5 ms·

I am loving all this emacs love lately (I am an emacsophile), but I do find all this attention it is getting suddenly a bit surprising. Is it just that "long li

I am loving all this emacs love lately (I am an emacsophile), but I do find all this attention it is getting suddenly a bit surprising. Is it just that "long lines, LSP, fast syntax hightlighting" is making new people interested, or is it just us neckbeards coming out of the woods? I mean, many of these things are just a package-install away right now. I seldom see vim put in the same lime-light, for instance. Or maybe I am just more attentive to the coverage now?

treeblah 4y ago
For me its been the questionable stewardship of vscode (https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276 https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276) driving me away from vscode and the Emacs from Scratch videos from the System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs. When I was looking for alternatives I stumbled on those videos and they blew me away. Also Emacs 28/29 has been way more welcoming and easy to get started with than when I first tried 8 or so years ago.
- ews 4y ago
  People like David from System Crafters and Prot are definitely doing a lot to bringing Emacs backs to the masses. They are a visible manifestation of the technical (and media) quality of part of the community. I do not think they get enough credit.
  - Apo1lom 4y ago
    I started using doom emacs cause of distrotube. Switched to vanilla emacs with the help of David
- bergheim 4y ago
  How people expect anything else from a huge corporation is mind-boggling to me. They open source something and people think they are being alturistic. Just like android. You start with open source, then move more and more things behind the corpwall. Emacs is free and is free for life. Also Davids channel is most excellent. There's a discord channel where people are very friendly and helpful as well.
  - xypage 4y ago
    I don't necessarily think that anyone was expecting anything else, it's just that VS Code is a great free tool, so even if you know it's probably going to go downhill over time it's hard to deny its effectiveness currently. I mean it's free, it comes with it's own compilers and toolchains, it's a lot easier to pick up than vim or emacs or even IntelliJ (that's just got a much more dense UI), so it's become the standard IDE for students. Then, once you've gotten your degree or your training or whatever, you'll probably want to stick with the tool you know.
  - asdajksah2123 4y ago
    It's kind of funny seeing how every few years we'll have a new hot editor, and all the people who convert to those editors will wonder why anyone would still use Emacs or Vim, only to find out a few years later why people continue to use these 30+ year old editors. In the meanwhile, both Vim and Emacs will incorporate the functionality that originally made the new editors popular, so the long time Emacs and Vim users lose almost nothing, did not have to go out of their way to use a new editor, and continued to benefit from the existing advantages of these editors.
- scombridae 4y ago
  System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    > I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself. Because it's a lot scarier to struggle alone. Plus as his videos progress and his knowledge progresses he frequently teaches you things that come up and practice a lot as a matter of course. It's kind of like when you start programming you have to build up your endurance for feeling like you're always in a dark room feeling around... and you convince yourself that it won't be like this one day. A decade or two later you realize you've become accustomed the darkness...
    - scombridae 4y ago
      you convince yourself it won't be like this one day In case you're considering a career in software, no, the feeling of groping around in the dark never disappears.
      - lanstin 4y ago
        But it's a feature, not a bug :) and occasionally one gets to imagine multi-dimensional diamonds and then build them.
      - FredPret 4y ago
        This helps my imposter syndrome no end
    - qorrect 4y ago
      > A decade or two later you realize you've become accustomed the darkness... Nice one.
    - teddyh 4y ago
- torben-friis 4y ago
  As a vscode user considering the move, how difficult would it be to get to the point of making emacs a daily driver? Can it be a pick it up as you go thing? Or would I have to spend a few evenings figuring out the basics and configuration? Is lisp knowledge required?
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    Depends on what you're gonna be doing with it. If you're mainly working with HTML, CSS, maybe some Bash scripts, you can just open it up, work your way through the (IMO excellent) tutorial and you're off to the races. That said, if Emacs gets its claws in you you may, like me, lose a fair few evenings and weekends just playing around with various packages and customization options because it's just so fun to tweak.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    I'd say give using it for weekend projects or a day or 1/2 day a week at work a try.
  - kamaal 4y ago
    >>As a vscode user considering the move, how difficult would it be to get to the point of making emacs a daily driver? Among the big list of features missing in Emacs as of now is remote development that way its done is vscode.
  - coutego 4y ago
    If you install Doom Emacs [1] after installing Emacs itself, I think it would be a couple of days. At least if you can live with the things Doom comes with. It's just a matter of following the instructions, uncommenting the relevant modules in .doom.d/init.el, syncing the changes and off you go. [1] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install
jpe90 4y ago
vim's stewardship is a lot more conservative but neovim has gotten a fair amount of press with recent releases
- alwillis 4y ago
  Yes—Neovim has gotten a lot of press the last couple of years on HN and elsewhere. Native LSP and Treesitter support for Neovim shipped nearly 18 months ago. Someone asked if the uptick in interest in the venerable (Neo)Vim and Emacs editors was due to the neckbeards awakening from their hibernation… something to that affect. What’s interesting about the Neovim community is how young most of the core contributors and those new-to-Vim are. Lots of vs code refugees.
  - jpe90 4y ago
    You get plenty of, er, new old contributors as well! As long as the projects are interesting and compelling, people of all ages will keep comin' :)
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Casual emacs user since 1991, and from my POV ... it seems like maybe a confluence of things (lsp, treesitter, etc.) is bringing some people back into the Emacs folds. For years emacs is what I used for C/C++ coding. Then CLion came on the scene, and it would be very hard for me to walk away that from and train my fingers back to meta super land. But it does seem like Emacs is getting competitive as an alternative to IDEs. My new job is all in Julia, and I suspect emacs will provide a better experience for that than a Jetbrains IDE. I'll give it a whirl.
- karthink 4y ago
  > My new job is all in Julia Where is this, if you don't mind my asking?
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    https://relational.ai/ https://relational.ai/
- heintje_ghulam 4y ago
  Hi! Happy to see someone interested in using Emacs for Julia work. I recommend the following packages for your setup: julia-vterm (https://melpa.org/#/julia-vterm https://melpa.org/#/julia-vterm) (https://github.com/shg/julia-vterm.el https://github.com/shg/julia-vterm.el) ob-julia-vterm (https://melpa.org/#/ob-julia-vterm https://melpa.org/#/ob-julia-vterm) (https://github.com/shg/ob-julia-vterm.el https://github.com/shg/ob-julia-vterm.el) FYI, julia-vterm depends on: julia-mode (https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/julia-mode.html https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/julia-mode.html) (https://github.com/JuliaEditorSupport/julia-emacs https://github.com/JuliaEditorSupport/julia-emacs) vterm (https://melpa.org/#/julia-vterm https://melpa.org/#/julia-vterm) (https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm)
- patrick451 4y ago
  Yes, I really think LSP has been a game changer. I started using emacs in undergrad and later gradschool mostly for the Latex support. Combined with helm-bibtex it's a killer feature set. I worked mostly with matlab in gradschool and mostly used the matlab editor. But when I needed python or c I used emacs, though it was always a slog to get to get IDE-like features working. LSP was really a game changer that let me get rid of CDET and ctags and elpy, and has let me continue using emacs now at work. If not for LSP, I almost certainly would be using clion or VScode. I will say though, the one place emacs doesn't cut it is for jupyter notebooks. VScode really is pretty killer there.
modernerd 4y ago
Emacs deserves the love! (I say this as a former Emacs user who switched to VS Code; I'm now frustrated enough with VSC to be reconsidering Emacs after the 29 announcements.) It's encouraging to see the big quality of life additions in 29, if only because one person's “just a package-install away” is another's “should be bundled by default”. And it's not just the headline features. There are many little things from the 29 notes[1] that solve minor niggles or replace chunks of my old “retired” config: - New command to change the font size globally. To increase the font size, type 'C-x C-M-+' or 'C-x C-M-='; to decrease it, type 'C-x C-M--'; to restore the font size, type 'C-x C-M-0'. - New command 'restart-emacs'. This is like 'save-buffers-kill-emacs', but instead of just killing the current Emacs process at the end, it starts a new Emacs process (using the same command line arguments as the running Emacs process). - New command 'rename-visited-file'. This command renames the file visited by the current buffer by moving it to a new location, and also makes the buffer visit this new file. [1]: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/NEWS.29 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/NEWS.2...
- anyfoo 4y ago
  > New command 'rename-visited-file'. This command renames the file visited by the current buffer by moving it to a new location, and also makes the buffer visit this new file. FINALLYYYYYYY!
  - medstrom 4y ago
    For those still on 28, `crux-rename-file-and-buffer` does the same thing (https://github.com/bbatsov/crux https://github.com/bbatsov/crux). I've been using it for half a decade at this point.
    - sph 4y ago
      crux is such a fantastic quality-of-life package.
- a1369209993 4y ago
  > because one person's "just a package-install away" is another's "should be bundled by default". FWIW, it's also another's "has transitive dependencies that try to brick my computer". Claims like "just a package-install away" would be significantly more convincing if they could fix that (ie, fix (remove) the ability of packages to have transitive dependencies). (This isn't anything specific to EMACS, to be clear; I've never seen a mainstream package system that bothered to enforce a meaningful limit on the depth of dependency graphs.)
avar 4y ago
This is probably borderline flamebait, but my impression as an outsider looking in is that Richard Stallman not being as involved as he once was in setting policy for FSF projects held it back quite a bit. Most notably, he had a long-time prohibition of any sort of FFI for both GCC and Emacs. Yes, the reversal of that policy was more than 12 years ago at this point[1], but note how the first Emacs release with an FFI came out in late 2016[2]. Arguably it's only in the last couple of years that we've seen the floodgates open on the potential of that. E.g. TreeSitter & the SQLite interface in this upcoming Emacs 29 release is only there because of FFI. I really respect what Stallman's done for the free software movement at large, but I think in this and a few other cases he was fighting yesterday's battles for around two decades too long. 1. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-03/msg00240.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-03/msg00... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs
tikhonj 4y ago
Seems like Emacs has always had a presence in the cultural background of online programming—most people might not use it, but they're aware of it and maybe vaguely curious—so it takes a relatively small push to generate discussion. The substantial new features in the last couple of releases is enough of a push, especially after a prolonged (perceived?) slowdown in changes.
cranium 4y ago
I switched from Vim to Spacemacs years ago and I was generally willing to roll up my sleeves to configure it in exchange for the additional power and freedom. But now, with the maturity of these pre-configured distributions and the nice things like LSP, you don't even need to fiddle much with elisp to have a solid environment working for you. I can now imagine introducing Emacs as a first text-editor / IDE to a novice (OK, maybe not with the Vim layer enabled).
aeonik 4y ago
For me, I just changed my note taking system to Logseq last summer which supports org formatted notes. I had heard about org mode, but it seemed like too much trouble to learn Emacs for note taking. Cue Distrotube on YouTube creating a series that makes it really easy to get started with Doom Emacs, and cue me wanting to learn Clojure combined with it being to hard to modify VSCode's Calva and Cursive... and I finally had enough arrows pointing toward Emacs. Best decision I've ever made. Emacs is slowly consuming all of my workflows. I finally feel like I have the editor of my dreams, it's just a little rough around the edges still. I hope to contribute to it once I get better.
fifanut 4y ago
The Emacs ecosystem has a larger contributor pool, and contributing is easier. A bunch of factors off the top of my head: * MELPA making contributing and reaching users easier. * The growth of Emacs packages on GitHub. * The ease of concurrent programming, e.g. emacs-aio. * The learning curve being reduced with spacemacs and Doom. * The continued development of Emacs upstream by its great contributors. * The increase in upstream development, with emphasis on bug tracker hygiene. See Lars blog posts. * LSP/Treesitter being developed, though this doesn't explain why Emacs seems to get more HN visibility than other editors. If I put my Emacs hat on, perhaps the promise of Emacs is being fulfilled: an ever growing set of interopable, extensible, introspective functionality being useful to a wider set of active users.
- klibertp 4y ago
  > * The ease of concurrent programming, e.g. emacs-aio. There's no such thing. emacs-aio is an extension bolted on top of generators and promises, which is how it was bolted on in Python too - so not bad by itself - but the problem is that nothing in Emacs core supports it. Async in Emacs is still, in 2022, a callback hell, and it's not even supported in newer APIs, like completion-at-point (which is awful - I understand that the origin of this is minibuffer completions and that it might be justified to do everything synchronously, but in-buffer completions should not freeze the editor!) Now we have threads, but seemingly nobody uses them - not surprising, given that last time I tried I got a segfault pretty quickly (fixed since then). Still, threads? With locks and semaphores? Didn't we all agree that these are not the greatest primitives for concurrency? What about channels or async streams? Not to mention, the threads normally should be preemptively scheduled, while currently they are "mostly cooperative" in Emacs. IOW you can still run code in a thread that will not return control to any other thread, as long as it doesn't do IO. Which would be fine with coroutines, but these are supposedly threads! So you pay in memory for threads but get coroutines, but with pretty fuzzy notion of what's atomic. It's a cosmic horror story. I'm trying to write a "guide to modern Elisp programming" - there were definitely very interesting and good developments in Emacs Lisp over the last 5 years, and generally the language, coupled with convenience libraries like cl, seq, s, f, and so on, became a very productive environment. EIEIO (and cl-structs) and multimethods (true multimethods, which landed at some point in cl-lib without much fanfare, though they really deserve more attention) are incredibly expressive if you don't mind a bit of syntactic overhead (clojure-style . and .. would be appreciated). cl-loop is incredibly versatile tool that lets you declaratively state almost any kind of iteration and reduction. There's object inspector, there's a package supporting many kinds of refactorings, and of course helpful for rendering information about commands, functions, and variables. It's overall great and productive environment... until you try doing async, unfortunately.
_ph_ 4y ago
I think there has been quite a few very fundamental enhancements to Emacs recently. The JIT which was added to 28 and now a pure GTk Emacs. This fixes some very long standing infrastructure issues and enables further exciting developments. A faster Elisp not only makes the editor feel snappier - it also opens up application development in Emacs. It becomes feasible and nice to develop much larger packages or even complete software on top of Emacs. The pure GTk Emacs cleans up the UI handling and I hope this also means for more widgets becoming available to Elisp. This would enable quite a lot of interesting additions.
globular-toast 4y ago
When I started using emacs 15 years ago, most people did not use a text editor as such. They used specialised IDEs, an email app, a text editor, a note taking app etc. I soon realised that using a single text editor for everything that was text was great, and that also, most things are probably text. Like almost everything i do with a computer is editing text. I think editors like VS Code and I guess Atom etc. to a lesser extend have made a lot more people aware of this and it's caused people to take a new look at emacs since it was doing the same thing decades before and arguably does it better.

treeblah 4y ago

For me its been the questionable stewardship of vscode (https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276 https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276) driving me away from vscode and the Emacs from Scratch videos from the System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs. When I was looking for alternatives I stumbled on those videos and they blew me away. Also Emacs 28/29 has been way more welcoming and easy to get started with than when I first tried 8 or so years ago.

ews 4y ago
People like David from System Crafters and Prot are definitely doing a lot to bringing Emacs backs to the masses. They are a visible manifestation of the technical (and media) quality of part of the community. I do not think they get enough credit.
- Apo1lom 4y ago
  I started using doom emacs cause of distrotube. Switched to vanilla emacs with the help of David
bergheim 4y ago
How people expect anything else from a huge corporation is mind-boggling to me. They open source something and people think they are being alturistic. Just like android. You start with open source, then move more and more things behind the corpwall. Emacs is free and is free for life. Also Davids channel is most excellent. There's a discord channel where people are very friendly and helpful as well.
- xypage 4y ago
  I don't necessarily think that anyone was expecting anything else, it's just that VS Code is a great free tool, so even if you know it's probably going to go downhill over time it's hard to deny its effectiveness currently. I mean it's free, it comes with it's own compilers and toolchains, it's a lot easier to pick up than vim or emacs or even IntelliJ (that's just got a much more dense UI), so it's become the standard IDE for students. Then, once you've gotten your degree or your training or whatever, you'll probably want to stick with the tool you know.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  It's kind of funny seeing how every few years we'll have a new hot editor, and all the people who convert to those editors will wonder why anyone would still use Emacs or Vim, only to find out a few years later why people continue to use these 30+ year old editors. In the meanwhile, both Vim and Emacs will incorporate the functionality that originally made the new editors popular, so the long time Emacs and Vim users lose almost nothing, did not have to go out of their way to use a new editor, and continued to benefit from the existing advantages of these editors.
scombridae 4y ago
System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself. Because it's a lot scarier to struggle alone. Plus as his videos progress and his knowledge progresses he frequently teaches you things that come up and practice a lot as a matter of course. It's kind of like when you start programming you have to build up your endurance for feeling like you're always in a dark room feeling around... and you convince yourself that it won't be like this one day. A decade or two later you realize you've become accustomed the darkness...
  - scombridae 4y ago
    you convince yourself it won't be like this one day In case you're considering a career in software, no, the feeling of groping around in the dark never disappears.
    - lanstin 4y ago
      But it's a feature, not a bug :) and occasionally one gets to imagine multi-dimensional diamonds and then build them.
    - FredPret 4y ago
      This helps my imposter syndrome no end
  - qorrect 4y ago
    > A decade or two later you realize you've become accustomed the darkness... Nice one.
  - teddyh 4y ago
torben-friis 4y ago
As a vscode user considering the move, how difficult would it be to get to the point of making emacs a daily driver? Can it be a pick it up as you go thing? Or would I have to spend a few evenings figuring out the basics and configuration? Is lisp knowledge required?
- tmtvl 4y ago
  Depends on what you're gonna be doing with it. If you're mainly working with HTML, CSS, maybe some Bash scripts, you can just open it up, work your way through the (IMO excellent) tutorial and you're off to the races. That said, if Emacs gets its claws in you you may, like me, lose a fair few evenings and weekends just playing around with various packages and customization options because it's just so fun to tweak.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  I'd say give using it for weekend projects or a day or 1/2 day a week at work a try.
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>As a vscode user considering the move, how difficult would it be to get to the point of making emacs a daily driver? Among the big list of features missing in Emacs as of now is remote development that way its done is vscode.
- coutego 4y ago
  If you install Doom Emacs [1] after installing Emacs itself, I think it would be a couple of days. At least if you can live with the things Doom comes with. It's just a matter of following the instructions, uncommenting the relevant modules in .doom.d/init.el, syncing the changes and off you go. [1] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install

jpe90 4y ago

vim's stewardship is a lot more conservative but neovim has gotten a fair amount of press with recent releases

alwillis 4y ago
Yes—Neovim has gotten a lot of press the last couple of years on HN and elsewhere. Native LSP and Treesitter support for Neovim shipped nearly 18 months ago. Someone asked if the uptick in interest in the venerable (Neo)Vim and Emacs editors was due to the neckbeards awakening from their hibernation… something to that affect. What’s interesting about the Neovim community is how young most of the core contributors and those new-to-Vim are. Lots of vs code refugees.
- jpe90 4y ago
  You get plenty of, er, new old contributors as well! As long as the projects are interesting and compelling, people of all ages will keep comin' :)

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Casual emacs user since 1991, and from my POV ... it seems like maybe a confluence of things (lsp, treesitter, etc.) is bringing some people back into the Emacs folds. For years emacs is what I used for C/C++ coding. Then CLion came on the scene, and it would be very hard for me to walk away that from and train my fingers back to meta super land. But it does seem like Emacs is getting competitive as an alternative to IDEs. My new job is all in Julia, and I suspect emacs will provide a better experience for that than a Jetbrains IDE. I'll give it a whirl.

karthink 4y ago
> My new job is all in Julia Where is this, if you don't mind my asking?
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  https://relational.ai/ https://relational.ai/
heintje_ghulam 4y ago
Hi! Happy to see someone interested in using Emacs for Julia work. I recommend the following packages for your setup: julia-vterm (https://melpa.org/#/julia-vterm https://melpa.org/#/julia-vterm) (https://github.com/shg/julia-vterm.el https://github.com/shg/julia-vterm.el) ob-julia-vterm (https://melpa.org/#/ob-julia-vterm https://melpa.org/#/ob-julia-vterm) (https://github.com/shg/ob-julia-vterm.el https://github.com/shg/ob-julia-vterm.el) FYI, julia-vterm depends on: julia-mode (https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/julia-mode.html https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/julia-mode.html) (https://github.com/JuliaEditorSupport/julia-emacs https://github.com/JuliaEditorSupport/julia-emacs) vterm (https://melpa.org/#/julia-vterm https://melpa.org/#/julia-vterm) (https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm)
patrick451 4y ago
Yes, I really think LSP has been a game changer. I started using emacs in undergrad and later gradschool mostly for the Latex support. Combined with helm-bibtex it's a killer feature set. I worked mostly with matlab in gradschool and mostly used the matlab editor. But when I needed python or c I used emacs, though it was always a slog to get to get IDE-like features working. LSP was really a game changer that let me get rid of CDET and ctags and elpy, and has let me continue using emacs now at work. If not for LSP, I almost certainly would be using clion or VScode. I will say though, the one place emacs doesn't cut it is for jupyter notebooks. VScode really is pretty killer there.

modernerd 4y ago

Emacs deserves the love! (I say this as a former Emacs user who switched to VS Code; I'm now frustrated enough with VSC to be reconsidering Emacs after the 29 announcements.) It's encouraging to see the big quality of life additions in 29, if only because one person's “just a package-install away” is another's “should be bundled by default”. And it's not just the headline features. There are many little things from the 29 notes[1] that solve minor niggles or replace chunks of my old “retired” config: - New command to change the font size globally. To increase the font size, type 'C-x C-M-+' or 'C-x C-M-='; to decrease it, type 'C-x C-M--'; to restore the font size, type 'C-x C-M-0'. - New command 'restart-emacs'. This is like 'save-buffers-kill-emacs', but instead of just killing the current Emacs process at the end, it starts a new Emacs process (using the same command line arguments as the running Emacs process). - New command 'rename-visited-file'. This command renames the file visited by the current buffer by moving it to a new location, and also makes the buffer visit this new file. [1]: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/NEWS.29 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/NEWS.2...

anyfoo 4y ago
> New command 'rename-visited-file'. This command renames the file visited by the current buffer by moving it to a new location, and also makes the buffer visit this new file. FINALLYYYYYYY!
- medstrom 4y ago
  For those still on 28, `crux-rename-file-and-buffer` does the same thing (https://github.com/bbatsov/crux https://github.com/bbatsov/crux). I've been using it for half a decade at this point.
  - sph 4y ago
    crux is such a fantastic quality-of-life package.
a1369209993 4y ago
> because one person's "just a package-install away" is another's "should be bundled by default". FWIW, it's also another's "has transitive dependencies that try to brick my computer". Claims like "just a package-install away" would be significantly more convincing if they could fix that (ie, fix (remove) the ability of packages to have transitive dependencies). (This isn't anything specific to EMACS, to be clear; I've never seen a mainstream package system that bothered to enforce a meaningful limit on the depth of dependency graphs.)

avar 4y ago

This is probably borderline flamebait, but my impression as an outsider looking in is that Richard Stallman not being as involved as he once was in setting policy for FSF projects held it back quite a bit. Most notably, he had a long-time prohibition of any sort of FFI for both GCC and Emacs. Yes, the reversal of that policy was more than 12 years ago at this point[1], but note how the first Emacs release with an FFI came out in late 2016[2]. Arguably it's only in the last couple of years that we've seen the floodgates open on the potential of that. E.g. TreeSitter & the SQLite interface in this upcoming Emacs 29 release is only there because of FFI. I really respect what Stallman's done for the free software movement at large, but I think in this and a few other cases he was fighting yesterday's battles for around two decades too long. 1. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-03/msg00240.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-03/msg00... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs

tikhonj 4y ago

Seems like Emacs has always had a presence in the cultural background of online programming—most people might not use it, but they're aware of it and maybe vaguely curious—so it takes a relatively small push to generate discussion. The substantial new features in the last couple of releases is enough of a push, especially after a prolonged (perceived?) slowdown in changes.

cranium 4y ago

I switched from Vim to Spacemacs years ago and I was generally willing to roll up my sleeves to configure it in exchange for the additional power and freedom. But now, with the maturity of these pre-configured distributions and the nice things like LSP, you don't even need to fiddle much with elisp to have a solid environment working for you. I can now imagine introducing Emacs as a first text-editor / IDE to a novice (OK, maybe not with the Vim layer enabled).

aeonik 4y ago

For me, I just changed my note taking system to Logseq last summer which supports org formatted notes. I had heard about org mode, but it seemed like too much trouble to learn Emacs for note taking. Cue Distrotube on YouTube creating a series that makes it really easy to get started with Doom Emacs, and cue me wanting to learn Clojure combined with it being to hard to modify VSCode's Calva and Cursive... and I finally had enough arrows pointing toward Emacs. Best decision I've ever made. Emacs is slowly consuming all of my workflows. I finally feel like I have the editor of my dreams, it's just a little rough around the edges still. I hope to contribute to it once I get better.

fifanut 4y ago

The Emacs ecosystem has a larger contributor pool, and contributing is easier. A bunch of factors off the top of my head: * MELPA making contributing and reaching users easier. * The growth of Emacs packages on GitHub. * The ease of concurrent programming, e.g. emacs-aio. * The learning curve being reduced with spacemacs and Doom. * The continued development of Emacs upstream by its great contributors. * The increase in upstream development, with emphasis on bug tracker hygiene. See Lars blog posts. * LSP/Treesitter being developed, though this doesn't explain why Emacs seems to get more HN visibility than other editors. If I put my Emacs hat on, perhaps the promise of Emacs is being fulfilled: an ever growing set of interopable, extensible, introspective functionality being useful to a wider set of active users.

klibertp 4y ago
> * The ease of concurrent programming, e.g. emacs-aio. There's no such thing. emacs-aio is an extension bolted on top of generators and promises, which is how it was bolted on in Python too - so not bad by itself - but the problem is that nothing in Emacs core supports it. Async in Emacs is still, in 2022, a callback hell, and it's not even supported in newer APIs, like completion-at-point (which is awful - I understand that the origin of this is minibuffer completions and that it might be justified to do everything synchronously, but in-buffer completions should not freeze the editor!) Now we have threads, but seemingly nobody uses them - not surprising, given that last time I tried I got a segfault pretty quickly (fixed since then). Still, threads? With locks and semaphores? Didn't we all agree that these are not the greatest primitives for concurrency? What about channels or async streams? Not to mention, the threads normally should be preemptively scheduled, while currently they are "mostly cooperative" in Emacs. IOW you can still run code in a thread that will not return control to any other thread, as long as it doesn't do IO. Which would be fine with coroutines, but these are supposedly threads! So you pay in memory for threads but get coroutines, but with pretty fuzzy notion of what's atomic. It's a cosmic horror story. I'm trying to write a "guide to modern Elisp programming" - there were definitely very interesting and good developments in Emacs Lisp over the last 5 years, and generally the language, coupled with convenience libraries like cl, seq, s, f, and so on, became a very productive environment. EIEIO (and cl-structs) and multimethods (true multimethods, which landed at some point in cl-lib without much fanfare, though they really deserve more attention) are incredibly expressive if you don't mind a bit of syntactic overhead (clojure-style . and .. would be appreciated). cl-loop is incredibly versatile tool that lets you declaratively state almost any kind of iteration and reduction. There's object inspector, there's a package supporting many kinds of refactorings, and of course helpful for rendering information about commands, functions, and variables. It's overall great and productive environment... until you try doing async, unfortunately.

_ph_ 4y ago

I think there has been quite a few very fundamental enhancements to Emacs recently. The JIT which was added to 28 and now a pure GTk Emacs. This fixes some very long standing infrastructure issues and enables further exciting developments. A faster Elisp not only makes the editor feel snappier - it also opens up application development in Emacs. It becomes feasible and nice to develop much larger packages or even complete software on top of Emacs. The pure GTk Emacs cleans up the UI handling and I hope this also means for more widgets becoming available to Elisp. This would enable quite a lot of interesting additions.

globular-toast 4y ago

When I started using emacs 15 years ago, most people did not use a text editor as such. They used specialised IDEs, an email app, a text editor, a note taking app etc. I soon realised that using a single text editor for everything that was text was great, and that also, most things are probably text. Like almost everything i do with a computer is editing text. I think editors like VS Code and I guess Atom etc. to a lesser extend have made a lot more people aware of this and it's caused people to take a new look at emacs since it was doing the same thing decades before and arguably does it better.