7 ms·

I’m not a long-time emacs user, but as a new one, my enthusiasm is really growing. Like everyone, I’m finding that I’m in an increasingly disparate set of too

I’m not a long-time emacs user, but as a new one, my enthusiasm is really growing. Like everyone, I’m finding that I’m in an increasingly disparate set of tools with diverging interface design choices to get my jobs done. The cognitive dissonance that all these different interfaces presents me with feels like it’s getting out of hand, and is growing non-linearly. Emacs is a arcane tool, and is dated in so many ways, but I don’t know that I can find another solution that allows me to counter the ever-growing complexity of software productivity solutions that I presented with both in my personal and professional life. I know I’m not alone. As someone who’s not a developer nor a full-time product person, (actually a doctor that wandered into tech), I often wonder why I can’t choose my own front end, and why am forced to use interfaces that don’t work very well for me. Emacs helps me escape some of that (at the cost of a huge relative learning curve, granted)

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Well said. :-)
BeetleB 5y ago
> As someone who’s not a developer nor a full-time product person, If this year's Emacsconf is anything like the last one, you are a good candidate for watching/attending it. I know whenever Emacs is brought up on HN inevitable comparisons with IDEs and VSCode are made, but if you browse last year's talks, you'll see that most talks are not related to SW development. Emacs has a lot of enthusiasts who like it not for SW development but as an ecosystem.
badsectoracula 5y ago
Unified interfaces and allowing users to transfer any transferable knowledge between programs was one of the main ideas behind GUIs like the original Macintosh and Windows, but somewhere around the turn of the millennium things... broke. But there was a time when interfaces were unified, sometimes to an absurd level (e.g. applications having a File menu when they had nothing to do with files) but IMO that is still better than every app being its own thing.
- jen20 5y ago
  > but somewhere around the turn of the millennium things... broke The rise of electron as an 'acceptable' (to some people) substitute for platform-native applications and the myth of the possibility of the "cross platform UI" has accelerated this, really. It's quite unfortunate.
  - tikhonj 5y ago
    Seems like Electron would make a stronger foundation than native toolkits for Emacs-style flexibility, extensibility and composition. The DOM, for all its faults, charts a solid path between being flexible and still being structured, all while making it easy to change and extend from the outside. I've found it's much easier to write a browser extension that adds functionality to GMail—even without GMail actively supporting extensions—than it is to write a similar extension to, say, the native Outlook app (even with explicit plugin support from Microsoft). I haven't paid much attention to the Electron world myself so I don't know to what extent anybody is taking advantage of this, but even if they're not, I expect it would be easier than with alternatives.
- jsrcout 5y ago
  My first job out of college was developing software on the Macintosh in the late 80s/early 90s and I absolutely took for granted being able to count on the user interface to work in a sane and consistent way for 99% of all software. I fondly recall and very much miss that.
agumonkey 5y ago
there's some enjoyable stability in emacs in a way, sadly it's changing a bit due to the growing number of packages and overlays. But it's still a little less tiring than trying idea then vscode then <new-ide> In emacs I get my freedom, it's cool. And in 2020.. it's the 2nd or 3rd lightest choice.
gumby 5y ago
> As someone who’s not a developer nor a full-time product person Emacs was famously used by “secretaries” (as they were referred to in those days) not only to write documents and mail but to write macros to make their lives simpler. Of course none of them could “program” (which was considered quite intimidating) but they didn’t consider writing Emacs macros to be “programming”. Back then Emacs was written in TECO so writing actual libraries was pretty arcane and not as easy as it is today. But I’m glad the learned helplessness around programming has largely ablated, in part through improved tools and in part through simple acceptance.
- p_l 5y ago
  The version that was used by secretaries in that story was programmed in Lisp, MACLISP for Multics specifically, and extended in Lisp.
  - gumby 5y ago
    I would be surprised if that were the case as the secretaries in tech square were using it on the PDP-10. But its very possible -- I never interacted with any non-programmer Multics users.
    - p_l 5y ago
      The AI ITS machines I think weren't used by non-technical users much, the TOPS-20 machines might be, but the anecdote I heard was always in context of Multics, which had much more explicit time sharing story behind it (with computing as utility).
      - gumby 5y ago
        I don’t know why you say that — the ITS machines were used by everybody in 545 tech square, researchers, admins and “secretaries” alike (both AI and LCS), from when I was there until they were gradually retired. The one TOPS-20 machine, Oz, didn’t arrive until times had changed and a lot of alternatives were already in use. As for time sharing: ITS stands for “Incompatible Timesharing System” (a joke on CTSS), with memory protection, etc used by multiple users on terminals and over the net starting around/before the Multics project (all of which preceded Emacs of course)
jasonmorton 5y ago
I've been using emacs for many years now, and I'm sad to say that it has never been slower, despite the hardware getting better. Now it lags like crazy when editing a latex document, no matter the recent version. Something went off the rails in the last year or so, and even Atom is more responsive.
- tikhonj 5y ago
  Have you tried the new native compilation system? I haven't worked on LaTeX documents specifically, but I did see a noticeable improvement in responsiveness across the board and a massive improvement in Elisp-heavy functionality like org-agenda. I've used it on both Linux and macOS; for whatever reason, my Emacs has always been snappier on my Linux machine, and that's still true with native compilation, but now the macOS experience is also pretty solid.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Have you tried profiling? It's working fine with me on both Windows (without WSL) and Linux.
- unhammer 5y ago
  Even without your init file (`emacs -Q`)? Or try profiling (M-x profiler-start, pick cpu, do stuff, then M-x profiler-report) to see if any third party package is involved or not
sachac 5y ago
As one of the EmacsConf organizers, I'm particularly fond of talks that explore how people use Emacs outside the standard software dev stuff, although I'm also keen on talks that demonstrate a well-configured workflow for code or other things. =) Both EmacsConf 2019 and 2020 had lots of talks for general audiences and lots of talks focused on development, so you'll probably find something that interests you. Actually, can I convince you to share your experience and submit a talk proposal? User stories were a well-received part of EmacsConf last year, and lots of people liked Pierce Wang's talk on learning Emacs as a high school student who's passionate about music. I think people would love to hear about how you wandered in, how you climbed up that learning curve, and how you've been tweaking things to fit you. =)

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

Well said. :-)

BeetleB 5y ago

> As someone who’s not a developer nor a full-time product person, If this year's Emacsconf is anything like the last one, you are a good candidate for watching/attending it. I know whenever Emacs is brought up on HN inevitable comparisons with IDEs and VSCode are made, but if you browse last year's talks, you'll see that most talks are not related to SW development. Emacs has a lot of enthusiasts who like it not for SW development but as an ecosystem.

badsectoracula 5y ago

Unified interfaces and allowing users to transfer any transferable knowledge between programs was one of the main ideas behind GUIs like the original Macintosh and Windows, but somewhere around the turn of the millennium things... broke. But there was a time when interfaces were unified, sometimes to an absurd level (e.g. applications having a File menu when they had nothing to do with files) but IMO that is still better than every app being its own thing.

jen20 5y ago
> but somewhere around the turn of the millennium things... broke The rise of electron as an 'acceptable' (to some people) substitute for platform-native applications and the myth of the possibility of the "cross platform UI" has accelerated this, really. It's quite unfortunate.
- tikhonj 5y ago
  Seems like Electron would make a stronger foundation than native toolkits for Emacs-style flexibility, extensibility and composition. The DOM, for all its faults, charts a solid path between being flexible and still being structured, all while making it easy to change and extend from the outside. I've found it's much easier to write a browser extension that adds functionality to GMail—even without GMail actively supporting extensions—than it is to write a similar extension to, say, the native Outlook app (even with explicit plugin support from Microsoft). I haven't paid much attention to the Electron world myself so I don't know to what extent anybody is taking advantage of this, but even if they're not, I expect it would be easier than with alternatives.
jsrcout 5y ago
My first job out of college was developing software on the Macintosh in the late 80s/early 90s and I absolutely took for granted being able to count on the user interface to work in a sane and consistent way for 99% of all software. I fondly recall and very much miss that.

agumonkey 5y ago

there's some enjoyable stability in emacs in a way, sadly it's changing a bit due to the growing number of packages and overlays. But it's still a little less tiring than trying idea then vscode then <new-ide> In emacs I get my freedom, it's cool. And in 2020.. it's the 2nd or 3rd lightest choice.

gumby 5y ago

> As someone who’s not a developer nor a full-time product person Emacs was famously used by “secretaries” (as they were referred to in those days) not only to write documents and mail but to write macros to make their lives simpler. Of course none of them could “program” (which was considered quite intimidating) but they didn’t consider writing Emacs macros to be “programming”. Back then Emacs was written in TECO so writing actual libraries was pretty arcane and not as easy as it is today. But I’m glad the learned helplessness around programming has largely ablated, in part through improved tools and in part through simple acceptance.

p_l 5y ago
The version that was used by secretaries in that story was programmed in Lisp, MACLISP for Multics specifically, and extended in Lisp.
- gumby 5y ago
  I would be surprised if that were the case as the secretaries in tech square were using it on the PDP-10. But its very possible -- I never interacted with any non-programmer Multics users.
  - p_l 5y ago
    The AI ITS machines I think weren't used by non-technical users much, the TOPS-20 machines might be, but the anecdote I heard was always in context of Multics, which had much more explicit time sharing story behind it (with computing as utility).
    - gumby 5y ago
      I don’t know why you say that — the ITS machines were used by everybody in 545 tech square, researchers, admins and “secretaries” alike (both AI and LCS), from when I was there until they were gradually retired. The one TOPS-20 machine, Oz, didn’t arrive until times had changed and a lot of alternatives were already in use. As for time sharing: ITS stands for “Incompatible Timesharing System” (a joke on CTSS), with memory protection, etc used by multiple users on terminals and over the net starting around/before the Multics project (all of which preceded Emacs of course)

jasonmorton 5y ago

I've been using emacs for many years now, and I'm sad to say that it has never been slower, despite the hardware getting better. Now it lags like crazy when editing a latex document, no matter the recent version. Something went off the rails in the last year or so, and even Atom is more responsive.

tikhonj 5y ago
Have you tried the new native compilation system? I haven't worked on LaTeX documents specifically, but I did see a noticeable improvement in responsiveness across the board and a massive improvement in Elisp-heavy functionality like org-agenda. I've used it on both Linux and macOS; for whatever reason, my Emacs has always been snappier on my Linux machine, and that's still true with native compilation, but now the macOS experience is also pretty solid.
BeetleB 5y ago
Have you tried profiling? It's working fine with me on both Windows (without WSL) and Linux.
unhammer 5y ago
Even without your init file (`emacs -Q`)? Or try profiling (M-x profiler-start, pick cpu, do stuff, then M-x profiler-report) to see if any third party package is involved or not

sachac 5y ago

As one of the EmacsConf organizers, I'm particularly fond of talks that explore how people use Emacs outside the standard software dev stuff, although I'm also keen on talks that demonstrate a well-configured workflow for code or other things. =) Both EmacsConf 2019 and 2020 had lots of talks for general audiences and lots of talks focused on development, so you'll probably find something that interests you. Actually, can I convince you to share your experience and submit a talk proposal? User stories were a well-received part of EmacsConf last year, and lots of people liked Pierce Wang's talk on learning Emacs as a high school student who's passionate about music. I think people would love to hear about how you wandered in, how you climbed up that learning curve, and how you've been tweaking things to fit you. =)