24 ms·

I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone

by anyfoo 5y ago

I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This starts with (nowadays) non-conformant shortcuts, includes window/buffer management (the terminology alone is archaic: panes are windows and windows are frames), and ends with elisp, which even Lisp programmers themselves rebuke. But such a do-over is impossible in both LaTeX and emacs, since that would also mean throwing all the thousands (ten thousands?) packages--and lots of core functionality--away. Stuff that has accumulated for many decades and that is the reason why we're sticking with it: Everything else feels very limited in comparison. And it's not just the "big" things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things. Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face with "emacsism" at some time.

CalChris 5y ago
With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm not trying to master the writing of a doc.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  I don't want to deeply learn an editor myself anymore, too, but that being said I am still extremely glad that the past decades have made me proficient in emacs. The editor is just one of the most important tools for me.
- cpach 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity, which editor do you use? Overleaf?
  - CalChris 5y ago
    Yes, Overleaf. I'd always had LaTeX envy but when faced with installation and configuration, I gave up again and again. Overleaf solved all that.
    - bkallus 5y ago
      In college we were required to typeset assignments in LaTeX for all the math classes past multivariable calculus. I started out with Overleaf, but switched to local compilation about a year in. It's much nicer to be able to write in my usual text editor and compile documents instantly. On Arch, all I had to do was install texlive-most. It includes every package I have ever needed to use. To compile a document, I just run 'pdflatex *.tex'. Sometimes bibtex too. If you're having trouble with setup and configuration, I recommend texlive.
    - andrepd 5y ago
      >installation and configuration On Linux, literally run the texlive installer script and install an editor like TexStudio if you'd like. That's it.
- User23 5y ago
  Imagine a carpenter saying, "I don't want to master my tools, I just want to build things."
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    There’s mastering the use of your tools and there’s tinkering with the windings on the electric motor inside your tools. Emacs offers users both.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    How common is it for carpenters to make their own tools? I actually don't know!
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      Did you write Emacs? Did I write Emacs?
    - AlanYx 5y ago
      For a lot of custom carpentry, it's pretty common for carpenters to make their own jigs to solve specific problems (e.g., if you need to use your router a bit like a thickness plane to mill down some object by a couple of millimetres along some axis so it fits somewhere, you probably want to build a jig first).
    - _moof 5y ago
      Pretty common, I think. I've made clamps and rove punches for instance, and I've been tempted to make drill bits. (But this is for wooden boatbuilding, which is its own uniquely crotchety corner of carpentry. Not unlike emacs...)
    - ARandomerDude 5y ago
      For most woodworkers, I'd say the analogy is closest to making "plugins" for existing tools. They require a little knowledge (which easily obtained on YouTube), and can greatly increase your ability to use the base tool. One example is a table saw sled, which helps you make clean, repeatable, 90º cuts. It's one of the most useful "plugins" you can have for your table saw, and relatively easy to make. Making the actual table saw, on the other hand, would be expensive and very difficult, and would require knowledge of many fields (metal working, electrical systems, etc.).
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  The problem with LaTeX is that it isn't well-designed enough that you can just use it without thinking about the magic. When stuff is not up to scratch (image is placed incorrectly, spacing in your table is wrong, your diagram has an incorrect alignment, etc), the error messages suck, and you often need to figure out what the magic does to be able to fix the issue.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  The thing with LaTeX is that it's a full text-oriented programing language. What is great if you want to extend it, but a problem if you want to use it on any context not supported by the interpreter. So, if you don't want to create a PDF, it just sucks.
- eulgro 5y ago
  > With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). $ latexmk -pdf main.tex How hard is that? The only thing Overleaf adds here is a button and a 10x compilation time overhead. > I don't always remember what that magic meant. Overleaf mostly won't help you here, unless I'm mistaken. I don't mean to be aggressive here, I just don't get the Overleaf hype. What's wrong with good old text editor + version control? I think I'll pass on the slow web app for now. At least they have Git integration so nobody is going to force me to use it.
  - remexre 5y ago
    How do you do package (version) management for LaTeX? There's more than a few documents I've come across that won't build on my system, giving often-indecipherable compilation errors. Overleaf at least ensures everyone involved is using the same environment without needing to ship a Docker container or the like, or try to pin down versions.
    - eulgro 5y ago
      I suppose it should be fairly portable, except for missing packages maybe. In my case I have literally every common package installed so that's not an issue. But LaTeX errors are a real pain, I'll admit that.
    - Filligree 5y ago
      Nix has a decent solution here, i.e. turn the document into a nix derivation. with import <nixpkgs> {}; pkgs.runCommand "cv.pdf" rec { src = ./cv.tex; bin = with pkgs.texlive; combine { inherit scheme-medium collection-latexrecommended collection-fontsextra moderncv etoolbox; }; buildInputs = [ bin ]; allowSubstitutes = false; } '' ln -s $src cv.tex latexmk -pdf cv.tex mkdir $out mv *pdf $out/ '' These days I'd probably use flakes to pin down the latex version.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    Lol, that's not the command for making a LaTeX document. The command for making a LaTeX document fills a sheet for all the shit you have to install--half of which isn't correct on whatever documentation you're reading--and THEN you can `latexmk`. And I do mean you. I gave up after a solid week. I'll just make whatever I want in PowerPoint, save it to a PDF, and be done in 15 minutes. Yes, I said PowerPoint. Set you're slides to 8.5x11 and it became a typesetting program. I've started getting my coworkers to use it for such and they are absolutely delighted by the bump in design quality they are getting because they aren't fighting Word anymore.
- lenkite 5y ago
  Use pandoc
908B64B197 5y ago
> But such a do-over is impossible in both LaTeX and emacs, since that would also mean throwing all the thousands (ten thousands?) packages--and lots of core functionality--away. For LaTeX a large part of the appeal is to get a template and be able to respect whatever arbitrary formatting requirements. Someone could build a layer on top of existing LaTeX to add a more modern language on top of it and have it expand to LaTeX.
grae_QED 5y ago
Why redo something if it works? People are still using Fortran because it works well for certain applications. Just because its old doesn't mean its outdated. I could even argue that since Emacs hasn't been phased out (and still has a decent user base) that it does something that other text editors don't (or can't) do.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Fortran has seen major changes over the 64 years it's been in use. I feel that Emacs Lisp has had a much slower evolution (though admittedly I've only used it for about 20 years, I can't comment on how much it changed prior to that). In particular, the biggest change I'm aware of with Emacs Lisp (the language) is that we now have lexically scoped variables. The biggest change to its implementation has been a push towards native compilation (much improved performance, I like it). The language has, otherwise, largely remained the same. In some regard, this can be seen as a consequence of having a decent base language. Where Fortran's original version became increasingly indecent as time went on, Emacs Lisp seems to have held up better thanks to a stronger foundation. That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. In particular, the things that (my opinion) are still missing from the language are: 1. A good concurrency model. CSP, actors, I don't care but it needs to exist. Paired with the native execution we're getting now, this would greatly improve the real and perceived performance of the system. 2. A real module system. I'm not talking about a package manager, but moving things into module scopes a la Common Lisp packages. The prefixed names for functions and variables is a hazard. Even if you leave every symbol exported by default so that you don't lose visibility to module internals it would be better than now. It would also open up a lot of opportunities like the potential to run multiple versions of the same package side-by-side.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    > Fortran has seen major changes over the 64 years it's been in use. And yet most Fortran programmers reject/ignore those changes and stick to Fortran 77. When I was in academia, I couldn't find a single person writing Fortran code in anything newer than 77.
Koshkin 5y ago
> entirely different Well not entirely - it's modeless, and some usual keybindings work as well (Home/End, etc.). The built-in tutorial is brief and to the point, it will get one started pretty quickly.
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face with "emacsism" at some time. Speaking from the experience of someone who has repeatedly bounced off Emacs for going on two decades now, you absolutely will. :) > When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things. This sort of "little thing" is, perhaps ironically, why I keep going back to BBEdit, at least for my technical writing work: it has a whole lot of these little "multipurpose tool" commands for text manipulation -- and, because they're in old-school Mac menus, they're discoverable. Thinking about it, that's one of the main reasons I bounce off both Emacs and Vim: it's not that I can't figure out the basics or even the, er, intermediates; it's that so much of the advanced stuff is relatively opaque. I am sure that there is probably a command in both Emacs and Vim that equates to, for instance, "find all lines matching this regex that occur more than once in this document, delete them, and copy them to a new document" (a task which sounds like I am making it up, but I swear I have had to do on multiple occasions in my current role). But I am also sure that it is not as easy as selecting "Text > Process Duplicate Lines..." and checking "Delete duplicate lines", "Leaving one" and "Match using pattern".
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Top of my head, I am pretty sure that I can do that with a "keyboard macro" involving list-matching-lines, and delete-matching-lines (that is literally what the commands are called). "Keyboard macro" by the way is a good and a bad name at once: It does not fully describe the vastly more powerful feature, as it is much more semantic than just repetition of keystrokes, but at its surface it looks like that and helps you get started. If anyone reading this hasn't used keyboard macros in emacs, try it out the next time you do something repetitive. It's amazing how it can simplify those tasks. "C-x (" to start defining one, "C-x )" to end it, "C-x e" to run it, which conveniently also ends definition if you want to use it right away. Of course you can do things like "M-5 C-x e" to run it 5 times. But I do get your point: Things are probably much less discoverable in emacs, unless you are relatively proficient in it already maybe. You need to switching into a "programmer" mind fairly quickly, while BBedit probably just lets you do powerful stuff through simple UI.
Cacti 5y ago
There’s at least two ways you could keep the Emacs ecosystem while refreshing some of the other pieces (to build a new editor): - You could reimplement the Emacs LISP VM and change what some of the native editor types refer to (buffer, point, window, etc.) so that they are interpreted in a “modern” UI setting. Maybe add some new opcodes while you’re at it to handle things like threading. - You could fork emacs, strip out the display engine, and completely rewrite it (it’s notoriously complicated and probably not worth dealing with 50 years of legacy hacks). Either of these options would give you a reasonable chance of skipping over the inherent complexity of the system without having to ditch all of the ecosystem packages), though they’re both still pretty involved. A big part of the reason for this is you’d inherently end up losing some OS compatibility in the process, and maintaining compatibility is probably the biggest problem with making changes or updates to emacs. If you’re willing to ditch that burden, your options expand dramatically.
stouset 5y ago
> And it's not just the "big" things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things. FWIW this is something most editors let you do trivially. With VS Code, select the lines you want to sort, press Cmd-Shift-P to bring up fuzzy command search, type "sort", press enter. Your selected lines are sorted. I think you might be surprised to find that all the major editors these days have most all of the little things you might want day-to-day covered. Of course the set of little things one cares about will differ from person to person and from the capabilities we've personally found the most use out of. It's hard to argue when that one thing you use every day isn't supported in some other editor, but the list of those is shrinking quicker than I suspect most people realize. There are a lot of people contributing to these tools and that plus not having to reinvent every wheel from scratch (and maintain that code on top) means that modern editors can cut into the lead time advantage of something like Emacs quicker than you might otherwise think.
- neolog 5y ago
  I agree with what you say about IDEs, but Emacs' "advantage" over other text editors is that it is only superficially a text editor. It's really more of an operating system.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    How does the old joke go -- "Now if Emacs only had a decent text editor, it would be a pretty decent OS."
    - mike97 5y ago
      Evil mode
- viseztrance 5y ago
  I think you would still be surprised at how many things emacs can still do better like undo in region or even simple macros that find use even during simple text edits. Though ultimately feature per feature, I don't think emacs looks all that great, but the difference is that you can actually use a lot of what it has to offer whereas it's difficult to do so in more modern editors (with fuzzy matching and all).
bsder 5y ago
As an emacs user, I would say that emacs really didn't have competition until VSCode and modern programming languages. For example, everybody was kind of 80-90% on syntax highlighting. Some editors and IDEs were a little better at one language than others, but most weren't that great and had all manner of weird edge cases. And, if you wrote a new language, good luck because you had to write a syntax highlighter for it in both emacs and vim to get traction. And then VSCode came along with the Language Server Protocol. Suddenly, you only needed to write a well-constrained plugin to get your syntax highlighting to about 80%. That was okay. But the modern languages learned from the failures of C and C++ and designed themselves to be parsed quickly and accurately. So, now your LSP syntax highlighting could go to roughly 99% accuracy on VSCode. And the highlighters were incremental. Suddenly there was a genuine advantage to using something other than emacs. And this is before we get to things like a debugger that works, etc. I've used all the IDE's, but VSCode is the first one to pry emacs from under my fingers. And for people who like to complain about VSCode and Electron bloat (a valid complaint), I'd like to point you to some of the old nicknames from the emacs vs vi religious wars (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping springs to mind ...) Bloat simply isn't an argument for most people.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  I agree that lsp is a necessity nowadays, and I was almost willing and close to give up emacs. And then emacs got proper lsp support (even in at least two forms, lip-mode and eglot), and now I'm happy.
- lliamander 5y ago
  Is there a definitive Emacs key-binding plug-in for VSCode? I've tried several in the past and none seemed quite right. IntelliJ, on the other hand, has great support for emacs key-bindings.
- Frondo 5y ago
  One other thing about VSCode being an Electron app -- it is by far the snappiest and most responsive and least bad memory-wise Electron app I've used. This isn't like Slack or Discord. It's like magic what they've built on Electron, one of these days I'll dig into the code to see how they did it.
impendia 5y ago
What is your criticism of LaTeX? I am a research mathematician, and I and essentially all my colleagues are LaTeX users. To me it feels like the correct tool for the job; the only widespread criticism I've heard is that it doesn't produce documents accessible to the blind. (And I've heard that work on this is in process.) I tend to be unsympathetic to criticism that a tool is "outdated"; if a tool is right for the job, why change it? But I want to keep an open mind -- what would you like to see in LaTeX's place?
- andi999 5y ago
  My pick with Latex is: Error messages look to me as complicated as C++ template errors, packages sometimes don't work well together, a lot of boilerplate is usually needed, and I feel somehow the Syntax needs too many keystrokes, like why not make {} for sub and superscript optional and everything until the next space character is sub or superscripted (and not only one character). Also writing {\rm text} feels wrong. Shdnd it be \rm {text} and maybe instead one shd be able to use $ in an equation block to get to a non italic font. While markdown is not advanced enough, I feel the making it easier for the user to use is the right modern approach, from which maybe a full system could be designed. Also figure placement should allow more fine-tuning (not sure how, and yes this is against the original spirit)
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Might the {\rm text} notation be LISP-inspired syntax? Replace the braces with parentheses and remove the slash and you get `(rm text)`
    - andi999 5y ago
      Somehow \mbox is the opposite though (see the examples) : https://www.tutorialspoint.com/tex_commands/mbox.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/tex_commands/mbox.htm Honestly I think I am missing all the points about brackets in Latex, if somebody knows the Syntax (and the 'why' pls tell me).
- GiovanniP 5y ago

by anyfoo 5y ago

CalChris 5y ago

With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm not trying to master the writing of a doc.

anyfoo 5y ago
I don't want to deeply learn an editor myself anymore, too, but that being said I am still extremely glad that the past decades have made me proficient in emacs. The editor is just one of the most important tools for me.
cpach 5y ago
Just out of curiosity, which editor do you use? Overleaf?
- CalChris 5y ago
  Yes, Overleaf. I'd always had LaTeX envy but when faced with installation and configuration, I gave up again and again. Overleaf solved all that.
  - bkallus 5y ago
    In college we were required to typeset assignments in LaTeX for all the math classes past multivariable calculus. I started out with Overleaf, but switched to local compilation about a year in. It's much nicer to be able to write in my usual text editor and compile documents instantly. On Arch, all I had to do was install texlive-most. It includes every package I have ever needed to use. To compile a document, I just run 'pdflatex *.tex'. Sometimes bibtex too. If you're having trouble with setup and configuration, I recommend texlive.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    >installation and configuration On Linux, literally run the texlive installer script and install an editor like TexStudio if you'd like. That's it.
User23 5y ago
Imagine a carpenter saying, "I don't want to master my tools, I just want to build things."
- sokoloff 5y ago
  There’s mastering the use of your tools and there’s tinkering with the windings on the electric motor inside your tools. Emacs offers users both.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  How common is it for carpenters to make their own tools? I actually don't know!
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Did you write Emacs? Did I write Emacs?
  - AlanYx 5y ago
    For a lot of custom carpentry, it's pretty common for carpenters to make their own jigs to solve specific problems (e.g., if you need to use your router a bit like a thickness plane to mill down some object by a couple of millimetres along some axis so it fits somewhere, you probably want to build a jig first).
  - _moof 5y ago
    Pretty common, I think. I've made clamps and rove punches for instance, and I've been tempted to make drill bits. (But this is for wooden boatbuilding, which is its own uniquely crotchety corner of carpentry. Not unlike emacs...)
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    For most woodworkers, I'd say the analogy is closest to making "plugins" for existing tools. They require a little knowledge (which easily obtained on YouTube), and can greatly increase your ability to use the base tool. One example is a table saw sled, which helps you make clean, repeatable, 90º cuts. It's one of the most useful "plugins" you can have for your table saw, and relatively easy to make. Making the actual table saw, on the other hand, would be expensive and very difficult, and would require knowledge of many fields (metal working, electrical systems, etc.).
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
The problem with LaTeX is that it isn't well-designed enough that you can just use it without thinking about the magic. When stuff is not up to scratch (image is placed incorrectly, spacing in your table is wrong, your diagram has an incorrect alignment, etc), the error messages suck, and you often need to figure out what the magic does to be able to fix the issue.
marcosdumay 5y ago
The thing with LaTeX is that it's a full text-oriented programing language. What is great if you want to extend it, but a problem if you want to use it on any context not supported by the interpreter. So, if you don't want to create a PDF, it just sucks.
eulgro 5y ago
> With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). $ latexmk -pdf main.tex How hard is that? The only thing Overleaf adds here is a button and a 10x compilation time overhead. > I don't always remember what that magic meant. Overleaf mostly won't help you here, unless I'm mistaken. I don't mean to be aggressive here, I just don't get the Overleaf hype. What's wrong with good old text editor + version control? I think I'll pass on the slow web app for now. At least they have Git integration so nobody is going to force me to use it.
- remexre 5y ago
  How do you do package (version) management for LaTeX? There's more than a few documents I've come across that won't build on my system, giving often-indecipherable compilation errors. Overleaf at least ensures everyone involved is using the same environment without needing to ship a Docker container or the like, or try to pin down versions.
  - eulgro 5y ago
    I suppose it should be fairly portable, except for missing packages maybe. In my case I have literally every common package installed so that's not an issue. But LaTeX errors are a real pain, I'll admit that.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    Nix has a decent solution here, i.e. turn the document into a nix derivation. with import <nixpkgs> {}; pkgs.runCommand "cv.pdf" rec { src = ./cv.tex; bin = with pkgs.texlive; combine { inherit scheme-medium collection-latexrecommended collection-fontsextra moderncv etoolbox; }; buildInputs = [ bin ]; allowSubstitutes = false; } '' ln -s $src cv.tex latexmk -pdf cv.tex mkdir $out mv *pdf $out/ '' These days I'd probably use flakes to pin down the latex version.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Lol, that's not the command for making a LaTeX document. The command for making a LaTeX document fills a sheet for all the shit you have to install--half of which isn't correct on whatever documentation you're reading--and THEN you can `latexmk`. And I do mean you. I gave up after a solid week. I'll just make whatever I want in PowerPoint, save it to a PDF, and be done in 15 minutes. Yes, I said PowerPoint. Set you're slides to 8.5x11 and it became a typesetting program. I've started getting my coworkers to use it for such and they are absolutely delighted by the bump in design quality they are getting because they aren't fighting Word anymore.
lenkite 5y ago
Use pandoc

908B64B197 5y ago

> But such a do-over is impossible in both LaTeX and emacs, since that would also mean throwing all the thousands (ten thousands?) packages--and lots of core functionality--away. For LaTeX a large part of the appeal is to get a template and be able to respect whatever arbitrary formatting requirements. Someone could build a layer on top of existing LaTeX to add a more modern language on top of it and have it expand to LaTeX.

grae_QED 5y ago

Why redo something if it works? People are still using Fortran because it works well for certain applications. Just because its old doesn't mean its outdated. I could even argue that since Emacs hasn't been phased out (and still has a decent user base) that it does something that other text editors don't (or can't) do.

Jtsummers 5y ago
Fortran has seen major changes over the 64 years it's been in use. I feel that Emacs Lisp has had a much slower evolution (though admittedly I've only used it for about 20 years, I can't comment on how much it changed prior to that). In particular, the biggest change I'm aware of with Emacs Lisp (the language) is that we now have lexically scoped variables. The biggest change to its implementation has been a push towards native compilation (much improved performance, I like it). The language has, otherwise, largely remained the same. In some regard, this can be seen as a consequence of having a decent base language. Where Fortran's original version became increasingly indecent as time went on, Emacs Lisp seems to have held up better thanks to a stronger foundation. That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. In particular, the things that (my opinion) are still missing from the language are: 1. A good concurrency model. CSP, actors, I don't care but it needs to exist. Paired with the native execution we're getting now, this would greatly improve the real and perceived performance of the system. 2. A real module system. I'm not talking about a package manager, but moving things into module scopes a la Common Lisp packages. The prefixed names for functions and variables is a hazard. Even if you leave every symbol exported by default so that you don't lose visibility to module internals it would be better than now. It would also open up a lot of opportunities like the potential to run multiple versions of the same package side-by-side.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  > Fortran has seen major changes over the 64 years it's been in use. And yet most Fortran programmers reject/ignore those changes and stick to Fortran 77. When I was in academia, I couldn't find a single person writing Fortran code in anything newer than 77.

Koshkin 5y ago

> entirely different Well not entirely - it's modeless, and some usual keybindings work as well (Home/End, etc.). The built-in tutorial is brief and to the point, it will get one started pretty quickly.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

> Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face with "emacsism" at some time. Speaking from the experience of someone who has repeatedly bounced off Emacs for going on two decades now, you absolutely will. :) > When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things. This sort of "little thing" is, perhaps ironically, why I keep going back to BBEdit, at least for my technical writing work: it has a whole lot of these little "multipurpose tool" commands for text manipulation -- and, because they're in old-school Mac menus, they're discoverable. Thinking about it, that's one of the main reasons I bounce off both Emacs and Vim: it's not that I can't figure out the basics or even the, er, intermediates; it's that so much of the advanced stuff is relatively opaque. I am sure that there is probably a command in both Emacs and Vim that equates to, for instance, "find all lines matching this regex that occur more than once in this document, delete them, and copy them to a new document" (a task which sounds like I am making it up, but I swear I have had to do on multiple occasions in my current role). But I am also sure that it is not as easy as selecting "Text > Process Duplicate Lines..." and checking "Delete duplicate lines", "Leaving one" and "Match using pattern".

anyfoo 5y ago
Top of my head, I am pretty sure that I can do that with a "keyboard macro" involving list-matching-lines, and delete-matching-lines (that is literally what the commands are called). "Keyboard macro" by the way is a good and a bad name at once: It does not fully describe the vastly more powerful feature, as it is much more semantic than just repetition of keystrokes, but at its surface it looks like that and helps you get started. If anyone reading this hasn't used keyboard macros in emacs, try it out the next time you do something repetitive. It's amazing how it can simplify those tasks. "C-x (" to start defining one, "C-x )" to end it, "C-x e" to run it, which conveniently also ends definition if you want to use it right away. Of course you can do things like "M-5 C-x e" to run it 5 times. But I do get your point: Things are probably much less discoverable in emacs, unless you are relatively proficient in it already maybe. You need to switching into a "programmer" mind fairly quickly, while BBedit probably just lets you do powerful stuff through simple UI.

Cacti 5y ago

There’s at least two ways you could keep the Emacs ecosystem while refreshing some of the other pieces (to build a new editor): - You could reimplement the Emacs LISP VM and change what some of the native editor types refer to (buffer, point, window, etc.) so that they are interpreted in a “modern” UI setting. Maybe add some new opcodes while you’re at it to handle things like threading. - You could fork emacs, strip out the display engine, and completely rewrite it (it’s notoriously complicated and probably not worth dealing with 50 years of legacy hacks). Either of these options would give you a reasonable chance of skipping over the inherent complexity of the system without having to ditch all of the ecosystem packages), though they’re both still pretty involved. A big part of the reason for this is you’d inherently end up losing some OS compatibility in the process, and maintaining compatibility is probably the biggest problem with making changes or updates to emacs. If you’re willing to ditch that burden, your options expand dramatically.

stouset 5y ago

> And it's not just the "big" things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things. FWIW this is something most editors let you do trivially. With VS Code, select the lines you want to sort, press Cmd-Shift-P to bring up fuzzy command search, type "sort", press enter. Your selected lines are sorted. I think you might be surprised to find that all the major editors these days have most all of the little things you might want day-to-day covered. Of course the set of little things one cares about will differ from person to person and from the capabilities we've personally found the most use out of. It's hard to argue when that one thing you use every day isn't supported in some other editor, but the list of those is shrinking quicker than I suspect most people realize. There are a lot of people contributing to these tools and that plus not having to reinvent every wheel from scratch (and maintain that code on top) means that modern editors can cut into the lead time advantage of something like Emacs quicker than you might otherwise think.

neolog 5y ago
I agree with what you say about IDEs, but Emacs' "advantage" over other text editors is that it is only superficially a text editor. It's really more of an operating system.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  How does the old joke go -- "Now if Emacs only had a decent text editor, it would be a pretty decent OS."
  - mike97 5y ago
    Evil mode
viseztrance 5y ago
I think you would still be surprised at how many things emacs can still do better like undo in region or even simple macros that find use even during simple text edits. Though ultimately feature per feature, I don't think emacs looks all that great, but the difference is that you can actually use a lot of what it has to offer whereas it's difficult to do so in more modern editors (with fuzzy matching and all).

bsder 5y ago

As an emacs user, I would say that emacs really didn't have competition until VSCode and modern programming languages. For example, everybody was kind of 80-90% on syntax highlighting. Some editors and IDEs were a little better at one language than others, but most weren't that great and had all manner of weird edge cases. And, if you wrote a new language, good luck because you had to write a syntax highlighter for it in both emacs and vim to get traction. And then VSCode came along with the Language Server Protocol. Suddenly, you only needed to write a well-constrained plugin to get your syntax highlighting to about 80%. That was okay. But the modern languages learned from the failures of C and C++ and designed themselves to be parsed quickly and accurately. So, now your LSP syntax highlighting could go to roughly 99% accuracy on VSCode. And the highlighters were incremental. Suddenly there was a genuine advantage to using something other than emacs. And this is before we get to things like a debugger that works, etc. I've used all the IDE's, but VSCode is the first one to pry emacs from under my fingers. And for people who like to complain about VSCode and Electron bloat (a valid complaint), I'd like to point you to some of the old nicknames from the emacs vs vi religious wars (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping springs to mind ...) Bloat simply isn't an argument for most people.

anyfoo 5y ago
I agree that lsp is a necessity nowadays, and I was almost willing and close to give up emacs. And then emacs got proper lsp support (even in at least two forms, lip-mode and eglot), and now I'm happy.
lliamander 5y ago
Is there a definitive Emacs key-binding plug-in for VSCode? I've tried several in the past and none seemed quite right. IntelliJ, on the other hand, has great support for emacs key-bindings.
Frondo 5y ago
One other thing about VSCode being an Electron app -- it is by far the snappiest and most responsive and least bad memory-wise Electron app I've used. This isn't like Slack or Discord. It's like magic what they've built on Electron, one of these days I'll dig into the code to see how they did it.

impendia 5y ago

What is your criticism of LaTeX? I am a research mathematician, and I and essentially all my colleagues are LaTeX users. To me it feels like the correct tool for the job; the only widespread criticism I've heard is that it doesn't produce documents accessible to the blind. (And I've heard that work on this is in process.) I tend to be unsympathetic to criticism that a tool is "outdated"; if a tool is right for the job, why change it? But I want to keep an open mind -- what would you like to see in LaTeX's place?

andi999 5y ago
My pick with Latex is: Error messages look to me as complicated as C++ template errors, packages sometimes don't work well together, a lot of boilerplate is usually needed, and I feel somehow the Syntax needs too many keystrokes, like why not make {} for sub and superscript optional and everything until the next space character is sub or superscripted (and not only one character). Also writing {\rm text} feels wrong. Shdnd it be \rm {text} and maybe instead one shd be able to use $ in an equation block to get to a non italic font. While markdown is not advanced enough, I feel the making it easier for the user to use is the right modern approach, from which maybe a full system could be designed. Also figure placement should allow more fine-tuning (not sure how, and yes this is against the original spirit)
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Might the {\rm text} notation be LISP-inspired syntax? Replace the braces with parentheses and remove the slash and you get `(rm text)`
  - andi999 5y ago
    Somehow \mbox is the opposite though (see the examples) : https://www.tutorialspoint.com/tex_commands/mbox.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/tex_commands/mbox.htm Honestly I think I am missing all the points about brackets in Latex, if somebody knows the Syntax (and the 'why' pls tell me).
GiovanniP 5y ago