4 ms·

Why mention Emacs here? I'm sure you know CL works fine with Vim and other editors like Jupyter notebooks, Atom/Pulsar (very good support), VSCode (still in dev

Why mention Emacs here? I'm sure you know CL works fine with Vim and other editors like Jupyter notebooks, Atom/Pulsar (very good support), VSCode (still in development), etc. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

lproven 3y ago
1. Because any time I've seen a newbie ask about Common Lisp dev tools, they're told it's worth the time to learn Emacs and that Emacs with Slime is amazing. 2. I've been trying to learn Emacs on and off for about 25 years and I personally think it's horrible beyond belief. Vim is just as bad, but at least as someone who's been using vi for closer to 35 years now, I know how to open something, change a few characters and save it. I'm not a programmer. I don't use code editors from choice. But I have done in the past and I have opinions about them. It looks to me like you have a choice: a nice modern editor with poor integration, or a horrible crufty old editor which doesn't even know what the Alt key or windows are called but which has great integration. IMHO, as expressed on HN before, Lisp ought to have a slick GUI system for newbies approaching it. The commercial ones do. For FOSS, the code is out there. It's a done thing, many decades ago. It just needs modernising. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81798.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81798.html
- lispm 3y ago
  It's hard to believe that you should not be able to open a file, edit and save it with GNU Emacs. I have a Mac, downloaded https://emacsformacosx.com https://emacsformacosx.com , started it, command-o opens a file dialog, typed characters, command-s saved the file. > For FOSS, the code is out there. It's a done thing, many decades ago. It just needs modernising. That one is an ancient code base dating back to the 60s, written in a Lisp dialect roughly ten people in the world can program with some competence (I can't, can you?). It's a nice project, but it is far far away from what GNU Emacs provides. GNU Emacs has many many thousand man years more work and polishing in it, ongoing. If you would learn a complex and large Lisp like Interlisp or Common Lisp, then one would better use a development environment for it. I doubt Medley is easier to use&learn than something like GNU Emacs + Slime + SBCL. For Common Lisp, Medley is the worse development environment, since very few code has developed for and with it. People use other tools to write Lisp code (vim, GNU Emacs, ...). People are just trying to get Medley to somewhat support the state of Common Lisp from 34 years ago (CLtL2). It has, like, zero support for Scheme or other programming languages (Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, Rust, ...). GNU Emacs is not my favorite Lisp IDE, but it's by far the most practical solution for average developers: it does not cost anything, it has good Lisp support for several Lisp dialects and all kinds of other programming languages, it runs good enough on almost all current operating systems, hopefully respects my data privacy, ... Sure one can use a new editor with less support for Lisp. I've also known Lisp developers using vi in a terminal. People have different preferences for their tools.
  - lproven 3y ago
    > It's hard to believe that you should not be able to open a file, edit and save it with GNU Emacs. Believe it, baby. See my response immediately above. Or maybe immediately below, depending on HN. P.S. A macOS version is cheating. That I can use... but it's not the standard Emacs UI.
    - _19qg 3y ago
      > A macOS version is cheating. That I can use... but it's not the standard Emacs UI. There is no such thing as a single standard UI. In addition to the terminal version, GNU Emacs was ported to window systems loooooooong time ago. It's perfectly normal to use them. I use the GTK version of GNU Emacs on Linux.
      - lproven 3y ago
        > There is no such thing as a single standard UI Yes, there is, and it is called CUA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access I learned about 20 different text editors before CUA came along. I refuse to learn any new ones unless they comply with CUA. I write English, not code. Any one of dozens of CUA editors are perfectly fine and adequate for my needs. > GNU Emacs was ported to window systems loooooooong time ago. So its programmers have had decades to adapt it so that it conforms to the standards set in the 1980s and adopted by the entire computer industry, from Apple to Xerox. If they can't be bothered to adapt it, I can't be bothered to learn their ugly pre-standardisation UI. Some examples: a document is held in a window which can be split into panes to see more than one at a time. Those are the terms. Use them, or GTFO. The keystrokes for file operations are always Ctrl + the first letter of the relevant English verb, e.g. Ctrl+O is Open, Ctrl+P is Print. The Control key is abbreviated Ctrl and nothing else. The key next to Ctrl is called Alternate, abbreviated Alt. It is not called anything else on PC systems, although Macs call it Option, abbreviated Opt. It is not called "Meta" and no hardware made in 40 years called it that. The software was ported to the hardware; now port its manual and its UI, or GTFO. Incidentally, a second danger of using the wrong name is that because it's wrong, different teams use it for different things. The KDE team call the Super key "Meta". https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/khelpcenter/fundamentals/kbd.html https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/khelpcenter/fundamentals/kbd... They are wrong, too. Ctrl, Alt, Win/Super. Deal with it. The world changes. Software must adapt.
- kazinator 3y ago
  I've not used Emacs to edit a file since 1994 and I hadn't used it for very long back them. But I seem to remember after these 30 years that was something simple, like Ctrl-X Ctrl-S to save, and Ctrl-X Ctrl-C to quit. Edit: I don't have Emacs installed absolutely anywhere; but I went to a machine provided by the GCC Farm project and tried it there. I remembered right.
  - lproven 3y ago
    Good for you. In 1994 I was mainly supporting DOS, Windows for Workgroups, Novell Netware, and DEC VAX/VMS. There was no xNix of any form in the UK branch of the company, and I think the HQ mainly ran on much the same stuff with some added Classic MacOS. The point being that I learned literally dozens of editors and UIs in the 1980s and early 1990s... and then CUA came along and swept it all away, and I never looked back. I wrote much of the original Wikipedia article on CUA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access Much more recently I also wrote this: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/ I never ran Emacs, never had any reason to learn Emacs, so I never did. I did learn WordStar, WordStar 2000 (totally different), WordStar Express (totally different again), WordPerfect, MultiMate, DisplayWrite, MS Word 4.x and the different 5.x and the different 6.x, plus WinWord 1 and the different 2, and LocoScript, and The Last Word, and Edlin, and DOS EDIT, and many many more. I am very much not unable to learn new editors. But for over 30 years now, I haven't had to. And that's wonderful and I am absolutely not learning another new different editor now, at over half a century old. Any editor that wants me to try it must conform 100% to the CUA standard, or it can die in a fire. Weird editor keystrokes are 1970s/1980s stuff, and keeping them 40 years is inexcusable.
    - kazinator 3y ago
      I've also not had to learn a new editor for 30 years since switching to Vim. The core of vi is standardized in POSIX (IEEE 1003.1) https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/v... The nice thing about standards ...

lproven 3y ago

1. Because any time I've seen a newbie ask about Common Lisp dev tools, they're told it's worth the time to learn Emacs and that Emacs with Slime is amazing. 2. I've been trying to learn Emacs on and off for about 25 years and I personally think it's horrible beyond belief. Vim is just as bad, but at least as someone who's been using vi for closer to 35 years now, I know how to open something, change a few characters and save it. I'm not a programmer. I don't use code editors from choice. But I have done in the past and I have opinions about them. It looks to me like you have a choice: a nice modern editor with poor integration, or a horrible crufty old editor which doesn't even know what the Alt key or windows are called but which has great integration. IMHO, as expressed on HN before, Lisp ought to have a slick GUI system for newbies approaching it. The commercial ones do. For FOSS, the code is out there. It's a done thing, many decades ago. It just needs modernising. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81798.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81798.html

lispm 3y ago
It's hard to believe that you should not be able to open a file, edit and save it with GNU Emacs. I have a Mac, downloaded https://emacsformacosx.com https://emacsformacosx.com , started it, command-o opens a file dialog, typed characters, command-s saved the file. > For FOSS, the code is out there. It's a done thing, many decades ago. It just needs modernising. That one is an ancient code base dating back to the 60s, written in a Lisp dialect roughly ten people in the world can program with some competence (I can't, can you?). It's a nice project, but it is far far away from what GNU Emacs provides. GNU Emacs has many many thousand man years more work and polishing in it, ongoing. If you would learn a complex and large Lisp like Interlisp or Common Lisp, then one would better use a development environment for it. I doubt Medley is easier to use&learn than something like GNU Emacs + Slime + SBCL. For Common Lisp, Medley is the worse development environment, since very few code has developed for and with it. People use other tools to write Lisp code (vim, GNU Emacs, ...). People are just trying to get Medley to somewhat support the state of Common Lisp from 34 years ago (CLtL2). It has, like, zero support for Scheme or other programming languages (Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, Rust, ...). GNU Emacs is not my favorite Lisp IDE, but it's by far the most practical solution for average developers: it does not cost anything, it has good Lisp support for several Lisp dialects and all kinds of other programming languages, it runs good enough on almost all current operating systems, hopefully respects my data privacy, ... Sure one can use a new editor with less support for Lisp. I've also known Lisp developers using vi in a terminal. People have different preferences for their tools.
- lproven 3y ago
  > It's hard to believe that you should not be able to open a file, edit and save it with GNU Emacs. Believe it, baby. See my response immediately above. Or maybe immediately below, depending on HN. P.S. A macOS version is cheating. That I can use... but it's not the standard Emacs UI.
  - _19qg 3y ago
    > A macOS version is cheating. That I can use... but it's not the standard Emacs UI. There is no such thing as a single standard UI. In addition to the terminal version, GNU Emacs was ported to window systems loooooooong time ago. It's perfectly normal to use them. I use the GTK version of GNU Emacs on Linux.
    - lproven 3y ago
      > There is no such thing as a single standard UI Yes, there is, and it is called CUA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access I learned about 20 different text editors before CUA came along. I refuse to learn any new ones unless they comply with CUA. I write English, not code. Any one of dozens of CUA editors are perfectly fine and adequate for my needs. > GNU Emacs was ported to window systems loooooooong time ago. So its programmers have had decades to adapt it so that it conforms to the standards set in the 1980s and adopted by the entire computer industry, from Apple to Xerox. If they can't be bothered to adapt it, I can't be bothered to learn their ugly pre-standardisation UI. Some examples: a document is held in a window which can be split into panes to see more than one at a time. Those are the terms. Use them, or GTFO. The keystrokes for file operations are always Ctrl + the first letter of the relevant English verb, e.g. Ctrl+O is Open, Ctrl+P is Print. The Control key is abbreviated Ctrl and nothing else. The key next to Ctrl is called Alternate, abbreviated Alt. It is not called anything else on PC systems, although Macs call it Option, abbreviated Opt. It is not called "Meta" and no hardware made in 40 years called it that. The software was ported to the hardware; now port its manual and its UI, or GTFO. Incidentally, a second danger of using the wrong name is that because it's wrong, different teams use it for different things. The KDE team call the Super key "Meta". https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/khelpcenter/fundamentals/kbd.html https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/khelpcenter/fundamentals/kbd... They are wrong, too. Ctrl, Alt, Win/Super. Deal with it. The world changes. Software must adapt.
kazinator 3y ago
I've not used Emacs to edit a file since 1994 and I hadn't used it for very long back them. But I seem to remember after these 30 years that was something simple, like Ctrl-X Ctrl-S to save, and Ctrl-X Ctrl-C to quit. Edit: I don't have Emacs installed absolutely anywhere; but I went to a machine provided by the GCC Farm project and tried it there. I remembered right.
- lproven 3y ago
  Good for you. In 1994 I was mainly supporting DOS, Windows for Workgroups, Novell Netware, and DEC VAX/VMS. There was no xNix of any form in the UK branch of the company, and I think the HQ mainly ran on much the same stuff with some added Classic MacOS. The point being that I learned literally dozens of editors and UIs in the 1980s and early 1990s... and then CUA came along and swept it all away, and I never looked back. I wrote much of the original Wikipedia article on CUA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access Much more recently I also wrote this: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/ I never ran Emacs, never had any reason to learn Emacs, so I never did. I did learn WordStar, WordStar 2000 (totally different), WordStar Express (totally different again), WordPerfect, MultiMate, DisplayWrite, MS Word 4.x and the different 5.x and the different 6.x, plus WinWord 1 and the different 2, and LocoScript, and The Last Word, and Edlin, and DOS EDIT, and many many more. I am very much not unable to learn new editors. But for over 30 years now, I haven't had to. And that's wonderful and I am absolutely not learning another new different editor now, at over half a century old. Any editor that wants me to try it must conform 100% to the CUA standard, or it can die in a fire. Weird editor keystrokes are 1970s/1980s stuff, and keeping them 40 years is inexcusable.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    I've also not had to learn a new editor for 30 years since switching to Vim. The core of vi is standardized in POSIX (IEEE 1003.1) https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/v... The nice thing about standards ...