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Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

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Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#91

Post by [deleted] »

Mononokay wrote: post #78
jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me as a daily Emacs user this sounds like another "editor war" rant. I neither find Emacs hard to customize nor do I think it has any substantial limitations other than the ones that are based on my own lack of knowledge. It's always fair to compare it to Vim, but I don't think it makes much sense to compare it in general to VS Code or Atom. One major reason for me to use Emacs and not newer software is that it i…

VS Code and Atom are practically guaranteed to run until the end of time at this point. The sole benefit of web apps is that they're more likely to remain functional than native ones.

[deleted]

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#92

Post by PeCaN »

jhall1468 wrote: post #42
jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me as a daily Emacs user this sounds like another "editor war" rant. I neither find Emacs hard to customize nor do I think it has any substantial limitations other than the ones that are based on my own lack of knowledge. It's always fair to compare it to Vim, but I don't think it makes much sense to compare it in general to VS Code or Atom. One major reason for me to use Emacs and not newer software is that it i…

Both Atom and VSCode are multiplatform and can run on any platform emacs can. Hell there's a version of it that runs in-browser. Both have commercial backing and the platform is built ok Chrome. Hard to imagine a world where any of that adds up to ephemeral.

I'd love to use Atom on a little QNX system, can you tell me where I can find the Atom distribution? It's possible to build Emacs on it.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#94

Post by krylon »

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #32
rusk wrote: post #21

Here's what grinds my gears: That the cursor follows the visible buffer. It would be nice to be able to scroll to another part of a file and then just start typing and be back where I was ... I mean I could understand if this was an efficiency thing to do with scaling to large files due to a kind of a tiling memory model or something, but emacs doesn't even do that! It's not a huge deal I've learned to get used to us…

The cursor stays in the viewport because, deep down, Emacs still thinks that it's outputting to a 1970s-era ASCII terminal. See this https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo... “Internally, Emacs still belives it’s a text program, and we pretend Xt is a text terminal, and we pretend GTK is an Xt toolkit. It’s a fractal of delusion.” For years, James Gosling, author of the first version of Emacs th…

Regarding Emacs vs. VS Code, it is kind of funny that Emacs was once the canonical big, fat, bloated editor, but it did not grow much bigger since then. So today, Emacs is kind of lightweight: On my work computer, VS Code will easily gobble up half a gigabyte of RAM with only a handful of files open, while Emacs with dozens of buffers consistently stays below 100 MB.

Compared to nvi or mg, GNU Emacs is still pretty big, but I think the size-to-feature-richness ratio is more balanced in Emacs. Also, I will come out and admit that I like Emacs for being Emacs. I have tried VS Code at work, and it is not bad. But from a certain point of view, VS Code is just Emacs Re-Imagined using Javascript instead of Lisp. And Emacs just has a ~30-year head start on VS Code at being Emacs. Last, but not least, the Emacs default key bindings for moving the cursor around are by now so deeply ingrained in my muscle memory that I will not willingly switch to an editor that does not support them. And all the Emacs-keybindings extensions for VS Code I have tried were ... not quite there, yet, at least for me.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#95

Post by krylon »

BooneJS wrote: post #51
jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me as a daily Emacs user this sounds like another "editor war" rant. I neither find Emacs hard to customize nor do I think it has any substantial limitations other than the ones that are based on my own lack of knowledge. It's always fair to compare it to Vim, but I don't think it makes much sense to compare it in general to VS Code or Atom. One major reason for me to use Emacs and not newer software is that it i…

Emacs is compared to vim because both can be run in a terminal on a remote machine, not because it’s the JS-editor-of-the-month. There’s a fairly decent chance I’d switch away from vim if I ever had a job where I could edit code locally.

Emacs has TRAMP, which allows transparent access to files on remote systems using a variety of protocols (but mostly ssh/sftp).

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#96

Post by krylon »

oblio wrote: post #50
jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me as a daily Emacs user this sounds like another "editor war" rant. I neither find Emacs hard to customize nor do I think it has any substantial limitations other than the ones that are based on my own lack of knowledge. It's always fair to compare it to Vim, but I don't think it makes much sense to compare it in general to VS Code or Atom. One major reason for me to use Emacs and not newer software is that it i…

For some perspective: BBEdit - launched in 1992 (26 years ago), still around. Notepad++ - launched in 2003 (15 years ago), still around. Textmate - launched in 2004 (14 years ago), still around. Sublime - launched in 2008 (10 years ago), still around. Almost all the mainstream editors since 1995 at least are around. They have been marginalized, but they're generally around. Especially cross platform editors and even…

It makes sense, I guess. As programmers, we naturally spend a lot of time with our editors of choice, so we become very attached to them, both emotionally and practically - with Emacs, at least, you accumulate your customizations and extensions over time, and you want all the time and effort you put into learning and customizing to pay off. And with any editor, there's the muscle memory - it's like you're offloading certain tasks to a dedicated piece of hardware, thus freeing your mind to focus on the task at hand. It's a kind of "lock-in", if you will, but it's the kind that enhances your productivity.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#97

Post by jackewiehose »

gkya wrote: post #85
wyuenho wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Ctrl+U-Space do if you don't mind me asking? Is that some magic that you've bound? Mind sharing?

It's C-u in Emacs lingo; it pops the mark ring. Some actions like C- , M- push the position of the point to the mark ring before moving it, and when you pop the mark ring, you jump to the position that was pushed most recently.

> Some actions [...] push the position of the point to the mark ring before moving it

Notably C-s and C-r (incremental search forward/backward). That in combination with C-space is the way to navigate in emacs like a pro :-)

(btw: its C-u C-space. C-u space inserts 4 whitespace)

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#98

Post by dang »

samatman wrote: post #93

Does anyone happen to know why e-lisp iterators stop on a magic `iter-end-of-sequence` instead of on `nil`? That doesn't seem Lispy.

Probably because the sequence might contain nil as an element, and you don't want to short-circuit the iteration when that's the case.

For the same reason, it's the usual thing in Lisps to break on a sentinel value (defaulting to EOF or similar) when reading sexprs from a file. In cases where nil isn't a valid element, you can always specify nil as the sentinel.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#99

Post by [deleted] »

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #32
rusk wrote: post #21

Here's what grinds my gears: That the cursor follows the visible buffer. It would be nice to be able to scroll to another part of a file and then just start typing and be back where I was ... I mean I could understand if this was an efficiency thing to do with scaling to large files due to a kind of a tiling memory model or something, but emacs doesn't even do that! It's not a huge deal I've learned to get used to us…

The cursor stays in the viewport because, deep down, Emacs still thinks that it's outputting to a 1970s-era ASCII terminal. See this https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo... “Internally, Emacs still belives it’s a text program, and we pretend Xt is a text terminal, and we pretend GTK is an Xt toolkit. It’s a fractal of delusion.” For years, James Gosling, author of the first version of Emacs th…

[deleted]

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#100

Post by jackewiehose »

rusk wrote: post #21

Here's what grinds my gears: That the cursor follows the visible buffer. It would be nice to be able to scroll to another part of a file and then just start typing and be back where I was ... I mean I could understand if this was an efficiency thing to do with scaling to large files due to a kind of a tiling memory model or something, but emacs doesn't even do that! It's not a huge deal I've learned to get used to us…

C-x 4 c

(clone-indirect-buffer-other-window) comes in handy

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