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Emacs Survey
- bzg 6y agoWith some comments by Bozhidar Batsov (https://github.com/bbatsov https://github.com/bbatsov) here: https://emacsredux.com/blog/2020/10/22/state-of-emacs-survey/ https://emacsredux.com/blog/2020/10/22/state-of-emacs-survey...
- taeric 6y agoReading in another comment that there was some hostility in the official mailing list had me worried to read his take. Instead, I got a wonderfully done perspective on it. Has done criticism, but all constructive. And lots of hope for seeing the results. I share his general ideas on this. I, also, don't really care for forcing standardisation. Nor do the defaults worry me. I'm convinced most of the "Emacs is hard" crowd is just send fulfilling propaganda. So many think it is harder than alternatives because that is just what you say.
- rgoulter 6y ago> I'm convinced most of the "Emacs is hard" crowd is just send fulfilling propaganda. So many think it is harder than alternatives because that is just what you say. It's not too hard for people to learn, sure. But it's also a much steeper learning curve to get value from compared to IDEs or to VSCode. The latter are really quite nice out of the box. And it's surely way easier for a novice to dig themselves into a hole they can't get out of with Emacs compared to VSCode. I think spending some time to know your tools better is a good thing. But for those who don't have the time or interest, I wouldn't say Emacs is a great choice.
- guenthert 6y agoI'm not convinced. I recently installed VSCode after all that hype and I'm somewhat disappointed. Without referring to external media, it's not all that easy to get anything done. It isn't exactly intuitive. It takes effort like anything else. (full disclosure: these days I'm almost exclusively an Emacs user, but for Java I might use IntelliJ instead and long time ago, when VisualAge for Java was still around, I evaluated a bunch of Java IDEs for the company I worked for)
- taeric 6y agoExactly the point I'm pushing. I hasten to add that I'm not claiming the alternatives are bad. Just not as rosy as often pushed.
- dhms 6y agolsp-java [1] might interest you. There was a lightning talk [2] about it at Emacs Conf 2019. [1] https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-java https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-java [2] https://emacsconf.org/2019/talks/19/ https://emacsconf.org/2019/talks/19/
- taeric 6y agoAnd on this, I just disagree. It feels faster to use vs code for people that are used to tools like vs code. For novices, though, they are all complicated. Worse, for many IDEs, the worst hole to dig is where you tie yourself to the IDE. Too many times have I seen projects that only build on a particular desktop with the press of a button on a particular IDE. :(
- smartmic 6y agoIs it really too much to ask from such a project to learn about its initiators and purpose in a first place directly from the site itself?
- tephra 6y agoWell there was a lot of talk about this on the mailing list with a lot of core devs opposed to the idea.
- reeealloc 6y agoNo, it's not.
- okprod 6y agoWho's behind this survey / it's not clear to me from looking at the survey page. Also kind of odd for a survey about Emacs to require nonfree JavaScript.
- nobody9999 6y ago> Who's behind this survey / it's not clear to me from looking at the survey page. That's a great question. Whois does not provide any identifying information (other than Google as the registrar) for the domain, and the site appears to be hosted on the Google cloud. It would be interesting to have such information. Perhaps if someone involved is here on HN, they could share that information? >Also kind of odd for a survey about Emacs to require nonfree JavaScript. I'd note that while the online form does require javascript (and that it's non-free is noted on the page), you aren't required to use it. Rather you also have the option to download the survey template and email it to the group.
- nullc 6y agoYou and the poster up-thread that complained that it even mentioned that it used non-free javascript must now fight to the death!
- choeger 6y agoI entered this at the end: Emacs is a good text editor and I run it for every text file I read or write. As a text editor however, emacs can never handle things like project-management, software development and testing in the same way as an IDE. Yet, it has all the features of an IDE available in some melpa repository. Unfortunately, one is always forced to configure the editor and tweak it here and there to get maybe 80% of what would be possible. And then your settings break your workflow in *that other project* or for a simple plain file. Emacs should finally acknowledge that projects are a thing and support them out-of-the-box. I would wish for an emacs daemon that considers itself responsible for a single project and manages the language server, version control, compiler and all the other project settings. Whenever I open a file in the scope of that project, the daemon should then configure my emacs instance accordingly to work well in the context of that project.
- Jtsummers 6y agoIf it helps, maybe not the solution you want but what I do: I launch a different emacs server for each project I'm working on, and make any modifications necessary there. Usually I only have one project per language open at a time, but suppose I have two lisp projects (unrelated) and don't want a cluttered up set of buffers that all look almost the same (by name, some getting a number appended if they were the second opened). I'll launch a named daemon from inside the project's root directory (emacs --daemon=foo, or with my .zshrc it's just emacsd foo). Then I can access it using emacsclient -s foo (or e -s foo with my .zshrc). If you really want it customized per project you could probably add some logic to your .emacs file or elsewhere that would run custom elisp per server, maybe check to see if the directory it was launched in has a .emacs file and evaluate that.
- testaccount119 6y ago> maybe check to see if the directory it was launched in has a .emacs file and evaluate that. Yes, or use .dir-locals.el like civilized ;)
- Jtsummers 6y ago
- bluehazed 6y agoFor the people wondering "who's asking": https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/je3eht/emacs_user_survey_2020_is_open/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/je3eht/emacs_user_su... https://blog.abrochard.com/ann-emacs-survey-2020.html https://blog.abrochard.com/ann-emacs-survey-2020.html
- okprod 6y agoLol -- Who -- Questions or comments can go to contact@emacssurvey.org
- m463 6y agoI was wondering that. This appears to be some random person doing this - doesn't appear to be sponsored or approved by rms/gnu/fsf. (especially with non-free javascript)
- dilap 6y agoha, that's funny! well, i think the answers will be of general interest in any case.
- barrkel 6y agoI'm not sure emacs will properly evolve as long as RMS is still involved.
- shadowgovt 6y agoEmacs evolution is really always just a fork away, if someone can build something better than what's there for enough users to care.
- hyperman1 6y agoXEmacs? I liked it bether than the real thing, it still died
- 6y ago
- _cipher_ 6y agoI think this survey was populated without any thought. 1. it does not specify to whom this website belongs to, neither what the purpose of this survey is 2. in programming languages, there's not even one lisp dialect. In a survey. For Emacs. :p [Edit]: correction for 2, as there's clojure. Thanks anamexis.
- anamexis 6y agoI generally agree, but re #2, there is Clojure.
- _cipher_ 6y agoYes, you are correct! Thanks. Shame though that neither common lisp or scheme are present.
- anoncake 6y agoElisp wasn't included either, but I guess the question above covers that.
- dleslie 6y agoRight? In terms of time spent programming in Emacs, my dominant languages would be C, C++, C#, Scheme, ELisp and Ruby. Seems odd to leave out the language Emacs was written in.
- jimhefferon 6y agoAlso left out LaTeX.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI think it’s because the took the list from the stack overflow developer survey. Probably they’re hoping to pick up more general emacs users and not emacs package developers
- guenthert 6y ago
- nickdrozd 6y agoIt isn't possible to fill out the online form in EWW, so I'm not doing it.
- clircle 6y agoYou must be fun at parties
- varbhat 6y agoSo, GNU Emacs is thinking to modernize , improvise the Emacs which i think is very good. https://lwn.net/Articles/819452/ https://lwn.net/Articles/819452/
- varbhat 6y ago*improve (sorry for typo)
- zests 6y agoDoes anyone have an example of emacs achieving parity with JetBrains in code completion/code searching? I've put in a small amount of effort into this (hand-rolling a python config, using a DOOM config I found) and I get something that seems really slow if it works at all. Before I invest more time I was wondering if anyone had a screen cast or any personal experiences with this. Frankly I'd use whichever editor has the best code complete and search capabilities. Right now I use emacs for magit and orgmode but want to expand it to other areas.
- Arkanosis 6y agoI can't really compare because, well, I don't use JetBrains IDEs at all, but for supported languages, emacs-lsp does provide features like code completion, lookup, inline documentation…. It is the single biggest improvement to Emacs for me since I've started using it a long, long time ago. I can tell that it works very well for at least Python and Rust. I remember TypeScript support looked nice too, though I don't do much TypeScript these days. edit: screenshots / screencasts: https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/page/gallery/ https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/page/gallery/
- dhagz 6y agoIt's not bad for Go either. The only issue is that gopls is still considered alpha, so it's not the most stable thing out there, but that's not Emacs's problem.
- mgdev 6y ago> this requires nonfree Javascript So... I get the motivation for including this, and I understand Emacs's roots. But IMO this mindset — the one that motivated including this disclaimer - is also why efforts to "modernize" will pay an extra tax, possibly preventing its success. Emacs has a prioritization rubric that places freedom above mainstream utility. That's perfectly fine, but it inherently limits 1) its audience size, and subsequently 2) its contributor pool and 3) financial upside - either direct or indirect (used to support the project). This means it will always lag behind the projects that are setting the bar for what "modern" means.
- okprod 6y agoModern doesn't have to mean nonfree
- Siira 6y agoExcept it is still better than those "modern" projects. I use a lot of editors in parallel, and Emacs has the best UX by a landslide. (I have 3000 lines of config in addition to using Doom, but that is what emacs is about in the first place.)
- auganov 6y agoWell, since this survey does in fact include "nonfree" javascript it would imply the authors don't subscribe to that mindset but mentioned it out of respect to those who do. I'm not sure how much this inhibits Emacs. It's architected in a certain way and there's decades of elisp code one wouldn't want to throw away. IMO this is the biggest limiting factor. Most big fundamental improvements would mean giving a lot of stuff up. Not a huge fan of "free" software absolutists but just haven't seen this come into play too much with Emacs.
- belorn 6y agoPeople who do not care about what software is made of, under which user license, where data get stored or who reads it and for what purpose will use something like google docs. The modernized mindset is to put things on a sticky platform, preferable one which hardware keys they control, data mine everything for profit, and not have any way for "customers" to contact the company and object if the customer get kicked out of the platform. For people who do care there is a spectrum of issues they might care about, including free vs non-free. Surveys like this might even help the developers to identify which of those issues users do care about, and as such, the people behind the survey likely want to make the survey as inclusive to that spectrum as possible.
- jll29 6y agoThey didn't ask the heretic question of "other editors used" (in parallel, not "before"), but I'm going to tell you the answer anyhow: I use XEmacs 21.4 and Sublime 3.2.2 (and sometimes editors that come with various IDEs). I also regularly use vi when logged in as 'root', as it's an established sysadmin best practice not to run third-party software as super user. Sublime is more beautiful but I trust Emacs more (Sublime still has the odd bug) and I master Emacs commands fairly well by now (used since 1993).
- bitwize 6y agoI answered the survey, but I've begun the process of moving away from Emacs, and adopting what is considered the standard toolkit for a programmer in my position. And for enterprise JavaScript development, the standard editor is Visual Studio Code. The reason why is because using anything else creates unnecessary friction between me and the rest of the team. This applies to other tools as well; for example, the default way to bench-test a running web service is to "use Postman". I could use curl, and that would be easier for me, especially from a scripting standpoint, but everybody else's vocabulary is in terms of Postman, so I'm forcing myself to use that.
- morelisp 6y agoI gave the parallel answers anyway, but weird none of my parallel editors were on there (let alone previous, which even I had to look up the name of to remember). No Xcode, no Visual Studio - both extremely common. Definitely a "web kids" survey.
- shadowgovt 6y agoProps to JotForm---I accidentally closed my browser window mid-survey and upon restoring from history, it successfully picked up where I left off. If I'd had to start over, I wouldn't have bothered.
- cannam 6y agoI filled this in for fun - it's short enough and impersonal enough that I didn't feel I cared what happens to the data. As an Emacs user for some decades who never really uses any other editor, I found a few questions I didn't understand very well or recognise the answers for. I suppose other users must be more ecosystem-minded than I am. I was intrigued by the (mandatory) question about which theme you use. Does Emacs even "have" named themes?
- drunkpotato 6y agoYes, many! I use deeper-blue. solarized-light and -dark are also good. Themes don’t seem to work well with terminal emacs though, but I haven’t dug into the issue much since I’m mostly in the GUI.
- barrkel 6y agoWell, I wrote my own theme so I could have a consistent experience between GUI and terminal. It meant customizing my terminal colours so they were non-awful (the minimal 16 are super-garish, I have mine tuned for less harsh contrast but also more colour differentiation considering I'm red/green colourblind). I then used the same customized terminal colours in my GUI theme. It works like this: (if (display-graphic-p) (setq color-yellow "#f57900" color-bright-yellow "#fce94f" color-red "#ff6464" color-bright-red "#ef2929" color-bright-green "#73d216" color-green "#4e9a06" color-blue "#729fcf" color-bright-blue "#204a87" color-white "#babdb6" color-bright-white "#eeeeec" color-magenta "#ad7fa8" color-bright-magenta "#1d324b" color-black "#1a2022" color-bright-black "#2e3436" color-bright-cyan "#555753" color-cyan "#888a85") (setq color-black "black" color-white "white" color-red "red" color-green "green" color-blue "blue" color-yellow "yellow" color-cyan "cyan" color-magenta "magenta" color-bright-black "brightblack" color-bright-white "brightwhite" color-bright-red "brightred" color-bright-green "brightgreen" color-bright-blue "brightblue" color-bright-yellow "brightyellow" color-bright-cyan "brightcyan" color-bright-magenta "brightmagenta")) Then, later on, I use these colours for setting the faces for the cursor, region, keywords, comments, tweaking various different major modes, etc. With a true-colour capable terminal there's no technical reason to need to take these steps, but this approach works for me in rxvt-unicode and mintty, the two terminals I use on Linux and Windows respectively, and aren't mucked up by any level of tmux or screen nesting.
- dleslie 6y agoOne of the later questions is regarding whether a future survey should include demographic questions. I'm curious why there's any hesitation to ask? It seems there could be missing information because the questions posed aren't tied to the relative harm an issue could pose. IE, a user might complain that right-to-left editing is broken in some frustrating matter, but without some weighting related to demographics (or other) that complaint might get lost in the noise. The outcome might be that a lesser-frustrating issue may receive more development time because it simply received more complaints. IE, instead of fixing right-to-left editing and so broaden the potential audience the developer hours might be spent on spelling errors or integrating a melpa package into core. This is not to say there exists a right-to-left bug! I am simply using it as a hypothetical example.
- asah 6y agoMad points for a terrific survey, esp the last question (no spoilers pls). LOL, my .emacs is so hacked-up, I had to check to make sure I had the correct answer!
- timonoko 6y agoThey did not ask, but Swedish letter "å" is bloody useless on Finnish keyboard, so I have (global-set-key (kbd "å") 'hippie-expand)
- arc-in-space 6y agohippie-expand is so blessed. It surprises me that all other text editors/IDE's seem to have converged on the distracting pop-up thing
- timonoko 6y agoThis is also phonetic choice as "åååå" is an expression of amazement and puzzlement.
- Bost 6y agoI use the WinKey extensively. My top two contenders are: s-c sp-copy-sexp s-b sp-backward-copy-sexp followed closely by: s-p helm-projectile-find-file s-f helm-find-files s-r helm-recentf s-R spacemacs/rename-current-buffer-file s-0 delete-window s-2 split-window-below s-3 split-window-right-and-focus s-D dired-jump :) The rest can be enjoyed here https://github.com/Bost/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/.spacemacs https://github.com/Bost/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/.spacemac...
- OhSoHumble 6y agoAt the end of the survey there was a 'what is the default binding to find a file' question. I wonder how many people don't know the answer to that question. I didn't. For Doom Emacs the binding is SPC f d. I've been using Doom for two years and before that I was using Spacemacs. I have no idea what the default bindings are.
- arc-in-space 6y agoThis was definitely a bit weird for what seems like a question that was probably supposed to filter out malicious responses? I happen to still use the default binding but I could easily see myself forgetting if I happened to be an evil-mode person.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- masukomi 6y agoi've been using space p f in doom. space f d is find directory not file. space f f is find file no clue what the default is.
- Derbasti 6y agoI actually had to think about that one. It is ingrained so deeply into my muscle memory that I haven't actively thought about it in a long time.
- 6y ago
- nanna 6y agoFilled it in and then managed to get the default keybinding question at the end wrong. Hope that doesn't discount my entry. It's muscle memory, damnit!
- rurban 6y agoI always use C-x b but this was apparently the wrong answer.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThat lets you switch buffers, not visit files.
- lovecg 6y agoI had to go and find a file to see what keys my fingers have been pressing all these years.
- chombier 6y agoSame here, I had to actually do it to check the keys :)
- velcrovan 6y agoI've been using it for less than a year and I pretty much started with Doom Emacs. I know like three or four ways to open a file…but which, if any, is “the default”??? Heck if I know!!
- morelisp 6y agoIt was too short for `ESC x find-file`. :(
- Isamu 6y agoSo I guess I have been using Emacs for at least 36 years. Did they mean to say GNU Emacs?
- nanna 6y agoRespect.
- morelisp 6y agoI chuckled at "be specific" when it asked for issues you ran into when first starting to use Emacs. Whatever it was that led me to use XEmacs for a couple years at first is both completely out of my head and certainly irrelevant to people today. (I think it was something to do with OOTB integration with whatever print spooler I had configured!)
- cannam 6y agoMy biggest problem at first was that the Unix server (a Gould NP-1) didn't have enough memory to run an Emacs instance for every terminal in the class, so it was painfully, agonisingly slow. The joke about "Eight Megs And Continually Swapping" would have been very real, if only I had heard it then. I really hated Emacs at the time. I only stuck with it because the alternative was vi.