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I tried out Atom and found its "hackability" sorely lacking compared to Emacs. Which made me sad, because it's the only new-gen editor to really claim to be "h

by cle 9y ago

I tried out Atom and found its "hackability" sorely lacking compared to Emacs. Which made me sad, because it's the only new-gen editor to really claim to be "hackable". Specifically, what I'm looking for in an editor is the ability to introspect most/all of the editor's internals from the editor itself (including documentation, debugging, live modification of the editor, etc.). In Emacs, all of that is just a few keystrokes away. Atom is somewhat introspectable in that I can pop open a Chrome dev console and poke around at the DOM and the JS files, but it isn't at all as straightforward as in Emacs (e.g. given some keystroke or some function in Emacs, it's extremely trivial to jump to the source code and start modifying/debugging it). Given that these activities aren't clearly documented in Atom documentation, I can only assume that they aren't priorities for Atom and that, in fact, Atom isn't designed to be "hackable" in the sense that Emacs is "hackable". Which is really disappointing, because a truly "hackable" editor a la Emacs, built on a web stack like Electron, would make me giddy with excitement.

BeetleB 9y ago
>Specifically, what I'm looking for in an editor is the ability to introspect most/all of the editor's internals from the editor itself (including documentation, debugging, live modification of the editor, etc.). Although it is ugly, and the documentation is poor, and web site looks like it's from the 90's, and the project lead is a bit eccentric, you may want to consider the Leo editor: http://leoeditor.com/ http://leoeditor.com/ It's written in Python, and pretty much gives you access to most/all its internals. Unfortunately, the state of the documentation is pretty poor which is why I never had the time to spend mastering it. But I've followed it enough, and it really is a very powerful editor. I think only Emacs surpasses it in self-scriptability. A lot of non-programmers have used it to do pretty interesting things (helps that Python is "easier" for them than Lisp).
earenndil 9y ago
> a truly "hackable" editor a la Emacs, built on a web stack like Electron, would make me giddy with excitement. Why? I would much rather a truely "hackable" editor a la emacs, built on a native stack. Like emacs. (And I say this as a vim user).
- cle 9y ago
  Because building attractive UIs and doing graphical things is much easier on a web stack. Emacs can run in a terminal emulator, but as an editor in a development environment, that's not a use case I've ever had. I'd much rather be able to seamlessly plot some data with vega.js or slap together a quick UI for a tool, or be able to trivially inline images, animations, videos, PDFs, etc. without having to fiddle with native libs.
  - runevault 9y ago
    This makes me wonder what an editor would look like where you can hack at the text buffer/background data/etc in something lower level, but had that information also accessible with a web based layer for doing UI stuff. Might be best of both worlds, might just be insanely messy.
    - cle 9y ago
      That is basically the ideal editor I have in my head. It would be messy, but in the way that Emacs is also messy, which is what makes it so great :). It significantly shortens the distance from my brain to running code.

by cle 9y ago

BeetleB 9y ago

>Specifically, what I'm looking for in an editor is the ability to introspect most/all of the editor's internals from the editor itself (including documentation, debugging, live modification of the editor, etc.). Although it is ugly, and the documentation is poor, and web site looks like it's from the 90's, and the project lead is a bit eccentric, you may want to consider the Leo editor: http://leoeditor.com/ http://leoeditor.com/ It's written in Python, and pretty much gives you access to most/all its internals. Unfortunately, the state of the documentation is pretty poor which is why I never had the time to spend mastering it. But I've followed it enough, and it really is a very powerful editor. I think only Emacs surpasses it in self-scriptability. A lot of non-programmers have used it to do pretty interesting things (helps that Python is "easier" for them than Lisp).

earenndil 9y ago

> a truly "hackable" editor a la Emacs, built on a web stack like Electron, would make me giddy with excitement. Why? I would much rather a truely "hackable" editor a la emacs, built on a native stack. Like emacs. (And I say this as a vim user).

cle 9y ago
Because building attractive UIs and doing graphical things is much easier on a web stack. Emacs can run in a terminal emulator, but as an editor in a development environment, that's not a use case I've ever had. I'd much rather be able to seamlessly plot some data with vega.js or slap together a quick UI for a tool, or be able to trivially inline images, animations, videos, PDFs, etc. without having to fiddle with native libs.
- runevault 9y ago
  This makes me wonder what an editor would look like where you can hack at the text buffer/background data/etc in something lower level, but had that information also accessible with a web based layer for doing UI stuff. Might be best of both worlds, might just be insanely messy.
  - cle 9y ago
    That is basically the ideal editor I have in my head. It would be messy, but in the way that Emacs is also messy, which is what makes it so great :). It significantly shortens the distance from my brain to running code.