7 ms·

If you could change one thing about Emacs what would it be?

33 points by Decabytes 5y ago

bserge 5y ago
The ability to read comments without being told to install the app or fuck off to r/popular.
- josefx 5y ago
  Do you have the same problem on old.reddit.com?
  - znpy 5y ago
    That's exactly where that problem happens the most. Reddit has been pushing the and the new version so aggressively lately that it's really upsetting.
- umanwizard 5y ago
  https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/padv22/if_you_could_change_one_thing_about_emacs_what/ https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/padv22/if_you_could_...
- shildup 5y ago
  https://teddit.net/about https://teddit.net/about https://teddit.net/r/emacs/comments/padv22/if_you_could_change_one_thing_about_emacs_what/ https://teddit.net/r/emacs/comments/padv22/if_you_could_chan...
Juliate 5y ago
The users? /s
- cafard 5y ago
  Ouch.
smitty1e 5y ago
(namespacing-so-the-functions-and-variables-dont-need-these-sorts-of-prefixes)
- jolmg 5y ago
  That would complicate hot-reloading though. Currently you can just modify a function and reload it by re-executing its defun. If you implement smarter namespacing, reloading it would require knowing what namespace it belongs to. You'd have to do the modification in the original file instead of anywhere (like the *stratch* buffer), or put the modified definition in some kind of construct that specifies the namespace it belongs to. Also, finding the documentation and definition of a given symbol under the cursor would also get more complicated. Having everything in one global namespace has its perks.
  - pritambaral 5y ago
    Common Lisp has both namespacing (even package-local-nicknames!) and hot-reloading by re-executing its defun. Emacs Lisp isn't too far off Common Lisp, and whatever allows CL to have this (mostly the reader, and of course, the package system) is also easy to support in Emacs Lisp.
ghostganz 5y ago
RMS?
blackbear_ 5y ago
VIM bindings everywhere, not only for text editing but for all core editor functions.
- GaveUp 5y ago
  I’d be happy if the existing bindings just behaved closer to how they do in vim. As with all vim binding plugins there’s always slight differences that drive muscle memory mad.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    I'm not a hardcore vimmer, but I use evil-mode religiously and use vim for my sysadmin work on remote servers. I've never noticed a difference between evil-mode's behavior and vim's, while I usually get extremely frustrated with Vim plugins for IDEs. Can you tell me what differences you've run into between vim and evil-mode?
nahuel0x 5y ago
Unify all font-locking and textual manipulation on treesitter. See neovim.
coldacid 5y ago
Adding a decent text editor would be nice... :D
- Hublium 5y ago
  Evil mode?
  - MonkeyClub 5y ago
    Déjà vu -- I think there was a recent Emacs HN post, with the exact same couplet.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097905
billfruit 5y ago
Have a dual pane file manager built in. Dired seems design for single pane operation. Ensure that etags is compulsorily bundled with emacs, I am remembering that in a few distro's etags missing despite installing the emacs package. Change the default scrolling mode.
- hibbelig 5y ago
  > _Ensure that etags is compulsorily bundled with emacs, I am remembering that in a few distro's etags missing despite installing the emacs package._ My understanding is that Exuberant Ctags provides an etags binary, as well, and you're likely to want to use it as it supports more languages. Maybe Debian (and its derivatives) can make use of the "alternatives" system to redirect etags to the "best" installed version. Or the one the user prefers :-)
- hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
  > Have a dual pane file manager built in. Dired seems design for single pane operation. You _can_ use dired like midnight commander. See the tutorial http://emacsrocks.com/e16.html http://emacsrocks.com/e16.html
psychstudio 5y ago
Preemptive multithreading.
newdude116 5y ago
Endow it with a decent editor.
Pet_Ant 5y ago
Have it be in a standard Scheme or CommonLisp instead of EmacsLisp so that it actually benefited those communities with reuse.
- Qem 5y ago
  Guile Scheme would be great for this purpose.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Gerbil Scheme is quite nice too.
  - aijony 5y ago
    Better idea, use Guile's built in Emacs lisp engine: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Emacs-Lisp.html#Emacs-Lisp https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Emacs-Li...
    - Pet_Ant 5y ago
      No because then it is still using EmacsLisp which is dynamically scoped. The idea is really to move it over to a traditional lexically scoped Scheme.
- guenthert 5y ago
  Are we talking about GNU Emacs then? There seem to be a few Emacs or Emacs-like editors in various state of completion / deterioration implemented in CL. Hemlock comes to mind and Climacs.
- guenthert 5y ago
  For as much as I like the grand dame of programming languages, I don't think it would be the best substitute for Emacs Lisp. CL is a fairly large language and takes considerably time to learn. An unnecessary burden for someone just wanting to customizes his/her editor. Further, an Emacs in CL obviously requires a CL interpreter/compiler. I'm afraid this limits portability as e.g. SBCL, arguably the best open source CL compiler, supports only a handful of environments. CLISP was pretty portable, but the project seems dead. I'm sure, if today (or twenty years ago) GNU Emacs would be written, Guile might be chosen as implementation / extension language.
newlikeice 5y ago
I would add more obfuscation and slowly make it impossible to learn. Have the emacs veterans talk about the old days slowly making it seem like all you had to do was install emacs and you were so productive that emacs wrote the programs for you! Then eventually the word emacs turns into an adjective describing the perfect program. To the point that instead of "Turing complete" we say "Emacs complete" then years in the future someone will ask "WTF is emacs?" and they will simply say it's god.
ordu 5y ago
All the UI code. It is a legacy created for text-terminal. It works in a graphic environments due to hacks, but it is sad. If emacs was built on top of a decent ui-toolkit, with nice widgets, like checkboxes, buttons, menus, scrollbars (i do not know how to use emacs' scrollbars). With panes (windows in emacs' terms) resizeable with mouse (one more pain point: I need to resize them maybe once per month, and I never quite remember how it may be done). UI of emacs is bad, it is terrible. It missed completely 30 last years of UI progress.
- jorams 5y ago
  What platform do you use it on? My default install has a GTK menu bar, tool bar and scrollbars, as well as windows that can be resized by mouse.
  - jolmg 5y ago
    They might want the customize-* stuff to use "prettier" buttons and checkboxes.
- tarboreus 5y ago
  This is why I like it. If it had all that junk, people would use it. The whole point is that everything in it is text, so you can treat everything the same. If you want a checkbox, you get some text. Widget? Some text. You have literally every other tool if you want dialog boxes flying in your face.
  - jolmg 5y ago
    It also has the perk that you can still use everything from a terminal, which is still useful for when you want to use it from a phone (i.e. via termux).
- iib 5y ago
  I think there is some work done with the pure gtk branch. Some context can be found here [1]. [1] https://deathwish.info/2020/08/01/pgtk-nativecomp/ https://deathwish.info/2020/08/01/pgtk-nativecomp/
didibus 5y ago
I'd improve its ability to load and edit large files.
bizony3002 5y ago
Choose: a) voice assist b) computational methods ui c) visualisation
- iib 5y ago
  This is actually an amazing talk[1] about doing voice coding in Emacs, over 8 years ago. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
professoretc 5y ago
Multi-cursor/multi-selection as a built-in thing. I'm aware that you can kind of hack this together, but all of Emacs assumes that there will be one selection and one cursor, so hacks don't really integrate nicely with the rest of Emacs.

33 points by Decabytes 5y ago

bserge 5y ago

The ability to read comments without being told to install the app or fuck off to r/popular.

josefx 5y ago
Do you have the same problem on old.reddit.com?
- znpy 5y ago
  That's exactly where that problem happens the most. Reddit has been pushing the and the new version so aggressively lately that it's really upsetting.
umanwizard 5y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/padv22/if_you_could_change_one_thing_about_emacs_what/ https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/padv22/if_you_could_...
shildup 5y ago
https://teddit.net/about https://teddit.net/about https://teddit.net/r/emacs/comments/padv22/if_you_could_change_one_thing_about_emacs_what/ https://teddit.net/r/emacs/comments/padv22/if_you_could_chan...

Juliate 5y ago

The users? /s

cafard 5y ago
Ouch.

smitty1e 5y ago

(namespacing-so-the-functions-and-variables-dont-need-these-sorts-of-prefixes)

jolmg 5y ago
That would complicate hot-reloading though. Currently you can just modify a function and reload it by re-executing its defun. If you implement smarter namespacing, reloading it would require knowing what namespace it belongs to. You'd have to do the modification in the original file instead of anywhere (like the *stratch* buffer), or put the modified definition in some kind of construct that specifies the namespace it belongs to. Also, finding the documentation and definition of a given symbol under the cursor would also get more complicated. Having everything in one global namespace has its perks.
- pritambaral 5y ago
  Common Lisp has both namespacing (even package-local-nicknames!) and hot-reloading by re-executing its defun. Emacs Lisp isn't too far off Common Lisp, and whatever allows CL to have this (mostly the reader, and of course, the package system) is also easy to support in Emacs Lisp.

ghostganz 5y ago

RMS?

blackbear_ 5y ago

VIM bindings everywhere, not only for text editing but for all core editor functions.

GaveUp 5y ago
I’d be happy if the existing bindings just behaved closer to how they do in vim. As with all vim binding plugins there’s always slight differences that drive muscle memory mad.
- NateEag 5y ago
  I'm not a hardcore vimmer, but I use evil-mode religiously and use vim for my sysadmin work on remote servers. I've never noticed a difference between evil-mode's behavior and vim's, while I usually get extremely frustrated with Vim plugins for IDEs. Can you tell me what differences you've run into between vim and evil-mode?

nahuel0x 5y ago

Unify all font-locking and textual manipulation on treesitter. See neovim.

coldacid 5y ago

Adding a decent text editor would be nice... :D

Hublium 5y ago
Evil mode?
- MonkeyClub 5y ago
  Déjà vu -- I think there was a recent Emacs HN post, with the exact same couplet.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097905

billfruit 5y ago

Have a dual pane file manager built in. Dired seems design for single pane operation. Ensure that etags is compulsorily bundled with emacs, I am remembering that in a few distro's etags missing despite installing the emacs package. Change the default scrolling mode.

hibbelig 5y ago
> _Ensure that etags is compulsorily bundled with emacs, I am remembering that in a few distro's etags missing despite installing the emacs package._ My understanding is that Exuberant Ctags provides an etags binary, as well, and you're likely to want to use it as it supports more languages. Maybe Debian (and its derivatives) can make use of the "alternatives" system to redirect etags to the "best" installed version. Or the one the user prefers :-)
hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
> Have a dual pane file manager built in. Dired seems design for single pane operation. You _can_ use dired like midnight commander. See the tutorial http://emacsrocks.com/e16.html http://emacsrocks.com/e16.html

psychstudio 5y ago

Preemptive multithreading.

newdude116 5y ago

Endow it with a decent editor.

Pet_Ant 5y ago

Have it be in a standard Scheme or CommonLisp instead of EmacsLisp so that it actually benefited those communities with reuse.

Qem 5y ago
Guile Scheme would be great for this purpose.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Gerbil Scheme is quite nice too.
- aijony 5y ago
  Better idea, use Guile's built in Emacs lisp engine: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Emacs-Lisp.html#Emacs-Lisp https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Emacs-Li...
  - Pet_Ant 5y ago
    No because then it is still using EmacsLisp which is dynamically scoped. The idea is really to move it over to a traditional lexically scoped Scheme.
guenthert 5y ago
Are we talking about GNU Emacs then? There seem to be a few Emacs or Emacs-like editors in various state of completion / deterioration implemented in CL. Hemlock comes to mind and Climacs.
guenthert 5y ago
For as much as I like the grand dame of programming languages, I don't think it would be the best substitute for Emacs Lisp. CL is a fairly large language and takes considerably time to learn. An unnecessary burden for someone just wanting to customizes his/her editor. Further, an Emacs in CL obviously requires a CL interpreter/compiler. I'm afraid this limits portability as e.g. SBCL, arguably the best open source CL compiler, supports only a handful of environments. CLISP was pretty portable, but the project seems dead. I'm sure, if today (or twenty years ago) GNU Emacs would be written, Guile might be chosen as implementation / extension language.

newlikeice 5y ago

I would add more obfuscation and slowly make it impossible to learn. Have the emacs veterans talk about the old days slowly making it seem like all you had to do was install emacs and you were so productive that emacs wrote the programs for you! Then eventually the word emacs turns into an adjective describing the perfect program. To the point that instead of "Turing complete" we say "Emacs complete" then years in the future someone will ask "WTF is emacs?" and they will simply say it's god.

ordu 5y ago

All the UI code. It is a legacy created for text-terminal. It works in a graphic environments due to hacks, but it is sad. If emacs was built on top of a decent ui-toolkit, with nice widgets, like checkboxes, buttons, menus, scrollbars (i do not know how to use emacs' scrollbars). With panes (windows in emacs' terms) resizeable with mouse (one more pain point: I need to resize them maybe once per month, and I never quite remember how it may be done). UI of emacs is bad, it is terrible. It missed completely 30 last years of UI progress.

jorams 5y ago
What platform do you use it on? My default install has a GTK menu bar, tool bar and scrollbars, as well as windows that can be resized by mouse.
- jolmg 5y ago
  They might want the customize-* stuff to use "prettier" buttons and checkboxes.
tarboreus 5y ago
This is why I like it. If it had all that junk, people would use it. The whole point is that everything in it is text, so you can treat everything the same. If you want a checkbox, you get some text. Widget? Some text. You have literally every other tool if you want dialog boxes flying in your face.
- jolmg 5y ago
  It also has the perk that you can still use everything from a terminal, which is still useful for when you want to use it from a phone (i.e. via termux).
iib 5y ago
I think there is some work done with the pure gtk branch. Some context can be found here [1]. [1] https://deathwish.info/2020/08/01/pgtk-nativecomp/ https://deathwish.info/2020/08/01/pgtk-nativecomp/

didibus 5y ago

I'd improve its ability to load and edit large files.

bizony3002 5y ago

Choose: a) voice assist b) computational methods ui c) visualisation

iib 5y ago
This is actually an amazing talk[1] about doing voice coding in Emacs, over 8 years ago. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

professoretc 5y ago

Multi-cursor/multi-selection as a built-in thing. I'm aware that you can kind of hack this together, but all of Emacs assumes that there will be one selection and one cursor, so hacks don't really integrate nicely with the rest of Emacs.