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Even more batteries included with Emacs

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Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#91

Post by jr_isidore »

Half of the obscure features mentioned required the author's massaging to make useful to himself. The history of these "solutions looking for a problem" is common, some guy reveling in a rabbit hole of his own creation, the only difference being that guy was old enough to have a gnu.org email address whereas the rest of us publish our dabblings on github as third-party packages.

This reminds me of the fading but ever present power of institutionalism. For probably good reasons we accord higher respect to the Tonight Show than some rando podcaster. But at least in emacs's case, there really is no quality difference between a "batteries included" mode and one off the rack.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#92

Post by volemo »

gpderetta wrote: post #70
glimshe wrote: post #63

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

No, I think that ̶w̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶m̶u̶t̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶e̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶e̶u̶r̶o̶m̶a̶n̶c̶e̶r̶ emacs will merge with claude instead.

Already did: https://github.com/stevemolitor/claude-code.el /j

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#93

Post by kristjansson »

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…

Why does emacs have to be for everyone? Its attraction, to this user at least, is the lifelong process of adaptation and discovery that molds it to the user, and the user to it.

It’s like a pet. I love my dog, I’m happy to tell you about my dog, share pictures, etc. But in sharing, I’m not asking you to take _my_ dog. If you’re inspired to go find your own dog, train it, care for it, you can have a dog too!

But neither taking my dog nor the first-day experience of your own dog will replicate, and asking for a dog with a good OOTB experience IMO misses the point.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#94

Post by simiones »

Matumio wrote: post #90
rk06 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ctrl-C in Emacs is not "terminate program", it is "start of user command", in most modes. Similarly, even in vi/vim, Ctrl-C does something completely different. So this has nothing to do with the terminal whatsoever.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#95

Post by kristjansson »

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

Learning that those shortcuts are arbitrary, application-defined conventions is the first step toward enlightenment.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#96

Post by cvdub »

quertyrecord74 wrote: post #49
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,…

Use borg package. You'll get rock solid emacs. Worth the effort.

Don’t think stuff like borg is necessary now that Emacs has built in support for installing packages from git repos (use-package :vc)

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#97

Post by rgoulter »

glimshe wrote: post #63

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies.

LLMs are powerful at dealing with text. And Emacs is highly extensible and typically text-oriented. Already I see people say that LLMs much Emacs much easier to use (since you can ask an LLM to come up with the elisp for you), but I reckon what Emacs provides ought to be useful the other way.

With Emacs, it's common to see people favour bringing various parts of the system all within Emacs. I'm reminded of that when I've seen how useful it can be to provide API access to logging/code/documentation when asking an LLM to troubleshoot.

With LLMs, there are several uses cases I see which are a natural fit for org-mode, and just imitated in markdown. -- e.g. org mode have TODO items, checklists, tables (including spreadsheet functionality), code blocks, tagging/properties.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#98

Post by iLemming »

royal__ wrote: post #19
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,…

Can you explain more what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem? I just switched from Doom Emacs to Neovim and my impression of Neovim has been much better. (I get that Emacs has a much more powerful backbone, I just realized that I didn't really need that power; I just want a good text editor)

> what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem

Nothing's wrong with it. It's just incomparable categorically. Just like you can't really equate a photo-editor and the web-browser. Sure, there's a way to do photo editing in the browser, still will be weird to compare them.

> Neovim has been much better

In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it, the opposite is hardly possible - you can bolt Lisp interpreter on top of Neovim, but it won't be the same.

> I just want a good text editor

Is that implying Emacs doesn't have "a good one"? You probably just have not discovered some mind-blowing features of the editor. It is hands down the best-known machine ever designed to deal with plain text, nothing even comes close. Indirect buffers alone are such a brilliant idea, I have zero clue how people ever exposed to that power would willingly abandon it. I get it though, building a text-manipulating theater orchestrated by Lisp is not for everyone. Unfortunately, most newcomers get attracted to Emacs hearing "how powerful an editor it is", without ever learning what exactly makes it as such.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#99

Post by JadeNB »

iLemming wrote: post #98
royal__ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem? I just switched from Doom Emacs to Neovim and my impression of Neovim has been much better. (I get that Emacs has a much more powerful backbone, I just realized that I didn't really need that power; I just want a good text editor)

> what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem Nothing's wrong with it. It's just incomparable categorically. Just like you can't really equate a photo-editor and the web-browser. Sure, there's a way to do photo editing in the browser, still will be weird to compare them. > Neovim has been much better In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it,…

> In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it, the opposite is hardly possible - you can bolt Lisp interpreter on top of Neovim, but it won't be the same.

Unless this is specifically what you want to do with Neovim, in which case you'll probably just use Emacs anyway, Neovim's inability to do this is probably not a strike against it. As royal__ says (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537120), they are just interested in a good text editor, not in raw computational power.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#100

Post by db48x »

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.

Technically Kill and Yank came from TECO, which is an entirely different visual editor that predates Emacs.
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