[HN Gopher] Toward a "modern" Emacs
___________________________________________________________________
Toward a "modern" Emacs
Author : lukastyrychtr
Score : 92 points
Date : 2020-09-25 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| sinbad_sinclait wrote:
| Coming from the standpoint of a new emacs user/young programmer I
| found that my problem with base emacs is getting to a minimal
| viable setup just took to much time.
|
| It wasn't until I learned about spacemacs that I gave emacs
| another try and I haven't gone back since.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Though it's made great improvements in recent years, GNU Emacs,
| the vanilla package, is more of an unrefined platform than a more
| finalized product that competitors like VSCode are.
|
| SpaceEmacs is closer to such a refined product, though it's aimed
| at Vim users (with the 'evil' Vim-support package being front and
| foremost). I am not currently aware of a kind of "best-of-emacs"
| distribution that focuses on putting Emacs' strengths in their
| best light (likely at the cost of dropping some UI backwards-
| compatibility).
|
| As an aside, the article [1] by Dan Coliascione (@quotemstr) from
| a few years ago about the effort required to work with Emacs'
| compatibility layers is insightful and hilarious. "GNU Emacs is
| an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine
| emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a
| 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype."
|
| I honestly don't expect vanilla GNU Emacs to modernize its UI,
| because of its incredible legacy baggage. But I do look forward
| to new "distributions" that do so!
|
| https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo...
| dragandj wrote:
| https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Thanks! I had forgotten about Emacs Prelude.
| jug wrote:
| I'm by no means an expert on this subject but isn't this a bit
| like xemacs? More mouse-driven. Friendlier menus. Sure, rough by
| modern standards but why not just contribute to that project? I
| felt it was a pragmatic approach that kept the emacs patterns and
| usage intact. If you VS Codeify Emacs, is it then even a modern
| Emacs?
|
| Edit: OK maybe xemacs is no longer actively developed, but
| sxemacs then.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > There was some discussion of adopting the Solarized color
| palette in particular. As Dmitry Gutov pointed out, though,
| Solarized makes for a rather low-contrast experience
|
| This is a strange complaint - it's tautological. The whole point
| of Solarized is to reduce the contrast.[1] It's kind of like
| saying having a dark background is bad, because it is dark.
|
| For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast is
| good. When I introduced it to a coworker, he didn't want to
| switch to it because of the low contrast. After a week of using
| it, he can't imagine going back to high contrast.
|
| As for the rest, while I do agree with some points, I will say:
| If you make Emacs more like VS Code, then people will have even
| fewer reasons to use Emacs.
|
| [1] https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/
| Finnucane wrote:
| It's an accessibility issue. Low contrast sucks for people with
| vision issues. dark mode can be kinda sucky too. Not that the
| default modes of most editors are much better. I'm color blind
| and have never really found a totally satisfactory scheme.
| SippinLean wrote:
| The point isn't to reduce the contrast, it's to use contrast
| based on _hue_ and less on _value_.
|
| Accessibility is the real concern. Solarized fails many of the
| checks for accessible text under standards such as WCAG 2.0.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The point isn't to reduce the contrast, it's to use
| contrast based on hue instead of value.
|
| It's not one or the other. It's both:
|
| > Solarized reduces brightness contrast but, unlike many low
| contrast colorschemes, retains contrasting hues
| mrob wrote:
| Hue contrast is objectively worse than brightness contrast
| because human cone cells are lower resolution than rod
| cells. This is the reason chroma subsampling is used in
| lossy video/image compression.
| wrycoder wrote:
| To each his own - there are many choices, easily installed:
|
| https://emacsthemes.com/
| da39a3ee wrote:
| > For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast
| is good.
|
| I stare at a computer all day and I hate low contrast themes,
| including solarized.
|
| I am not claiming my view applies to everyone, so please, could
| you stop doing that. It is subjective: there is nothing
| inherently superior about solarized, even for people who stare
| at screens all day.
|
| And it is not just an accessibility issue. It is a subjectivity
| issue.
| auganov wrote:
| There is surprisingly little research on this.
|
| Personally I find that contrast between different themes,
| that is when switching from say one website to another, is
| the most eye strain inducing. Going from reading black on
| white to white on black or vice versa just hurts.
|
| I keep everything black/dark on white themed since that's how
| most of the world works. I suspect many who use certain
| themes experience eye strain when viewing normal stuff and
| falsely assume it proves the efficacy of their theme.
| robocat wrote:
| I love this: "Or, as Richard Stallman put it": 'It is unfortunate
| that the people who implemented the newer editors chose
| incompatibility with Emacs.'
|
| It is interesting to see a comment that is 100% at odds with the
| brutal evolution of ideas that occurs in a good ecology of
| software.
|
| If the same mindset applies to the rest of emacs then they really
| stand no chance or real progress. (edit: the rest of emacs, and
| not just key bindings which the RMS quote I have removed from
| context applies to).
| Finnucane wrote:
| I suppose rms can't understand why anybody would think anything
| could be better than what he chose to do 40-something years
| ago.
| beagle3 wrote:
| A lot of things are different without being better.
|
| Before ctrl-x/Ctrl-v became the standard for Cut/paste, it
| was Ctrl-del/Ctrl-insert in many dos and early Windows
| editors - which makes a lot more mnemonic sense.
|
| It's better to standardize on something, but that something
| isn't necessarily better and is often worse.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Those might make more sense, but even if my MacBook had
| Insert & Del keys, I doubt I could Ctrl- them with one
| hand.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| C-x and C-c make some sense as cut and copy. But C-v, C-z,
| C-y as paste, undo, and redo just make little sense. The
| first two make sense for their proximity to x and c in the
| QWERTY layout. y only makes sense if it happened to be
| unassigned.
|
| Keyboard shortcuts will always fall into one of two
| categories: That makes perfect sense (usually mapping to a
| mnemonic like C-a for "select all"); That's totally
| arbitrary (C-y). It makes sense (and cua-mode offers it) to
| offer the opportunity to rebind the keys to the mainstream
| arbitrarily selected shortcuts, but it also makes sense to
| keep what's been used by emacs users for 40 years since
| that's what they're used to at this point (oh hell, I've
| been using it for 20 years, time has flown).
| mjw1007 wrote:
| A third category is those chosen for their physical
| position.
| robocat wrote:
| Mnemonic keyboard shortcuts must be a bastard to learn if
| you don't speak English.
|
| And shortcuts based on finger distance must suck for
| anyone using a non-qwerty keyboard (especially a non-
| latin character based language!).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Indeed. I use the Dvorak layout (a choice I made twenty
| years ago and have stuck with since my typing speed did
| improve, by virtue of finally learning to touch type
| properly), and many shortcuts make no sense. On the other
| hand, I actually found emacs much more comfortable to
| use.
| liability wrote:
| The P and V operations on semaphores are from Dutch. I
| find this difficult, _" The V kind of looks like a down
| arrow.. but wait no that's increment. The P could mean
| plus.. wait no that's decrement..."_
| Otek wrote:
| Oh look. It's THIS thread again
| danShumway wrote:
| Do the defaults in Emacs matter, at all? Doom Emacs, Spacemacs,
| and dozens of other default configs already exist. I've been
| using Emacs for years, I never learned the default keybindings. I
| used Evil mode right from the start.
|
| I just don't see this as a real problem.
|
| A small (incomplete) list of real problems:
|
| - No timeline on Wayland support, Wayland will likely require
| substantial work and refactoring.
|
| - Performance issues on long lines of text.
|
| - Architectural/technical debt.
|
| - etc...
|
| Emacs is, fundamentally, a power-user editor. There are problems
| to solve, but "I had to change the default fonts" isn't one of
| them. Why would you use Emacs in the first place if you weren't
| interested in changing the default fonts? Maybe I'm out of touch,
| but I would never recommend a new Emacs user to just download
| Emacs directly. I assume they're starting with someone else's
| config.
|
| Emacs fills a specific niche that other text editors today still
| aren't satisfying, and it should continue to fill that niche.
| What other text editor can I use as a window manager?
|
| I haven't checked in a while, but I think Spacemacs solves
| literally every single problem that they're talking about,
| including prompting users whether they'd like to enable CUA mode
| by default. But Spacemacs can't solve the Wayland problem.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| That was touched on in the article:
|
| > Some of the ideas found in these distributions may well merit
| inclusion in Emacs, but that does not happen. Emacs maintainer
| Eli Zaretskii complained that the creators of these
| distributions do not contribute their work back.
|
| If the changes aren't being contributed back, any gain from
| them is lost for users of the default system. Creating an
| unnecessary fork within the user base, especially where the
| changes could be enabled via a configuration change (start with
| default, but prompt at first run to go to Doom Emacs or
| Spacemacs).
| BeetleB wrote:
| The article also touched on why this is the case: Not
| everyone wants to assign copyright to the FSF.
| kosolam wrote:
| give up on this pile of nak-nak-nak. It's all too held up by a
| small bunch of blind fanatics or such. Just use one of the other
| normal editors. Com'on man, you gotta be blind to not see how
| idiotic the situation is. And I'll tell you another thing, these
| are just fairy tales, all the stories about emacs being great are
| not delivered in a balanced way. The pain to learn and use all
| these terrible extensions for basic functionalities is enormous.
| The amount of stuff that you have to ingest and then the mental
| space that this takes. It's just not worth it.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Changing the default UI is a non-problem: new users will like it,
| old-timers will have an easy time reverting it, or maybe their
| custom config will undo it right away, depending how it is
| implemented. Source: I am actually a Vim user, which under
| Windows comes with some Windows shortcuts by default. I had no
| problem undoing it.
|
| The idea of copying current UI trends (dark theme, burger menu)
| however made me think of that quote saying that the best way to
| anticipate the future is to invent it.
|
| By imitating others you are not modern, you already are behind.
|
| Doing the same thing but only slightly better won't attract much
| users - Emacs should have learned that from its victories against
| its clones. Doing something different for the sake of being
| different won't attract much users either. The challenge - and
| the opportunity - is to do things differently in order to make
| something significantly better ( _vim_ cough _vim_ ).
| da39a3ee wrote:
| We should stop making the tutorial prominent and stop worshipping
| it. I've used Emacs for 20 years and write emacs-lisp packages
| and I don't use all those weird keybindings for moving around the
| buffer. That's what the arrow keys are for! There's an
| international aspect to this: those who went to school in the USA
| typically touch-type; but in some other countries one does not
| learn to touch type unless one is aiming to become what used to
| be called a secretary.
| rhabarba wrote:
| Being easy to use by newbies has killed too many great ideas
| already.
| auganov wrote:
| The biggest threat to Emacs is a number of hard to fix
| performance issues. Like rendering of very long lines. Luckily
| for Emacs other editors have their own performance issues, but
| their architectures might make them more fixable.
|
| The other issue is the display model. Rendering using browser
| technologies enables other editors to do things Emacs just can't.
|
| I'm sure some gimmicks might bring in more users. But implicit in
| this kind of thinking is that Emacs is perfect as it is and with
| right marketing it will explode. I sincerely doubt this. The
| biggest problems are pretty fundamental.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Just today I edited a file which basically consisted out of a
| line with almost 2 million characters, my emacs was basically
| unresponsive for a longer time. This amount of data shouldn't
| slow down a modern machine that badly.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product's life where the
| geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to new
| expected behavior, thus driving away the newbies. Eventually the
| product dwindles to just supporting the few remaining geezers
| left.
|
| I'm not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color
| palette changes. But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention
| select-all, save, close window, undo, etc.) are not a fad. They
| have been the standard in everything _except_ for Emacs for over
| THIRTY FIVE YEARS. They were standard when Ronald Reagan was
| president.
|
| Pop-up menus on right-button-click have been standard for almost
| as long, dating to X11 and NeXTSTEP (which is where OS X got
| them).
|
| And the most awful trend is in preventing clear improvements in
| modes and functionality from coming to the forefront simply
| because geezers are not used to them. The argument seems to be
| that making all these kinds of things standard would be hard on
| the geezers. This is nonsense. Unlike the newbies, the geezers
| _know how to turn this stuff off_.
|
| The geezers prevent this because Emacs is their ecosystem. But
| for everyone else, Emacs is a small part of a much larger
| ecosystem (MacOS, Linux, Windows) with which it is increasingly
| incompatible and archaic. This is myopia pure and simple.
| donio wrote:
| Emacs is in that blissful state where it's resisting
| sacrificing its core user base by trying to cater to people who
| are not going to use it anyway.
|
| As a long term user I am very happy with the direction of Emacs
| development over the past few years. Emacs is pretty much the
| only piece of modern software where I don't have worry about
| losing functionality when I upgrade to a new version. Each new
| version is better than the old one.
| sebow wrote:
| I'm not even a "geezer" of which you speak for but the fact
| that emacs does not have the standard copy-paste, cut, save,
| etc key-bindings by default is what makes it so powerful. The
| reason the community is the way it is is presumably because the
| learning curve makes the people who give up easily left out.
| The only fact I personally "hate" emacs is only that i don't
| have the time to learn lisp & customize the editor to the full
| extent myself, but that's not really a strong argument against
| emacs.(As resources about customizing emacs are not that hard
| to find, and the lisp/emacs-lisp community is not 'harsh')
|
| Just because everyone has some "standard"-deemed features does
| not mean emacs should have it aswell.Are you complaining about
| these things with vim aswell? A lot of people use emacs because
| of performance reasons, customization opportunities and more or
| less because emacs is de facto almost an operating system.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Emacs has been at that stage for well over a decade, arguably
| two. What we're seeing now is the slow process of finally
| muddling their way out.
| [deleted]
| liability wrote:
| As an Emacs newbie (less than one year of usage) I could not
| disagree more. I disagree with basically everything you just
| said. If somebody wants notepad++, they should just use that
| instead of trying to turn Emacs into something it never was.
|
| As an olive branch: Perhaps Emacs could prompt the user on
| first run what sort of control scheme they want. Emacs
| standard, Evil mode, or some notepad clone could be modes that
| ship with Emacs by default (evil already does.)
|
| (I chose evil, because I came from vim. Maybe this is why Emacs
| was so easy for me to pick up. But by the same token, Vim is
| arcane compared to Notepad style editors but is quite popular,
| so I outright reject the hypothesis that Emacs has lower
| numbers because it's arcane. Rather, I think it has a
| marketting ''problem'' relative to Vim.)
| mplanchard wrote:
| Yeah honestly I think a config "wizard" when you start up to
| get some basic standard stuff ready to go, like package
| installs, themes, evil/CUA/traditional keybindings, LSP
| stuff, some major modes, etc. would go a long way towards
| making it less intimidating and more productive out of the
| gate.
|
| Also some kind of popup help for keybindings like you get
| with the Doom/Spacemacs leader key would I think help a lot.
|
| I certainly don't think that changing the color scheme or
| other "chrome" improvements are going to make any meaningful
| difference, and honestly the discussion in the article
| sounded kind of condescending, assuming that the only reason
| people might find emacs difficult to get started with is
| because it doesn't have cat videos or a dark color scheme.
| [deleted]
| kzemek wrote:
| > But by the same token, Vim is arcane compared to Notepad
| style editors but is quite popular, so I outright reject the
| hypothesis that Emacs has lower numbers because it's arcane
|
| vim might be arcane compared to Notepad, but I've been
| successfully using vim as an editor of choice in ssh pretty
| much throughout the whole uni without knowing more than :w
| and :q (at which point it basically _was_ a notepad). I was
| ever completely lost in Emacs though, with its nested C-x,
| M-x seemingly without rhyme or reason. I wouldn 't "outright"
| reject that hypothesis without more scrutiny.
|
| Anecdotally, I've been an Emacs (Spacemacs) user for a few
| years after that, and I never got used to all the commands I
| would use on a daily - but not hourly - basis, having to
| always look those up. But, as one of the other top-level
| posts said, what made me switch in the end were the language
| servers.
| liability wrote:
| Vim drops noobs straight into normal mode, meaning the
| moment they start trying to type they get confused. I know
| that's what happened to me. The arcane nature of Emacs
| doesn't make itself apparent nearly so fast.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Only if it isn't invoked as "evim", "eview", "vim -y", or
| "view -y".
| liability wrote:
| True, though a noob wouldn't know how to invoke it like
| that.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product's life where
| the geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to
| new expected behavior
|
| It doesn't look like your an Emacs user. As another commenter
| pointed out (as did the article indirectly), Emacs has more
| users than ever. It's definitely growing - not dwindling. As an
| Emacs user, the last decade has shown an immense growth in
| capabilities via MELPA packages. The number of sites with tips
| on improving Emacs flows has also gone up exponentially.
|
| Not only is it not dying, it's thriving.
|
| > They were standard when Ronald Reagan was president.
|
| For a whole other definition of standard. A lot of the popular
| DOS applications from Reagan/Bush's time did not use these
| keybindings. Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins were the norm. Ctrl-C for
| quitting was the norm.
|
| (I'm not against CUA bindings by default - merely pointing out
| a misconception you have).
|
| > But for everyone else, Emacs is a small part of a much larger
| ecosystem (MacOS, Linux, Windows) with which it is increasingly
| incompatible and archaic.
|
| Actually, Emacs is pretty good at interacting with the wider
| ecosystems. It can communicate and interact with other
| processes, etc. I can, for example, link to a message in MS
| Outlook and have it open up in my TODO list in Emacs.
| mi_lk wrote:
| > Emacs has more users than ever. It's definitely growing -
| not dwindling.
|
| Growing in terms of the number of users, dwindling in terms
| of the share among editors
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Market share shouldn't matter.
|
| The numbers that do matter: Are the number of contributors
| increasing, decreasing, or stable? Are the number of users
| increasing, decreasing, or stable? Is the rate of increase
| (if increasing) for either of these itself increasing,
| decreasing, or stable?
|
| As long as contributors and users are both increasing,
| you're probably ok. As long as the rates of increase are at
| least stable, you're ok.
|
| It's not like this is a life or death struggle, emacs will
| probably outlive us all.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Historical note: CUA didn't come along until 1987. In 1985,
| the Lisa had been out for two years, and CUA was that far
| into the future, as indeed were Windows 2.0 and OS/2 1.0.
|
| It's true that the claim that the Mac/Lisa key chords were
| the standard 35 years ago is quite wrong. But it's false to
| claim that there was another standard instead.
| rleigh wrote:
| I don't really buy the argument I'm afraid.
|
| I've been an Emacs user for over 20 years. I like it, and
| find it productive. But it's stuck in a rut, in a very
| similar manner to Perl 5. If that isn't addressed, it will
| fade into the background. I'd argue that's already happened.
| None of my coworkers in any of the jobs I've worked in have
| used it, and that includes academia and various industries.
| It seems to be restricted to the uber-nerds who find out
| about it and go through the pain of learning how to drive it
| effectively. I used to use it for everything, from GNUS to
| org-mode, but my usage is declining.
|
| The keybindings need to be fixed. CUA has been the norm for
| what, 35 years at this point. C-y is paste. C-z minimises the
| window (WTF!) C-_ is undo. It's not just nonstandard and
| counterintutive, it's _unnecessarily_ nonstandard and
| counterintuitive. They aren 't more efficient, they aren't
| more effective. It's a barrier to adoption which doesn't need
| to be there. It has a certain familiarity for us long-time
| users, but that's about it. Every other application uses
| something based on CUA, so it's not like we couldn't switch
| over.
|
| While I certainly wouldn't want a "GNOME 3" type of makeover,
| where all the actual userbase are cast aside to be replaced
| by a hypothetical potential userbase which doesn't actually
| exist, I do think it's well worth a look at present-day
| alternatives and to make sure it doesn't fall behind. Because
| I think it actually has fallen behind, and it needs to get
| its act together to retain its relevance.
|
| Recently I got a personal JetBrains subscription and started
| using CLion. While I still miss many little small features,
| there are quite a number of big features which Emacs doesn't
| attempt to do, and so the small annoyances are worth it for
| those large benefits. Emacs needs to be able to do better
| than this to not only keep up, but to do better than its
| competitors.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I said:
|
| > (I'm not against CUA bindings by default - merely
| pointing out a misconception you have).
|
| And you respond with:
|
| > I don't really buy the argument I'm afraid.
|
| And then you write a whole comment about how CUA is better.
|
| Which argument did I make that you don't buy? Why is this a
| reply to my comment?
|
| > I do think it's well worth a look at present-day
| alternatives and to make sure it doesn't fall behind.
|
| In all my jobs that used IDEs (including JetBrains's
| excellent stuff), I used both the IDE and Emacs - the
| latter for text editing, etc. The former for all the
| goodies it brings (navigation, etc). There's no law saying
| it has to be one or the other. IDEs becoming very popular
| in no way threatens Emacs.
|
| > Because I think it actually has fallen behind, and it
| needs to get its act together to retain its relevance.
|
| I could really easily write a whole article on all the
| features Emacs has that many more popular editors don't
| have, and then end the article with "Those other editors
| are falling behind."
|
| We have to clearly delineate what "falling behind" means,
| and whether it is relevant. VS Code gaining in popularity
| doesn't necessarily impact Emacs. In my career I've met an
| order of magnitude more Vim users, and Emacs is not the
| worse because of it. Emacs's capabilities have grown much
| faster than Vim's has, and Emacs has a lot more users than
| it used to. Furthermore, most Vim users I've encountered at
| work are not fairly advanced users: They just need
| something to edit files with. Having them switch to Emacs
| will neither help them nor the Emacs community.
|
| I don't mind some of the proposed changes (nicer defaults,
| revamping the tutorial, etc). But I really don't want a
| mindless goal of increasing user counts. More users will
| not make Emacs gain more capabilities. Passionate users
| will.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > It doesn't look like your an Emacs user.
|
| I have been an avid Emacs user since, I think, 1988.
|
| > A lot of the popular DOS applications
|
| Bzzt. 35 years ago the standard was Windows and MacOS. Soon
| thereafter NeXTSTEP and nearly all X11 apps adapted the same.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| While Windows technically existed in '85, no one
| statistically was using it yet. Other's copied the CUA
| interface into the late 80s however.
| throwaway2938a wrote:
| Don't know what platform you are on, but on Mac with the GUI
| version, standard cut-copy-paste keybindings all work, as well
| as select-all, save, close window (Cmd + w), undo.
|
| Obviously they don't work in terminals.
| FandangoRanger wrote:
| Is it really necessary to ascribe some negative quality of
| ageism to people who created and use software and then
| castigate them for it? Do you work for PeopleSoft? Makes your
| argument seem weak and flimsy, in fact arguments like yours can
| be dismissed out of hand.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I am one of those geezers.
| FandangoRanger wrote:
| Doesn't pass the switch test.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I've developed software since the early 1980s. I've used
| Emacs continuously since the late 1980s. Perhaps you
| should respond to the substance of a posting rather than
| complaining that a geezer used the term geezer to
| describe people like himself.
|
| __EDIT __You created your account two days ago and you
| 're already accusing people of ageism? Get off my lawn.
| mrob wrote:
| Here's a new user perspective on Emacs (based on memory; I
| actually have more experience than this):
|
| I open emacs-gtk. A document is already loaded. I try to type
| something, and every letter I type gives the unhelpful error
| message "[letter] is undefined". I guess this means I need to
| create a new document first. I open the File menu, and see "Visit
| New File...". "Visit" sounds weird, and the "..." is suspicious,
| but at least it has "New" in it, so I pick that. It opens a file
| picker, so "Visit New File..." must be Emacs slang for "Open...",
| and there is apparently no "New" functionality in the File menu.
| There's also an "Open File..." menu item too for some mysterious
| reason, but that's obviously not what I want, so I ignore it.
|
| I check the Help menu. This has 19 (!) top level options, none of
| which are obviously correct, and one of which is "Emacs
| Psychotherapist". I click that one out of curiosity. It replaces
| the starting document without warning and there's no obvious way
| to get it back. I'm presented with more Emacs slang. I assume
| "RET" means Enter, and that Psychotherapist must be a Microsoft
| Clippy clone.
|
| I type "new document", hoping it will search the documentation. I
| immediately notice the scroll bar flickering. This draws my
| attention to the incorrect size of the drag handle. I click the
| empty space below the drag handle, which moves the drag handle
| but doesn't actually affect the text. I drag the drag handle back
| up, which makes the text glitch out for a moment, but otherwise
| does nothing.
|
| I press "RET" twice, and get "Why do you say new document?" I
| then realize that it's actually an Eliza clone not a Clippy
| clone, and I've wasted my time. I give up on trying to create a
| new file, and just Open an existing one. I immediately notice the
| cursor is an ugly inverse video cursor instead of a normal thin
| line cursor. I press and hold the down arrow key, and notice that
| scrolling moves in big jumps instead of line-by-line. It also
| forcibly moves the cursor. It seems the cursor lives in screen
| space like it's still the 1970s and I'm using a hardware
| terminal. There is no obvious way to keep its position in the
| document while you navigate somewhere else. Despite this, Page Up
| cannot move the cursor to the beginning of the document like it
| should. Page Down works though.
|
| I assume that, like every modern text editor, there's a "Find in
| This Document..." feature bound to Control-F for easy navigation.
| There's not: Control-F is bound to right arrow. Presumably this
| made sense 40 years ago. There is not even any Find functionality
| in the Edit menu, which you'd think would be core functionality
| for any text editor.
|
| In the course of this experimentation, I notice that merely
| moving the mouse cursor over the scroll bar is enough to make it
| flicker. I hold the scroll down button with the mouse. It
| actually does scroll, but extremely slowly, averaging about one
| line per second. The timing is inconsistent, and the CPU usage is
| strangely high.
|
| I type something, and notice that there is no visual indication
| that the document now contains unsaved changes, such an asterisk
| in the title bar, or a dot on the Save icon. I press Control-S to
| save, which doesn't save, and instead triggers the Find function
| I was looking for. I decide that "Modern Emacs" is a hopeless
| quest and give up in favor of something written this century.
| catern wrote:
| Responding in your same spirit: Did you notice where it said
| "Tutorial" in the starting document you ignored, or where it
| said "Tutorial" in the help menu you ignored?
| mrob wrote:
| Most likely yes. But the only reason I tried Emacs in the
| first place was because I knew it could do complicated
| things. I expected "Tutorial" to be the place to get started
| with those complicated things. It didn't occur to me that a
| tutorial would be necessary for such seemingly simple
| operations.
|
| I did later go on to read tutorials, and I put many hours
| into customizing my .emacs file, but I always felt like I was
| fighting the system. Emacs is designed for hardware that's
| now museum pieces, and those design decisions have pervasive
| effects that make it impossible to configure Emacs to act
| like modern software.
| FandangoRanger wrote:
| I'm crying.
| rcconf wrote:
| After using Emacs for 10+ years, I've switched to VSCode for a
| really simple reason: fuzzy matching a file in a project. I've
| tried so many different plugins and hacks to get it to work, but
| it never did quite work. Searching for a filename either matches
| the wrong file, or new files that were freshly added are no
| longer there.
| Ixiaus wrote:
| Projectile + Helm works extremely well for me, did you try
| those modes?
| gen220 wrote:
| I'm a vim user, but I imagine there's a similar way to do this
| in emacs...
|
| The secret is piping fd into fzf and opening the selected value
| from fzf. You can probably write a 2-liner in elisp that shells
| out.
|
| In my experience, this pipeline provides a faster and better
| matching experience than any IDE.
|
| Once I got this working, I never went back to VS Code. :)
| tgbugs wrote:
| Glad to see that other observers have keyed in on the
| discoverability aspect. I tried to highlight it in [1].
| Unfortunately I haven't been able to hop back into the discussion
| there, and things have been moving at a fantastic pace.
|
| The longer I have been working to develop processes and systems,
| the more I have come to appreciate defaults that do not change.
| It is interesting to see some of the new *coin and blockchain
| folks in their dark forest threads worrying about what happens if
| the interpreter changes its semantics and lamenting that
| contracts are meaningless if the interpreter can change. That is
| what standards are for, and that is what the "backwards geezers"
| are trying to do for Emacs since it doesn't have a standard, only
| social norms. I'm not too too worried though, since there are
| many sensible people in the community who understand why changing
| defaults can destroy trust and waste the time of millions of
| people. I am also not worried because there are many creative
| solutions to the problem of how to attract and maintain new users
| in a way that they can come to appreciate the benefits of
| stability.
|
| 1. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
| devel/2020-09/msg00...
| im3w1l wrote:
| Emacs' very-hard-to-fix issue is that it's based on a grid of
| characters. This means it will never be able to do many nice IDE
| things.
| FandangoRanger wrote:
| Emacs will never be a GUI-only editor, it was designed for a
| terminal and that is still a use case that many people take
| advantage of.
|
| Don't worry though - if you don't like Emacs you can use any of
| a number of other editors.
| efficax wrote:
| What can you not do with a grid of characters exactly?
| im3w1l wrote:
| Nicely formatted math. Gui designers. Diagrams.
|
| And personally I find tabs is the most efficient design for
| switching between files.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Nicely formatted math.
|
| Can you elaborate? With a keystroke, it renders a LaTeX
| formula inline.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Oh nice! I guess it's less limited than I thought!
| FandangoRanger wrote:
| I think we're seeing a culture clash between people who
| come from a computing background where the terminal was
| either not used at all, or was a second class citizen, and
| people who come from a background where a terminal is the
| main way to interact with the system and the GUI is
| relegated to mostly showing terminals and doing the GUI-
| oriented tasks that can't be easily accomplished in the
| terminal, like pixel-image editing and drawing.
| mrob wrote:
| Edit natural language documents without wasting about 1/4
| of your screen width on useless column alignment
| information.
| gandalfgeek wrote:
| Seems like we should treat "Emacs" more as a platform than an
| editor. You then take that platform and build your own editor
| (and perhaps many other things!) on top of it. E.g. Doom,
| Spacemacs.
| mapgrep wrote:
| I don't know. I read the whole article and it seems the
| suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more "modern" by
| defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing
| right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And
| the author of the article would like the development process to
| be more "modern."
|
| Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if
| not the most successful. It is widely used for a staggering array
| of tasks.
|
| It is over _40 years old_.
|
| When I see a highly successful 40+ year old piece of software, my
| first instinct isn't to ask what the people behind it can learn
| from me but what I can learn from them.
|
| I'm not saying the editor can not be improved. But I think the
| bar is much higher than this. It's not an insult to say something
| like emacs is not "modern." Of course it's not. And changing the
| colors? The shortcuts that have worked for decades? Please.
|
| If someone thinks emacs will be more successful with these
| cosmetic changes they are welcome to fork it since this is one of
| the earliest open source programs. Code talks, a bunch of people
| opining on a mailing list is pretty worthless in comparison.
| wtetzner wrote:
| You don't even need to fork it. Just have write a .emacs file
| that new users can copy to their home directory that sets all
| of that stuff up.
| neltnerb wrote:
| I think I still have the .emacs file I inherited from an
| upperclassman. It had better syntax highlighting than what
| was built in at the time =)
| TylerE wrote:
| See, this is what I _hate_ about emacs.
|
| It feels like a spring loaded bundle of magic that will
| explode if I look at it wrong, and, having exploded, I will
| never ever ever get it put back the way it was.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| It's over 40 years old but it has fewer and fewer users younger
| than that. VS code is rapidly taking over it's niche and
| without modernization, of many kinds, emacs will die out in a
| generation.
| bJGVygG7MQVF8c wrote:
| In a generation, vim and emacs will still be around with
| their minuscule but loyal user bases of tinkerers and VS code
| will have long been replaced by something newer and flashier.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I've used Emacs for 33 of those 40+ years, and I agree with
| that until the word "without".
|
| You don't mean "modernization". You mean "without it
| changing". And the answer is yes, it will die out.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| What are some of the changes you would want to see?
| tsuujin wrote:
| I think adopting cua-mode as the default would go a long
| way towards reducing the initial friction for new users.
|
| Most of the time when I try to get people to adopt emacs,
| they abandon it because it feels like a huge task to
| relearn basic text manipulation. They never get to
| actually see what makes emacs good because they don't
| feel compelled to get past the initial bump.
| konjin wrote:
| Proper multithreading/tasking.
| konjin wrote:
| When you've been warned the world will end if ~notepad~ VS
| code will take over for 50 years you tend to become blase
| about the whole thing.
|
| Emacs has a steep learning curve and that's good. You need a
| moat to keep the barbarians from destroying your kingdom.
| Miraste wrote:
| > It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks.
|
| Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and
| industry experience I've never seen anyone use emacs for
| anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few
| times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions
| online.
|
| Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs
| use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but
| has stayed close to that number for years.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Meanwhile, I'm always amazed how, on HN threads about Emacs,
| people talk about preferring the Vi family of editors. When I
| installed Linux on my computer two decades ago and had to
| learn *nix, my own (totally subjective) impression was that
| the Vi family was regarded as clunky and half-obsolete, about
| as much of a pain as editing in ed. As I began to contribute
| to the Free Software community, most of the other people I
| interacted with seemed to use Emacs. So, to find out that Vi
| is still used and loved in 2020 has been a shock.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| I don't think many people are using Vi. Its more likely
| they are using vim or neovim, which are both far from
| clunky.
| spudlyo wrote:
| I think the thing about Vi and Vim that has the most value
| in 2020 is not the software itself, but rather the
| keyboard-centric composable modal editing system that they
| popularized.
|
| Some of the growth that Emacs has enjoyed over the past
| several years is from folks who want the Vim style modal
| editing in an editor as customizable and extensible as
| Emacs. Emacs "distributions" such as Doom and Spacemacs
| cater to these folks.
| pritovido wrote:
| When I entered a technical University in Spain, all the
| masters(teachers that have done incredible things on their
| lives) used either Vim or Emacs.
|
| Most "normal" people just used other "more visual" editors.
|
| As I learned from the masters I started using more and more
| both vim for unix tasks and programming and emacs for lisp.
| Now I use 65%vim, 30% emacs, 5% other editors.
|
| Both of those editors are extremely powerful. But you need
| to know how to use them. It is not painful for the master
| to use them, in fact it is automatic and instantaneous and
| faster than any other editor, a thought becomes an action
| without conscious intervention, like you thing in playing
| Do minor in an instrument and your fingers do it
| automatically, you want to erase a line or replace a word,
| you think on it, is done.
|
| They are like musical instruments. You could have the best
| piano or violin in the world, if a mediocre player plays
| them, you get bad sound.
|
| Most people would be better served with a simple electronic
| piano or a tablet with lights that point to the next notes
| of the song, and auto correct them when they play a bad
| note.
| liability wrote:
| Nov.el is my favorite ebook reader.
| jrimbault wrote:
| Just to add links to the SO surveys mentionned here :
|
| - 2019: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#develo
| pment-e...
|
| - 2018: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#develo
| pment-e...
|
| - 2017: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#techno
| logy-_-...
|
| - 2016:
| https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#technology-
| de...
|
| - 2015: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015#tech-
| editor
|
| What's really amazing is vscode just appearing out of nowhere
| (7% in 2016, 35% in 2018). Blindsiding everyone. Cross
| platform, excellent to good enough UI/UX (very much inspired
| by Sublime Text but free), easily extensible in a widely
| available (and widely taught) language. For better or for
| worse.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| The hypothesis that Emacs is used for many things is
| consistent with the hypothesis that Emacs usage is rare. This
| is because many humans have existed over the years, so a
| staggering array of tasks can be addressed in even a small
| fraction of those person-years.
| gnulinux wrote:
| Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many startups
| in the US and _almost_ everyone uses emacs. Last few years,
| VSCode has been getting popular though. I had a similar
| experience when I was a student in UC Berkeley, although it
| seems like there were more vim users in school than in
| industry. Anyway, pretty much all my current coworkers use
| Emacs and I work in Boston, MA.
|
| Personally: I cannot imagine programming without emacs, to me
| programming is so strongly associated with emacs...
|
| Of course, I also understand that it's all personal
| preference.
| sokoloff wrote:
| From your username and Boston's proximity to MIT and FSF,
| it's possible that your experience isn't totally
| representative. :)
|
| Mine isn't either and I find it hard to imagine owning a
| computer (or using git beyond the very basic operations)
| without having access to emacs, but it does seem likely
| that coworkers won't have completely independent text
| editor preferences. I would expect to see more VS and
| VSCode in the Redmond, WA area, even at places that aren't
| Microsoft.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5%
| usage, but has stayed close to that number for years.
|
| It is possible that "Stack Overflow surveys" select for
| programmers who tend not to use Emacs. For example, I use
| Emacs regularly and know what Stack Overflow is, but have
| never taken one of these surveys.
|
| I'm not even sure _how_ they survey developers. Ask on some
| crufty mailing list and you probably will get a completely
| different distribution from the one they showed.
| oblio wrote:
| They probably just send a newsletter to StackOverflow users
| :-)
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| Emacs users are probably more likely to unsubscribe to
| newsletters that they did not sign up for :)
|
| (On a side rant, I really dislike how a lot of websites
| have normalized "create an account on a website" to mean
| "Sign up for receiving a plethora of emails about
| everything the website and its creators are up to these
| days")
| oblio wrote:
| I've personally known 2 Emacs users in my ~15 years in the
| industry. I've worked in Europe for various startups and a
| bunch of corporations. Both of them used it as a sort of
| hobby/side editor, their main money maker was an IDE (VS,
| IntelliJ).
|
| I've probably worked with 500 developers, if not more.
|
| My personal impression is that Emacs is like the Yeti of
| programming editors. Everybody has heard about it, few claim
| to have seen it and even fewer still can claim to have proof
| of the sighting :-)
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| Since you mention IntelliJ, is it possible that the
| corporations you have worked in have been heavy on Java?
|
| JDEE (http://jdee.sourceforge.net/) exists, but even I give
| up on Emacs when I want to write a lot of Java (and I use
| Emacs for literally everything else, including JS).
| schwartzworld wrote:
| JS development in IntelliJ/WebStorm is an amazing
| experience. The refactoring features alone make it easy
| to write code without worrying about details like "where
| does the file go" or "what should I name this". You can
| get the code working and rename / move code with a single
| click later on, knowing the refactor will propagate
| through the app.
|
| The intellisense is amazing too. Start typing a method
| name and you see arguments with type annotations. it's
| overkill for scripting, but working on tangled legacy
| code it's very helpful.
| gnulinux wrote:
| This is amazing.
|
| I already wrote this to another comment, but quoting
| myself:
|
| > Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many
| startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Last few
| years, VSCode has been getting popular though. I had a
| similar experience when I was a student in UC Berkeley,
| although it seems like there were more vim users in school
| than in industry. Anyway, pretty much all my current
| coworkers use Emacs and I work in Boston, MA.
|
| > Personally: I cannot imagine programming without emacs,
| to me programming is so strongly associated with emacs...
|
| > Of course, I also understand that it's all personal
| preference.
|
| I don't know if there is a way to prove that I'm lying. :)
| oblio wrote:
| Isn't Boston where MIT is and where Stallman lives?
|
| Also, Berkeley as in BSD.
|
| You're probably living in a smaller bubble than mine :-)
| hnarayanan wrote:
| I'm nearly 40 and I've used it as my primary text editor
| since I was a teen and daily for my job.
|
| For your anecdata collection.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| org-mode and magit seem to bring in a lot of emacs users,
| even if they're only using one of those two things. If I
| stopped using emacs for code tomorrow, I'd still use org-mode
| and magit and still encourage others to do so as well, even
| if I also pushed a different editor or IDE for writing code.
| bryal wrote:
| In my uni, many professors used Emacs when demonstrating. For
| example, one course [0] used the Agda language [1] as a proof
| assistant. Afaik, the only good interactive Agda interface is
| the Emacs Agda mode [2]. Maybe you just live in a region of
| the world that happens to have a weak culture of using Emacs?
|
| [0] http://www.cse.chalmers.se/edu/year/2017/course/DAT350/
|
| [1] https://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/pmwiki.php
|
| [2] https://agda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/emacs-
| mode.html
| eigenhombre wrote:
| Half my fifteen-person team at work (in a fast-growing mid-
| size fintech company in Chicago) uses Emacs, for
| editing/testing/running code in several languages,
| interacting with Web services, running various shells,
| calendar functions, document writing including UML diagrams
| and mathematics typesetting, and personal planning (Org
| Mode). To do this, we collectively probably use about 0.1% of
| the publicly available extension packages for Emacs on MELPA.
|
| But the short summary is that most people use it for the
| various functions an IDE provides. The major difference
| between Emcs and other IDEs (VSCode, IntelliJ, ...) is that
| (a) it's often a little harder to get functionality that is
| provided out-of-the-box by another IDE, but (b) it's _much_
| easier (in some cases, infinitely easier) to implement
| workflows or functionality _not already implemented_ by said
| IDE.
|
| As an example, I often run snippets of code and want to
| insert the result directly beneath the code in question
| (similar to Jupyter in Python, but for any language, in plain
| text, directly in my editor). A trivial amount of Emacs Lisp
| gave me that with minimal effort.
|
| If you like to have nearly absolute control of your editing
| experience, Emacs might be interesting to you. For most
| people starting out, who just want to get hacking on some
| code as quickly as possible, it is perhaps not the best fit.
| Igelau wrote:
| I have a feeling the SO numbers aren't accounting for Org
| Mode users.
| wrycoder wrote:
| The Prelude package uses dark mode to give Emacs a modern look.
| And adds line numbers for the same reason - LOL.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I feel old when I see "modern Emacs" and think "Oh, maybe they
| are finally either finishing off Guile Emacs, or porting the
| extension language to Common Lisp".
|
| I guess I agree that ibuffer should be part of the standard
| distribution. Less sure about undo-tree, but could be an option
| if the authors released it under appropriate licenses (I
| understand that contributing code to Emacs is somewhat
| cumbersome; although if I were smart enough to do so, I would
| jump through the hoops in a heartbeart).
| da39a3ee wrote:
| This really doesn't seem that complicated.
|
| (1) Either we aim to make Emacs popular or we don't.
|
| Personally, I don't think we should bother: I suggest we make it
| a razor-sharp tool for people prepared to learn some lisp. I also
| suggest we open up the development experience to allow
| contributions and code review via PRs.
|
| But lots of people want to make it popular. So fine, we do that.
| Then there's no argument at all for keeping the defaults like a
| bunch of male lisp programmers over the age of 50 want. Because
| every single one of them has an emacs init file they've been
| tending to for decades and they know how to make the relevant
| changes to override the defaults.
|
| So if we are making it popular there should be no time whatsoever
| given to RMS saying that some keybinding from the early 80s is
| objectively better.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've been checking out alternative text editors, and was recently
| impressed with micro[1].
|
| The only issue I have with it is that it doesn't handle text
| navigation with the Ctrl + arrow key combinations that let you
| jump to the start and end of words.
|
| There's a small revival of modernized text-based apps now that Go
| and Rust gained adoption. I've even come across an editor written
| in Nim, called moe[2].
|
| Are there other editors out there that are worth trying out?
|
| [1] https://github.com/zyedidia/micro
|
| [2] https://github.com/fox0430/moe/
| flowerlad wrote:
| I have been an Emacs user for 20+ years, and I don't use editors
| that can't be configured to use Emacs key bindings. Luckily IDEs
| like Visual Studio can be configured to mimic Emacs.
|
| To me the issues that make Emacs not modern are: (1) Slow
| startup. (2) Buggy language modes. (The ones that come with it
| are good, but third party ones such as web-mode are buggy.) and
| (3) No intellisense out of the box.
| dragandj wrote:
| For the first point, use emacs service + emacsclient. Starts
| instantly.
| onedognight wrote:
| This and avoiding require in your .emacs. When packages are
| autoloaded on demand emacs starts up quickly. As a quick test
| try emacs -q" to see if something in your .emacs is the cause
| of the slowdown.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Yeah definitely ignore all the seasonal requests for the latest
| fads, and just focus on the last paragraph. I think the post
| author agrees, hence the sarcastic tone.
|
| The fact is Emacs does many neat things but is also a giant
| steaming pile of sh-- tech debt. I'm sure VSCode will get there
| too as time passes, but older editors simply have a head start in
| this regard.
|
| Emacs needs it's Neovim (which also contributes back to Vim)
| moment. My old favorite would be returning to
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs and finishing that
| off. No reason Emacs needs to also maintain it's own Lisp engine,
| and I'm sure lexical scope would help reign in tech debt too.
|
| Oh, and make emacsclient to a eamcsserver on another machine
| work, please! That would be such a killer app.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| emacsclient to an emacsserver on another machine works fine.
| You'll want to tunnel it over ssh.
|
| If the machines don't have a shared filesystem namespace, I
| suggest writing a small wrapper that translates the file's
| pathname to what the server needs (whether that's a mounted
| network filesystem or a tramp string or whatever).
| klodolph wrote:
| I would love something like "Emacs's Neovim". Guile should be
| enough. Keep packages out of the global namespace. Get rid of
| Elisp and all its differences. Let me use C-Z/X/C/V for
| undo/cut/copy/paste (or maybe C-Shift-C is fine?)
|
| Keep org-mode, web-mode, etc :-)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I don't think we even need Guile (though I wouldn't
| complain). Just cleaning up the way packages install (a
| proper package system, which could be optional) would be a
| vast improvement for elisp.
|
| By creating a package system, making everything default into
| the el-user package if not otherwise specified, and moving
| the core elisp capabilities to the el/emacs-lisp package
| (used by el-user, importing everything), you'd create a clean
| path for moving forward. I have zero time and energy to
| contribute to emacs, but this is really the only fundamental
| change I'd want as someone who does delve into elisp
| frequently (or used to, not so much in the past year or so).
| evolve2k wrote:
| Yes this 100%. My son is just finishing high school and is
| taking an interest in code to the level of questioning if it's
| worth learning emacs/vim. At the time I spoke of how emacs
| seems to be approaching a neovim moment and then pointed out
| that practically if the community was not prepared to invest in
| supporting new users like him, then he's better off not
| supporting them and to look solidly at neovim (beyond the
| default of vscode).
| evolve2k wrote:
| As I see it the older emacs users see many of their decisions
| as right because they made them. What I'm sensing is a total
| lack of basic design thinking. A "neoEmacs" could achieve this,
| get clear who the new target audience is and based around this
| what a neoEmacs clear project goals would be (something like
| "position an emacs to be the editor of choice for people born
| after the year 2000") [or whatever] and then with a new persona
| start to unpack critical design considerations and priorities a
| project plan from there.
|
| For emacs to survive/thrive it will need to go through a
| process of transformation. Even from these conversations I can
| see right now that can't happen with the current core emacs
| project. I neoEmacs would be a great way forward.
| abhiyerra wrote:
| Not saying this is the way to do it but there is a remacs
| which is working on rewriting Emacs in Rust and fixing the C
| level issues in the process: https://github.com/remacs/remacs
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm surprised by this .. emacs have seen so much activity on so
| many layers. From cute transient overlays, lsp, deeply critical
| modes (magit), and even deep level work. The community is sharing
| a lot of extensions of all kinds through melpa and similar. I
| don't think emacs have been as 'popular' as now since long ago.
|
| Also one consideration, emacs is still lean, all those others
| editors are html/js based and hyper heavy.
| klodolph wrote:
| Funny that Emacs is considered "lean" today. It was definitely
| consider one of the heaviest, most bloated editors out there in
| the past. "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"
| agumonkey wrote:
| Indeed but the swap is real, I tried vscode (win64) on a 2nd
| gen i5 and couldn't insert chars in real time. Emacs is not
| smooth on windows but I couldn't go back to it fast enough.
| BeetleB wrote:
| The article did point it out. It likely has more users than it
| ever has - just that the growth is slow, and it has dropped in
| terms of percentage use.
| agumonkey wrote:
| but the market share war is absurd, nothing of quality came
| out of this
| snazz wrote:
| Yeah, to an extent I agree. If you're just using your text
| editor as a text editor--and you're willing to have fairly
| limited support for integrations and other stuff like that
| --worrying about market share is unnecessary. If you rely
| on complex, IDE-type features for languages that move
| quickly, you might be better-served by a more popular
| editor.
| JacksonGariety wrote:
| The Emacs community should start by perfecting lsp-mode so that
| it can compete with VS Code in terms of functionality. That will
| simultaneously keep power users from switching AND bring in
| people from other "easy to use" editors that lack such
| functionality.
| math0ne wrote:
| Emacs needs this so bad but I really believe it could never
| attract enough people to develop and maintain it without sane
| defaults.
| smabie wrote:
| I find that lsp-mode works pretty well most of the time. If
| you look at the commit history, the project is very active.
| It's also pretty easy to set up.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I found that it didn't work out of the box for me (Rust and
| Python) but that eglot did work out of the box.
|
| Eglot, not lsp-mode, will be the LSP implementation that
| makes it into the GNU Emacs distribution (because it is
| being developed with FSF assignments, and because the
| maintainer is active in the GNU Emacs development
| community, maintaining eldoc and flymake, and maybe
| others).
| edw wrote:
| I basically gave up on Emacs and switched to a combination of
| VS Code and old-school vi for Go and everything else,
| respectively. Finding an effing theme that allowed me to
| program in Go in a terminal without making LSP's overlays
| unreadable was nearly impossible. I spent days trying to make
| this work. I've used Emacs since 1991.
| spudlyo wrote:
| This is possible, but it's a bit of a pain. One problem is
| that the popular themes cater to GUI Emacs users where you
| have 24-bit color depth. On the terminal this gets
| approximated to one of the available 256 colors, and this
| approximation is often not great. This makes themes on the
| terminal look weird sometimes.
|
| With some work, you can enable 24-bit color support in TTY
| emacs, which solves this problem. Combine this with some work
| to either tweak or remove the more obnoxious LSP overlays and
| you can have a fairly good LSP experience on the TTY.
| math0ne wrote:
| I think if you could easily install and use emacs to edit a text
| file with no knowledge it's userbase would grow exponentially
| overnight.
| jorams wrote:
| You can. By default it boots up with a menu bar and toolbar,
| with familiar buttons to open and save files. Most keys do
| exactly what you expect.
|
| This does not affect the size of the userbase much. If your
| needs are that simple, just stick to any basic editor you're
| already familiar with.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| How about instead the Emacs website and splash screen recommends
| different `flavours' of Emacs instead? Such as Doom and Prelude
| for example. No reason to change vanilla Emacs.
|
| Stop having Emacs be the recommended way to install and use
| Emacs.
| FandangoRanger wrote:
| If only there were projects that repackaged Emacs together with
| packages which adapt the program for people who prefer other
| keybindings. And failing that, maybe Emacs should include some
| facility for remapping key bindings?
| the-smug-one wrote:
| I don't understand why you're sarcastic, it's as if you did
| not read my post.
| mrob wrote:
| I tried Ergo Emacs, because I like Xah Lee's attitude to
| modernization, but even somebody so willing to abandon old
| defaults can't make Emacs feel modern. Emacs makes
| assumptions like "a document has a backing file on disk" and
| "a cursor has a location on screen" that only make sense with
| obsolete hardware. The weird janky feeling is embedded too
| deep for any easy fix.
| baby wrote:
| All of these are missing the point imo. The biggest advantage of
| modern IDE is the ease in trying new plugins and functionalities.
| Everything is a menu away, and fuzzy searching makes it easy to
| find out commands and learn their shortcuts. This whole process
| just doesn't exist in emacs. To get a plugin, it's a huge step
| (setting up custom elisp to get melpa) and then it's a huge
| learning curve just to try a plugin.
| xrd wrote:
| I've been an emacs user for more than 20 years.
|
| Is it just me, or is this article completely missing the point?
|
| I've switched to VS Code because I can install extensions so
| easily. Getting a theme installed is not my concern at all.
|
| With emacs, I'm still never sure how to get elpa (or why not
| melpa) to work correctly. And, modern packages for react never
| seem to be available there anyway.
|
| I'm still astounded package management is so bad on emacs.
|
| For the record, emacs and tmux are still the first thing I
| install on any new server. I still use emacs on a daily basis.
| But, not on my desktop Linux machine anymore.
| ssivark wrote:
| Have you tried the "straight" package manager? Quite nifty.
| wtetzner wrote:
| use-package has basically solved the package management problem
| for me in Emacs.
| BeetleB wrote:
| use-package can make package management easier, but _using_
| it s not beginner friendly. As an advanced Emacs user, when I
| read its docs, there were too many subtleties that can trip
| up a beginner.
|
| Indeed, just yesterday I stopped using use-package for one of
| my packages as I couldn't figure out why it wasn't behaving
| properly - reverting to _require_ solved it.
| jakevoytko wrote:
| I've been gradually switching towards completely using IDEs for
| like 8 years now, and in the past 2 or 3 I've broken free
| completely. Some of my symptoms are the same as yours:
| Frustrating package management, obvious missing gaps in
| functionality.
|
| My conclusion is slightly different: I don't need a text editor
| anymore. I need an IDE and it's a bonus if it's a good text
| editor.
|
| Efficient text editing is nice. But I spend a lot of time
| jumping between files, looking up definitions, reading
| documentation, tracing through code, debugging, comparing tests
| and regular code, etc. Plus all of the features that you
| expect: (colorblind-friendly) syntax highlighting, syntax
| highlighting, linting, etc. This is where the package pain
| comes in. I don't want to figure out how to configure the cross
| product of "every single IDE feature that I need" and "every
| single language that I use." I gave up. It's too much. I want
| my environment to either do it by default, or install a single
| plugin per language and never think about it again.
|
| I'm not sure how Emacs can get "more modern," because being
| modern would likely start from the premise that you'd need to
| allow the core innovation of IDEs. They provide a pluggable
| framework to get uniform behavior across every language that
| you use. That ship sailed in Emacs - how do you move away from
| 40 years of "we ship a vanilla experience and you customize
| your environment completely to your own liking"?
| rightbyte wrote:
| I really like using Emacs but as soon as I touch a big
| project I need a point and click friendly IDE with
| refactoring/smart search support to keep my head from
| spinning. It would be great with some vanilla autocomplete
| with a language server thing that "almost just works".
| fmakunbound wrote:
| What's extending VS Code like compared to Emacs?
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| The article makes some interesting points, to me, though, I think
| the Emacs devs need to have a discussion with themselves if they
| even want to go here.
|
| Here's what I see as an outsider if I'm a Windows users and want
| to give this great emacs editor I've heard so much about a try:
|
| First off, I search for emacs, I land on a page with a Windows
| link. I click that link, I get a rant about how Windows is evil.
|
| Ok, fine, sure, gnu and all of that.
|
| Then I follow a link to download it from a mirror. That link
| doesn't actually lead to a download, it leads to a directory on
| the mirror that I need to drill down into another directory. The
| README in this directory contradicts the emacs website on which
| version I download. I go to download the installer, if I try to
| run it, I get a big scary warning (I can't blame GNU on this too
| much, but still, more friction). Finally, I have emacs on my
| machine. (If I follow the directions on the webpage, I download a
| zip file, and I'm left wondering why I should run "runemacs.exe"
| and not run "emacs.exe". I know why, but dang it, this is just
| silly)
|
| I run it. I'm presented with some combination of a text UI and
| iconography from the 90's. I get emacs doesn't change much, but
| this adds to the sour taste already building.
|
| And then there's the intro, which is what this article is
| touching on. The first thing it teaches me is some odd-for-me
| commands to navigate that as a user are all new and unlike every
| editor I've used.
|
| Now I decide to play around and open a file. Do I want to "visit
| new file" or "open file"? I pick one, and it helpfully defaults
| to showing me files in the emacs installation folder. Great.
|
| And by this point the thing has beeped at me a dozen or so times
| for reasons known only to emacs, and I'm tired of it all.
|
| Emacs is clearly designed for people that use emacs, and that's
| fine, but if you want to get more mindshare, you'll need to,
| first thing, ask me if I want to set it up to act like VS Code or
| IntelliJ or Emacs.
| dragandj wrote:
| > it teaches me is some odd-for-me commands to navigate that as
| a user are all new and unlike every editor I've used.
|
| That is the point. If it worked the same as every editor you've
| used, why switch? The point why Emacs is better is because it's
| different. These things need to be learned. Otherwise, Emacs
| can't help you.
|
| It would be like people complaining that playing a guitar is
| different than pushing the play button on every music player
| they've ever tried. Well, yes, that is the point.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Really? The point why Emacs is better is that it has
| different keyboard shortcuts?
| acqq wrote:
| That is what I never understood -- I've implemented exactly
| this "which editor emulation do you want to use" and "edit
| your own bindings" for one Windows product containing
| editor in early nineties. It wasn't hard. The default was,
| of course, the "least surprising" for the platform, but it
| also allowed other popular editors then. If there's
| anything that can reduce friction to the new user, it's
| that: a beginner can use the actions he already knows how
| to do. Let him just the ability to access those that are
| unique -- for these he anyway doesn't have any reflexes.
|
| My biggest eyeroll whenever I looked at Emacs "help" (or
| any other, Emacs is not unique in that approach) was "and
| then you use Meta key." Well I don't think that anybody
| bought a physical keyboard with a key on which it was
| written "Meta" for a least 30 years. How about recognizing
| that for the beginners?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key
|
| "But, meta is not always the same key" I hear every time --
| fine, but that should also be the part of "advanced stuff."
| Just let people know that they initially have Alt, Ctrl and
| Escape where on the keycaps Alt, Ctrl and Escape are
| written.
| dragandj wrote:
| In Emacs, you can configure literally anything,
| _including the keybindings_. Some people use Emacs with
| Vim keybindings (Evil, Spacemacs, Doom).
|
| Now, for me, typical Emacs keybindings, of which the
| majority is defined in 3rd party packages are very
| logical, while Vim's are not. But the users who prefer
| the Vim way did they work and configured Emacs however
| they liked.
|
| OTOH, of the million people who complain and ask for
| Ctrl+C for copy and Ctrl+V for paste and whatnot, I've
| never seen anyone who did the 2 minutes or two hours of
| work, went into a configuration, and changed these keys.
| Why's that so, if that's such a great idea?
| tsuujin wrote:
| Probably because having the default be something other
| than what a user is used to is not going to compel them
| towards doing the research to fix it.
|
| In order to get cua-mode working in emacs, you first have
| to know that it exists. I didn't know it existed for like
| two years of daily emacs usage, I just can't find it in
| myself to expect someone to know about it after 10
| minutes.
|
| By the time you know it exists, you've already accepted
| the keybindings and you've already put in the time to
| build some muscle memory, and it doesn't seem as
| important anymore.
|
| The fact that some people get past it isn't really an
| indicator that it isn't a huge friction point.
| bitmunk wrote:
| Nope, it's the ecosystem around them.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings aren't
| one of them.
|
| I spent weeks trying to switch, but ultimately I found the
| experience frustrating. UIs follow the same patterns for a
| reason, it makes it easier for users to adopt the tech.
|
| The biggest draw for me was org-mode with org-babel. I've
| never seen anything else like it
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings
| aren't one of them.
|
| I find this difficult to understand for people who use the
| terminal. The keybindings are the _exact same_ for most
| terminals by default, since they use readline. Want to go
| to the end of your command? `Ctrl-E`. Want to go to the
| beginning? `Ctrl-A`. Want to search backwards through
| history? `Ctrl-R` (same thing you would do while searching
| backwards through an Emacs buffer).
|
| All of these _also_ happen to work everywhere in MacOS. Put
| your cursor on the URL and press Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E.
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