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Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers? I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is

Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers? I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. I can't imagine why it needs to be popular. It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users. If I had a horse in the race I'd focus on the developer experience. Make it easier to extend, make the runtime faster (the native compilation stuff is super cool), better unicode support, alternate input methods, etc. If people want to use it for publishing it should be easy to write a package to cater to those users. For me, a long time emacs user, I think the biggest concern I have is ensuring that the project is sustained by new developers.

sandinmyjoints 7y ago
I largely agree with you. Out of curiosity, where do you think Unicode support could be better?
- agentultra 7y ago
  Completeness, speed, and defaults would be nice. I'm mostly satisfied as a user. I'm working on a mode for editing emojicode[0] and it's a weird edge case but it'd be nice if emacs worked out of the box with nice defaults for this sort of thing. More experienced library authors might have more to say about it. [0] https://www.emojicode.org/ https://www.emojicode.org/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
dmortin 7y ago
Popularity means more users and more contributors. I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them?
- sachdevap 7y ago
  > I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them? What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. Not among the package maintainers anyways, and also of note here is remacs - I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. And popularity does not always mean more contributors, not when they are just the consumers of the product. The drop off in delta contributors / delta consumers is fast.
  - dmortin 7y ago
    > What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. Not among the package maintainers anyways I was talking about the "core developers" who work on the emacs core, not packages. AFAIK most of them has a long history with emacs, using it for decades, so they can't be that young. But of course I know mostly about the maintaners and stuff. It's possible there are lots of younger contributors.
  - rfrey 7y ago
    > I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. Why not?
    - Koshkin 7y ago
      A lack of imagination?
      - sachdevap 7y ago
        Guilty. I clearly had a blind spot there.
  - serf 7y ago
    >What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. the same thing that probably made you say this : >I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. emacs is an older software package, from the 'original home of hackers', extended in a (sorta) language that is notoriously connected to old-school AI and academic programming. The holy war of vi vs. emacs has raged for decades -- and emacs/vi/lisp jokes are some of the oldest computer geek jokes in existence. I can imagine the fans skew older then say fans of something like Electron or Flutter. The only computer-geek-joke-theme that I can think of that'd be older would be the billions of COBOL jokes -- but that's just because i'm too young to have heard the billions of punch-card and wire-routing jokes that inevitably existed before I was here.
cg505 7y ago
Developer experience is more than just technical too. I know some package authors (and myself personally) find themselves very disillusioned with the GNU approach to contribution, especially regarding licensing and copyright assignment.
- agentultra 7y ago
  Good point!
- downerending 7y ago
  Re copyright, what would you prefer? Alternatively, what would you even do with the copyright to your fixes and additions to GNU emacs?
  - serf 7y ago
    a lot of contributors/developers are bothered by the fact that they have to play ball with copyright laws, at all. it's a fact of life for developers with projects anywhere near the GNU-scape that if you don't GNU it, you'll catch a lot of hatred, even worse if you choose to avoid licensing all together -- and gods help you if you choose a tongue-in-cheek licensing agreement like WTFPL. at the end of the day a lot of people just want to contribute meaningfully to a project that they use and enjoy, but the headache of licensing and catching flak by choosing the wrong one (and since all the communities have opposing thoughts, they're all the wrong one to certain folks), it just becomes easy to 'forget to contribute' -- especially when your patch or whatever is working fine locally and there is little practical incentive to catch that much heat. I think the legalese issues turns a lot of would-be contributors into local-patcher type developers, and then they leave for greener pastures once what they needed patched is on their own machine -- especially for projects like emacs where 90 percent of development is going to be towards extensions. ...and I say all this from a position of love and admiration for GNU and the FSF.
    - aspaceman 7y ago
      Yeah I completely agree. It's like, I agree with GNU and the FSF, but that doesn't mean I'm as strict as they are. I want to contribute to MIT, Apache, and BSD licensed projects as well, or I want to just not think about it and work on some project that has no licensing info whatsoever. But (some definitely not all) folks are pretty all or nothing. There's a lot of jerk developers on the net though, maybe it's better to just ignore them?
wayneftw 7y ago
Perhaps adding JavaScript to the list of languages that you can extend Emacs with would be a good start - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryExtensionLanguage https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryExtensionLanguage
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  For the backend or the gui-interface?
- state_less 7y ago
  Or, emacs in the browser. Popular editors like VS Code use monaco and now github has codespaces [1] which is running in the browser. People live as much or more in the browser as the terminal these days, so bring the emacs sauce to where the people live. Maybe you could get some of the c compiled to web assembly, and the lisp would follow? It'd be neat to open a buffer to the page emacs lives in and start editing, call JS code, or embed emacs into a page as easily as monaco. Maybe the GUI components could be made out of HTML 5? 1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/github-gets-a-built-in-ide-with-codespaces-discussion-forums-and-more/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/github-gets-a-built-in-ide... PS. Rough sledding for Gitpod with this announcement.
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    Agree, browser-based front-ends make so much sense today - conceivably including one for emacs (which can work in the client-server mode anyway).
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      Would you realistically be able to bind enough emacs keybinds in a web page so that it feels natural? Or would you need some extra extension to help with that? I'm not very familiar with how easy it is to capture browser keybinds in a web page.
      - alexhutcheson 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
julianeon 7y ago
> That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users. Color me surprised! I'm turning into a stereotypical Linux greybeard but I must be true to my nature, and endorse Linux for writers. There's this famous story, about the secretaries who mastered Emacs and preferred it to the other 'easier' administrative programs they were offered. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gnu.emacs.help/QU6xN34ollo/K.. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gnu.emacs.help/QU6xN34ollo/K.... "Shel wrote Mailman in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp… Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for … four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it." "People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them." Hell, there's even a 1-hour series on YouTube called "Emacs for Writers." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU Spoiler: I skimmed it and it's as I thought - it's largely about Emacs and org-mode. Honestly, I can't argue with the classics. Here's my pitch. Writers of the world: You are information workers. That means you have problems with the organization of information, probably, and - related - information overload. Let Emacs help you with this! It has a mode, org-mode, which is usually overcomplicated, but is basically as simple as markdown (no, really). Has anyone ever walked away from Markdown because it was too difficult to understand? Probably not. It doesn't have to be any harder with org-mode. In fact, in the next two lines, I'll teach you about 95% of how I use it - everything, in two lines. * an asterisk before a line makes it like a sublayer of the layer/line above it; if you're on a sublayer, add another asterisk to make a sublayer of a sublayer, and so on ad infinitum... * press tab to expand a layer or a sublayer you are on; press tab again to contract or hide it That's it! That's 95% of the value of org-mode right there. It's the simplest way to organize information, in my experience. Now, there are other advantages too, like: Emacs works with plain text, and plain text is super portable (everything can read plain text), fast to load, and can even be a convenient method of organizing things, if you give your files descriptive names and learn to use 'ls' to list things. Because those files are plain text, they take up almost no space, so it's fine if your computer has a zillion of them, it'll be blazing fast. I could go on, but these two things alone make Emacs worth your time, and there's plenty of other advantages, like using LaTeX to make PDF's, you can 'grow into' also.
chacha2 7y ago
Is it really too hard to imagine why the creator of the Free Software Foundation would rather people use a free software text editor over the current proprietary alternatives?
Koshkin 7y ago
I find word processors with all their formatting, hyphenation etc. capabilities more of a distraction than help. IMHO they are better for publishing a text than for writing it. Even a simple text editor seems like a better choice.
spindle 7y ago
That's so well stated, /u/agentuitra. Thank you.
asdf123wtf 7y ago
I dunno... I think newer editors are often easier to extend than emacs. Think atom or vscode or even sublime. They're all extensible enough such that emacs has no real major advantage IMHO. They can be extended with mainstream languages that many programmers already know, instead of an idiosyncratic lisp with no practical application outside of emacs itself. Emacs still has some great modes (like tramp) - but overall, I don't think its customization is really a special killer emacs feature anymore.
- jmarcher 7y ago
  I've had to write simple plugins for both SublimeText and VSCode to get the equivalent of a one-liner in Emacs. Comparing anything with Emacs extensibility is not even fair. There are hooks for everything, you can invoke other people packages from your own code, if you want trouble you can overwrite other people's packages specific functions, etc. Emacs has a lot of flaws though. I don't really recommend people using it. Even after showing the neat stuff, I can do with it.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > I dunno... I think newer editors are often easier to extend than emacs. Think atom or vscode or even sublime. Can't see how. It's hard to be easier to extend than being able to just wrtie a line of code in an init file, do M-x eval-region on it, and be done. You can extend Emacs 100% through ad-hoc manner, and none of that requires any extra infrastructure. I don't think VSCode or Atom are approaching anywhere close this level of flexibility.
- tester89 7y ago
  I’ve been porting the Sly IDE to Sublime and basically I would say Sublime is a hostile development environment, a lot of times errors dont trigger stack traces and just silently fail which is super frustrating.
rodgerd 7y ago
Why would you want to become a maintainer when your suggestions will be blocked by a guy who doesn't even know what org-mode is, hasn't coded in decades, and insists the terminology has to pretend it's 1968?
random_cynic 7y ago
> Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers? Yes. > I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. Maybe imagine harder or (just an idea) stop imagining and see the real world? > It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. Read the history of emacs again. It originated as a set of macros over TECO to make editing easier (hence the name emacs). Editing is always the primary function, the lisp interpreter was an afterthought. > That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users. Read the linked thread again. One "such user" is RMS. That pretty much has been his goal since the 90s to make Emacs a better word processor.

sandinmyjoints 7y ago

I largely agree with you. Out of curiosity, where do you think Unicode support could be better?

agentultra 7y ago
Completeness, speed, and defaults would be nice. I'm mostly satisfied as a user. I'm working on a mode for editing emojicode[0] and it's a weird edge case but it'd be nice if emacs worked out of the box with nice defaults for this sort of thing. More experienced library authors might have more to say about it. [0] https://www.emojicode.org/ https://www.emojicode.org/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

dmortin 7y ago

Popularity means more users and more contributors. I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them?

sachdevap 7y ago
> I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them? What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. Not among the package maintainers anyways, and also of note here is remacs - I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. And popularity does not always mean more contributors, not when they are just the consumers of the product. The drop off in delta contributors / delta consumers is fast.
- dmortin 7y ago
  > What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. Not among the package maintainers anyways I was talking about the "core developers" who work on the emacs core, not packages. AFAIK most of them has a long history with emacs, using it for decades, so they can't be that young. But of course I know mostly about the maintaners and stuff. It's possible there are lots of younger contributors.
- rfrey 7y ago
  > I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. Why not?
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    A lack of imagination?
    - sachdevap 7y ago
      Guilty. I clearly had a blind spot there.
- serf 7y ago
  >What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. the same thing that probably made you say this : >I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. emacs is an older software package, from the 'original home of hackers', extended in a (sorta) language that is notoriously connected to old-school AI and academic programming. The holy war of vi vs. emacs has raged for decades -- and emacs/vi/lisp jokes are some of the oldest computer geek jokes in existence. I can imagine the fans skew older then say fans of something like Electron or Flutter. The only computer-geek-joke-theme that I can think of that'd be older would be the billions of COBOL jokes -- but that's just because i'm too young to have heard the billions of punch-card and wire-routing jokes that inevitably existed before I was here.

cg505 7y ago

Developer experience is more than just technical too. I know some package authors (and myself personally) find themselves very disillusioned with the GNU approach to contribution, especially regarding licensing and copyright assignment.

agentultra 7y ago
Good point!
downerending 7y ago
Re copyright, what would you prefer? Alternatively, what would you even do with the copyright to your fixes and additions to GNU emacs?
- serf 7y ago
  a lot of contributors/developers are bothered by the fact that they have to play ball with copyright laws, at all. it's a fact of life for developers with projects anywhere near the GNU-scape that if you don't GNU it, you'll catch a lot of hatred, even worse if you choose to avoid licensing all together -- and gods help you if you choose a tongue-in-cheek licensing agreement like WTFPL. at the end of the day a lot of people just want to contribute meaningfully to a project that they use and enjoy, but the headache of licensing and catching flak by choosing the wrong one (and since all the communities have opposing thoughts, they're all the wrong one to certain folks), it just becomes easy to 'forget to contribute' -- especially when your patch or whatever is working fine locally and there is little practical incentive to catch that much heat. I think the legalese issues turns a lot of would-be contributors into local-patcher type developers, and then they leave for greener pastures once what they needed patched is on their own machine -- especially for projects like emacs where 90 percent of development is going to be towards extensions. ...and I say all this from a position of love and admiration for GNU and the FSF.
  - aspaceman 7y ago
    Yeah I completely agree. It's like, I agree with GNU and the FSF, but that doesn't mean I'm as strict as they are. I want to contribute to MIT, Apache, and BSD licensed projects as well, or I want to just not think about it and work on some project that has no licensing info whatsoever. But (some definitely not all) folks are pretty all or nothing. There's a lot of jerk developers on the net though, maybe it's better to just ignore them?

wayneftw 7y ago

Perhaps adding JavaScript to the list of languages that you can extend Emacs with would be a good start - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryExtensionLanguage https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryExtensionLanguage

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
For the backend or the gui-interface?
state_less 7y ago
Or, emacs in the browser. Popular editors like VS Code use monaco and now github has codespaces [1] which is running in the browser. People live as much or more in the browser as the terminal these days, so bring the emacs sauce to where the people live. Maybe you could get some of the c compiled to web assembly, and the lisp would follow? It'd be neat to open a buffer to the page emacs lives in and start editing, call JS code, or embed emacs into a page as easily as monaco. Maybe the GUI components could be made out of HTML 5? 1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/github-gets-a-built-in-ide-with-codespaces-discussion-forums-and-more/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/github-gets-a-built-in-ide... PS. Rough sledding for Gitpod with this announcement.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Agree, browser-based front-ends make so much sense today - conceivably including one for emacs (which can work in the client-server mode anyway).
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Would you realistically be able to bind enough emacs keybinds in a web page so that it feels natural? Or would you need some extra extension to help with that? I'm not very familiar with how easy it is to capture browser keybinds in a web page.
    - alexhutcheson 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

julianeon 7y ago

> That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users. Color me surprised! I'm turning into a stereotypical Linux greybeard but I must be true to my nature, and endorse Linux for writers. There's this famous story, about the secretaries who mastered Emacs and preferred it to the other 'easier' administrative programs they were offered. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gnu.emacs.help/QU6xN34ollo/K.. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gnu.emacs.help/QU6xN34ollo/K.... "Shel wrote Mailman in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp… Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for … four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it." "People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them." Hell, there's even a 1-hour series on YouTube called "Emacs for Writers." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU Spoiler: I skimmed it and it's as I thought - it's largely about Emacs and org-mode. Honestly, I can't argue with the classics. Here's my pitch. Writers of the world: You are information workers. That means you have problems with the organization of information, probably, and - related - information overload. Let Emacs help you with this! It has a mode, org-mode, which is usually overcomplicated, but is basically as simple as markdown (no, really). Has anyone ever walked away from Markdown because it was too difficult to understand? Probably not. It doesn't have to be any harder with org-mode. In fact, in the next two lines, I'll teach you about 95% of how I use it - everything, in two lines. * an asterisk before a line makes it like a sublayer of the layer/line above it; if you're on a sublayer, add another asterisk to make a sublayer of a sublayer, and so on ad infinitum... * press tab to expand a layer or a sublayer you are on; press tab again to contract or hide it That's it! That's 95% of the value of org-mode right there. It's the simplest way to organize information, in my experience. Now, there are other advantages too, like: Emacs works with plain text, and plain text is super portable (everything can read plain text), fast to load, and can even be a convenient method of organizing things, if you give your files descriptive names and learn to use 'ls' to list things. Because those files are plain text, they take up almost no space, so it's fine if your computer has a zillion of them, it'll be blazing fast. I could go on, but these two things alone make Emacs worth your time, and there's plenty of other advantages, like using LaTeX to make PDF's, you can 'grow into' also.

chacha2 7y ago

Is it really too hard to imagine why the creator of the Free Software Foundation would rather people use a free software text editor over the current proprietary alternatives?

Koshkin 7y ago

I find word processors with all their formatting, hyphenation etc. capabilities more of a distraction than help. IMHO they are better for publishing a text than for writing it. Even a simple text editor seems like a better choice.

spindle 7y ago

That's so well stated, /u/agentuitra. Thank you.

asdf123wtf 7y ago

I dunno... I think newer editors are often easier to extend than emacs. Think atom or vscode or even sublime. They're all extensible enough such that emacs has no real major advantage IMHO. They can be extended with mainstream languages that many programmers already know, instead of an idiosyncratic lisp with no practical application outside of emacs itself. Emacs still has some great modes (like tramp) - but overall, I don't think its customization is really a special killer emacs feature anymore.

jmarcher 7y ago
I've had to write simple plugins for both SublimeText and VSCode to get the equivalent of a one-liner in Emacs. Comparing anything with Emacs extensibility is not even fair. There are hooks for everything, you can invoke other people packages from your own code, if you want trouble you can overwrite other people's packages specific functions, etc. Emacs has a lot of flaws though. I don't really recommend people using it. Even after showing the neat stuff, I can do with it.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> I dunno... I think newer editors are often easier to extend than emacs. Think atom or vscode or even sublime. Can't see how. It's hard to be easier to extend than being able to just wrtie a line of code in an init file, do M-x eval-region on it, and be done. You can extend Emacs 100% through ad-hoc manner, and none of that requires any extra infrastructure. I don't think VSCode or Atom are approaching anywhere close this level of flexibility.
tester89 7y ago
I’ve been porting the Sly IDE to Sublime and basically I would say Sublime is a hostile development environment, a lot of times errors dont trigger stack traces and just silently fail which is super frustrating.

rodgerd 7y ago

Why would you want to become a maintainer when your suggestions will be blocked by a guy who doesn't even know what org-mode is, hasn't coded in decades, and insists the terminology has to pretend it's 1968?

random_cynic 7y ago

> Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers? Yes. > I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. Maybe imagine harder or (just an idea) stop imagining and see the real world? > It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. Read the history of emacs again. It originated as a set of macros over TECO to make editing easier (hence the name emacs). Editing is always the primary function, the lisp interpreter was an afterthought. > That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users. Read the linked thread again. One "such user" is RMS. That pretty much has been his goal since the 90s to make Emacs a better word processor.