6 ms·

I say this as an avid emacs user: Emacs has a real problem in that it's very powerful but the, let's say, spiritual leader of the project (Stallman) is so wildl

by na85 6y ago

I say this as an avid emacs user: Emacs has a real problem in that it's very powerful but the, let's say, spiritual leader of the project (Stallman) is so wildly divorced from the real world because of his personal choices that he really has no idea what makes a compelling UX vs what makes a complete mess of arcane incantations. On top of that, the documentation is only suitable as a reference for someone who already knows emacs, so it's hard to learn. To wit: Again I really really like Emacs as a piece of software, and I've been using it for like 10 years now. Maybe 3 or 4 of those years I've been using it reasonably seriously and even I find my eyes glaze over because of how dense and unapproachable the documentation is. On top of that, being a political project, Stallman actively resists certain improvements to Emacs that would for example make it work better on my Mac, because my Mac is nonfree and Stallman would rather have an objectively poorer piece of software than one that "encourages" using MacOS. And of course the other senior people in the Emacs project don't want to go against Stallman, so emacs is doomed to being a mediocre niche text editor with unrealized potential to become a household name. If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Alas I don't have the skill nor the time to attempt such a thing. Edit: hey how about a substantive reply rather than drive-by downvotes?

omaranto 6y ago
> If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Emacs does have sane defaults. Did you mean instead you want defaults that remind you of the defaults in other (younger) programs that people might be more familiar with? That can be useful to gain more users. But it doesn't require an Emacs "clone", just an Emacs package with the settings you want. This approach is actually pretty popular: many people use CUA mode, Evil or even a distribution like Doom or Spacemacs. There's no need to change Emacs just to change a few defaults. There are also package that address the "modern UI conventions" part of your complaint too to some extent, and again, distributions like Doom and Spacemacs include some of these packages. (Personally I only care if UI is practical and efficient, not if it is modern, but I do understand that some people like modern UIs for their own sake.)
saagarjha 6y ago
> so emacs is doomed to being a mediocre niche text editor with unrealized potential to become a household name Emacs is absolutely a household name, at least in the world of text editors…
- na85 6y ago
  I mean household name in the same class as MS Office.
  - fwip 6y ago
    Are there any text editors that are? Maybe Notepad or Notes.app because they come preinstalled?
    - trenchgun 6y ago
      VScode is.
      - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
        In 20 years, no-one will remember VScode, but Emacs will still be around.
      - fwip 6y ago
        The same class as Office? My teachers in highschool knew what Office was and how to use it. I doubt most teachers now have heard the name VS code and don't know why they'd want it.
- lgessler 6y ago
  I'd venture that it's not among rank-and-file software developers, though.
  - nsl73 6y ago
    I’m a software developer, that commonly talks about software development with a diverse group of software developers. I’ve never had a conversation with a software developer where they didn’t know what vim or emacs are.
lgessler 6y ago
> If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Worthy of mention, of course, is Spacemacs[1], which made Emacs approachable to me, someone who hadn't used much beyond Notepad++ and Eclipse before then. [1]: https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/
- na85 6y ago
  To me, the existence of spacemacs and doom and others are an indictment of Emacs' poor out of the box experience.
  - lgessler 6y ago
    I don't disagree. I greatly appreciate Emacs now that I know (5% or less of) it, but I don't think I could have gotten here if Spacemacs hadn't provided sane defaults for packages and keybindings.
  - jonfw 6y ago
    That's the makings of great open source software- you have something very lightweight and unopiniated at the core, and distributions can pack all of the features and opinion they want on top of that to target more specific use cases. This allows you to keep the opinion downstream of the core project, so changes by people with different opinions can still find their way upstream. Linux and Kubernetes are structured the same way- nobody is using that out of box on it's own
  - iLemming 6y ago
    You have to understand that Spacemacs, Doom, ErgoEmacs, Prelude, etc. are not products. They are collections of recipes. And bare-bone Emacs is not a product either. Emacs is a kitchen where you use Lisp to bake your own editor/IDE/frankensteinian toy. Using Spacemacs or Doom doesn't liberate you from learning Lisp and Emacs internals.
    - mercer 6y ago
bjr11 6y ago
You are asking others to make something that you want that they don't want and not giving them anything in exchange (money, time, code). Then saying "ALAS" I wont make these changes myself only complain on the internet about them. These vague wondrous changes will make Emacs a "household name". 1) Who cares about being a household name. Vain goals serve no one 2) You didn't specify one actionable change.
- na85 6y ago
  >You are asking others to make something that you want that they don't want and not giving them anything in exchange (money, time, code). Please quote where I asked anyone to do anything. I merely explained why emacs is not popular and why in my opinion it will never be. This is sad to me because I quite like emacs, and if I had the capacity to fork it I would.
taeric 6y ago
If all you think it needs are sensible defaults, try just bending said defaults. I'm somewhat curious what choices of Stallman's you think are holding it back. Feels more alive to me than it has ever felt. And that branch that is using gcc to compile elisp is a delight. I concede I expect there are choices made that could be bad; but I suspect most of the choices people think matter, don't. Which is why i highlight the compiling elisp branch. A complete rewrite would not have had as much of an impact. And, frankly, I feel elisp is easily as good of a language as any proposed choice. Better than most.
- omaranto 6y ago
  I agree about Emacs Lisp. A language without dynamically scoped variables or without macros would be a big step backwards.
- tetris11 6y ago
  This. How is Stallman holding back the UX?
  - bitwize 6y ago
    It doesn't follow Apple UI guidelines. In 1984 we learned that having one, single, mouse-driven UI paradigm for all programs, handed down to us by our superiors in Cupertino, was an objectively superior mode of interaction with a computer, saving many lives' worth of time and brainpower over the years. Yet somehow, Stallman remains so empathy-deprived as to be stubbornly unenlightened by this knowledge.
  - iLemming 6y ago
    He ain't holding it back. He's stalling it. He's the Stall-Man after all.
quadrifoliate 6y ago
I'm genuinely puzzled about why posters like this want to make Emacs into some kind of household name if only it would do some random thing that they want. I'm a die-hard Emacs fan, but it's a tool. It works well -- really well for a lot of us. For the rest, honestly, I don't care very much about evangelizing Emacs because I have a lot left to explore about using it first. There is 20- and 30- year old elisp out there that still runs perfectly well on a modern Emacs and probably solves some of your problems. Rendering a crop of the latest fly-by-night emoji is honestly the least of my concerns (with reference to the MacOS thing), although I personally disagree strongly with Stallman's stance in that matter. I agree about the docs being dense and somewhat unapproachable, a lot could be done towards making elisp easier to approach. I think a big problem here is the unapproachability of any Lisp (not just Emacs Lisp) as a scripting and configuration language. In fact, I wonder if (Clojure being the first), elisp is the second most popular scripted Lisp in existence.
- hvis 6y ago
  > Rendering a crop of the latest fly-by-night emoji is honestly the least of my concerns (with reference to the MacOS thing), although I personally disagree strongly with Stallman's stance in that matter. Of course you do. This policy doesn't benefit you in the slightest, and since you are a macOS user already, all of your experience is telling you that this policy doesn't work. But this particular policy is logical, and it doesn't really hurt Emacs. And, who knows, perhaps one day some talented/bored macOS developer will become so unhappy with Emacs not showing the latest fashion of emojis, they will go on and implement that support in Free libraries that are used for text rendering on GNU/Linux, and contribute it upstream.
sriku 6y ago
Been reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus the past few days and your comment reminded me of the beginning (quoting from memory, not exact words) - "this book will perhaps be understand only by those who've already had the thoughts expressed in it or similar thoughts" :) Emacs kind of gives me that same vibe. I used it for many years to organize my research but still have a hard time remembering key strokes and such .. though i dont have a similar issue with vim whose modal interface I find rather pleasantly compositional. So I get both the sense of power and flexibility, and the chaos of it.

by na85 6y ago

omaranto 6y ago

> If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Emacs does have sane defaults. Did you mean instead you want defaults that remind you of the defaults in other (younger) programs that people might be more familiar with? That can be useful to gain more users. But it doesn't require an Emacs "clone", just an Emacs package with the settings you want. This approach is actually pretty popular: many people use CUA mode, Evil or even a distribution like Doom or Spacemacs. There's no need to change Emacs just to change a few defaults. There are also package that address the "modern UI conventions" part of your complaint too to some extent, and again, distributions like Doom and Spacemacs include some of these packages. (Personally I only care if UI is practical and efficient, not if it is modern, but I do understand that some people like modern UIs for their own sake.)

saagarjha 6y ago

> so emacs is doomed to being a mediocre niche text editor with unrealized potential to become a household name Emacs is absolutely a household name, at least in the world of text editors…

na85 6y ago
I mean household name in the same class as MS Office.
- fwip 6y ago
  Are there any text editors that are? Maybe Notepad or Notes.app because they come preinstalled?
  - trenchgun 6y ago
    VScode is.
    - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
      In 20 years, no-one will remember VScode, but Emacs will still be around.
    - fwip 6y ago
      The same class as Office? My teachers in highschool knew what Office was and how to use it. I doubt most teachers now have heard the name VS code and don't know why they'd want it.
lgessler 6y ago
I'd venture that it's not among rank-and-file software developers, though.
- nsl73 6y ago
  I’m a software developer, that commonly talks about software development with a diverse group of software developers. I’ve never had a conversation with a software developer where they didn’t know what vim or emacs are.

lgessler 6y ago

> If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Worthy of mention, of course, is Spacemacs[1], which made Emacs approachable to me, someone who hadn't used much beyond Notepad++ and Eclipse before then. [1]: https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/

na85 6y ago
To me, the existence of spacemacs and doom and others are an indictment of Emacs' poor out of the box experience.
- lgessler 6y ago
  I don't disagree. I greatly appreciate Emacs now that I know (5% or less of) it, but I don't think I could have gotten here if Spacemacs hadn't provided sane defaults for packages and keybindings.
- jonfw 6y ago
  That's the makings of great open source software- you have something very lightweight and unopiniated at the core, and distributions can pack all of the features and opinion they want on top of that to target more specific use cases. This allows you to keep the opinion downstream of the core project, so changes by people with different opinions can still find their way upstream. Linux and Kubernetes are structured the same way- nobody is using that out of box on it's own
- iLemming 6y ago
  You have to understand that Spacemacs, Doom, ErgoEmacs, Prelude, etc. are not products. They are collections of recipes. And bare-bone Emacs is not a product either. Emacs is a kitchen where you use Lisp to bake your own editor/IDE/frankensteinian toy. Using Spacemacs or Doom doesn't liberate you from learning Lisp and Emacs internals.
  - mercer 6y ago

bjr11 6y ago

You are asking others to make something that you want that they don't want and not giving them anything in exchange (money, time, code). Then saying "ALAS" I wont make these changes myself only complain on the internet about them. These vague wondrous changes will make Emacs a "household name". 1) Who cares about being a household name. Vain goals serve no one 2) You didn't specify one actionable change.

na85 6y ago
>You are asking others to make something that you want that they don't want and not giving them anything in exchange (money, time, code). Please quote where I asked anyone to do anything. I merely explained why emacs is not popular and why in my opinion it will never be. This is sad to me because I quite like emacs, and if I had the capacity to fork it I would.

taeric 6y ago

If all you think it needs are sensible defaults, try just bending said defaults. I'm somewhat curious what choices of Stallman's you think are holding it back. Feels more alive to me than it has ever felt. And that branch that is using gcc to compile elisp is a delight. I concede I expect there are choices made that could be bad; but I suspect most of the choices people think matter, don't. Which is why i highlight the compiling elisp branch. A complete rewrite would not have had as much of an impact. And, frankly, I feel elisp is easily as good of a language as any proposed choice. Better than most.

omaranto 6y ago
I agree about Emacs Lisp. A language without dynamically scoped variables or without macros would be a big step backwards.
tetris11 6y ago
This. How is Stallman holding back the UX?
- bitwize 6y ago
  It doesn't follow Apple UI guidelines. In 1984 we learned that having one, single, mouse-driven UI paradigm for all programs, handed down to us by our superiors in Cupertino, was an objectively superior mode of interaction with a computer, saving many lives' worth of time and brainpower over the years. Yet somehow, Stallman remains so empathy-deprived as to be stubbornly unenlightened by this knowledge.
- iLemming 6y ago
  He ain't holding it back. He's stalling it. He's the Stall-Man after all.

quadrifoliate 6y ago

I'm genuinely puzzled about why posters like this want to make Emacs into some kind of household name if only it would do some random thing that they want. I'm a die-hard Emacs fan, but it's a tool. It works well -- really well for a lot of us. For the rest, honestly, I don't care very much about evangelizing Emacs because I have a lot left to explore about using it first. There is 20- and 30- year old elisp out there that still runs perfectly well on a modern Emacs and probably solves some of your problems. Rendering a crop of the latest fly-by-night emoji is honestly the least of my concerns (with reference to the MacOS thing), although I personally disagree strongly with Stallman's stance in that matter. I agree about the docs being dense and somewhat unapproachable, a lot could be done towards making elisp easier to approach. I think a big problem here is the unapproachability of any Lisp (not just Emacs Lisp) as a scripting and configuration language. In fact, I wonder if (Clojure being the first), elisp is the second most popular scripted Lisp in existence.

hvis 6y ago
> Rendering a crop of the latest fly-by-night emoji is honestly the least of my concerns (with reference to the MacOS thing), although I personally disagree strongly with Stallman's stance in that matter. Of course you do. This policy doesn't benefit you in the slightest, and since you are a macOS user already, all of your experience is telling you that this policy doesn't work. But this particular policy is logical, and it doesn't really hurt Emacs. And, who knows, perhaps one day some talented/bored macOS developer will become so unhappy with Emacs not showing the latest fashion of emojis, they will go on and implement that support in Free libraries that are used for text rendering on GNU/Linux, and contribute it upstream.

sriku 6y ago

Been reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus the past few days and your comment reminded me of the beginning (quoting from memory, not exact words) - "this book will perhaps be understand only by those who've already had the thoughts expressed in it or similar thoughts" :) Emacs kind of gives me that same vibe. I used it for many years to organize my research but still have a hard time remembering key strokes and such .. though i dont have a similar issue with vim whose modal interface I find rather pleasantly compositional. So I get both the sense of power and flexibility, and the chaos of it.