29 ms·

I wish I had the enthusiasm, grit and dare I say "sisu" that lisp developers possess. I worked with a guy - very skilled Clojure developer - who was an absolute

I wish I had the enthusiasm, grit and dare I say "sisu" that lisp developers possess. I worked with a guy - very skilled Clojure developer - who was an absolute wizard in Emacs. If a car company sold a vehicle that was powered by emacs, he would have bought it. He will probably construct his own casket out of elisp to be buried in.

gumby 3y ago
Emacs was not originally written in Lisp and is a great programmer's (and general) editor even if you never touch or think of Lisp. You can even write (and save and edit) keyboard macros knowing no programming at all.
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  Didn't emacs give Stallman RSI? No thank you, I'll still with vim.
  - mksybr 3y ago
    Scary stuff! http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.htm...
    - neilv 3y ago
      But it's not necessarily an Emacs thing... When RMS got it, the Internet (this was pre-Web) started chattering about RSI (back when the Internet was relatively high signal, and altruistic). I'm pretty sure that early information about typing ergonomics, received when I was still a teen, is why today I can type all day and night without problem. Coincidentally, around the time of Internet buzzing about it, almost my entire development team got hand pain, and some of them had to stop typing altogether. Only one of several of them used Emacs; the rest were Vi or Sun's simple mouse-based notepad.exe-like editor. (We all used Sun Type-4 keyboards and the optical mice, in our cubicle system with the lowered keyboard shelves, and decent chairs with lots of adjustability. I think something in there was more likely the cause.) That said, Emacs definitely was one of the culprits for ergonomics problems, in that it encouraged multiple-simultaneous-keypresses (e.g., Ctrl-something, Alt-something), which is one of many possible contributors to typing injuries. But at the same time, Emacs back then could dramatically reduce the amount of keystrokes and mousing you had to do, compared to the alternatives, so IMHO the situation wasn't really "Emacs will blow out your hands". It's maybe also worth noting that RMS and JWZ (and perhaps others mentioned?) were prolific super-programmers, so the sheer amount of typing is probably also a contributor. JWZ was also eventually at Netscape, where they were popularizing the whole dotcom gold rush sleep-under-your-desk culture. Which will secretly eat up your health, when you think you're being strong and powering through tons of grunt work (losing, when you think you're winning). Poor ergonomics, stress, sleep deprivation, or trying to write an entire software ecosystem mostly by yourself, can cut your typing career short, and worse. Try not to do that, and not to let your colleagues inadvertently do that.
      - zer8k 3y ago
        > That said, Emacs definitely was one of the culprits for ergonomics problems, in that it encouraged multiple-simultaneous-keypresses (e.g., Ctrl-something, Alt-something), which is one of many possible contributors to typing injuries. But at the same time, Emacs back then could dramatically reduce the amount of keystrokes and mousing you had to do, compared to the alternatives, so IMHO the situation wasn't really "Emacs will blow out your hands". Having used emacs for a number of years and now switched off it for greener pastures I think it comes down to the key chords. Even if you start with the best intentions you will inevitably end up with hair-brained chord schemes for what you need to do. Emacs is a fantastic editor, vim is vastly more ergonomic. Maybe I should try DOOM emacs or evil mode raw and see how it holds up. I am not a huge fan of having to switch to something like vscodium especially given I spent a long time configuring Emacs perfectly. But my hands are thanking me. Editor technology has advanced significantly. Aside from ergonomics the underlying architecture of emacs seems very resistant to change. This is somewhat frustrating especially w.r.t. certain LSPs and other niceties modern editing has afforded us. Unfortunately there's nothing like it if you're a fan of LISP-likes.
        nequo 3y ago
        > Maybe I should try DOOM emacs or evil mode raw and see how it holds up. Evil is definitely well worth it. > This is somewhat frustrating especially w.r.t. certain LSPs and other niceties modern editing has afforded us. Which LSP servers don't work with Emacs?
  - nequo 3y ago
    If you already know Vim, you should probably not use Emacs without Evil: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil It gives you comprehensive Vim bindings so what you need to learn to be comfortable in Emacs is very little. As a bonus, it also keeps your RSI risk unchanged.
  - wry_discontent 3y ago
    Totally silly nonsense. Just don't press buttons in a way that hurts your hands. Literally exactly how you use the computer now.
  - lavp 3y ago
    You can use evil-mode and you’ll have the Vim key bindings in emacs. I use this and it’s great. Also, an ergonomic keyboard can help with pain; I had pains on my right wrist and using the Kinesis Advantage has helped me tremendously.
dmvdoug 3y ago
“And death i think is no parenthesis” (e.e. cummings)
krylon 3y ago
zile is an attempt to create an equivalent to GNU Emacs using Lua instead of Lisp. There was an attempt to merge the GNU Guile engine into emacs to replace the elisp bytecode VM; Guile would have supported, in addition to elisp, Scheme and Javascript. But last I heard the project had stagnated or fizzled out entirely. One might argue that VS Code is using Javascript in a similar manner to Emacs using elisp, but ... it just doesn't feel the same to me. I have very little experience with VS Code, though, so I might be mistaken.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  my problem with emacs is not lisp, lol. lisp is great.
- sph 3y ago
  Removing Lisp from Emacs means completely missing the point and not understanding that's the thing that makes Emacs work. zile is not Emacs in Lua, it's just a programmable text editor. It's not the same thing.
  - krylon 3y ago
    While I do love me some Lisp, I don't think it's a categorical requirement to get an emacs-like experience. Lua is a very nice language, very dynamic, built around a few powerful primitives, that it should be possible to get something equally useful eventually. It just would be an insane amount of work. GNU Emacs has been going for nearly 40 years now, with lots and lots of contributors over time. Simply building something that is equivalent in terms of features would take forever; and I think the zile people have much less brainshare than Emacs. So I think it should be possible theoretically, but in practice, it's a lost cause. Guile Emacs would have been cool because it could have kept on using the tons and tons of elisp code that exist now, but apparently the pressure to get that to work was not large enough to warrant the effort. And with emacs now supporting native compilation of elisp, it's likely to stay the gold standard for the foreseeable future.

gumby 3y ago

Emacs was not originally written in Lisp and is a great programmer's (and general) editor even if you never touch or think of Lisp. You can even write (and save and edit) keyboard macros knowing no programming at all.

sdfghswe 3y ago
Didn't emacs give Stallman RSI? No thank you, I'll still with vim.
- mksybr 3y ago
  Scary stuff! http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.html http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.htm...
  - neilv 3y ago
    But it's not necessarily an Emacs thing... When RMS got it, the Internet (this was pre-Web) started chattering about RSI (back when the Internet was relatively high signal, and altruistic). I'm pretty sure that early information about typing ergonomics, received when I was still a teen, is why today I can type all day and night without problem. Coincidentally, around the time of Internet buzzing about it, almost my entire development team got hand pain, and some of them had to stop typing altogether. Only one of several of them used Emacs; the rest were Vi or Sun's simple mouse-based notepad.exe-like editor. (We all used Sun Type-4 keyboards and the optical mice, in our cubicle system with the lowered keyboard shelves, and decent chairs with lots of adjustability. I think something in there was more likely the cause.) That said, Emacs definitely was one of the culprits for ergonomics problems, in that it encouraged multiple-simultaneous-keypresses (e.g., Ctrl-something, Alt-something), which is one of many possible contributors to typing injuries. But at the same time, Emacs back then could dramatically reduce the amount of keystrokes and mousing you had to do, compared to the alternatives, so IMHO the situation wasn't really "Emacs will blow out your hands". It's maybe also worth noting that RMS and JWZ (and perhaps others mentioned?) were prolific super-programmers, so the sheer amount of typing is probably also a contributor. JWZ was also eventually at Netscape, where they were popularizing the whole dotcom gold rush sleep-under-your-desk culture. Which will secretly eat up your health, when you think you're being strong and powering through tons of grunt work (losing, when you think you're winning). Poor ergonomics, stress, sleep deprivation, or trying to write an entire software ecosystem mostly by yourself, can cut your typing career short, and worse. Try not to do that, and not to let your colleagues inadvertently do that.
    - zer8k 3y ago
      > That said, Emacs definitely was one of the culprits for ergonomics problems, in that it encouraged multiple-simultaneous-keypresses (e.g., Ctrl-something, Alt-something), which is one of many possible contributors to typing injuries. But at the same time, Emacs back then could dramatically reduce the amount of keystrokes and mousing you had to do, compared to the alternatives, so IMHO the situation wasn't really "Emacs will blow out your hands". Having used emacs for a number of years and now switched off it for greener pastures I think it comes down to the key chords. Even if you start with the best intentions you will inevitably end up with hair-brained chord schemes for what you need to do. Emacs is a fantastic editor, vim is vastly more ergonomic. Maybe I should try DOOM emacs or evil mode raw and see how it holds up. I am not a huge fan of having to switch to something like vscodium especially given I spent a long time configuring Emacs perfectly. But my hands are thanking me. Editor technology has advanced significantly. Aside from ergonomics the underlying architecture of emacs seems very resistant to change. This is somewhat frustrating especially w.r.t. certain LSPs and other niceties modern editing has afforded us. Unfortunately there's nothing like it if you're a fan of LISP-likes.
      - nequo 3y ago
        > Maybe I should try DOOM emacs or evil mode raw and see how it holds up. Evil is definitely well worth it. > This is somewhat frustrating especially w.r.t. certain LSPs and other niceties modern editing has afforded us. Which LSP servers don't work with Emacs?
- nequo 3y ago
  If you already know Vim, you should probably not use Emacs without Evil: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil It gives you comprehensive Vim bindings so what you need to learn to be comfortable in Emacs is very little. As a bonus, it also keeps your RSI risk unchanged.
- wry_discontent 3y ago
  Totally silly nonsense. Just don't press buttons in a way that hurts your hands. Literally exactly how you use the computer now.
- lavp 3y ago
  You can use evil-mode and you’ll have the Vim key bindings in emacs. I use this and it’s great. Also, an ergonomic keyboard can help with pain; I had pains on my right wrist and using the Kinesis Advantage has helped me tremendously.

dmvdoug 3y ago

“And death i think is no parenthesis” (e.e. cummings)

krylon 3y ago

zile is an attempt to create an equivalent to GNU Emacs using Lua instead of Lisp. There was an attempt to merge the GNU Guile engine into emacs to replace the elisp bytecode VM; Guile would have supported, in addition to elisp, Scheme and Javascript. But last I heard the project had stagnated or fizzled out entirely. One might argue that VS Code is using Javascript in a similar manner to Emacs using elisp, but ... it just doesn't feel the same to me. I have very little experience with VS Code, though, so I might be mistaken.

whalesalad 3y ago
my problem with emacs is not lisp, lol. lisp is great.
sph 3y ago
Removing Lisp from Emacs means completely missing the point and not understanding that's the thing that makes Emacs work. zile is not Emacs in Lua, it's just a programmable text editor. It's not the same thing.
- krylon 3y ago
  While I do love me some Lisp, I don't think it's a categorical requirement to get an emacs-like experience. Lua is a very nice language, very dynamic, built around a few powerful primitives, that it should be possible to get something equally useful eventually. It just would be an insane amount of work. GNU Emacs has been going for nearly 40 years now, with lots and lots of contributors over time. Simply building something that is equivalent in terms of features would take forever; and I think the zile people have much less brainshare than Emacs. So I think it should be possible theoretically, but in practice, it's a lost cause. Guile Emacs would have been cool because it could have kept on using the tons and tons of elisp code that exist now, but apparently the pressure to get that to work was not large enough to warrant the effort. And with emacs now supporting native compilation of elisp, it's likely to stay the gold standard for the foreseeable future.