[HN Gopher] Emacs Timeline ___________________________________________________________________ Emacs Timeline Author : susam Score : 76 points Date : 2022-07-31 10:56 UTC (3 days ago) (HTM) web link (emacs.brause.cc) (TXT) w3m dump (emacs.brause.cc) | mcbuilder wrote: | Emacs first public release is as old as I am. It seems that | development on GNU Emacs is regaining momentum. I'm glad to be | using an editor that's probably going to be around for the rest | of my life time. | dan-robertson wrote: | GNU Emacs development does indeed seem to have picked up the | pace in the last 5-10 years. And the package archives and | development community outside of people working on the core | editor seems super vibrant. See, eg, magit, | helm/ivy/vertico/..., spacemacs/doom, paredit, eglot, ... | sys_64738 wrote: | No mention of derivatives like Micro Emacs for the Amiga circa. | 1985. | juice_bus wrote: | Has anyone here 'adapted' to Emacs after starting out with Visual | Studio / Code / etc? I have tried multiple times over the years | to give it a shot but it hasn't stuck. | lotw_dot_site wrote: | Isn't the reason why people gravitate to standard utilities | such as emacs and vim largely _because_ they simply can 't cope | with all of the shiny graphical bloat while they are trying to | wrack their brains coming up with some new kind of thing or | another? I use vim, and I've spent countless hours of my life | trying to write a new kind of vim with it. (See: | https://lotw.site/shell, then enter "import fs && vim" at the | prompt.) | umanwizard wrote: | Modern GNU Emacs isn't really comparable to vim in this | respect, since people use it with tons of bells and whistles. | Emacs is probably better described as a "framework for | building custom IDEs" than as a "text editor". Yes, vim | plugins exist but my impression is that using stock vim with | no plugins and only a bit of configuration is much more | mainstream than doing a similar thing with emacs. | | I'm sure people are out there who just use stock emacs, but | I'm not sure why you would do so instead of using something | simple like nano. | _ph_ wrote: | I don't mind a good IDE. But that only "works" well, as long | as you are working in one single language, day in and out. | There have been such times in my life and I was happy with | the corresponding IDE (unless it itself was just crap :p). | But if you are not so focussed, jumping between languages | quicker, or just if you don't have a good IDE at hand for | your language, Emacs is your friend :). | medstrom wrote: | These days there is the similarly general-purpose VSCode | and competitors, so this particular angle holds no water. | _ph_ wrote: | Sorry, first you should consider your language. "Holds no | water" is way to strong, especially as it is absolutely | wrong. VSCode is nice but a far cry from the abilities of | Emacs. And while it does somewhat support a lot of | languages, setting it up for a new language is way more | work implementing a complex protocol compared to Emacs. | | Maybe it has become better, but for a while I looked into | it as it was popular for Go editing. Unfortunately, there | is way to much predetermined flow built in, so Emacs | makes it the way better Go editor for me. Back then, | there was even no key binding for compiling the current | file. | | And as I said, the language coverage is much worse than | Emacs, as it is its hackability. | comfypotato wrote: | To set the tone of my reply: I'm an every-day-all-day | Emacs user. I greatly enjoy configuring my Emacs. Your | point about "hackability" is spot on. That being said, I | think the language "holds no water" is reasonable here. | It sounds like you haven't used VSCode in a while. (As a | lightweight IDE) it has completely seamless integration | with every popular language. | DMell wrote: | I have tried multiple times but always run into a wall feeling | as if my learning is hindered by also having to learn my tools. | | Im just so comfortable in a JetBrains IDE. | outworlder wrote: | I 'adapted' before VSCode was a thing (we had Sublime, | Textmate, etc). | | The main issue for most people is that the standard install is | pretty barebones in terms of ergonomic enhancements. Sure, the | default Emacs install has _way_ more functionality than a | VSCode install full of plugins. But it won't have simple things | like fuzzy search for commands, buffers, etc. | | I'd suggest looking into Spacemacs, or Doom Emacs if you are | comfortable with VI. Those will have sane defaults and cut down | on the amount of script snippets you have to add considerably. | ubermonkey wrote: | Yeah, I came to it late -- actually, I came to it _after_ my | jobs stopped being "sling code all day." | | What brought me to it was Orgmode. I'd TRIED to use emacs | before, 20 years ago, in my LAMP-stack days, but it was too | easy to use more modern editors (for me, on a Mac, this was a | mix of BBEdit and TextMate). The learning curve in emacs is | intense. | | Then years later, I got sick of the existing to-do software I | was using. I changed jobs into a MUCH busier one, and the David | Allen / GTD tools like Omnifocus just weren't working for me. I | realized what I really really needed was the ability to take | notes and intersperse to-do items in the text, and then have | some tool that would look at my notes files and show me a | dynamic view of the to-dos coming up (or overdue). | | I mentioned this desire to a friend, and he said, in so many | words, "boy do I have some good news for you, because that | exactly describes orgmode." | | In adopting orgmode, I find myself using emacs for other tasks, | too, including whatever generic coding I end up doing now where | it's reasonable to do so (ie, not vba and not interacting with | MS SQL Server). | lkfsfldkjfslk wrote: | I think people who stick with it tend to be people who see it | as a hobby. If you're just looking to get stuff done VS Code or | JetBrains will get you up and running way faster than Emacs, | with similar productivity. I stick with Emacs because it's so | configurable it can be exactly the way I want it, which I | haven't found in other editors. | sedeki wrote: | Sure Emacs is endlessly configurable. But it is too clunky | for my taste. | | I realize this is sort of like complaining about trivial code | style preferences in a code review, rather than looking at | what the code at hand is actually doing. | | But Emacs just feels too... Old-school. Not in a cool way, | but rather in a boring way. | | I wish I "figured out" Emacs though. | wolpoli wrote: | Growing up with Windows GUI, I too found many concepts in | Emacs are just too different and "old-school". | | I wonder if there is an opportunity for a modern, open- | source, extendable, programmable text editing environment | that uses CUA, Tabs instead of Buffers, and Javascript | instead of LISP. Or if it's already too late because VS | Code has already taken over the modern, open-source, and | extendable parts already? | kagevf wrote: | Using different tools for different types of work / programming | is an option. | | I started using emacs almost 3 years ago for org mode; a few | months later I started programming in Common Lisp. Emacs works | very well for those 2 use cases, and I feel like I've adapted | well-enough. I still use Visual Studio for C#, and everything | else is either vim or vim key-bindings. | jsyolo wrote: | Emacs with evil mode? | kqr wrote: | I have, but it took a very long time. For the most common | operations, you can get Emacs to be as convenient as whatever | you're coming from, but it takes quite a bit of work and | learning if you're new to it. When I transitioned, LSP wasn't a | thing either so it had to be configured fresh for every | language, pretty much. | | What makes it worth it for me is that | | (a) Once configured properly, I have a uniform interface to | files, regardless of what sort of files they are. This save me | time and mental effort. | | (b) Emacs is extremely hackable in ways you won't understand | for the first year or two, at least. If there's something about | its behaviour you don't like, you can run a couple of commands | and be taken to the relevant parts of the editor (Lisp) source | code. Then you can replace that code (or better, write new code | that hooks into it dynamically) with whatever you would like | instead. | | The latter sounds like a nutty thing to desire, and it's very | hard to appreciate it without having used it for a while. | acmdas wrote: | Agree wholeheartedly with your (a) and (b), and would add: | | (c) Emacs won't disappear after a few years (where "few" can | mean decades if your career lasts that long - mine ran from | 1967 to 2011 and I still use emacs daily) the way virtually | every (or maybe every) "more intuitive" editor/environment | will, given time. Your investment in learning it will really | pay off. | scombridae wrote: | _Emacs won 't disappear... the way every "more intuitive" | editor will_ | | Adoption rates of intuitive IDEA and Visual Studio, while | not quite as old, have long pushed Emacs into niche | territory. Emacs hasn't disappeared only in the sense any | venerable UNIX utility hasn't. | p4bl0 wrote: | I switched from TextMate to Emacs 15 years ago. Nowadays I'm | slowly switching to Kate :). | mplanchard wrote: | Yes, I switched over after using vim for a few years, then | JetBrains, then VSCode. Being already familiar with vim | keybindings, doom emacs provided a nice on-ramp, much simpler | than spacemacs IMO, which I tried a year or two earlier. | | For me the key was starting small. Initially I just used emacs | for org-mode, then for magit, and then finally for programming. | Now I have a hard time imagining using something else. | fmakunbound wrote: | Yeah I adopted it after exploring other languages after | learning to program in Turbo Pascal 5. Bit later I started | using it for mail and news (Gnus) and other things. | | It's a life time tool that grows with you. | hvis wrote: | I've worked with Visual Studio, and Eclipse, and NetBeans for a | few years. | | Then tried Emacs while learning Clojure, and after a few to and | fro, stuck with it. | | This was before Visual Studio Code (or Atom) became a thing, | though. | bitwize wrote: | Kind of, almost by force. I was trying out Linux back in 1995, | coming from Windows. Going from Windows to Linux back then was | a bit like switching from a brand new economy sedan to one of | those cars built out of scrap by Immortan Joe and his War Boys. | Everything was so janky and cobbled together, but extremely | powerful, it seemed, compared to what you left behind. It would | be close to another year before some German Amigaheads put | together the first Linux desktop worth taking seriously -- KDE. | | So when I programmed on Windows, I used an IDE -- typically | Borland C++ or Microsoft Visual C++. When I wanted to program | for Linux -- ??? | | There was no equivalent. I had to use my old-school Unix skills | and write the code in a text editor, then use the compiler and | make to put it all together in an executable. I started with -- | pico, was it? But a friend told me Emacs was really great and | _the_ editor to use if you 're a programmer. I'd heard the name | Emacs from Micro Emacs on the Amiga, but apparently this was | big boy Emacs. | | It came with Slackware, so I fired it up. And holy crap. It | seemed unspeakably powerful and live-codable. I would only get | a sense for its true power over years of working with it -- to | code, to write HTML pages and stories. It had a web browser, | email client, and IRC client. It had _games_! All written in | Emacs Lisp. Blew my damn mind at the time. | | The skill ceiling for Emacs is tremendously high, it's not | something you will pick up easily. But for me it was well worth | learning. I won't call myself proficient in it, but I can do | things with it and shape it to my exact needs in ways Visual | Studio (Code) can't match, live, as I use it. To me it's worth | its weight in gold. | afry1 wrote: | I have indeed! This is my first year of using Emacs. Previously | I was using VS Code, and before that Atom, and before that | Sublime. | | Two things which have contributed to my success: - The System | Crafters YT channel. David has an amazing tutorial series where | you build a config file from scratch. I followed along, and it | both gave me a very functional Emacs config and taught me | enough about Emacs to get out of trouble when I goof up: | https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemCrafters - Not being afraid to | go back to other editors/IDEs for a while, or even rely on | other editors for some tasks. Learning Emacs is tough enough as | it is, but when you're a working programmer and you're on the | clock for getting something done, it's extra tough to tolerate | the slowdown from all those 1000 little things that you haven't | gotten comfortable with, or features which were present in your | previous editor but aren't yet present in your Emacs config. In | past lives I would have just rage-quit and given up on Emacs, | but I tried to be gentle with myself this time and take breaks | from Emacs when I need to, and it has been a winning strategy. | | Never going back. | _ph_ wrote: | I have. I had used various IDEs, from Turbo Pascal over Borland | C++ and Visuaol Basic, the last being jBuilder. When Borland | refused to give me an upgrade deal to the next version after I | had bought jBuilder 1.0, I had enough anger to really dig into | emacs and to learn to use it and the back then really great JDE | package for Java development. Since then I have mostly stuck to | Emacs for my coding. Sometimes I still would use an IDE, for | Java coding you really can't avoid intelliJ :), but most of the | time it is just Emacs. | | Once you have the keybindings in your brain, you will struggle | with other editors. And the main advantage of Emacs for me is: | I can edit really everything editable, and will find a nice | environment. Most IDEs are limited one or few languages and | outside of that, you are out of luck. | | Having support for everything I edit and seamlessly between | languages, many of which don't have "IDEs", ist hard to beat. I | avoid Java these days, but take SLIME as a really great Common | Lisp IDE, or from quite early on good Go support, and many | more. And in all of the modes, C-c C-c will either compile the | file or evaluate the function under the cursor. And I can edit | all those languages not only with the same tool, but within the | same session. In one Emacs, you can edit them all side-by-side. | truncate wrote: | I learned programming in various IDEs. Visual C++ 6, | Code::Blocks etc ... Moved to Vim somehow when learning Linux, | and eventually Emacs because I was programming a lot in Racket | and it was just nicer there. This all predates Visual Studio | Code. | | The thing is you won't feel any benefit of using Vim/Emacs over | Visual Studio Code unless you put LOT OF TIME configuring it. I | didn't use any of the configuration framework like Spacemacs, | and built my config over the years (adapted bunch of stuff from | Centaur Emacs as it was super simple to copy things from | there). But once you get it, it almost feels like an extension | of you which I never feel on the other IDEs. And now with LSP | clients on Emacs, bunch of basic things for programmning almost | work out of box, it has never been easier. | | I've a feeling you can probably get there by configuring Visual | Studio Code too, but it does feel as inviting to be hacked as | say Emacs. | p4bl0 wrote: | > unless you put LOT OF TIME configuring it | | I don't think this is true. What is true is that by putting a | lot of time into fine tuning your own Emacs you learn to | master Emacs. | | But then, once you master it, you can use it almost vanilla, | and still be as efficient and productive. | | I've spent years customizing my init.el file and even wrote | minor and major modes and a few custom packages. At some | point my Emacs was loading almost a thousand lines of | personal elisp code. | | Then I decided to try to slim down my config and started | fresh. I used M-x customize for a few things (I did | everything manually before) and have a small -- maybe 20 | lines? -- init.el file and that's it. | | It still rocks and I'm still very proficient with it. | | Now I'm trying to go further and switching to Kate. It's a | fun ride but a bit hard at time and has lead be to become a | small contributor to the project to improve both Kate and the | underlying KTextEditor :). I'm kind of rediscovering the fun | I had configuring my Emacs 15 years back ^^. | truncate wrote: | Isn't fine tuning ~= spending time configuring? How much | configuration and fine tuning you need is subjective. I | personally don't like using it vanilla, particularly if I'm | working on a big codebase. | | I love all those fancy modes and they are all part of my | workflow -- ivy, ivy-ripgrep , magit, lsp (for | autocompletion, code navigation), diff-highlight, | perspective, swiper, flycheck, projectile etc etc. I like | to figure out keybindings, that work for me over long term. | You also don't want to make it feel bloated, overwhelming, | and slow meanwhile. Without all these, it is just good for | doing quick edits. | | In the end I want to be productive with the codebases I | work with. There was a time, pre-LSP and native-comp when | Emacs was getting super slow, and I was ready to jump ship | to VSCode, plainly because I wasn't feeling | productive/efficient with Emacs anymore. | | Edit: to give further context. When you install LSP, it may | or may not be as per your taste. For me, I don't like bunch | of UI stuff it adds like breadcrumbs, doc popups, sidebars. | So you'd spend sometime finding the right config to | disable. Now multiply this with bunch of other packages you | like, figuring out right set of keybindings that are | intuitive and easy, it all takes a bit of time IMO. | _ph_ wrote: | I have to disagree with this a bit. I try to keep my emacs | file pretty minimal, like 20 lines of customizations like | fonts and a few flags, the rest mostly just requiring | additional packages and a very few custom functions. | gamekathu wrote: | Yes, it is my second year running with Emacs after ditching | VSCode. While I miss the remote editing capability of VSCode, | working on a shared HPC cluster made me finally use Emacs. | Nowadays, I have shifted most of my workflows in Emacs, | especially using Org mode, and I believe it should stick for | the next several years. | bryanlarsen wrote: | Emacs has TRAMP for remote editing, although I'm not sure how | that compares to VSCode's capability. | karthink wrote: | > I'm not sure how that compares to VSCode's capability. | | Not favorably. Perhaps there's a magic combination of SSH | and Tramp settings that can make the experience lag free, | but I can't find it. VSCode's remote editing was setup-free | and close to seamless when I tried it. | | Tramp has support for many, many more remote protocols | though. | dan-robertson wrote: | I suspect good ssh support is just so much more necessary | for vscode than it was for Emacs when tramp was | developed. I do think tramp was also full of generality | towards things that are very uncommon these days (various | different protocols, ssh workarounds, baud rates, ...) | hibbelig wrote: | How does Tramp in Emacs compare to VSCode remote editing? | [deleted] | Barrin92 wrote: | Yes. I started programming in ~ca 2010 when I went to uni and | we mostly programmed in Java with Netbeans, so using Emacs | wasn't exactly natural for me. The worst thing is the | keybindings which don't conform remotely to anything modern. | | I think the biggest issue is that people are simply intimidated | by learning Emacs from the bottom up _themselves_. It has an | incredibly extensive tutorial baked in. It 's almost completely | self-referential which distinguishes it from most stuff people | engage with today. And that's the crucial part I think because | if you start copying other people's configs around or just ask | stackoverflow I think you're not going to have a good time. | Emacs for me was the first complex thing where I basically | could have turned the internet off and just look at it myself. | | I honestly credit Emacs with no less than curing me of a weird | learned helplessness I got from my awful education that threw | tools at me where I had no hope of understanding what they do. | digdugdirk wrote: | Interesting perspective. What were you doing during the | initial semi-helpless "why-does-this-hurt-so-much" phase of | your emacs journey? | | I find that people who take a slower long-term approach tend | to be the ones that have a good experience. The moment | someone really "needs" to get something done with emacs is | usually when they shelve it for something more intuitive or | more powerful out of the box. | WoodenChair wrote: | I only tried once about 15 years ago (from GUI IDEs/editors) | and it didn't appeal to me. Now with GitHub Copilot and the | like I think the use of command-line editors will further | diminish for generalized programming tasks, although they will | always have a place in system administration. | mplanchard wrote: | Realistically, there's not much emacs can't do, including | integrating with copilot[1]. I think it's niche isn't system | administration, but people who have the time, energy, and | interest to really invest in their tools. Its configurability | is second to none, and it's not going anywhere. Emacs will | still be around long after vscode is forgotten, and it's nice | to know that the time I spend learning my editor won't go to | waste when some big corp decides to up and leave, or the | programming zeitgeist moves on to the shiny new thing. | | [1]: https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el | scombridae wrote: | _Emacs will still be around long after vscode is forgotten_ | | Neither antecedent (vscode dies) nor consequent (emacs | survives) is at all assured. | umanwizard wrote: | Nothing lasts forever, but Emacs has enough momentum | behind it that I'd be shocked if it dies within our | lifetime (assuming there's no general collapse of | technological civilization, of course). Even if the FSF | were to become defunct, enough people care about Emacs | and are involved with it that somebody will continue | developing it. | | VSCode's development is so totally dominated by one | company that it's hard to imagine it continuing to go | strong if they decided to discontinue it (Cf. the fate of | Atom). | mplanchard wrote: | True! I guess there's only one way to find out. | acmdas wrote: | History rather suggests that both antecedents will occur, | assured or not. MS isn't known for keeping tools around | for decades. | samatman wrote: | Visual C++ turns 30 next February. | | So maybe there's an exception for tools with Visual in | the name. | | And all of Office. | rayiner wrote: | I started with visual studio in the late 1990s. Didn't try | Emacs until 2005 when I started using SLIME for Common Lisp. | Committed myself to doing some projects in Common Lisp, and | insofar as SLIME is head and shoulders better than anything | else for that, it forced me to learn the environment. | | After leaving programming entirely for a decade I can back to | Emacs recently when I discovered pdf-tools and Org mode. Took | only a bit of time to get reacclimatize this time. It's all | muscle memory. You just have to force yourself to do real work | with it so you exercise the muscles. | Hammershaft wrote: | I also bounced off multiple times but have now been happily | using it for 2 years. I really reccomend trying Doom Emacs and | learning the default VIM modal editing. Doom comes with sane | defaults and very simple configuration presets for every | language out of the box. Learning modal editing pays off | quickly. | | https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs | [deleted] | dannyobrien wrote: | To fail to answer your question, I've been a vim (then neovim) | user for twenty years or so, and moved to emacs in the last | couple of years.(initially because of a desire to have a | searchable/configurable email client, then I stayed because of | org-mode.). | | I did not move from Code -- but I had an interesting | interaction with my son recently, who is a Code user. I was | showing him my org-agenda set up. He noted that it was weird to | organize your life in the app you use to edit code. I do see | his point! | Jtsummers wrote: | > He noted that it was weird to organize your life in the app | you use to edit code. I do see his point! | | Only if you think of it as an "app", which often carries a | connotation of singular or narrowly constrained purpose. I | open an app to get directions, I open an app to see my email, | I open an app to send a message, I open an app to check my | grocery list. | | Emacs isn't an _app_ , it's a system. Is it also weird that | we use the same systems (Linux, Windows, macOS) to code and | organize our lives and to host a variety of limited purpose | apps? | eftychis wrote: | I like to see this as, you write code in/via the tool you | trust to organize your life. | | But I do like your son's is a good perspective to think upon | -- and all claims/questions deducing from it. | jcpst wrote: | Mhm, evil and org-mode brought me to emacs. I generate | documentation, presentations, embed little scripts to | transform org-tables, and use ledger-mode. I don't even use | it for coding projects anymore. | dan-robertson wrote: | I used to use visual studio and I think I maybe also learned | some very basic vim (arrow keys, i, dd, p, :wq) to do some | remote sysadmin type things. I wanted to learn Common Lisp | which, at the time, meant having to learn Emacs too. And then I | was more interested in things outside of windows and Emacs | stuck. (Also the calculator in it is amazing). | | Funnily, I also work for a company where many people use Emacs | (it was the only editor with good support for our tools for a | long time - you can even order lunch from it - new hires were | encouraged to use it, even non-software engineers when they | needed to interact with the Linux side of things) which I think | is pretty uncommon. There was definitely a time 10 years or so | ago when vim seemed to have massive popularity online and | everything else seemed to fly under the radar. | intrasight wrote: | I started with Gosmacs back in 1984 at CMU. Time does fly. | caboteria wrote: | I'm curious whether you are still an emacs user. I'm a relative | emacs noob, having started using it around the turn of the | century, and I can't imagine how much time I would have wasted | learning the editor of the moment over and over. | dilap wrote: | Otoh, how much time have you wasted customizing your editor? | I know it's a lot for me! :-) | | It's sort of a palette cleanser. "Ehhh, I don't feel like | working what I'm supposed to be working on, I think there's | this urgent emacs feature I should figure out..." | convolvatron wrote: | I started with zmacs in '87. it seemed so old and such an | established part of the canon even then - I can hardly believe | it was just a baby, and that I'm still using it as a daily | driver 35 years later. | ordu wrote: | Nice. But `content-type: text/plain` makes html to be shown as a | text. Not a big difference, because mostly it is a one big `pre`, | but nevertheless. | dang wrote: | We've changed the URL from | https://depp.brause.cc/brause.cc/emacs/timeline.html and it | seems to be working now. | gumby wrote: | I think the first entry should include Eugene Cicarelli's TECO | init file which was the base of the others. | | The 0th entry should be the addition of "^R MODE" to TECO, which | was the interactive display editing mode for what was previously | just a text mode editor like Multics qed or its descendant, | Unix's ed. I believe ^R mode (an MIT extension) was around '75. | | But this is second hand as I was quite late to the party, not | encountering Emacs until 1978. | ajross wrote: | Agreed. Does anyone know if there are sources retained anywhere | for any of that stuff? | | IIRC I went digging around the simh ITS packages (hard to do | since it's an alien filesystem image, not exactly a consumable | tarball) and couldn't find it. | forgotpwd16 wrote: | Although updated in GNU Emacs side, SXEmacs shows recent version | to be 22.1.16 (06-may-16) whereas 22.1.17 (02-sep-20) has been | released. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-03 23:00 UTC)