41 ms·

Emacs is special regarding UIs

477 points by signa11 6y ago

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
Not that it's anything like Emacs, but would SIM Application Toolkit be considered kind of similar? It provided almost a lowest-common-denominator user interface for apps, which could actually run in the smartphone era, although with practically no advantages over a native app.
- venamresm__ 6y ago
  You'd be surprised to hear STK is still in use even today by big mobile operators. Some even go as far as to launch campaigns to install STK applets on millions of devices and customers have no idea this is happening in the background.
  - yaantc 6y ago
    Yes, all the "eSIM" over-the-air management uses the STK for example. But to be fair, the user interface part is no longer used. The part of the STK still in use is what is required to support remote management functions between the network operator and some applet on the SIM card. The user is out of the loop, and it's perfectly fine for a modem not to support the user interaction part of the STK.
    - venamresm__ 6y ago
      I actually work within the eSIM ecosystem and other sim related activities. And, yes, some mobile operators do indeed use the STK UI today, it's not limited to background tasks.
melling 6y ago
Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant. Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  the new AOT compiler seems promising though and has a good chance of actually making it into the release.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Yes... but it's not that slow. In practice, emacs works at least as fast as I can think most of the time. This is the most important thing for me. It's the reason why I originally switched to git from svn (Linus also specifically mentions this as a design choice for git). In this day with electron and editors like VSCode I wouldn't call emacs particularly slow.
  - gpderetta 6y ago
    I think the reason that emacs feels fine most of the time even if elisp is slow is that usually abstractions are fairly minimal.
  - wiredfool 6y ago
    I’m not sure about the others, but rjsx mode is slow with moderately complicated files, and the (idr which) accompanying refactor minor mode is glacial on a mbp.
    - morelisp 6y ago
      rjsx is based on js2 which makes it unusually slow. js2 was a valiant attempt to make a major mode that uses elisp to actually parse the language. This gave it tremendous power compared to every non-Lisp major mode and most other JS editors at the time, but it has not aged especially well in modern JS support or performance. I’d try one of the LSP based approaches instead these days.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    More important, I never have to wait emacs to fill a buffer with the text I've typed. Yes, on some modes there is a visible delay between pasting text and being able to type again, or writing some code and it telling me it's wrong. But the one kind of interaction that matters is always flawless. Many editors do not get this right.
skissane 6y ago
I can think of a few UI styles Emacs doesn't support (to my knowledge) – line mode terminals, block mode terminals (such as IBM 3270 and 5250), and HTML. Now, whether any of those UI styles are actually worth supporting is a completely different question. But it is not quite as universal in support of different UIs as this email claims. (You can technically write line mode applications in Emacs Lisp, try `emacs -batch -l dunnet` for an example. But most Emacs functionality is not available in line mode, the core text editing functionality certainly isn't. There is also a HTTP server available for Emacs [1], so you could use it to implement a HTML-based user interface, but once again the vast majority of Emacs functions are not available over HTTP) [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HttpServer https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HttpServer
- rusk 6y ago
  Interesting ... has anybody tried a browser based (which is what I presume you mean by HTML) front end for emacs? EDIT - just to be clear, I'm talking about emacsclient, talking to a emacs server. Not an actual full blown emacs implementation that's just stupid.
  - dheera 6y ago
    With the new Chrome filesystem API it should be possible to make a full browser implementation. Let's just hope they don't have annoying GDPR and other popups when you're trying to edit a file.
    - warpech 6y ago
      There must be someone working on Emacs in Electron as we speak. I found some gist that's 2 years old: https://gist.github.com/chrisdone/f874ac1c872c004d6ce9e3cb20cc59e0 https://gist.github.com/chrisdone/f874ac1c872c004d6ce9e3cb20...
    - rusk 6y ago
      You shouldn't even have to need filesystem API if you're just using it as an emacs client connecting to an emacs server. Your remark about GDPR is kind of strange ... not sure what that would have to do with anything ... GDPR applies to people and organisations, not their tools.
jwr 6y ago
One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. When I could afford the extra megabytes of memory, I would also run X11. As years went by, I switched to the Mac. These days I'm worried about what will be taken away from me, especially with Apple and their insistence on removing ports, the idiotic "Touch Bar" instead of function keys — but also with Linux, where the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications, and the (increasingly broken) approach of gluing everything together into a big mudball means that if you're running anything that isn't "mainstream", things break and you are very much on your own. But I still have Emacs and I'm fairly confident that it will remain available and running on every platform I decide to switch to. And that I will be able to run it (with reduced functionality) on a text terminal.
- drsopp 6y ago
  > Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool Directory Opus. I've used it for nearly 30 years. First thing I install on Windows.
  - muro 6y ago
    Or total commander
  - jjbinx007 6y ago
    The MS-DOS version of XTree Gold was the best piece of software I used in the early 90s.
    - ungamedplayer 6y ago
      So true.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    Or FAR.
fierarul 6y ago
I thought it will be a criticism how everything seems off with the Emacs GUI from the copy-paste to the font rendering to the way scrolling is done, etc. I'd guess it managed to be so cross-platform by re-implementing everything, kinda like Java Swing but with less care for design. Now I understand how having a scriptable and text-based foundation would help with accessibility, just Emacs wins no UI contest.
- hpfr 6y ago
  I don't know if I'd call it reimplementation when the original Emacs is older than DOS and GNU Emacs, still maintained today, is older than Windows (1985). Emacs's keybindings, font rendering, and scrolling were just as valid then as any other approach. Let's at least avoid comparisons to Swing :). You can bind copy-and-paste as well as any other text wrangling functionality to whatever you want and there are ways to make it behave like other platforms without too much difficulty. But why hamstring Emacs' copy and paste by limiting it to the simplistic version we're used to when you can copy to multiple registers and have a searchable history of copied text? Font rendering uses Harfbuzz in the latest version and is quite good in my opinion, there's even color emojis. Scrolling is certainly better than any terminal emulator I've used, although there's no smooth scrolling. I guess everything is off if you're comparing it to a browser, but modern browsers aren't exactly paragons of UX either. But if you're comparing prettiness options like these, yeah, Emacs loses to VS Code. All Microsoft had to do was build a text editor on top of a browser engine to get those features :). I'd say Emacs is more extensible, though. Lisp machines and all
  - fierarul 6y ago
    I understand, but 35 years have passed, no need to stick to the original implementation that long. I'm a super basic user and nowadays basically have Emacs open all day just for org-mode. Nothing else. To me it seems a terrible text editor and has an UI that's foreign on macOS and Ubuntu. It's unclear to me under what OS/Window manager/etc Emacs fits right at home. It seems out of this world. I can imagine there may be some configuration that would fix some of these problems, but I just use Emacs as it comes out of the box.
code-faster 6y ago
unix is also User Interface Independent, but unlike emacs, it's actually used on a wide variety of interfaces: Mainframes, microcontrollers, web servers, phones (touch screen) and PCs.
- neolog 6y ago
  Pretty sure emacs is used on all of those
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It is also the reason why the only desktop based UNIXes that achieved any commercial success have full stack frameworks that make their UNIX underpinnings irrelevant.
smitty1e 6y ago
For those with wretched joints (me), Spacemacs[1] is a way to have all that org-mode[2] functionality, the joys of magit[3] and have it all work well over SSH. Leave all the icons to their fans. [1] https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/ [2] https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ [3] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/
- mkesper 6y ago
  After finding doom-emacs, I love that even more. Almost instant startup, non-broken magit key bindings, doom doctor etc. https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
  - DreamyCori 6y ago
    It seems like doom-emacs is the new way to go. I feel quiet sad about this cause I spent some time to switch to Spacemacs and now I have to move to another emacs distro.
    - dunefox 6y ago
      Why do you have to move? Are you using the dev-branch Spacemacs or master?
      - DreamyCori 6y ago
        master cause I want something stable.
        dunefox 6y ago
        I'm on dev and it's quite stable, imo. Then again I'm not a spacemacs poweruser so...
- DreamyCori 6y ago
  Anyone is info about the release model of Spacemacs ? It seems like nothing is moving. Any news ?
jmiskovic 6y ago
How does emacs UI work? It seems like each script is registering commands it can run in context of mode, and then you can bind key combos to commands. How do textual UIs do things like layouting of controls, updating of values and handling async requests?
- ywei3410 6y ago
  > How does emacs UI work? Emacs has the idea of _buffers_ which are the actual window panes that you can view. The _buffer_ has data in the form of text which has properties in much the same way a block of html can have properties. An emacs-lisp function has full access to do anything it wants with the buffer. For example it can insert contents, change the font family, change the bit of text into a button with a callback. This is exactly how syntax highlighting/semantic highlighting works in emacs, you just change the styling for bits of text [1]. A _mode_ inside emacs is a collection of emacs-lisp functions which trigger (usually on a file extension name). Typically they will set certain keybindings for specific mode-like behaviour. You always have a single _major_ mode and multiple _minor_ modes - the vim emulation layer, for example is simply a minor mode which adds the vim keybindings and emulates the vim state machine inside emacs-lisp. > It seems like each script is registering commands it can run in context of mode An emacs-lisp file can be _evaluated_ in the same way as a python file into emacs. It's like a REPL - you can evaluate a file and the functions become available. There's a bit of extra behaviour which allows lazy loading et cetera, but user defined scripts are first-class and there's no distinction between them and those which are "native". > updating of values You can update a variable by simply evaluating the appropriate lisp function. If you want to update a value in the text buffer, you just replace/rerender that chunk. > handling async requests A buffer can also have a _process_ running which gets events each time the buffer is updated. When you run a command, you direct the output to a buffer and you trigger your lisp function on certain events. This is sort of how the HTTP requests work, but there's libraries which abstract some of it for you. Buffers are really just an abstraction for textual data. Some of this is simplified, but I hope it gives you a vague idea of what emacs is. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/iemo44/wysiwygified_org_mode/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/iemo44/wysiwygified_...
  - 6y ago
vbsteven 6y ago
To me the main 2 primitives that make Emacs the extensible crossplatform app/platform/os/whatever you want to call it are these: * everything is a buffer, which in essence is a grid of text, that's the UI primitive, if you can render a grid of text you can probably build an emacs UI easily. * every action/command is an elisp function that operates on these buffers Combine these two and you can create pretty much anything. Code written in elisp that outputs buffers. An analogy with the modern web as a platform: elisp is the JavaScript and buffers are the DOM.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already. For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts here and there. Second, it feels like you have to spend a lot of time to set it all up. Third, will it replace an IDE? Error checking / linting, autocomplete, fast navigation, auto-imports, loads of things like that that seem to just work out-of-the-box in e.g. idea.
- jwandborg 6y ago
  I work daily in vim, emacs and idea (ideavim). I use emacs for org-mode exclusively. You only need to learn the buffer manipulation and org-mode keybinds for this, and the configuration. I use vim for ad-hoc text editing, it's a poor IDE as I've configured it. I use IntelliJ IDEA with IdeaVim for writing code. I do not consider myself superhuman. A notable fact is that at some point previously, I've used every one of these as my main development editor. I couldn't imagine having to maintain configuration for IDE-style features in all three editors, so I won't bother, but I do bother using the best tool for the job.
- kristopolous 6y ago
  Pretend I have a crashing program and I want something better than the GDB repl and I don't want to import/create some project. There's a lot of solutions for this but pretend I want to graphically step through, edit the code etc... Emacs can do this quite well without any special hassle. Just try using it as a debugger, when you're annoyed, search the web and you'll find your answer. I'm not an emacs user so this is coming from a non koolaid drinker but I've been using it more and more for these special use cases Maybe this is just as easy to do in, say, IntelliJ, I just feel like emacs will leave a cleaner footprint and have more sensible defaults. So give emacs a try for debugging something (the Google-fu is GUD, grand unified debugger), it's not hard to use, the learning curve is pretty modest and you may be surprised by how sensible it is.
- phist_mcgee 6y ago
dmortin 6y ago
Emacs is not a text editor, it's a platform independent VM which can run your scripts with a text UI. E.g. do you want keep an eye on some information which can be fetched from the net? You just write a script which regularly fetches the info and puts it into a buffer, so you can take a look at it anytime, and then regardless of platform you have that info readily available just by installing your own emacs config file. It's much easier to write such things in emacs than curating various different scripts in various languages (python, etc.) which all require their specific support which is either available or not.
- andreareina 6y ago
  We've been joking about emacs being an OS for a long time. And it even reads email (still haven't set that up actually...)
  - konjin 6y ago
    You can post on hacker news from it too. Sent from eww.
    - jimmyvalmer 6y ago
      Or Gnus. Sent from nnhackernews
      - mrspeaker 6y ago
        There's also a pretty nifty dedicated hackernews-mode. Sent from `M-x hackernews`.
        jimmyvalmer 6y ago
        That mode is rubbish. You can't reply nor vote, requires manual syncing, and renders stories as links rather jumping directly to the story.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
submeta 6y ago
Emacs + org has the potential to be the dream environment for everybody with a hacker mindset: Automate everything that has to do with text: Journaling, writing todo lists, parsing your Kindle highlights file (`My Clippings.txt'), writing project outlines, doing web research and saving your searches, notes, thoughts, summaries in Emacs via org-capture, drafting papers in org-mode, creating (text-based) tables and overviews, writing tech documentation with embedded screenshots, and many many more. What ties all these notes and files together is Emacs Lisp: Write Lisp functions to automate most of what you do. - Previously I used Python for that, but Elisp is so much more fun to automate text-based workflows. I would have to write a book to summarize all the ways this can transform your interactions and workflows with your computer and especially with everything text. Edit: After twenty years of using all sorts of text based databases and PIMs (AskSam, NetManages ECCOPro, various outliners, Outlook, Evernote, Omni{Focus,Outliner}, Bear Writer App, Ulysses App, and half a dozen other tools) I have come to realize that nothing beats Emacs + Org + Lisp.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I hate org. I use emacs 25/7, I hate org. Something about it rubs me the wrong way, yet I use it but only the basic parts. I think it's that I can't wrap my head around the mental model of it, and since it encompasses 2000 topics (trees, timing, workflow, states, agenda, journaling, tagging) it's like a mountain of mud before my eyes.
  - submeta 6y ago
    I started using it as an outliner. Then I added org-agenda to it, and migrated all my tasks from Things3 to it. Next I added repeated tasks, then org-habits, org-journal and some more. Incrementally.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      I choked at outliner level
  - blablablerg 6y ago
robenkleene 6y ago
What's the difference between what's being described here and the web? (In particular, Electron-based local applications which of course have a cross-platform web-based UI.) I'm not saying they aren't different, at the very least, Emacs prioritizes text, while the web prioritizes multimedia. But I'd love to hear other peoples takes on the differences.
- narwally 6y ago
  > What's the difference between what's being described here and the web? The web is generally terrible for accessibility. Since emacs has always prioritized maintaining compatibility between its graphical and text UIs, it words very well with screen readers and refreshable braille displays. It's also been designed from the beginning with keyboard navigation in mind.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  The Webstack is far more complex than anything emacs offers. Emacs has just a wall of text with some special markup, but there is not concept of layout for this text, and all navigation is usually separate from the wall of text, making accesability significant simpler to handle. In emacs there is a beginning and an end, and you just follow the flow. In webstack you have elements, which have a position and if you are lucky they are tagged with their purpose. If not, it's up to you to figure out whether this is for navigation or content or advertisement or some other navigation or comments, which is more another kind of navigation... Basically there is just no really realiable structure with the web. Sometimes there is something, sometimes not, sometimes it's this way, next week it can be that way... And even worse are dynamic site where parts of the site are loaded on demand. So you need a complex setup of tools to handle those content, instead of simple text-search and cursor-moving.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    You could construct the same kinds of problematic UIs in Emacs too... it's just that Emacs is not as widely used as the Web and its users don't have such varying demands and use cases for it, so it's not as common for that to happen. The Web is also designed around a linear flow of text. The Web also provides opportunities to make navigation semantics clear. The Web also implicitly supports keyboard navigation everywhere. etc. Although many websites try to work around those principles, is that a problem with the web or just the websites people are using today?
john4532452 6y ago
> I seldomly hear this property mentioned by anyone else, so even if it scratches OT-ness What does "OT-ness" stand for ?
- CKN23-ARIN 6y ago
  Off-topicness
  - john4532452 6y ago
    I could not find that in urban dictionary or google results.Is this commonly used in free software or open software mailing lists or did you just guessed it ?
    - detaro 6y ago
      OT for "Off-topic" is a very common abbreviation online, yes.
      - I_complete_me 6y ago
        Is there a common abbreviation online for On-topic? If so, what is it?
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  Presumably "off-topic-ness"
bartread 6y ago
This is somewhat oblique to the content of the post but "special" is about right. "Unnecessarily obtuse", particularly from a contemporary perspective, might be a less kind way to describe it. I could say the same about the documentation which, frankly, is not great at making you immediately productive. It's written like an academic treastise, not a tutorial for a piece of software that exists to help you get stuff done and where learning the software is not an end in itself. I've recently started making a relatively determined attempt to become proficient with emacs due to increasing frustration at poor performance from both VSCode and Sublime Text when working with larger projects and, I'm not going to lie, it's hard going. Take something as basic as working with multiple windows. Emacs has concepts of buffers, windows, and frames, but windows and frames are diametrically opposite in concept to windows and frames in client side web development. That's not too difficult to grasp but, say you're in dired, and you want to open a file in a new OS window (in emacs-speak this would be a frame). You'd think you could just move the caret over the filename and hit some key combination to open that file in another window (sorry, I mean frame). Possibly you can but the nearest I've managed to get so far is (from memory) C-x 5 f, which brings up the minibuffer prefilled with the pathname of the directory you're browsing in dired, and then you have to start typing the filename (which, granted, will autocomplete), which seems somewhat redundant, and only then can you open the file. It's also full of things to trip you up, like the key bindings for switching to another (emacs) window and killing a buffer - both fairly common operations - being far too similar and easy to confuse for a newbie. It just seems so deliberately contrary, but I'm hoping the investment will pay dividends given time and persistence (this is, however, approximately my fourth or fifth attempt in 20 years to learn emacs, so we'll see).
- morelisp 6y ago
  These are reasonable criticisms of Emacs’s interface, but the topic of the post is interfaces in Emacs, not Emacs’s interface. Sublime has no comparison point.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  As a long time emacs user, I can confirm that emacs is terrible... and everything else out there is deficient. I can write custom code (ew, elisp) to determine how to switch between buffers (test buffer and code under test) and I can run my tests and find operations and the like in a first class buffer and a dozen things like that which are just incredibly painful in other editors. Also I hit Cx-c by mistake thrice a week.
jefftk 6y ago
A website can have this cross-modality UI property too, but most sites don't. This is partly cultural (emacs mode developers generally caring more) and partly about collaboration (it's much easier to upstream issues with an emacs mode than a site).
blauditore 6y ago
Slightly off-topic, but people here seem to like that stuff: The author has a personal website[0], which is a gem from the "old internet" - a wild mix of technical stuff, pet cat pictures, and some personal history. [0]: https://delysid.org https://delysid.org
- sreevisakh 6y ago
  Very interesting! Made me curious about how a blind person codes (accessibility technology). Aside from that, I am also curious as to why you characterize the website as from the 'old internet'. It looks like a modern minimalist static site to me. Not what I would expect from a 90s site. What do you consider as the distinguishing features of old internet vs the modern version?
  - blauditore 6y ago
    Well, my classification of it as 'old internet' is of course subjective. To me it feels like many newer websites appear more clinical, in both, positive and negative ways. I think it's way less common now to mix personal stuff like pet photos with more professional topics like coding. Poeple who post both usually do this on different platforms (social networks vs. personal blog). From a technical point of view, the website makes heavier use of tooling that nowadays are used less, because there are alternaltives. One example are actual hyperlinks and different pages, whereas today there's some trend towards keeping more content on a single page and use buttons to navigate it.
mullikine 6y ago
I wish to profess my love for terminal emacs. I do not take it for granted. Hear ye. Any editor so powerful that also humbles itself to a 100x30 terminal without losing any power is pure class. This program deserves praise. I pray that GNU emacs will continue to support a text-only interface for many years to come and when at last the elisp fractal is no longer fit for purpose, I pray that its mechanics will be absorbed by the great neural network that will learn everything.
rleigh 6y ago
Some of its paradigms are plain stupid. C-Z (in the GUI) triggers minimise of the window. In a shell, that's fine. It suspends the process. In a GUI it is just bloody annoying. There's a perfectly good minimise button if I want it. This is just a frustration every time I fat-finger C-X. Which is used so frequently it's just asking to be pressed by accident.
- tom_ 6y ago
  I don't rate this shortcut either, but there's an easy fix for your .emacs: (when window-system (global-unset-key (kbd "C-z")))
  - rleigh 6y ago
    Thanks, that will certainly reduce my frustration a little bit!
benreesman 6y ago
IMHO emacs is kind of a Rorschach test w.r.t. Lisp. Some people really like programming in Lisp, and for them getting emacs to do what they want is fun and rewarding, particularly but not exclusively regarding interface affordances. I personally fall into this category. The fact that it has very similar keybindings to readline/bash (especially important if you spend a lot of time popping on and off servers that don’t have your dots and thus choose not to customize the shell too much) and macOS is a huge bonus. But I totally get that this is from outer space for another group. Vim is a great alternative for people who want a more opinionated editing wizard mode, and VSCode is really competent at interacting with remote filesystems and supporting lots of languages for the GUI crowd. It’s a great time to be editing text.
- lc9er 6y ago
  I'm a (neo)vim user that's been playing around with various Lisps lately. CL and Scheme interaction is worlds ahead in Emacs, but even with evil-mode, I'm having a hard time. There's lots of places where it just stops working, and I have to remember Emacs bindings. Emacs 27 and 28 are more responsive, especially on Windows, but vim actions are near instantaneous. A cool project I stumbled across is Aniseed[0], which thanks to Neovim's Lua bindings, lets you control neovim with Fennel. I haven't done anything noteworthy yet, but for the first time it actually seems like it would be fun to write my own plugins. [0] - https://github.com/Olical/aniseed https://github.com/Olical/aniseed
II2II 6y ago
Most of the comments seem to be missing a very important point from the post: > As a blind user, I can write a special mode which does something specific, say, implement an IRC client. Almost all my work can instantaneously be used by sighted people using their graphical toolkit. This goes well beyond the ability of the author to create software that is accessible for both sighted and blind users. It is stating that support for both audiences is handled elegantly by the same toolkit, so you aren't creating an adversarial situation where serving the needs of both groups of people requires some form of compromise in the user interface or necessitating significantly more effort. (I would imagine that some care is required, but Emacs developers are going to address it anyhow since the program is intended to run in graphical and non-graphical environments.) I suspect this support of multiple environments is part of the reason why there is an esoteric collection of applications that run within Emacs. As an example: it is possible to read ebooks in Emacs, with formatting and images being supported in X and gracefully handled in a terminal.
jancsika 6y ago
> Emacs is the only serious program I know which manages to be truely user interface independent, in addition to being platform-independent. So tell me about the UX of free software speech recognition in emacs. I want to read about how to set that up and the limitations of it as I watch my 5 year-old niece interact with Alexa.
argb 6y ago
One of the nice things about the terminal is that things stay consistent for decades or more - people are not chasing fashion trends all the time, as is happening with the Web and graphical UIs. Nobody is being forced to use a particular style and color scheme and we don't have repeated redesigns which remove functionality for the sake of user friendliness or minimalism.
- wiz21c 6y ago
  This. Plugins deliver value much more than graphical design. I also often tell myself that working in emacs is exhausting because it displays only valuable information => my brain works 100% of the time when I'm in front of it :-)
hosh 6y ago
This is something Richard Stallman has advocated for. Free software was not just about the availability of source code, but also about making sure software can function well on lower powered devices, lower bandwidth environment, or people who cannot use the same kind of interfaces. There was an essay discussing this ... but I do not recall it now.
dhosek 6y ago
Wow, it's interesting how many people seem to have their own takeaways from this, many of which seem to have missed the original point of the post (I wonder how many actually read the post). The author of the post on gnu.org is blind (and the "Raman" he referred to is T. V. Raman, a blind mathematician who I met ages ago when he gave a presentation at the Portland TeX Users Group meeting about adapting TeX for presenting mathematics to blind readers. Raman, in fact, wrote a reply to the message where he wrote: >A lot of baggage gets applied today when folks talk about "Accessibility", but to me the touch-stone of a truly Accessible system is one where you dont have to ask what interaction modality someone else is using e.g. witness email, where the persons participating in a conversation never need ask "Did the person I am talking to use Braille, speech, or something else", similarly, someone who has a hearing impairment can send you email without you ever needing to know that he cant hear you. I feel like too many developers treat accessibility as an afterthought rather than a central concern.
- sn41 6y ago
  It is an interesting historical note that T. V. Raman won the ACM best doctoral dissertation award as a blind scholar [1]. I take an active interest in accessibility partly because my wrists hurt. Technologies initially meant to help blind people have turned out to be useful for people with other conditions as well. [1] https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221 https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221
  - mercer 6y ago
    in my late teens and early twenties my wrists started hurting so bad that I could barely use a computer. While over time things improved to the point where I only have pain after doing pixel-style photoshop work with a mouse, it made me painfully aware of easy it is to take things for granted and not consider accessibility.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      NIH and others have recommendations that may help. I would also suggest seeing a specialist ASAP. A career may last a few decades but your body is for life.
larsbrinkhoff 6y ago
Emacs is a manifestation of the ITS user interfaces. They all relied on text because that's all that was available back then. They also used control characters, Altmode/Escape/Meta, and prefix arguments.

477 points by signa11 6y ago

Not that it's anything like Emacs, but would SIM Application Toolkit be considered kind of similar? It provided almost a lowest-common-denominator user interface for apps, which could actually run in the smartphone era, although with practically no advantages over a native app.

venamresm__ 6y ago
You'd be surprised to hear STK is still in use even today by big mobile operators. Some even go as far as to launch campaigns to install STK applets on millions of devices and customers have no idea this is happening in the background.
- yaantc 6y ago
  Yes, all the "eSIM" over-the-air management uses the STK for example. But to be fair, the user interface part is no longer used. The part of the STK still in use is what is required to support remote management functions between the network operator and some applet on the SIM card. The user is out of the loop, and it's perfectly fine for a modem not to support the user interaction part of the STK.
  - venamresm__ 6y ago
    I actually work within the eSIM ecosystem and other sim related activities. And, yes, some mobile operators do indeed use the STK UI today, it's not limited to background tasks.

melling 6y ago

Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant. Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.

gpderetta 6y ago
the new AOT compiler seems promising though and has a good chance of actually making it into the release.
globular-toast 6y ago
Yes... but it's not that slow. In practice, emacs works at least as fast as I can think most of the time. This is the most important thing for me. It's the reason why I originally switched to git from svn (Linus also specifically mentions this as a design choice for git). In this day with electron and editors like VSCode I wouldn't call emacs particularly slow.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  I think the reason that emacs feels fine most of the time even if elisp is slow is that usually abstractions are fairly minimal.
- wiredfool 6y ago
  I’m not sure about the others, but rjsx mode is slow with moderately complicated files, and the (idr which) accompanying refactor minor mode is glacial on a mbp.
  - morelisp 6y ago
    rjsx is based on js2 which makes it unusually slow. js2 was a valiant attempt to make a major mode that uses elisp to actually parse the language. This gave it tremendous power compared to every non-Lisp major mode and most other JS editors at the time, but it has not aged especially well in modern JS support or performance. I’d try one of the LSP based approaches instead these days.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  More important, I never have to wait emacs to fill a buffer with the text I've typed. Yes, on some modes there is a visible delay between pasting text and being able to type again, or writing some code and it telling me it's wrong. But the one kind of interaction that matters is always flawless. Many editors do not get this right.

skissane 6y ago

I can think of a few UI styles Emacs doesn't support (to my knowledge) – line mode terminals, block mode terminals (such as IBM 3270 and 5250), and HTML. Now, whether any of those UI styles are actually worth supporting is a completely different question. But it is not quite as universal in support of different UIs as this email claims. (You can technically write line mode applications in Emacs Lisp, try `emacs -batch -l dunnet` for an example. But most Emacs functionality is not available in line mode, the core text editing functionality certainly isn't. There is also a HTTP server available for Emacs [1], so you could use it to implement a HTML-based user interface, but once again the vast majority of Emacs functions are not available over HTTP) [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HttpServer https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HttpServer

rusk 6y ago
Interesting ... has anybody tried a browser based (which is what I presume you mean by HTML) front end for emacs? EDIT - just to be clear, I'm talking about emacsclient, talking to a emacs server. Not an actual full blown emacs implementation that's just stupid.
- dheera 6y ago
  With the new Chrome filesystem API it should be possible to make a full browser implementation. Let's just hope they don't have annoying GDPR and other popups when you're trying to edit a file.
  - warpech 6y ago
    There must be someone working on Emacs in Electron as we speak. I found some gist that's 2 years old: https://gist.github.com/chrisdone/f874ac1c872c004d6ce9e3cb20cc59e0 https://gist.github.com/chrisdone/f874ac1c872c004d6ce9e3cb20...
  - rusk 6y ago
    You shouldn't even have to need filesystem API if you're just using it as an emacs client connecting to an emacs server. Your remark about GDPR is kind of strange ... not sure what that would have to do with anything ... GDPR applies to people and organisations, not their tools.

jwr 6y ago

One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. When I could afford the extra megabytes of memory, I would also run X11. As years went by, I switched to the Mac. These days I'm worried about what will be taken away from me, especially with Apple and their insistence on removing ports, the idiotic "Touch Bar" instead of function keys — but also with Linux, where the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications, and the (increasingly broken) approach of gluing everything together into a big mudball means that if you're running anything that isn't "mainstream", things break and you are very much on your own. But I still have Emacs and I'm fairly confident that it will remain available and running on every platform I decide to switch to. And that I will be able to run it (with reduced functionality) on a text terminal.

drsopp 6y ago
> Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool Directory Opus. I've used it for nearly 30 years. First thing I install on Windows.
- muro 6y ago
  Or total commander
- jjbinx007 6y ago
  The MS-DOS version of XTree Gold was the best piece of software I used in the early 90s.
  - ungamedplayer 6y ago
    So true.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  Or FAR.

fierarul 6y ago

I thought it will be a criticism how everything seems off with the Emacs GUI from the copy-paste to the font rendering to the way scrolling is done, etc. I'd guess it managed to be so cross-platform by re-implementing everything, kinda like Java Swing but with less care for design. Now I understand how having a scriptable and text-based foundation would help with accessibility, just Emacs wins no UI contest.

hpfr 6y ago
I don't know if I'd call it reimplementation when the original Emacs is older than DOS and GNU Emacs, still maintained today, is older than Windows (1985). Emacs's keybindings, font rendering, and scrolling were just as valid then as any other approach. Let's at least avoid comparisons to Swing :). You can bind copy-and-paste as well as any other text wrangling functionality to whatever you want and there are ways to make it behave like other platforms without too much difficulty. But why hamstring Emacs' copy and paste by limiting it to the simplistic version we're used to when you can copy to multiple registers and have a searchable history of copied text? Font rendering uses Harfbuzz in the latest version and is quite good in my opinion, there's even color emojis. Scrolling is certainly better than any terminal emulator I've used, although there's no smooth scrolling. I guess everything is off if you're comparing it to a browser, but modern browsers aren't exactly paragons of UX either. But if you're comparing prettiness options like these, yeah, Emacs loses to VS Code. All Microsoft had to do was build a text editor on top of a browser engine to get those features :). I'd say Emacs is more extensible, though. Lisp machines and all
- fierarul 6y ago
  I understand, but 35 years have passed, no need to stick to the original implementation that long. I'm a super basic user and nowadays basically have Emacs open all day just for org-mode. Nothing else. To me it seems a terrible text editor and has an UI that's foreign on macOS and Ubuntu. It's unclear to me under what OS/Window manager/etc Emacs fits right at home. It seems out of this world. I can imagine there may be some configuration that would fix some of these problems, but I just use Emacs as it comes out of the box.

code-faster 6y ago

unix is also User Interface Independent, but unlike emacs, it's actually used on a wide variety of interfaces: Mainframes, microcontrollers, web servers, phones (touch screen) and PCs.

neolog 6y ago
Pretty sure emacs is used on all of those
pjmlp 6y ago
It is also the reason why the only desktop based UNIXes that achieved any commercial success have full stack frameworks that make their UNIX underpinnings irrelevant.

smitty1e 6y ago

For those with wretched joints (me), Spacemacs[1] is a way to have all that org-mode[2] functionality, the joys of magit[3] and have it all work well over SSH. Leave all the icons to their fans. [1] https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/ [2] https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ [3] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/

mkesper 6y ago
After finding doom-emacs, I love that even more. Almost instant startup, non-broken magit key bindings, doom doctor etc. https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
- DreamyCori 6y ago
  It seems like doom-emacs is the new way to go. I feel quiet sad about this cause I spent some time to switch to Spacemacs and now I have to move to another emacs distro.
  - dunefox 6y ago
    Why do you have to move? Are you using the dev-branch Spacemacs or master?
    - DreamyCori 6y ago
      master cause I want something stable.
      - dunefox 6y ago
        I'm on dev and it's quite stable, imo. Then again I'm not a spacemacs poweruser so...
DreamyCori 6y ago
Anyone is info about the release model of Spacemacs ? It seems like nothing is moving. Any news ?

jmiskovic 6y ago

How does emacs UI work? It seems like each script is registering commands it can run in context of mode, and then you can bind key combos to commands. How do textual UIs do things like layouting of controls, updating of values and handling async requests?

ywei3410 6y ago
> How does emacs UI work? Emacs has the idea of _buffers_ which are the actual window panes that you can view. The _buffer_ has data in the form of text which has properties in much the same way a block of html can have properties. An emacs-lisp function has full access to do anything it wants with the buffer. For example it can insert contents, change the font family, change the bit of text into a button with a callback. This is exactly how syntax highlighting/semantic highlighting works in emacs, you just change the styling for bits of text [1]. A _mode_ inside emacs is a collection of emacs-lisp functions which trigger (usually on a file extension name). Typically they will set certain keybindings for specific mode-like behaviour. You always have a single _major_ mode and multiple _minor_ modes - the vim emulation layer, for example is simply a minor mode which adds the vim keybindings and emulates the vim state machine inside emacs-lisp. > It seems like each script is registering commands it can run in context of mode An emacs-lisp file can be _evaluated_ in the same way as a python file into emacs. It's like a REPL - you can evaluate a file and the functions become available. There's a bit of extra behaviour which allows lazy loading et cetera, but user defined scripts are first-class and there's no distinction between them and those which are "native". > updating of values You can update a variable by simply evaluating the appropriate lisp function. If you want to update a value in the text buffer, you just replace/rerender that chunk. > handling async requests A buffer can also have a _process_ running which gets events each time the buffer is updated. When you run a command, you direct the output to a buffer and you trigger your lisp function on certain events. This is sort of how the HTTP requests work, but there's libraries which abstract some of it for you. Buffers are really just an abstraction for textual data. Some of this is simplified, but I hope it gives you a vague idea of what emacs is. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/iemo44/wysiwygified_org_mode/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/iemo44/wysiwygified_...
- 6y ago

vbsteven 6y ago

To me the main 2 primitives that make Emacs the extensible crossplatform app/platform/os/whatever you want to call it are these: * everything is a buffer, which in essence is a grid of text, that's the UI primitive, if you can render a grid of text you can probably build an emacs UI easily. * every action/command is an elisp function that operates on these buffers Combine these two and you can create pretty much anything. Code written in elisp that outputs buffers. An analogy with the modern web as a platform: elisp is the JavaScript and buffers are the DOM.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already. For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts here and there. Second, it feels like you have to spend a lot of time to set it all up. Third, will it replace an IDE? Error checking / linting, autocomplete, fast navigation, auto-imports, loads of things like that that seem to just work out-of-the-box in e.g. idea.

jwandborg 6y ago
I work daily in vim, emacs and idea (ideavim). I use emacs for org-mode exclusively. You only need to learn the buffer manipulation and org-mode keybinds for this, and the configuration. I use vim for ad-hoc text editing, it's a poor IDE as I've configured it. I use IntelliJ IDEA with IdeaVim for writing code. I do not consider myself superhuman. A notable fact is that at some point previously, I've used every one of these as my main development editor. I couldn't imagine having to maintain configuration for IDE-style features in all three editors, so I won't bother, but I do bother using the best tool for the job.
kristopolous 6y ago
Pretend I have a crashing program and I want something better than the GDB repl and I don't want to import/create some project. There's a lot of solutions for this but pretend I want to graphically step through, edit the code etc... Emacs can do this quite well without any special hassle. Just try using it as a debugger, when you're annoyed, search the web and you'll find your answer. I'm not an emacs user so this is coming from a non koolaid drinker but I've been using it more and more for these special use cases Maybe this is just as easy to do in, say, IntelliJ, I just feel like emacs will leave a cleaner footprint and have more sensible defaults. So give emacs a try for debugging something (the Google-fu is GUD, grand unified debugger), it's not hard to use, the learning curve is pretty modest and you may be surprised by how sensible it is.
phist_mcgee 6y ago

dmortin 6y ago

Emacs is not a text editor, it's a platform independent VM which can run your scripts with a text UI. E.g. do you want keep an eye on some information which can be fetched from the net? You just write a script which regularly fetches the info and puts it into a buffer, so you can take a look at it anytime, and then regardless of platform you have that info readily available just by installing your own emacs config file. It's much easier to write such things in emacs than curating various different scripts in various languages (python, etc.) which all require their specific support which is either available or not.

andreareina 6y ago
We've been joking about emacs being an OS for a long time. And it even reads email (still haven't set that up actually...)
- konjin 6y ago
  You can post on hacker news from it too. Sent from eww.
  - jimmyvalmer 6y ago
    Or Gnus. Sent from nnhackernews
    - mrspeaker 6y ago
      There's also a pretty nifty dedicated hackernews-mode. Sent from `M-x hackernews`.
      - jimmyvalmer 6y ago
        That mode is rubbish. You can't reply nor vote, requires manual syncing, and renders stories as links rather jumping directly to the story.
- kalleboo 6y ago

submeta 6y ago

Emacs + org has the potential to be the dream environment for everybody with a hacker mindset: Automate everything that has to do with text: Journaling, writing todo lists, parsing your Kindle highlights file (`My Clippings.txt'), writing project outlines, doing web research and saving your searches, notes, thoughts, summaries in Emacs via org-capture, drafting papers in org-mode, creating (text-based) tables and overviews, writing tech documentation with embedded screenshots, and many many more. What ties all these notes and files together is Emacs Lisp: Write Lisp functions to automate most of what you do. - Previously I used Python for that, but Elisp is so much more fun to automate text-based workflows. I would have to write a book to summarize all the ways this can transform your interactions and workflows with your computer and especially with everything text. Edit: After twenty years of using all sorts of text based databases and PIMs (AskSam, NetManages ECCOPro, various outliners, Outlook, Evernote, Omni{Focus,Outliner}, Bear Writer App, Ulysses App, and half a dozen other tools) I have come to realize that nothing beats Emacs + Org + Lisp.

agumonkey 6y ago
I hate org. I use emacs 25/7, I hate org. Something about it rubs me the wrong way, yet I use it but only the basic parts. I think it's that I can't wrap my head around the mental model of it, and since it encompasses 2000 topics (trees, timing, workflow, states, agenda, journaling, tagging) it's like a mountain of mud before my eyes.
- submeta 6y ago
  I started using it as an outliner. Then I added org-agenda to it, and migrated all my tasks from Things3 to it. Next I added repeated tasks, then org-habits, org-journal and some more. Incrementally.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I choked at outliner level
- blablablerg 6y ago

robenkleene 6y ago

What's the difference between what's being described here and the web? (In particular, Electron-based local applications which of course have a cross-platform web-based UI.) I'm not saying they aren't different, at the very least, Emacs prioritizes text, while the web prioritizes multimedia. But I'd love to hear other peoples takes on the differences.

narwally 6y ago
> What's the difference between what's being described here and the web? The web is generally terrible for accessibility. Since emacs has always prioritized maintaining compatibility between its graphical and text UIs, it words very well with screen readers and refreshable braille displays. It's also been designed from the beginning with keyboard navigation in mind.
slightwinder 6y ago
The Webstack is far more complex than anything emacs offers. Emacs has just a wall of text with some special markup, but there is not concept of layout for this text, and all navigation is usually separate from the wall of text, making accesability significant simpler to handle. In emacs there is a beginning and an end, and you just follow the flow. In webstack you have elements, which have a position and if you are lucky they are tagged with their purpose. If not, it's up to you to figure out whether this is for navigation or content or advertisement or some other navigation or comments, which is more another kind of navigation... Basically there is just no really realiable structure with the web. Sometimes there is something, sometimes not, sometimes it's this way, next week it can be that way... And even worse are dynamic site where parts of the site are loaded on demand. So you need a complex setup of tools to handle those content, instead of simple text-search and cursor-moving.
- shawnz 6y ago
  You could construct the same kinds of problematic UIs in Emacs too... it's just that Emacs is not as widely used as the Web and its users don't have such varying demands and use cases for it, so it's not as common for that to happen. The Web is also designed around a linear flow of text. The Web also provides opportunities to make navigation semantics clear. The Web also implicitly supports keyboard navigation everywhere. etc. Although many websites try to work around those principles, is that a problem with the web or just the websites people are using today?

john4532452 6y ago

> I seldomly hear this property mentioned by anyone else, so even if it scratches OT-ness What does "OT-ness" stand for ?

CKN23-ARIN 6y ago
Off-topicness
- john4532452 6y ago
  I could not find that in urban dictionary or google results.Is this commonly used in free software or open software mailing lists or did you just guessed it ?
  - detaro 6y ago
    OT for "Off-topic" is a very common abbreviation online, yes.
    - I_complete_me 6y ago
      Is there a common abbreviation online for On-topic? If so, what is it?
CGamesPlay 6y ago
Presumably "off-topic-ness"

bartread 6y ago

This is somewhat oblique to the content of the post but "special" is about right. "Unnecessarily obtuse", particularly from a contemporary perspective, might be a less kind way to describe it. I could say the same about the documentation which, frankly, is not great at making you immediately productive. It's written like an academic treastise, not a tutorial for a piece of software that exists to help you get stuff done and where learning the software is not an end in itself. I've recently started making a relatively determined attempt to become proficient with emacs due to increasing frustration at poor performance from both VSCode and Sublime Text when working with larger projects and, I'm not going to lie, it's hard going. Take something as basic as working with multiple windows. Emacs has concepts of buffers, windows, and frames, but windows and frames are diametrically opposite in concept to windows and frames in client side web development. That's not too difficult to grasp but, say you're in dired, and you want to open a file in a new OS window (in emacs-speak this would be a frame). You'd think you could just move the caret over the filename and hit some key combination to open that file in another window (sorry, I mean frame). Possibly you can but the nearest I've managed to get so far is (from memory) C-x 5 f, which brings up the minibuffer prefilled with the pathname of the directory you're browsing in dired, and then you have to start typing the filename (which, granted, will autocomplete), which seems somewhat redundant, and only then can you open the file. It's also full of things to trip you up, like the key bindings for switching to another (emacs) window and killing a buffer - both fairly common operations - being far too similar and easy to confuse for a newbie. It just seems so deliberately contrary, but I'm hoping the investment will pay dividends given time and persistence (this is, however, approximately my fourth or fifth attempt in 20 years to learn emacs, so we'll see).

morelisp 6y ago
These are reasonable criticisms of Emacs’s interface, but the topic of the post is interfaces in Emacs, not Emacs’s interface. Sublime has no comparison point.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
As a long time emacs user, I can confirm that emacs is terrible... and everything else out there is deficient. I can write custom code (ew, elisp) to determine how to switch between buffers (test buffer and code under test) and I can run my tests and find operations and the like in a first class buffer and a dozen things like that which are just incredibly painful in other editors. Also I hit Cx-c by mistake thrice a week.

jefftk 6y ago

A website can have this cross-modality UI property too, but most sites don't. This is partly cultural (emacs mode developers generally caring more) and partly about collaboration (it's much easier to upstream issues with an emacs mode than a site).

blauditore 6y ago

Slightly off-topic, but people here seem to like that stuff: The author has a personal website[0], which is a gem from the "old internet" - a wild mix of technical stuff, pet cat pictures, and some personal history. [0]: https://delysid.org https://delysid.org

sreevisakh 6y ago
Very interesting! Made me curious about how a blind person codes (accessibility technology). Aside from that, I am also curious as to why you characterize the website as from the 'old internet'. It looks like a modern minimalist static site to me. Not what I would expect from a 90s site. What do you consider as the distinguishing features of old internet vs the modern version?
- blauditore 6y ago
  Well, my classification of it as 'old internet' is of course subjective. To me it feels like many newer websites appear more clinical, in both, positive and negative ways. I think it's way less common now to mix personal stuff like pet photos with more professional topics like coding. Poeple who post both usually do this on different platforms (social networks vs. personal blog). From a technical point of view, the website makes heavier use of tooling that nowadays are used less, because there are alternaltives. One example are actual hyperlinks and different pages, whereas today there's some trend towards keeping more content on a single page and use buttons to navigate it.

mullikine 6y ago

I wish to profess my love for terminal emacs. I do not take it for granted. Hear ye. Any editor so powerful that also humbles itself to a 100x30 terminal without losing any power is pure class. This program deserves praise. I pray that GNU emacs will continue to support a text-only interface for many years to come and when at last the elisp fractal is no longer fit for purpose, I pray that its mechanics will be absorbed by the great neural network that will learn everything.

rleigh 6y ago

Some of its paradigms are plain stupid. C-Z (in the GUI) triggers minimise of the window. In a shell, that's fine. It suspends the process. In a GUI it is just bloody annoying. There's a perfectly good minimise button if I want it. This is just a frustration every time I fat-finger C-X. Which is used so frequently it's just asking to be pressed by accident.

tom_ 6y ago
I don't rate this shortcut either, but there's an easy fix for your .emacs: (when window-system (global-unset-key (kbd "C-z")))
- rleigh 6y ago
  Thanks, that will certainly reduce my frustration a little bit!

benreesman 6y ago

IMHO emacs is kind of a Rorschach test w.r.t. Lisp. Some people really like programming in Lisp, and for them getting emacs to do what they want is fun and rewarding, particularly but not exclusively regarding interface affordances. I personally fall into this category. The fact that it has very similar keybindings to readline/bash (especially important if you spend a lot of time popping on and off servers that don’t have your dots and thus choose not to customize the shell too much) and macOS is a huge bonus. But I totally get that this is from outer space for another group. Vim is a great alternative for people who want a more opinionated editing wizard mode, and VSCode is really competent at interacting with remote filesystems and supporting lots of languages for the GUI crowd. It’s a great time to be editing text.

lc9er 6y ago
I'm a (neo)vim user that's been playing around with various Lisps lately. CL and Scheme interaction is worlds ahead in Emacs, but even with evil-mode, I'm having a hard time. There's lots of places where it just stops working, and I have to remember Emacs bindings. Emacs 27 and 28 are more responsive, especially on Windows, but vim actions are near instantaneous. A cool project I stumbled across is Aniseed[0], which thanks to Neovim's Lua bindings, lets you control neovim with Fennel. I haven't done anything noteworthy yet, but for the first time it actually seems like it would be fun to write my own plugins. [0] - https://github.com/Olical/aniseed https://github.com/Olical/aniseed

II2II 6y ago

Most of the comments seem to be missing a very important point from the post: > As a blind user, I can write a special mode which does something specific, say, implement an IRC client. Almost all my work can instantaneously be used by sighted people using their graphical toolkit. This goes well beyond the ability of the author to create software that is accessible for both sighted and blind users. It is stating that support for both audiences is handled elegantly by the same toolkit, so you aren't creating an adversarial situation where serving the needs of both groups of people requires some form of compromise in the user interface or necessitating significantly more effort. (I would imagine that some care is required, but Emacs developers are going to address it anyhow since the program is intended to run in graphical and non-graphical environments.) I suspect this support of multiple environments is part of the reason why there is an esoteric collection of applications that run within Emacs. As an example: it is possible to read ebooks in Emacs, with formatting and images being supported in X and gracefully handled in a terminal.

jancsika 6y ago

> Emacs is the only serious program I know which manages to be truely user interface independent, in addition to being platform-independent. So tell me about the UX of free software speech recognition in emacs. I want to read about how to set that up and the limitations of it as I watch my 5 year-old niece interact with Alexa.

argb 6y ago

One of the nice things about the terminal is that things stay consistent for decades or more - people are not chasing fashion trends all the time, as is happening with the Web and graphical UIs. Nobody is being forced to use a particular style and color scheme and we don't have repeated redesigns which remove functionality for the sake of user friendliness or minimalism.

wiz21c 6y ago
This. Plugins deliver value much more than graphical design. I also often tell myself that working in emacs is exhausting because it displays only valuable information => my brain works 100% of the time when I'm in front of it :-)

hosh 6y ago

This is something Richard Stallman has advocated for. Free software was not just about the availability of source code, but also about making sure software can function well on lower powered devices, lower bandwidth environment, or people who cannot use the same kind of interfaces. There was an essay discussing this ... but I do not recall it now.

dhosek 6y ago

Wow, it's interesting how many people seem to have their own takeaways from this, many of which seem to have missed the original point of the post (I wonder how many actually read the post). The author of the post on gnu.org is blind (and the "Raman" he referred to is T. V. Raman, a blind mathematician who I met ages ago when he gave a presentation at the Portland TeX Users Group meeting about adapting TeX for presenting mathematics to blind readers. Raman, in fact, wrote a reply to the message where he wrote: >A lot of baggage gets applied today when folks talk about "Accessibility", but to me the touch-stone of a truly Accessible system is one where you dont have to ask what interaction modality someone else is using e.g. witness email, where the persons participating in a conversation never need ask "Did the person I am talking to use Braille, speech, or something else", similarly, someone who has a hearing impairment can send you email without you ever needing to know that he cant hear you. I feel like too many developers treat accessibility as an afterthought rather than a central concern.

sn41 6y ago
It is an interesting historical note that T. V. Raman won the ACM best doctoral dissertation award as a blind scholar [1]. I take an active interest in accessibility partly because my wrists hurt. Technologies initially meant to help blind people have turned out to be useful for people with other conditions as well. [1] https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221 https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221
- mercer 6y ago
  in my late teens and early twenties my wrists started hurting so bad that I could barely use a computer. While over time things improved to the point where I only have pain after doing pixel-style photoshop work with a mouse, it made me painfully aware of easy it is to take things for granted and not consider accessibility.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    NIH and others have recommendations that may help. I would also suggest seeing a specialist ASAP. A career may last a few decades but your body is for life.

larsbrinkhoff 6y ago

Emacs is a manifestation of the ITS user interfaces. They all relied on text because that's all that was available back then. They also used control characters, Altmode/Escape/Meta, and prefix arguments.