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I may be biased (as you point out), but I think that the flexibility Emacs’ architecture (and Lisp) provides is what makes Emacs such a great editor. It’s effec

I may be biased (as you point out), but I think that the flexibility Emacs’ architecture (and Lisp) provides is what makes Emacs such a great editor. It’s effectively a canvas for you to create your ideal text editor on. (Although not everyone wants to do that, I know.) Re: Electron, I personally feel like Electron would be the opposite of the solution. Rather, I’d be excited to see a new high-performance Emacs GUI with graphics acceleration, greater visual fidelity, etc. similar to Sublime Text. ST is the only editor I’d consider switching back to. It just feels so snappy and smooth to use. The only other thing I’d desire in a “NeoEmacs” would just be better performance defaults — many configs including my own have plenty of lines dedicated to tweaking obscure settings to squeeze more performance out. Ideally that wouldn’t be required.

slightwinder 5y ago
> I may be biased (as you point out), but I think that the flexibility Emacs’ architecture (and Lisp) provides is what makes Emacs such a great editor. It’s effectively a canvas for you to create your ideal text editor on. (Although not everyone wants to do that, I know.) Yes, emacs is a great tool, hardly possible to deny this. But this is not the bias I meant. I just question whether the benefit people get's from this flexibility, outweights the price most people pay for it. > Re: Electron, I personally feel like Electron would be the opposite of the solution. Rather, I’d be excited to see a new high-performance Emacs GUI with graphics acceleration, greater visual fidelity, This would indeed be cool to have. But is it realistic that someone will materialize this dream? The amount of work to make this is enourmous, and GNU emacs-project has not even enough manpower to fix their existing GUI-problems. If you wanna see a high-performance editor GUI, just take a look at Sublime Text. It's an insanly optimized and very good editor. But it also took them over a decade of regular work with a small company behind it. Not to mention that it's not as flexible as emacs. How long would you think an open source-project of free workers will need to build a modern emacs that will saisfy enough people? That's the point of electron: it's here, now. It takes away all the hard work of build the important and costly groundbase and will save you a decade of investment. And it will stay and improve in the future. This makes it the ugly but realistic solution where you take the tradeoff of a slower platform to get the chance to actual get something done on a high level.

slightwinder 5y ago

> I may be biased (as you point out), but I think that the flexibility Emacs’ architecture (and Lisp) provides is what makes Emacs such a great editor. It’s effectively a canvas for you to create your ideal text editor on. (Although not everyone wants to do that, I know.) Yes, emacs is a great tool, hardly possible to deny this. But this is not the bias I meant. I just question whether the benefit people get's from this flexibility, outweights the price most people pay for it. > Re: Electron, I personally feel like Electron would be the opposite of the solution. Rather, I’d be excited to see a new high-performance Emacs GUI with graphics acceleration, greater visual fidelity, This would indeed be cool to have. But is it realistic that someone will materialize this dream? The amount of work to make this is enourmous, and GNU emacs-project has not even enough manpower to fix their existing GUI-problems. If you wanna see a high-performance editor GUI, just take a look at Sublime Text. It's an insanly optimized and very good editor. But it also took them over a decade of regular work with a small company behind it. Not to mention that it's not as flexible as emacs. How long would you think an open source-project of free workers will need to build a modern emacs that will saisfy enough people? That's the point of electron: it's here, now. It takes away all the hard work of build the important and costly groundbase and will save you a decade of investment. And it will stay and improve in the future. This makes it the ugly but realistic solution where you take the tradeoff of a slower platform to get the chance to actual get something done on a high level.