10 ms·

Emacs is sexy

139 points by type0 10y ago

analognoise 10y ago
Can't access this at work - it's blocked as pornography. Hope I don't have to explain that in the log to anyone - "No really, it's a text editor..."
- agumonkey 10y ago
  1yo http://archive.is/h3vZ0 http://archive.is/h3vZ0
  - elevensies 10y ago
    reran it: http://archive.is/6klEx http://archive.is/6klEx
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Then how do you explain [glances down] that?
- jwilk 10y ago
  Do they block whole .sexy TLD?
- fulafel 10y ago
  Sounds like you would have proof of a pretty major privacy problem at your job if someone confronted you about that.
- type0 10y ago
  Here, some real RMS porn: https://rms.sexy/ https://rms.sexy/ - thats probably why sexy domains are blocked...
ubercow 10y ago
Obligatory https://www.vim.sexy/ https://www.vim.sexy/
- faragon 10y ago
  Thanks God! :-)
- oldgun 10y ago
  I just know every time there's an HN post about Emacs/Vi there's gonna be a fight ;)
  - AlexAMEEE 10y ago
    No, because we simply don't compare elephants with fruits, we also don't compare a text editor with an operating system.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Ouch. That's not what I expected.
- ursus_bonum 10y ago
  This satire is a little too subtle for me, assuming this isn't real.
kt9 10y ago
I've been using Emacs for over 15 years now and I do almost all my work in it. The two things that I still haven't found good solutions for in emacs are available out of the box in almost every editor today: 1. Autocomplete of methods, classes, variables etc 2. Auto import statement organisation Yes I am aware of JDEE for #2 and I am aware of emacswiki/autocomplete but none of those solutions are as smooth, well integrated or work well enough like they do in atom or visual studio. If someone was to rethink the problem from the ground up and solve it in an elegant and efficient way my life would be complete.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  is JDEE based on CEDET ? CEDET is a proper abstraction for this but IIRC it's hard to use and a bit too slow.
- benaiah 10y ago
  Emacs features vary wildly in support from language to language - in Go, for instance, it's very easy to get both those working, while in Java it requires something more complicated such as eclim. company-mode is by far the best completion frontend, but the quality of the completions is dependent on how good the backend is, which varies a lot.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  Is that a Java-specific thing? My experience with C++ is that ever since libclang became widely used, autocompletion works really well—but that's because libclang is so good. Is there an analog of libclang for Java?
  - hellofunk 10y ago
    What package are you using for your Emacs back end for completion? I've tried several and never really found them stable or even working in some cases. I write a couple thousand lines of C++ every week in emacs and I've actually become very productive without auto completion, so perhaps I'm not missing it anymore at all.
tkamat29 10y ago
Emacs itself isn't sexy; the sole reason I use emacs is the power and extensibility offered by emacs lisp. If vim used elisp instead of shudders vimscript, I would use it in a heartbeat.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  Elisp (or even better, Guile) are definitely huge reasons to use emacs for me, but there are many, many other things I use it for instead of vim (which I also know, and have used for over 20 years). org-mode and w3m (a web browser that can be integrated in to emacs) are my two biggest draws, but eventually I mean to get the mail client working, give the shell modes another try, and maybe get the irc and RSS clients going too. The sky's the limit with emacs, while vim does more closely stick to being just an editor. All that said, I still use vim when I need it, such as for getting syntax highlighting of strace files, which last time I checked, emacs did not have a mode for. vim is also often much faster on large files.
  - sigzero 10y ago
    org-mode is what makes me stop and go "Hmmmm" about finally throwing in the towel and using it. I really hate the key combos though.
    - ska 10y ago
      I really hate the key combos though. Why not change them?
      - bloaf 10y ago
        A beginner would not want to break compatibility with every tutorial/instruction manual. They would be faced with decisions about the placement of shortcuts they're not even sure what they do. They definitely wouldn't have the perspective to create logical families of shortcuts. So of course the solution is to suffer the bad shortcut placement in Emacs long enough to not need tutorials and fully understand what you're doing, then throw all the intuition you've gained out the window by remapping everything.
lowlevel 10y ago
No it isn't.
- sigzero 10y ago
  Agreed
lowlevel 10y ago
No it isn't.
wonks 10y ago
Personally, I still really like Sublime. The GUI makes it very easy to pick up.
- harrygeez 10y ago
  Are you're really comparing a text-editor to a... operating system? Emacs is a whole different beast
  - wonks 10y ago
    You're just inviting the "decent text editor" joke, aren't you? ;-) But yes, if all you want is text editing I'm not sure what's better than Sublime. I've hard good things about VS Code lately, though.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hprotagonist 10y ago
http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs.html And down the Xah Lee rabbit hole we go. If you have a question of the form "how do i <very complicated one-liner>", xah has almost certainly written a post about it.
Delmania 10y ago
In my experience, Emacs is excellent if you take the time to set it up to do as much as possible. Manage work with OrgMode, read email with any number of packages, edit code in one of the supported languages, send and receive messages. The less you have to leave the application, the more productive you are. There are 2 issues with this, the first is the sheer number of packages you need to install. Packages are a mixed blessing because they add so much, but if the person who wrote it stops working on it, you now need to take over or find something else. The second is the configuration. If you're willing to do all that work and keep it running, that's awesome.
- type0 10y ago
  > Packages are a mixed blessing because they add so much, but if the person who wrote it stops working on it, you now need to take over or find something else. I know Spacemacs brings in a huge bunch, do they have any way to mitigate that?
  - Delmania 10y ago
    Critical mass, there's enough people using it that if someone leaves, another person will step up.
wiz21c 10y ago
I'd love to be super powerful on emacs on Windows behind corporate firewalls... However, emacs doesn't speak NTLM :-(
- mkesper 10y ago
  It seems so: https://github.com/cpitclaudel/emacs/blob/master/lisp/net/ntlm.el https://github.com/cpitclaudel/emacs/blob/master/lisp/net/nt... Or use cntlmproxy.
giann 10y ago
I'd love to use emacs as my primary editor. But it's too slow compared to sublime.
- harrygeez 10y ago
  But Emacs lets you work faster
- tyrust 10y ago
  If you're referring to initial open time, look into running the Emacs daemon (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon).
- iLemming 10y ago
  I'd love to start using that super power tool with interchangeable heads from Black+Decker, but damn - it takes long time to recharge the batteries. I would rather stick to my knife and hand screwdriver. I'm so fast and efficient in using them.
philipsunrise 10y ago
https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/799008315015655424 https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/799008315015655424
fizixer 10y ago
Yeah right. Elisp was dynamic-scoping-only until version 24.1. That means elisp code written before that (i.e., 99.999% of emacs code that's not in C) as well as most of the code written after that, has essentially the feel of hacky cruft which will drown a modern programmer into an abyss of cognitive pain and headache when (s)he attempts to understand, modify, or debug it. (not unlike GOTO ridden spaghetti) How many programmers have you come across that claim to use elisp as their primary programming language? (to give you an idea, enough of emacs users/hackers are sick of elisp enough that emacs is now offered in two configurations: based on elisp or based on guile)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  Hey at least Elisp wasn't ever as bad as Mock Lisp, the extension language in Gosling (aka UniPress aka Evil Software Hoarder) Emacs. It had ultra-dynamic lazy scoping: It would defer evaluating the function parameters until they were actually needed by the callee (((or a function it called))), at which time it would evaluate the parameters in the CALLEE's scope. James Gosling honestly copped to how terrible a language MockLisp was in the 1981 Unix Emacs release notes: https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_cmuGosling_4195808/Gosling_Unix_EMACS_Dec81_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_cmuGosling_4195808/Gosl... 12.2. MLisp - Mock Lisp Unix Emacs contains an interpreter for a language that in many respects resembles Lisp. The primary (some would say only) resemblance between Mock Lisp and any real Lisp is the general syntax of a program, which many feel is Lisp's weakest point. The differences include such things as the lack of a cons function and a rather peculiar method of passing parameters. "Rather peculiar" is an understatement. More info, links and code examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727085
  - kazinator 10y ago
    That's why Java is the way it is. Like father, like abomination.
- 10y ago
habitue 10y ago
I think the implied subtext of this site is "emacs is sexy, but its logo isn't. Here, download this alternate logo so you can feel ok about using it on a mac"
ChiliDogSwirl 10y ago
Am I the only one who thinks there should be at least one actual screenshot of emacs on a site titled "emacs is sexy"?
- choward 10y ago
  I agree completely. Nothing is sexy about this: http://emacs.sexy/img/How-to-Learn-Emacs-v2-Large.png http://emacs.sexy/img/How-to-Learn-Emacs-v2-Large.png
  - deedree 10y ago
    I don't agree though, I started using emacs because of this one picture. There's way too much info out there if you're just starting to figure out what you want to use for coding. So sexy maybe not the right word for this picture but I still love it.
justduckhead 10y ago
emacs is a piece of shit really. i think someone had to say it
rcgorton 10y ago
No it is not. It is incredibly bloated and inefficient due to the the number of keystrokes required to do simple stuff. Eliza mode. I've personally watched some incredibly talented researchers/engineers using emacs to perform every-day work; For a lot of the operations, it would have taken me 5 seconds in vi/vim, but took > 10 seconds for said (very brilliant) folk. As in, some of these folk are world reknown and regularly cited in(and are reviewers of) ACM/IEEE computing related journals. So no: Emacs is not sexy. Emacs is a fuster-cluck so complex as to be completely counter-productive.
DonHopkins 10y ago
Kyle Machulis sure loves Emacs. He wrote "Deldo - The Sex Toy and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs": https://www.metafetish.com/2010/08/02/deldo-sex-toy-control-for-emacs/ https://www.metafetish.com/2010/08/02/deldo-sex-toy-control-... It's well worth freeze framing and reading the text in the list of all the different programming languages that Emacs supports. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo
- qdot76367 10y ago
  Hah, thanks! :D
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Clearly Vim is making inroads :-) I have used both, from Finseth's 'FINE'[1], to MicroEmacs (ue) to Gosling emacs. But I switched over to vi when I started using PC keyboards all the time because of that damn caps lock key. For a while I would keymap it back to control and spent extra for a keyboard that actually had a control key there, but eventually I gave up not being able to walk up to a vanilla / foreign install and effectively generate a text file from within an editor. [1] Fine Is Not EMACS
farhaven 10y ago
I'd like to throw in the obligatory https://rms.sexy/ https://rms.sexy/
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  How can I contribute this sexy photo I took of RMS many years ago, in that fleeting moment between being asked a joke (to which his questioning smile replied "I don't know, why do you wrap gerbils in duct tape?") and hearing the punchline. http://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-liz-mg.jpg http://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-li...
lgessler 10y ago
I feel compelled to mention Spacemacs in response to some of the comments here. In terms of configuration required for reasonable productivity, Spacemacs is macOS, and a plain Emacs install is Arch Linux. Spacemacs gives you sensible configuration and packages out of the box, whereas the Emacs tutorials I'd begun to read kept repeating, "These are the functions you'll want to use, but only you can decide what to bind them to". That made me lose interest really quick--I'd prefer to have a 95% solution and then adjust it, not reinvent a sensible configuration from nothing. Spacemacs gives you exactly that. If what I'm describing was a barrier for you in adopting Emacs, I'd encourage you to check it out.
qrbLPHiKpiux 10y ago
I find it very hard to use. Perhaps because I evolved with VIM.
nobleach 10y ago
I've been a Vim user for quite some time. I've taken breaks and used Sublime, and most recently Atom. (with vim-mode-plus). A few years back I took a couple of months and dedicated myself to only using Emacs. I wanted to just prove to myself that I could do it. I have to say, it's one heck of an editor/environment/way-of-life. I can't see myself making the jump, but I can see why many make it. Just like Vim, it's an investment. You don't just get down to work easily. And the config files you start with (even if you start with some "make your life easy" packages) probably aren't the same ones you'll have in 5 years. It's meant to evolve. Who knows where Webstorm will be in 5 more years... I wish the best for everyone, cause competition in this area provides lots of innovation... but I am pretty certain Vim and Emacs will still exist.
jstrate 10y ago
I'm surprised the article doesn't also mention the theme gallery here: https://pawelbx.github.io/emacs-theme-gallery/ https://pawelbx.github.io/emacs-theme-gallery/ I actually used it yesterday and am currently using the heroku theme(coming from zenburn for a few years).
- picandocodigo 10y ago
  I'm the author of the site and I didn't know about the theme gallery you mentioned, but this other one is linked: http://emacsthemes.com/ http://emacsthemes.com/ I'll add pawelbx's gallery on the next update. Thanks!
codermom 10y ago
WOW a guy/organization accused of being a sexist/bigoted decides to market software as “SEXY”! Really!? do you want your 12 yo daughter picking her text editor because it’s “SEXY”!
- contras1970 10y ago
  Notice that the site is not affiliated with Emacs.
rjkaplan 10y ago
The page's domain and title are disappointing to me. Using sexualized language can create an environment that is unduly hostile to women, even if this is not intended. Many of the biases against women that such language provokes are totally unconscious, so even if the intent is not harmful, it can be bad regardless. More info here: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexualized_environment http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexualized_environment Wording in this comment borrowed from here: https://github.com/alecthomas/voluptuous/issues/287 https://github.com/alecthomas/voluptuous/issues/287
- 1_player 10y ago
  Oh, please. Sexiness does not have gender. Is being human acceptable anymore? Yes, do we sex and find things and people sexy, sometimes even text editors.
- throw_throw 10y ago
  Are you implying only females can be sexy?
  - adultSwim 10y ago
    I believe he's implying that women have been and continue to be sexualized in a way and to an extent that men are not. I'm fine with this particular example but I wholeheartedly agree with the comment. However me being fine with it isn't enough - everyone already takes me seriously. I haven't always seen that same courtesy extended to women engineers.
- type0 10y ago
  With the same premise: https://rms.sexy https://rms.sexy The page's domain and title are disappointing to me. Using sexualized language can create an environment that is unduly hostile to RMS, even if this is not intended. Many of the biases against RMS that such language provokes are totally unconscious, so even if the intent is not harmful, it can be bad regardless. More info here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html
adultSwim 10y ago
I've spent years using emacs. It continues to be a tool worth using. My favorite editors are still nano and notepad.exe
everybodyknows 10y ago
Editing in the Multi-Occur buffer can be just about ideal for coordinating name changes across multiple files. Unfortunately, it's keystroke-inefficient out of the box. The elisp fixes are here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2641211/emacs-interactively-search-open-buffers http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2641211/emacs-interactive...

139 points by type0 10y ago

Can't access this at work - it's blocked as pornography. Hope I don't have to explain that in the log to anyone - "No really, it's a text editor..."

agumonkey 10y ago
1yo http://archive.is/h3vZ0 http://archive.is/h3vZ0
- elevensies 10y ago
  reran it: http://archive.is/6klEx http://archive.is/6klEx
jasonkostempski 10y ago
Then how do you explain [glances down] that?
jwilk 10y ago
Do they block whole .sexy TLD?
fulafel 10y ago
Sounds like you would have proof of a pretty major privacy problem at your job if someone confronted you about that.
type0 10y ago
Here, some real RMS porn: https://rms.sexy/ https://rms.sexy/ - thats probably why sexy domains are blocked...

ubercow 10y ago

Obligatory https://www.vim.sexy/ https://www.vim.sexy/

faragon 10y ago
Thanks God! :-)
oldgun 10y ago
I just know every time there's an HN post about Emacs/Vi there's gonna be a fight ;)
- AlexAMEEE 10y ago
  No, because we simply don't compare elephants with fruits, we also don't compare a text editor with an operating system.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Ouch. That's not what I expected.
ursus_bonum 10y ago
This satire is a little too subtle for me, assuming this isn't real.

kt9 10y ago

I've been using Emacs for over 15 years now and I do almost all my work in it. The two things that I still haven't found good solutions for in emacs are available out of the box in almost every editor today: 1. Autocomplete of methods, classes, variables etc 2. Auto import statement organisation Yes I am aware of JDEE for #2 and I am aware of emacswiki/autocomplete but none of those solutions are as smooth, well integrated or work well enough like they do in atom or visual studio. If someone was to rethink the problem from the ground up and solve it in an elegant and efficient way my life would be complete.

agumonkey 10y ago
is JDEE based on CEDET ? CEDET is a proper abstraction for this but IIRC it's hard to use and a bit too slow.
benaiah 10y ago
Emacs features vary wildly in support from language to language - in Go, for instance, it's very easy to get both those working, while in Java it requires something more complicated such as eclim. company-mode is by far the best completion frontend, but the quality of the completions is dependent on how good the backend is, which varies a lot.
conistonwater 10y ago
Is that a Java-specific thing? My experience with C++ is that ever since libclang became widely used, autocompletion works really well—but that's because libclang is so good. Is there an analog of libclang for Java?
- hellofunk 10y ago
  What package are you using for your Emacs back end for completion? I've tried several and never really found them stable or even working in some cases. I write a couple thousand lines of C++ every week in emacs and I've actually become very productive without auto completion, so perhaps I'm not missing it anymore at all.

tkamat29 10y ago

Emacs itself isn't sexy; the sole reason I use emacs is the power and extensibility offered by emacs lisp. If vim used elisp instead of shudders vimscript, I would use it in a heartbeat.

pmoriarty 10y ago
Elisp (or even better, Guile) are definitely huge reasons to use emacs for me, but there are many, many other things I use it for instead of vim (which I also know, and have used for over 20 years). org-mode and w3m (a web browser that can be integrated in to emacs) are my two biggest draws, but eventually I mean to get the mail client working, give the shell modes another try, and maybe get the irc and RSS clients going too. The sky's the limit with emacs, while vim does more closely stick to being just an editor. All that said, I still use vim when I need it, such as for getting syntax highlighting of strace files, which last time I checked, emacs did not have a mode for. vim is also often much faster on large files.
- sigzero 10y ago
  org-mode is what makes me stop and go "Hmmmm" about finally throwing in the towel and using it. I really hate the key combos though.
  - ska 10y ago
    I really hate the key combos though. Why not change them?
    - bloaf 10y ago
      A beginner would not want to break compatibility with every tutorial/instruction manual. They would be faced with decisions about the placement of shortcuts they're not even sure what they do. They definitely wouldn't have the perspective to create logical families of shortcuts. So of course the solution is to suffer the bad shortcut placement in Emacs long enough to not need tutorials and fully understand what you're doing, then throw all the intuition you've gained out the window by remapping everything.

lowlevel 10y ago

No it isn't.

sigzero 10y ago
Agreed

lowlevel 10y ago

No it isn't.

wonks 10y ago

Personally, I still really like Sublime. The GUI makes it very easy to pick up.

harrygeez 10y ago
Are you're really comparing a text-editor to a... operating system? Emacs is a whole different beast
- wonks 10y ago
  You're just inviting the "decent text editor" joke, aren't you? ;-) But yes, if all you want is text editing I'm not sure what's better than Sublime. I've hard good things about VS Code lately, though.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hprotagonist 10y ago

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs.html And down the Xah Lee rabbit hole we go. If you have a question of the form "how do i <very complicated one-liner>", xah has almost certainly written a post about it.

Delmania 10y ago

In my experience, Emacs is excellent if you take the time to set it up to do as much as possible. Manage work with OrgMode, read email with any number of packages, edit code in one of the supported languages, send and receive messages. The less you have to leave the application, the more productive you are. There are 2 issues with this, the first is the sheer number of packages you need to install. Packages are a mixed blessing because they add so much, but if the person who wrote it stops working on it, you now need to take over or find something else. The second is the configuration. If you're willing to do all that work and keep it running, that's awesome.

type0 10y ago
> Packages are a mixed blessing because they add so much, but if the person who wrote it stops working on it, you now need to take over or find something else. I know Spacemacs brings in a huge bunch, do they have any way to mitigate that?
- Delmania 10y ago
  Critical mass, there's enough people using it that if someone leaves, another person will step up.

wiz21c 10y ago

I'd love to be super powerful on emacs on Windows behind corporate firewalls... However, emacs doesn't speak NTLM :-(

mkesper 10y ago
It seems so: https://github.com/cpitclaudel/emacs/blob/master/lisp/net/ntlm.el https://github.com/cpitclaudel/emacs/blob/master/lisp/net/nt... Or use cntlmproxy.

giann 10y ago

I'd love to use emacs as my primary editor. But it's too slow compared to sublime.

harrygeez 10y ago
But Emacs lets you work faster
tyrust 10y ago
If you're referring to initial open time, look into running the Emacs daemon (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon).
iLemming 10y ago
I'd love to start using that super power tool with interchangeable heads from Black+Decker, but damn - it takes long time to recharge the batteries. I would rather stick to my knife and hand screwdriver. I'm so fast and efficient in using them.

philipsunrise 10y ago

https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/799008315015655424 https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/799008315015655424

fizixer 10y ago

Yeah right. Elisp was dynamic-scoping-only until version 24.1. That means elisp code written before that (i.e., 99.999% of emacs code that's not in C) as well as most of the code written after that, has essentially the feel of hacky cruft which will drown a modern programmer into an abyss of cognitive pain and headache when (s)he attempts to understand, modify, or debug it. (not unlike GOTO ridden spaghetti) How many programmers have you come across that claim to use elisp as their primary programming language? (to give you an idea, enough of emacs users/hackers are sick of elisp enough that emacs is now offered in two configurations: based on elisp or based on guile)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DonHopkins 10y ago
Hey at least Elisp wasn't ever as bad as Mock Lisp, the extension language in Gosling (aka UniPress aka Evil Software Hoarder) Emacs. It had ultra-dynamic lazy scoping: It would defer evaluating the function parameters until they were actually needed by the callee (((or a function it called))), at which time it would evaluate the parameters in the CALLEE's scope. James Gosling honestly copped to how terrible a language MockLisp was in the 1981 Unix Emacs release notes: https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_cmuGosling_4195808/Gosling_Unix_EMACS_Dec81_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_cmuGosling_4195808/Gosl... 12.2. MLisp - Mock Lisp Unix Emacs contains an interpreter for a language that in many respects resembles Lisp. The primary (some would say only) resemblance between Mock Lisp and any real Lisp is the general syntax of a program, which many feel is Lisp's weakest point. The differences include such things as the lack of a cons function and a rather peculiar method of passing parameters. "Rather peculiar" is an understatement. More info, links and code examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8727085
- kazinator 10y ago
  That's why Java is the way it is. Like father, like abomination.
10y ago

habitue 10y ago

I think the implied subtext of this site is "emacs is sexy, but its logo isn't. Here, download this alternate logo so you can feel ok about using it on a mac"

ChiliDogSwirl 10y ago

Am I the only one who thinks there should be at least one actual screenshot of emacs on a site titled "emacs is sexy"?

choward 10y ago
I agree completely. Nothing is sexy about this: http://emacs.sexy/img/How-to-Learn-Emacs-v2-Large.png http://emacs.sexy/img/How-to-Learn-Emacs-v2-Large.png
- deedree 10y ago
  I don't agree though, I started using emacs because of this one picture. There's way too much info out there if you're just starting to figure out what you want to use for coding. So sexy maybe not the right word for this picture but I still love it.

justduckhead 10y ago

emacs is a piece of shit really. i think someone had to say it

rcgorton 10y ago

No it is not. It is incredibly bloated and inefficient due to the the number of keystrokes required to do simple stuff. Eliza mode. I've personally watched some incredibly talented researchers/engineers using emacs to perform every-day work; For a lot of the operations, it would have taken me 5 seconds in vi/vim, but took > 10 seconds for said (very brilliant) folk. As in, some of these folk are world reknown and regularly cited in(and are reviewers of) ACM/IEEE computing related journals. So no: Emacs is not sexy. Emacs is a fuster-cluck so complex as to be completely counter-productive.

DonHopkins 10y ago

Kyle Machulis sure loves Emacs. He wrote "Deldo - The Sex Toy and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs": https://www.metafetish.com/2010/08/02/deldo-sex-toy-control-for-emacs/ https://www.metafetish.com/2010/08/02/deldo-sex-toy-control-... It's well worth freeze framing and reading the text in the list of all the different programming languages that Emacs supports. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo

qdot76367 10y ago
Hah, thanks! :D

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Clearly Vim is making inroads :-) I have used both, from Finseth's 'FINE'[1], to MicroEmacs (ue) to Gosling emacs. But I switched over to vi when I started using PC keyboards all the time because of that damn caps lock key. For a while I would keymap it back to control and spent extra for a keyboard that actually had a control key there, but eventually I gave up not being able to walk up to a vanilla / foreign install and effectively generate a text file from within an editor. [1] Fine Is Not EMACS

farhaven 10y ago

I'd like to throw in the obligatory https://rms.sexy/ https://rms.sexy/

DonHopkins 10y ago
How can I contribute this sexy photo I took of RMS many years ago, in that fleeting moment between being asked a joke (to which his questioning smile replied "I don't know, why do you wrap gerbils in duct tape?") and hearing the punchline. http://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-liz-mg.jpg http://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-li...

lgessler 10y ago

I feel compelled to mention Spacemacs in response to some of the comments here. In terms of configuration required for reasonable productivity, Spacemacs is macOS, and a plain Emacs install is Arch Linux. Spacemacs gives you sensible configuration and packages out of the box, whereas the Emacs tutorials I'd begun to read kept repeating, "These are the functions you'll want to use, but only you can decide what to bind them to". That made me lose interest really quick--I'd prefer to have a 95% solution and then adjust it, not reinvent a sensible configuration from nothing. Spacemacs gives you exactly that. If what I'm describing was a barrier for you in adopting Emacs, I'd encourage you to check it out.

qrbLPHiKpiux 10y ago

I find it very hard to use. Perhaps because I evolved with VIM.

nobleach 10y ago

I've been a Vim user for quite some time. I've taken breaks and used Sublime, and most recently Atom. (with vim-mode-plus). A few years back I took a couple of months and dedicated myself to only using Emacs. I wanted to just prove to myself that I could do it. I have to say, it's one heck of an editor/environment/way-of-life. I can't see myself making the jump, but I can see why many make it. Just like Vim, it's an investment. You don't just get down to work easily. And the config files you start with (even if you start with some "make your life easy" packages) probably aren't the same ones you'll have in 5 years. It's meant to evolve. Who knows where Webstorm will be in 5 more years... I wish the best for everyone, cause competition in this area provides lots of innovation... but I am pretty certain Vim and Emacs will still exist.

jstrate 10y ago

I'm surprised the article doesn't also mention the theme gallery here: https://pawelbx.github.io/emacs-theme-gallery/ https://pawelbx.github.io/emacs-theme-gallery/ I actually used it yesterday and am currently using the heroku theme(coming from zenburn for a few years).

picandocodigo 10y ago
I'm the author of the site and I didn't know about the theme gallery you mentioned, but this other one is linked: http://emacsthemes.com/ http://emacsthemes.com/ I'll add pawelbx's gallery on the next update. Thanks!

codermom 10y ago

WOW a guy/organization accused of being a sexist/bigoted decides to market software as “SEXY”! Really!? do you want your 12 yo daughter picking her text editor because it’s “SEXY”!

contras1970 10y ago
Notice that the site is not affiliated with Emacs.

rjkaplan 10y ago

The page's domain and title are disappointing to me. Using sexualized language can create an environment that is unduly hostile to women, even if this is not intended. Many of the biases against women that such language provokes are totally unconscious, so even if the intent is not harmful, it can be bad regardless. More info here: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexualized_environment http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexualized_environment Wording in this comment borrowed from here: https://github.com/alecthomas/voluptuous/issues/287 https://github.com/alecthomas/voluptuous/issues/287

1_player 10y ago
Oh, please. Sexiness does not have gender. Is being human acceptable anymore? Yes, do we sex and find things and people sexy, sometimes even text editors.
throw_throw 10y ago
Are you implying only females can be sexy?
- adultSwim 10y ago
  I believe he's implying that women have been and continue to be sexualized in a way and to an extent that men are not. I'm fine with this particular example but I wholeheartedly agree with the comment. However me being fine with it isn't enough - everyone already takes me seriously. I haven't always seen that same courtesy extended to women engineers.
type0 10y ago
With the same premise: https://rms.sexy https://rms.sexy The page's domain and title are disappointing to me. Using sexualized language can create an environment that is unduly hostile to RMS, even if this is not intended. Many of the biases against RMS that such language provokes are totally unconscious, so even if the intent is not harmful, it can be bad regardless. More info here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html

adultSwim 10y ago

I've spent years using emacs. It continues to be a tool worth using. My favorite editors are still nano and notepad.exe

everybodyknows 10y ago

Editing in the Multi-Occur buffer can be just about ideal for coordinating name changes across multiple files. Unfortunately, it's keystroke-inefficient out of the box. The elisp fixes are here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2641211/emacs-interactively-search-open-buffers http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2641211/emacs-interactive...