of files and have them show up in ediff.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#86

Post by rpdillon »

arikrahman wrote: post #17
QwenGlazer9000 wrote: post #7

All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix. I used to be on neovim, and that ecosystem compared to emacs feels like this image: https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes,…

I find that Emacs is actually the first mover on prime technologies. Just look at gptel and org-mode. Nothing else really even comes close. The reason some odd names exist like yank and kill or kill chain is because Emacs was the first and didn't have anything else to use as reference.

Kill chain is a military term relating to the sequence of events that lead up to the actual attack.

You're probably thinking of kill ring, which I always thought was a neat term.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#89

Post by justinhj »

Both Emacs and Neovim reward rtfm and working up from a vanilla configuration to your own custom one.

The distribution style packages for these editors make the user skip all that initial learning and discovery. It leads to people writing plugins and packages that simply replicate what was already possible. I have written plenty of elisp myself only to find out I was rewriting builtin functionality.

I'd also say that both editors are fully discoverable but you have to first learn how to use the various help available. Emacs is a bit ahead here with its help options, letting you search for functions, variables, info and man pages, apropos (fuzzy search) and more.

In short start vanilla and explore; this kind of blog really helps with that.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#90

Post by Matumio »

rk06 wrote: post #83
noelwelsh wrote: post #31

The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a den…

rest of the world is ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctrl-v. but emacs is in completely different world. for emacs to gain mindshare, it needs to meet people where they are, not where emacs was 30 yrs ago. of course, emacs does not work reliably in windows, so that is another issue

> of course, emacs does not work reliably in windows, so that is another issue

No, it's the same issue. In a Linux shell (say, bash or fish) ctrl-c is not "copy" but "terminate program". Most emacs editing keys (copy-paste, motion) work in the shell as they do in emacs, at least in fish and bash (and probably other places in Linux).

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