5 ms·

There are many things you can say about Emacs...

23 points by iamelgringo 19y ago

1gor 19y ago
I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the mindshare in Rails developer community. 'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-specific navigation, snippet-expansion etc. features two years ago and has improved greatly since then. (See screencast: http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net for example) I've tried to follow the crowd initially and to learn TextMate, but then... why learning new set of keystrokes? And why reimplementing a fraction of editing modes that emacs has available? When you can have... So I went back, but I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. Matz uses emacs after all...
- gcv 19y ago
  I think TextMate's Rails mode came before emacs-rails and inspired it. That's probably part of the reason. Another part is that TextMate behaves much more like a Mac app, and Rails was started by Mac users. So it's partly history, partly momentum. I also tried TextMate, and do still use it for some things (I like the personal text wiki extension, which I hacked a bit to use MediaWiki syntax), but found myself programming back in Emacs in short order. TextMate's extension mechanism is incredibly obtuse compared to elisp (the Lisp-intolerant claim this is a strength, but just try making sense of how to customize a non-trivial TextMate mode and see how far you get). Running external scripts just to do basic things seems pretty inefficient to me. Also, its UI needs lots and lots of work. The inability to simultaneously look at two buffers in one project is a deal killer for me. I'm sure it'll improve in the next version. Back on topic: native Unicode in Emacs 23 sounds great. So now, after only a few months of running the released version of 22, I guess I'll be back to running Emacs out of CVS. :)
- ardit33 19y ago
  "I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. " -- mainly b/c most of them are noobs. (seriously). A huge amount of Rails dev. are young, and just started programming, and to them emacs is just arcane old stuff, while textmate is much more accessible, and I actually agree with that. Just trying to download emacs is a pain, hidden in between ugly pages, while look textmate's webpage is much more shiny, and accessible. Plus people nowdays hate to have to jump thru config loops, and learn arcane old keyboard shortcuts just to get started. So, darwinian process is going on, and the new, simple, and nimble, is replacing the old and arcane.
  - mechanical_fish 19y ago
    DHH used TextMate in the famous "build a blog in 5 minutes" video that was many people's first introduction to Rails. I'm guessing it was also many people's first introduction to an editor that had real power.
  - jraines 19y ago
    Guilty as charged. Anyone know of a good Rails editor for Windows? I like the eclipse-based RadRails, but I heard they stopped supporting and updating it. I don't care about tons of IDE features, just would like something simple and shiny. I tried the NetBeans Rails editor and hated it.
    - davidw 19y ago
      Emacs, of course.
      - jraines 19y ago
        I will give it a try tonight!
        mechanical_fish 19y ago
        If you try it and find yourself tearing your hair out in enormous handfuls, do get somebody to give you a demo before you give up. Emacs is my favorite piece of software ever, but it does take some getting used to, and some practice. My inner emacs evangelist will haunt me for saying this, but there's a supposed TextMate clone, which I believe is called "E", that the local Ruby guys were talking about. I don't know if it's really any good, and I don't know if it's for Windows or just Linux.
        davidw 19y ago
        Yes, emacs is something to marry, not spend a night with:-) You'll love it more and more as the years pass and you continue to discover new aspects of it that continue to surprise and delight you.
- mrtron 19y ago
  You can do a lot of emac commands in textmate... Do a ctrl+s for example
  - mechanical_fish 19y ago
    Yes, but ctrl-r runs "Execute Line Inserting Result", which generally causes a brief pause followed by the spewing of some complete gibberish. That bit me approximately ten thousand million times when I switched to TextMate from emacs. The TextMate equivalent of ctrl-r is ctrl-shift-S. But it somehow doesn't seem to work as well... the semantics are not quite the same, and it isn't as good at remembering the search term from invocation to invocation. And ctrl-shift-S is a nasty three-key combo to have to press every time you want to do something as mundane as move backwards a few lines to a specific word. I tried to figure out how to remap ctrl-r to the equivalent of ctrl-shift-S. I couldn't figure out how. Which just goes to show that TextMate may be the best editor of the last fifteen years, but it's still not ready for prime time by emacs standards. I'm no elisp wizard, but I managed to figure out how to build my own custom shift-lock key (mapped to C-0) that works only on the top row of the keyboard, so that I can type something like this in emacs $extra($foo) = ! $bar; #pretend this was real code without touching the shift key once. TextMate can't even pretend to let me do something like that.
johnrob 19y ago
I think the first picture is pretty ugly, it looks too much like eclipse.
- ardit33 19y ago
  and what's wrong with eclipse? It does it's job well. It is an IDE not just a editor, and so far has been pretty popular for good reasons. I know it is trendy to bash java, but really what's wrong with eclipse?
  - mnemonicsloth 19y ago
    It's not Emacs. If that isn't enough, it's also not Vim.
  - johnrob 19y ago
    For many folks, myself included, the spirit of emacs is to avoid the mouse. That particular screen looks like it was designed to be used with a mouse. I agree that eclipse is a useful tool, but I don't think it has much in common with emacs. It feels strange saying this about editors, but they embody completely different notions of how programming is done. For example, when I pull up a file in emacs, I intend to read the code. Eclipse users tend to load the file and then examine the structure tab, looking directly at the method definitions. I've seen eclipse users ignore my comments because of this structure pane (and not reading the code file top to bottom). These editors definitely put us on different wave lengths :)
    - fendale 19y ago
      You can use the ECB (emacs code browser, which is what's displayed in the left column of the first image) quite happily without the mouse - I use it quite a lot in a terminal.
    - ghiotion 19y ago
      My God. I never noticed that, but you're absolutely right. I'm a vi guy myself, but all the other, more _visually_ oriented developers in the office don't read code from top to bottom. They scan the methods in the structure tab on eclipse. I always wondered why their eyes would constantly drift off the editor...
coffeeaddicted 19y ago
Well, as he asks for my excuse, why I still not use it ... I did grow up in the MS World where your fingers are trained to use <ctrl-v> and <ctrl-c>. And certainly all the other keybindings which you learn when programming with VS for a decade. I tried switching a few times, but having to press 3 keys at once is probably the main reason which keeps me still away from emacs. Does anyone know of some emacs scripts which put all the keybindings from VS into emacs? Including stuff like blockselection with alt+mouse? Serious, I'm mostly working on Unix these days, but I still miss the VS editor :-(
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  You can accomplish this if you want to, but please let us try to convince you that you don't want to. Learn emacs. If you do you will never need to "miss" your editor again, in your entire life. Emacs is open source, it's cross-platform, and it will never die... unless it is replaced by something so great that you will never miss it. Which may never happen. (TextMate is the best alternative I've seen in the last decade, but it has a long way to go.) You will eventually get emacs into your fingers. Buy Learning Emacs, a very good book. Learn to use kill-and-yank instead of copy-and-paste. Three keys at once? Am I such an emacs veteran that I just don't notice myself doing that? I guess I do have a few combos like that (C-M-\ , indent-region, is one I use quite a bit) but I have a Kinesis keyboard with Ctrl and Meta mapped to adjacent keys, one set for either hand, and that kind of solves a lot of the problem. One of the reasons I got fed up with TextMate and retreated back to emacs is that I can't stand all the three-key combos that the Mac insists on... it's all command-shift-this and command-option-that, because the Mac refuses to use the emacs prefix approach.
  - coffeeaddicted 19y ago
    As you might guess I have heard similar argument a lot already. I don't doubt that switching to emacs can be worth it, that's why I am asking about making it easier for me to start with it. I just don't see why I have to learn a new keymapping when nearly every new application out there uses a keymapping which is rather similar to the one which I am used to. I'm not looking for emacs to simulate VS. I'm really only interested in mapping the behavior of the mouse and the keyboard to common shortcuts. And you didn't really make an argument why learning another set of combos should be preferred to that. As it seems you rather also mapped it to your liking... So yes - I want to learn emacs. But no - I don't want to learn that specific keymapping, my current one works fine and every time I tried some emacs tutorial I was appealed by the 3 key combos after a while so much that I did give up. And because I'm not so deep in emacs I don't know yet how to do that, so I hoped that maybe someone else already did it.
jrsims 19y ago
Can someone give me a reason to try emacs and leave my trusty vim?
- lojic 19y ago
  Hard to say what would be a good reason for you, but I had used vim for a couple of years and really liked it. I still like its conciseness. I became interested in emacs because of the good support for Lisp w/ slime, etc. Plus, I thought I'd prefer extending my editor with Lisp vs. vim script - I was right. I hadn't written any vim scripts while using vim, but I've quickly written many little elisp functions and bound them to convenient keys. The dired (directory editing) feature is great. I like the way it handles buffers & bookmarks better than vim. I actually use the calendar feature. I like how the functions you right get integrated into the help facility automatically. The "Learning GNU Emacs" book is great. The architecture seems better than vim. I wasn't thrilled with all the "chording", but I'm writing new functions and making the keybindings comfortable for me. The help facility seems superior to me. Dynamic abbreviations, window/frame control. I'm sure there's more, but I only switched about 10 days ago :)
lojic 19y ago
I recently switched from vim to emacs. It's so easy to extend with elisp functions, and the buffer handling & directory editing is great. Not to mention ecb, etc. I still like vim, emacs just works better for me presently. I did have to put in some effort to get nice fonts, but as the article states, if you use emacs 23, you can get it to look beautiful. I wrote a post about how to get it running with nice fonts: http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on-ubuntu-linux/ http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on...
systems 19y ago
anyone here used scite, i've tried so many editors on windows and i've found scite to be the best of them all it's starts up quickly, i've added it to the windows shortcut context menu, and scite have this option that allow you to open all new file in the same instance on new tabs it have really good folding, and it have a simple and nice perl integration by default! i don't know much about scripting scite, i know it uses lua, but i am sure if it gets more popular, one will find nice languages mode for it on windows scite is king!
tehmoth 19y ago
first screenshot would be 'pretty' if it weren't editing python, which is horrible to look at, worse to code in.

23 points by iamelgringo 19y ago

1gor 19y ago

I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the mindshare in Rails developer community. 'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-specific navigation, snippet-expansion etc. features two years ago and has improved greatly since then. (See screencast: http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net for example) I've tried to follow the crowd initially and to learn TextMate, but then... why learning new set of keystrokes? And why reimplementing a fraction of editing modes that emacs has available? When you can have... So I went back, but I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. Matz uses emacs after all...

gcv 19y ago
I think TextMate's Rails mode came before emacs-rails and inspired it. That's probably part of the reason. Another part is that TextMate behaves much more like a Mac app, and Rails was started by Mac users. So it's partly history, partly momentum. I also tried TextMate, and do still use it for some things (I like the personal text wiki extension, which I hacked a bit to use MediaWiki syntax), but found myself programming back in Emacs in short order. TextMate's extension mechanism is incredibly obtuse compared to elisp (the Lisp-intolerant claim this is a strength, but just try making sense of how to customize a non-trivial TextMate mode and see how far you get). Running external scripts just to do basic things seems pretty inefficient to me. Also, its UI needs lots and lots of work. The inability to simultaneously look at two buffers in one project is a deal killer for me. I'm sure it'll improve in the next version. Back on topic: native Unicode in Emacs 23 sounds great. So now, after only a few months of running the released version of 22, I guess I'll be back to running Emacs out of CVS. :)
ardit33 19y ago
"I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. " -- mainly b/c most of them are noobs. (seriously). A huge amount of Rails dev. are young, and just started programming, and to them emacs is just arcane old stuff, while textmate is much more accessible, and I actually agree with that. Just trying to download emacs is a pain, hidden in between ugly pages, while look textmate's webpage is much more shiny, and accessible. Plus people nowdays hate to have to jump thru config loops, and learn arcane old keyboard shortcuts just to get started. So, darwinian process is going on, and the new, simple, and nimble, is replacing the old and arcane.
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  DHH used TextMate in the famous "build a blog in 5 minutes" video that was many people's first introduction to Rails. I'm guessing it was also many people's first introduction to an editor that had real power.
- jraines 19y ago
  Guilty as charged. Anyone know of a good Rails editor for Windows? I like the eclipse-based RadRails, but I heard they stopped supporting and updating it. I don't care about tons of IDE features, just would like something simple and shiny. I tried the NetBeans Rails editor and hated it.
  - davidw 19y ago
    Emacs, of course.
    - jraines 19y ago
      I will give it a try tonight!
      - mechanical_fish 19y ago
        If you try it and find yourself tearing your hair out in enormous handfuls, do get somebody to give you a demo before you give up. Emacs is my favorite piece of software ever, but it does take some getting used to, and some practice. My inner emacs evangelist will haunt me for saying this, but there's a supposed TextMate clone, which I believe is called "E", that the local Ruby guys were talking about. I don't know if it's really any good, and I don't know if it's for Windows or just Linux.
        davidw 19y ago
        Yes, emacs is something to marry, not spend a night with:-) You'll love it more and more as the years pass and you continue to discover new aspects of it that continue to surprise and delight you.
mrtron 19y ago
You can do a lot of emac commands in textmate... Do a ctrl+s for example
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  Yes, but ctrl-r runs "Execute Line Inserting Result", which generally causes a brief pause followed by the spewing of some complete gibberish. That bit me approximately ten thousand million times when I switched to TextMate from emacs. The TextMate equivalent of ctrl-r is ctrl-shift-S. But it somehow doesn't seem to work as well... the semantics are not quite the same, and it isn't as good at remembering the search term from invocation to invocation. And ctrl-shift-S is a nasty three-key combo to have to press every time you want to do something as mundane as move backwards a few lines to a specific word. I tried to figure out how to remap ctrl-r to the equivalent of ctrl-shift-S. I couldn't figure out how. Which just goes to show that TextMate may be the best editor of the last fifteen years, but it's still not ready for prime time by emacs standards. I'm no elisp wizard, but I managed to figure out how to build my own custom shift-lock key (mapped to C-0) that works only on the top row of the keyboard, so that I can type something like this in emacs $extra($foo) = ! $bar; #pretend this was real code without touching the shift key once. TextMate can't even pretend to let me do something like that.

johnrob 19y ago

I think the first picture is pretty ugly, it looks too much like eclipse.

ardit33 19y ago
and what's wrong with eclipse? It does it's job well. It is an IDE not just a editor, and so far has been pretty popular for good reasons. I know it is trendy to bash java, but really what's wrong with eclipse?
- mnemonicsloth 19y ago
  It's not Emacs. If that isn't enough, it's also not Vim.
- johnrob 19y ago
  For many folks, myself included, the spirit of emacs is to avoid the mouse. That particular screen looks like it was designed to be used with a mouse. I agree that eclipse is a useful tool, but I don't think it has much in common with emacs. It feels strange saying this about editors, but they embody completely different notions of how programming is done. For example, when I pull up a file in emacs, I intend to read the code. Eclipse users tend to load the file and then examine the structure tab, looking directly at the method definitions. I've seen eclipse users ignore my comments because of this structure pane (and not reading the code file top to bottom). These editors definitely put us on different wave lengths :)
  - fendale 19y ago
    You can use the ECB (emacs code browser, which is what's displayed in the left column of the first image) quite happily without the mouse - I use it quite a lot in a terminal.
  - ghiotion 19y ago
    My God. I never noticed that, but you're absolutely right. I'm a vi guy myself, but all the other, more _visually_ oriented developers in the office don't read code from top to bottom. They scan the methods in the structure tab on eclipse. I always wondered why their eyes would constantly drift off the editor...

coffeeaddicted 19y ago

Well, as he asks for my excuse, why I still not use it ... I did grow up in the MS World where your fingers are trained to use <ctrl-v> and <ctrl-c>. And certainly all the other keybindings which you learn when programming with VS for a decade. I tried switching a few times, but having to press 3 keys at once is probably the main reason which keeps me still away from emacs. Does anyone know of some emacs scripts which put all the keybindings from VS into emacs? Including stuff like blockselection with alt+mouse? Serious, I'm mostly working on Unix these days, but I still miss the VS editor :-(

mechanical_fish 19y ago
You can accomplish this if you want to, but please let us try to convince you that you don't want to. Learn emacs. If you do you will never need to "miss" your editor again, in your entire life. Emacs is open source, it's cross-platform, and it will never die... unless it is replaced by something so great that you will never miss it. Which may never happen. (TextMate is the best alternative I've seen in the last decade, but it has a long way to go.) You will eventually get emacs into your fingers. Buy Learning Emacs, a very good book. Learn to use kill-and-yank instead of copy-and-paste. Three keys at once? Am I such an emacs veteran that I just don't notice myself doing that? I guess I do have a few combos like that (C-M-\ , indent-region, is one I use quite a bit) but I have a Kinesis keyboard with Ctrl and Meta mapped to adjacent keys, one set for either hand, and that kind of solves a lot of the problem. One of the reasons I got fed up with TextMate and retreated back to emacs is that I can't stand all the three-key combos that the Mac insists on... it's all command-shift-this and command-option-that, because the Mac refuses to use the emacs prefix approach.
- coffeeaddicted 19y ago
  As you might guess I have heard similar argument a lot already. I don't doubt that switching to emacs can be worth it, that's why I am asking about making it easier for me to start with it. I just don't see why I have to learn a new keymapping when nearly every new application out there uses a keymapping which is rather similar to the one which I am used to. I'm not looking for emacs to simulate VS. I'm really only interested in mapping the behavior of the mouse and the keyboard to common shortcuts. And you didn't really make an argument why learning another set of combos should be preferred to that. As it seems you rather also mapped it to your liking... So yes - I want to learn emacs. But no - I don't want to learn that specific keymapping, my current one works fine and every time I tried some emacs tutorial I was appealed by the 3 key combos after a while so much that I did give up. And because I'm not so deep in emacs I don't know yet how to do that, so I hoped that maybe someone else already did it.

jrsims 19y ago

Can someone give me a reason to try emacs and leave my trusty vim?

lojic 19y ago
Hard to say what would be a good reason for you, but I had used vim for a couple of years and really liked it. I still like its conciseness. I became interested in emacs because of the good support for Lisp w/ slime, etc. Plus, I thought I'd prefer extending my editor with Lisp vs. vim script - I was right. I hadn't written any vim scripts while using vim, but I've quickly written many little elisp functions and bound them to convenient keys. The dired (directory editing) feature is great. I like the way it handles buffers & bookmarks better than vim. I actually use the calendar feature. I like how the functions you right get integrated into the help facility automatically. The "Learning GNU Emacs" book is great. The architecture seems better than vim. I wasn't thrilled with all the "chording", but I'm writing new functions and making the keybindings comfortable for me. The help facility seems superior to me. Dynamic abbreviations, window/frame control. I'm sure there's more, but I only switched about 10 days ago :)

lojic 19y ago

I recently switched from vim to emacs. It's so easy to extend with elisp functions, and the buffer handling & directory editing is great. Not to mention ecb, etc. I still like vim, emacs just works better for me presently. I did have to put in some effort to get nice fonts, but as the article states, if you use emacs 23, you can get it to look beautiful. I wrote a post about how to get it running with nice fonts: http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on-ubuntu-linux/ http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on...

systems 19y ago

anyone here used scite, i've tried so many editors on windows and i've found scite to be the best of them all it's starts up quickly, i've added it to the windows shortcut context menu, and scite have this option that allow you to open all new file in the same instance on new tabs it have really good folding, and it have a simple and nice perl integration by default! i don't know much about scripting scite, i know it uses lua, but i am sure if it gets more popular, one will find nice languages mode for it on windows scite is king!

tehmoth 19y ago

first screenshot would be 'pretty' if it weren't editing python, which is horrible to look at, worse to code in.