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What makes Emacs attractive to me is that it's a programming environment which you can modify on the fly. At least, that's what I have read, I've never actually
by Yuioup 6y ago
What makes Emacs attractive to me is that it's a programming environment which you can modify on the fly. At least, that's what I have read, I've never actually done it myself.
Visual Studio Code, the editor that I use daily, is based on Javascript (Typescript) but I have yet to see a page by Microsoft explaining to me that I can quickly whip up a script and execute it in my editor. From what I understand you need to create an extension and I think that takes a bit of setup.
A spiritual successor to Emacs could be an extensible editor based on a language which you can interpret on the fly, modifying your environment as you go along. That's what would make Emacs more attractive to me, along with modern keybindings like arrow keys...
- olivierestsage 6y agoFWIW, Emacs does support navigation via arrow keys by default, unless I am misunderstanding what you mean.
- Yuioup 6y agoTen minutes after I posted my message I just realized that the concept of a Macro has been around since the dawn of computing and is in large part responsible for the meteoric rise of Microsoft (along with a lot of viruses) What I mean is I'm looking for a editor with macro capabilities that can be programmed in, say, Javascript, Python or Lua.
- samatman 6y agoNeovim is an editor with macro capabilities, which can be programmed in LuaJIT. It's my terminal editor of choice, and yes, arrow keys work. But why would you want to use them?
- Yuioup 6y agoI've been using vim for 15 years so I know neovim. But ... can you make changes in neovim while it's running? Let me take it a step further. Imagine a text editor in which you can, while it's running, literally go into its source code and make changes and that those changes immediately take effect. If I'm not mistaken you can do that in emacs. That's what I find intriguing about it, not the text editor.
- samatman 6y agoI believe so, yes. Neovim is less programmable than Emacs insofar as more of it is written in C, it's substantially less documented, and Emacs has a substantial head start. But yeah, still fundamentally a programmable text editor. If you wanted to set up a file watcher over source code that automatically reloads it when files change, there's nothing stopping you. It's true that nothing other than Emacs is quite like Emacs. Neovim is evolving in the right direction though.