4 ms·
I believe the author of the article is criticizing Emacs for being a jack-of-all-trades that use neither the best approach for plain text (keep it simple, Syd)
by narag 4y ago
I believe the author of the article is criticizing Emacs for being a jack-of-all-trades that use neither the best approach for plain text (keep it simple, Syd) nor the best approach for code that I swear it's structured editing, after some time working in a system very similar to what some-mthfka describes in a sibling comment.
- scruple 4y agoIt's not Emacs fault that CSV is a garbage format. Anyone who has spent time dealing with CSV understands the hell that is lurking in it's shadows. I don't think the rants solution, though I did not finish reading it because I frankly got bored, is going to fix any of this, either.
- lanstin 4y agoThat isnt the problem he is describing tho, it is that you have no primitives in emacs that correspond to a rectangle of text entry boxes like the semantics of csv. You only have sequence of chars. The author wants people to rewrite emacs as a design system for arbitrary structures of data, with hooks for moving around the structure and editing the structure and i guess contents
- scruple 4y agoI see. I thought the rant was a mess, personally, so I stopped reading it. Theres some irony to be found in an unstructed rant about... structured editing. Anyway, if that's the point, then maybe tree-sitter can help us get there in the future? I still fail to see how this is an Emacs problem to solve. The vim/neovim model is also using what are essentially string dumps in the form of buffers. I'm sure every other editor is, too, but without going as far as actually having buffers, though I'm not invested enough into anything else to know what it's doing.