5 ms·

It's 10MB uncompressed so at that point I'd hope Emacs would have finally become a "reliably available option" first (13MB on my system). EDIT: why the downvot

It's 10MB uncompressed so at that point I'd hope Emacs would have finally become a "reliably available option" first (13MB on my system). EDIT: why the downvote? Not trolling, just genuinely sad that with today's hard drive sizes it's not a given that Emacs is available virtually everywhere, like vi or nano are.

sspiff 9y ago
While emacs is a terrific editor (or platform for editors), it is not easy to use. It has a unique set of keyboard shortcuts, which means that for most newcomers, their familiar hotkeys or key combos will do things that they don't expect. A modern, straightforward CLI editor would help many people.
- bostand 9y ago
  Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that. Isn't that what a true beginner would use anyway instead of the terminal version?
  - lloeki 9y ago
    We're talking terminal (not GUI) editors here. If I fire emacs on macOS there's no menu displayed by default. If I connect remotely on a Debian machine, the menu is there but mouse reporting is not working. The help, if started by itself, vanishes at the first keypress (on macOS), which makes it really easy to skip the C-x C-c part, and uses the emacs-only convention of C- instead of the well known ^ for control (although it's explained right there), thus doubly easy to miss. I can see how newcomers would be turned away from it.
    - AsyncAwait 9y ago
      vi(m) is usually included by default and is no easier to use for a beginner, so why not emacs?
      - lloeki 9y ago
        `apt-get install emacs-nox` pulls in 83MB on jessie. The installed-by-default one is vim-tiny (clocking in at 27MB), not vim-nox (which pulls in an additional 21MB), for which there is no similar emacs package. Turns out nano is ~370kB, that makes for a small non-modal beginner editor, the modal one being covered by vim-tiny.
        AsyncAwait 9y ago
        Fair, but I don't think 20MB vs 80MB should be a problem in 2017, people are downloading ~60GB games off Steam, downloading a ~5GB ISO every 6-24 months is not that much in comparison.
        type0 9y ago
        For some people on the move data transfers are expensive, even if 80MB isn't much that adds up very fast.
      - cryptonector 9y ago
        Because modal editing is where it's at!
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that. Which is still nearly useless without knowing of lots of Emacs arcana.
  - kire456 9y ago
    I was once a "true beginner", having been forced to use basic terminal commands in school and having decided to get a raspberry pi and shove Raspbian on it for laughs. There is no GUI over ssh from Windows unless you already know what you're doing. In that context, accidentally opening emacs is bewildering :)
  - deong 9y ago
    That's basically my question. What's the market for people who want a terminal based programmers editor in late 2017 who don't already use Vim or Emacs?
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Actually its default keys are available in lots of other places. Most notably anything that uses readline (like bash), but I've even found the keys work in unexpected places like the MATLAB editor. Plus the letter keys and arrow keys already do what you expect. What "expected behaviour" are you referring to?
  - sspiff 9y ago
    Granted, but bash and other readline applications generally have a very different mode of operation compared to a text editor. They operate on single lines of input at a time (most of the time). Editors like emacs operate on a multi-line body of text, and most people expect those to work like the other text fields in their environment (Ctrl-C/X/V for copy/cut/past, Ctrl-A for select all, shift-home/end/arrows to select text etc.) I know you can activate those keybinding in Emacs, but then none of the documentation you find about keyboard shortcuts will apply to you. The fact that many places support emacs keybindings (like MATLAB or IntelliJ) are an indication of how many programmers are used to those keybindings, but beginning or aspiring users most certainly are not. Don't get me wrong. I love Emacs. I use Emacs everywhere, and for everything. But I know that the default behaviour and keybindings were a hurdle to overcome when I first got to know Emacs, and it took me time and effort to get comfortable within the editor.
    - vetinari 9y ago
      Cocoa widgets for text entry in macOS support Emacs keybindings by default. Yes, TextEdit too. You cannot get nearer to beginning users than that. But yes, it takes a time to get used to. But that's matter of familiarity.
      - sspiff 9y ago
        But only Emacs users use those keybindings with those widgets, so that's not a good argument to say "emacs keybindings are well known by novice users".
    - cben 9y ago
      Emacs cua-mode is not bad. It does create some confusion with C-x shortcuts, eg. C-x C-s when typed too slowly will cut selected text and enter search, instead of saving :-( But I'd love a more total conversion to CUA... E.g. I have C-o to open files, and C-w to close buffer/window. https://gist.github.com/cben/ada7675ab9aa14000a1a50eae3986117 https://gist.github.com/cben/ada7675ab9aa14000a1a50eae398611... -- emacs user for >15yr, tired of motor context switching. (Terminal Ctrl+Shift+X/C/V vs it opening devtools in Chrome is bad enough...)
- dspillett 9y ago
  > While emacs is a terrific editor ... it is not easy to use. I would suggest it is easy to use, mainly because it can be customised pretty heavily to work your way, it just isn't easy to learn which is why I've stuck with other options.
  - jcelerier 9y ago
    I think that "easy to use" means "easy to use from the beginning" most of the time.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    Emacs is mostly just unfamiliar. It's also a little bit opinionated, and out of the box its opinions have a little bit of distance from most GUI editors. It's not actually hard to learn. I reckon vi is harder to learn, but at least with vi you know you have to do things differently. Emacs is much closer to other common editors, just a little bit different, and that can make it surprisingly frustrating, with the emphasis on surprise.
- meitham 9y ago
  I moved from Vim to Spacemacs (emacs with evil kit) four years ago. I was worried initially worried my productivity might go down due to not knowing emacs functions. Surprisingly, there was an included plugin (https://github.com/kai2nenobu/guide-key/blob/master/README.org https://github.com/kai2nenobu/guide-key/blob/master/README.o...) that offered me all the possible keys at the bottom. Most functiond are two, three or four keys away. For instance, I wanted to copy the file name I am editing I could press Spacebar, which offered about 15 further keys, such as f all functions to do with files, b for buffer functions, w for window functions, etc. Once i pressed f, then I see all the functions possible on a file, including Spc-f-y for yanking the file name. This made the editor auto discoverable for me, almost like jumping to Windows 3 after years on MS-DOS.
  - type0 9y ago
    Spacemacs is amazing but it's almost an IDE at that point.
    - meitham 9y ago
      An IDE with the best embedded editor, Vim, reimplemented with elisp!
coldtea 9y ago
>why the downvote? Because MB don't matter. It's about the experience it offers (e.g. as a better nano for early users) or doesn't offer. Nobody cares if Emacs is only 3MB more -- it's not an argument for "just use Emacs then".
- shandor 9y ago
  > Because MB don't matter I beg your pardon, but since Linux is increasingly used nowadays in quite resource constrained embedded devices, MB definitely does matter. (No, I don't claim that the individual 10 MB is very much on most devices that are actually capable of running linux. But once you go down that road and start having something else bloated than just the text editor, you are a few hundred MBs poorer in no time, and that is a lot.)
  - hnlmorg 9y ago
    I don't entirely agree with coldtea either but in defence of this project it is very easy to shrink the ELF binaries that Go spits out as there's a lot of debugging hooks in there that arguably you don't need on production boxes: https://blog.filippo.io/shrink-your-go-binaries-with-this-one-weird-trick/ https://blog.filippo.io/shrink-your-go-binaries-with-this-on...
    - shandor 9y ago
      Sure, my meaning wasn't to talk down the project itself, it looks neat! The "MB does not matter" just jumped at me (somewhat out of context, I have to admit) since I work in the embedded land, and the pain is sometimes too real there.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        Obviously the MB don't matter in this case and for the target audience of the editor, not in general and in every context.
  - coldtea 9y ago
b0rsuk 9y ago
I haven't downvoted you, but I wouldn't recommend Vim either, and it's my favourite editor. Vim is notorious for trapping users, they don't even know how to exit the program! Nano really gets the job done for people who have no clue about editor usage. If you only need to edit a few lines in a file once a month, immediate accessibility Nano provides is more valuable than powerful features that take time to memorize and absorb into muscle memory. Emacs, Vim are for people who use Nano enough to start feeling uncomfortable.
- mikegerwitz 9y ago
  > they don't even know how to exit the program Vim lists `:q' and `:help' prominently in the middle of the screen when you first start it. If you try to exit with C-c (in Normal mode), or C-c C-c (in Insert), you get this message: "Type :quit<Enter> to exit Vim"
  - vetinari 9y ago
    > Vim lists `:q' and `:help' prominently in the middle of the screen when you first start it. Only when you start it by itself intentionally, not when you want to edit something and your $EDITOR is not set, then you end up in vim without an idea, how to quit. I remember (in the mid-90s) making another telnet session and killing vi. Swearing in the process. Yes, I later learned the :q! command.
agumonkey 9y ago
13MB only ? how come
efficax 9y ago
It's 10MB uncompressed because go compiles libraries statically in the binary. 10MB is not really a big lift, and static compilation makes binary distribution much simpler. I don't have any objection to packaging emacs with the OS. Actually, it comes with macOS, although without graphical support (/usr/bin/emacs).
hiram112 9y ago
I'm always 'that guy' who will eventually run 'sudo yum install emacs-nox' on any of our dozens of EC2 instances I'm shelled into if I'm working with it for more than a few minutes. The problem is that some of these servers are already stripped down - it's even worse as we're moving to containers. Emacs, even the non-gui version, still requires about a dozen dependencies, at least on most Debian and RHEL based servers. And each time I install it, I get some bad feeling in the back of my mind, wondering if I'm the one who opened a big hole into our infrastructure because I just wouldn't learn vim. :) And yes I know about Tramp mode from my local machine, and other tricks, but sometimes it's easier to just install the damn editor locally.

sspiff 9y ago

While emacs is a terrific editor (or platform for editors), it is not easy to use. It has a unique set of keyboard shortcuts, which means that for most newcomers, their familiar hotkeys or key combos will do things that they don't expect. A modern, straightforward CLI editor would help many people.

bostand 9y ago
Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that. Isn't that what a true beginner would use anyway instead of the terminal version?
- lloeki 9y ago
  We're talking terminal (not GUI) editors here. If I fire emacs on macOS there's no menu displayed by default. If I connect remotely on a Debian machine, the menu is there but mouse reporting is not working. The help, if started by itself, vanishes at the first keypress (on macOS), which makes it really easy to skip the C-x C-c part, and uses the emacs-only convention of C- instead of the well known ^ for control (although it's explained right there), thus doubly easy to miss. I can see how newcomers would be turned away from it.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    vi(m) is usually included by default and is no easier to use for a beginner, so why not emacs?
    - lloeki 9y ago
      `apt-get install emacs-nox` pulls in 83MB on jessie. The installed-by-default one is vim-tiny (clocking in at 27MB), not vim-nox (which pulls in an additional 21MB), for which there is no similar emacs package. Turns out nano is ~370kB, that makes for a small non-modal beginner editor, the modal one being covered by vim-tiny.
      - AsyncAwait 9y ago
        Fair, but I don't think 20MB vs 80MB should be a problem in 2017, people are downloading ~60GB games off Steam, downloading a ~5GB ISO every 6-24 months is not that much in comparison.
        type0 9y ago
        For some people on the move data transfers are expensive, even if 80MB isn't much that adds up very fast.
    - cryptonector 9y ago
      Because modal editing is where it's at!
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that. Which is still nearly useless without knowing of lots of Emacs arcana.
- kire456 9y ago
  I was once a "true beginner", having been forced to use basic terminal commands in school and having decided to get a raspberry pi and shove Raspbian on it for laughs. There is no GUI over ssh from Windows unless you already know what you're doing. In that context, accidentally opening emacs is bewildering :)
- deong 9y ago
  That's basically my question. What's the market for people who want a terminal based programmers editor in late 2017 who don't already use Vim or Emacs?
cup-of-tea 9y ago
Actually its default keys are available in lots of other places. Most notably anything that uses readline (like bash), but I've even found the keys work in unexpected places like the MATLAB editor. Plus the letter keys and arrow keys already do what you expect. What "expected behaviour" are you referring to?
- sspiff 9y ago
  Granted, but bash and other readline applications generally have a very different mode of operation compared to a text editor. They operate on single lines of input at a time (most of the time). Editors like emacs operate on a multi-line body of text, and most people expect those to work like the other text fields in their environment (Ctrl-C/X/V for copy/cut/past, Ctrl-A for select all, shift-home/end/arrows to select text etc.) I know you can activate those keybinding in Emacs, but then none of the documentation you find about keyboard shortcuts will apply to you. The fact that many places support emacs keybindings (like MATLAB or IntelliJ) are an indication of how many programmers are used to those keybindings, but beginning or aspiring users most certainly are not. Don't get me wrong. I love Emacs. I use Emacs everywhere, and for everything. But I know that the default behaviour and keybindings were a hurdle to overcome when I first got to know Emacs, and it took me time and effort to get comfortable within the editor.
  - vetinari 9y ago
    Cocoa widgets for text entry in macOS support Emacs keybindings by default. Yes, TextEdit too. You cannot get nearer to beginning users than that. But yes, it takes a time to get used to. But that's matter of familiarity.
    - sspiff 9y ago
      But only Emacs users use those keybindings with those widgets, so that's not a good argument to say "emacs keybindings are well known by novice users".
  - cben 9y ago
    Emacs cua-mode is not bad. It does create some confusion with C-x shortcuts, eg. C-x C-s when typed too slowly will cut selected text and enter search, instead of saving :-( But I'd love a more total conversion to CUA... E.g. I have C-o to open files, and C-w to close buffer/window. https://gist.github.com/cben/ada7675ab9aa14000a1a50eae3986117 https://gist.github.com/cben/ada7675ab9aa14000a1a50eae398611... -- emacs user for >15yr, tired of motor context switching. (Terminal Ctrl+Shift+X/C/V vs it opening devtools in Chrome is bad enough...)
dspillett 9y ago
> While emacs is a terrific editor ... it is not easy to use. I would suggest it is easy to use, mainly because it can be customised pretty heavily to work your way, it just isn't easy to learn which is why I've stuck with other options.
- jcelerier 9y ago
  I think that "easy to use" means "easy to use from the beginning" most of the time.
- barrkel 9y ago
  Emacs is mostly just unfamiliar. It's also a little bit opinionated, and out of the box its opinions have a little bit of distance from most GUI editors. It's not actually hard to learn. I reckon vi is harder to learn, but at least with vi you know you have to do things differently. Emacs is much closer to other common editors, just a little bit different, and that can make it surprisingly frustrating, with the emphasis on surprise.
meitham 9y ago
I moved from Vim to Spacemacs (emacs with evil kit) four years ago. I was worried initially worried my productivity might go down due to not knowing emacs functions. Surprisingly, there was an included plugin (https://github.com/kai2nenobu/guide-key/blob/master/README.org https://github.com/kai2nenobu/guide-key/blob/master/README.o...) that offered me all the possible keys at the bottom. Most functiond are two, three or four keys away. For instance, I wanted to copy the file name I am editing I could press Spacebar, which offered about 15 further keys, such as f all functions to do with files, b for buffer functions, w for window functions, etc. Once i pressed f, then I see all the functions possible on a file, including Spc-f-y for yanking the file name. This made the editor auto discoverable for me, almost like jumping to Windows 3 after years on MS-DOS.
- type0 9y ago
  Spacemacs is amazing but it's almost an IDE at that point.
  - meitham 9y ago
    An IDE with the best embedded editor, Vim, reimplemented with elisp!

coldtea 9y ago

>why the downvote? Because MB don't matter. It's about the experience it offers (e.g. as a better nano for early users) or doesn't offer. Nobody cares if Emacs is only 3MB more -- it's not an argument for "just use Emacs then".

shandor 9y ago
> Because MB don't matter I beg your pardon, but since Linux is increasingly used nowadays in quite resource constrained embedded devices, MB definitely does matter. (No, I don't claim that the individual 10 MB is very much on most devices that are actually capable of running linux. But once you go down that road and start having something else bloated than just the text editor, you are a few hundred MBs poorer in no time, and that is a lot.)
- hnlmorg 9y ago
  I don't entirely agree with coldtea either but in defence of this project it is very easy to shrink the ELF binaries that Go spits out as there's a lot of debugging hooks in there that arguably you don't need on production boxes: https://blog.filippo.io/shrink-your-go-binaries-with-this-one-weird-trick/ https://blog.filippo.io/shrink-your-go-binaries-with-this-on...
  - shandor 9y ago
    Sure, my meaning wasn't to talk down the project itself, it looks neat! The "MB does not matter" just jumped at me (somewhat out of context, I have to admit) since I work in the embedded land, and the pain is sometimes too real there.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Obviously the MB don't matter in this case and for the target audience of the editor, not in general and in every context.
- coldtea 9y ago

b0rsuk 9y ago

I haven't downvoted you, but I wouldn't recommend Vim either, and it's my favourite editor. Vim is notorious for trapping users, they don't even know how to exit the program! Nano really gets the job done for people who have no clue about editor usage. If you only need to edit a few lines in a file once a month, immediate accessibility Nano provides is more valuable than powerful features that take time to memorize and absorb into muscle memory. Emacs, Vim are for people who use Nano enough to start feeling uncomfortable.

mikegerwitz 9y ago
> they don't even know how to exit the program Vim lists `:q' and `:help' prominently in the middle of the screen when you first start it. If you try to exit with C-c (in Normal mode), or C-c C-c (in Insert), you get this message: "Type :quit<Enter> to exit Vim"
- vetinari 9y ago
  > Vim lists `:q' and `:help' prominently in the middle of the screen when you first start it. Only when you start it by itself intentionally, not when you want to edit something and your $EDITOR is not set, then you end up in vim without an idea, how to quit. I remember (in the mid-90s) making another telnet session and killing vi. Swearing in the process. Yes, I later learned the :q! command.

agumonkey 9y ago

13MB only ? how come

efficax 9y ago

It's 10MB uncompressed because go compiles libraries statically in the binary. 10MB is not really a big lift, and static compilation makes binary distribution much simpler. I don't have any objection to packaging emacs with the OS. Actually, it comes with macOS, although without graphical support (/usr/bin/emacs).

hiram112 9y ago

I'm always 'that guy' who will eventually run 'sudo yum install emacs-nox' on any of our dozens of EC2 instances I'm shelled into if I'm working with it for more than a few minutes. The problem is that some of these servers are already stripped down - it's even worse as we're moving to containers. Emacs, even the non-gui version, still requires about a dozen dependencies, at least on most Debian and RHEL based servers. And each time I install it, I get some bad feeling in the back of my mind, wondering if I'm the one who opened a big hole into our infrastructure because I just wouldn't learn vim. :) And yes I know about Tramp mode from my local machine, and other tricks, but sometimes it's easier to just install the damn editor locally.