4 ms·

Emacs user here, have used vscode in the past. Yep, vscode is more intuitive. However emacs is mostly the kind of thing you dedicate a couple of months of dis

by znpy 2y ago

Emacs user here, have used vscode in the past. Yep, vscode is more intuitive. However emacs is mostly the kind of thing you dedicate a couple of months of discomfort and enjoy for the rest of your life. Quite literally. Spending some money on the “mastering emacs” book (https://www.masteringemacs.org/ https://www.masteringemacs.org/) is worth imho. Bonus point: little by little you start enjoying doing more stuff in emacs. It’s a meme, but it’s true.

lysace 2y ago
I spent 25 years using emacs before vscode (1997 to 2022-ish). I didn't go deep, I mostly just enjoyed the core parts of emacs + ccmode. I don't enjoy LISP but I still enjoy emacs, if that makes any sense. MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs. It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  What are the ways that VScode is better than Emacs?
  - lysace 2y ago
    I listed my favorites above. Generalizing it: Having smart people who really understand UX helps a lot with minimizing those months of pain before the payoff.
  - baq 2y ago
    vscode does three things extremely well: defaults, defaults and defaults. The most important ‘you just need M-x do-whatever after installing the whatever-doer package’ is supported out of the box (no details on purpose, try running emacs or vim without any config and compare to a clean fresh install of vscode).
    - znpy 2y ago
      Re: defaults. Sometimes i wonder if it’s worth giving those new emacs distributions a shot. I’m thinking about spacemacs or doom emacs. They look cool but so far i’ve been okay with stock emacs.
      - qubitcoder 1y ago
        I used Spacemacs for years and recommend it to others. It was fantastic in the early days, but the stability seems to have diminished. I encountered more bugs over time that I'd have to troubleshoot and fix myself. I switched to Doom Emacs a couple of years ago. It's well-maintained with regular updates, fantastic language support, and lightning fast. The CLI tooling is also nice (i.e., you can run 'doom upgrade' to update everything, or 'doom doctor' if you encounter an issue). It's the closest equivalent to VS Code in terms of working out of the box. Not to mention the advantages of Emacs with Vim keybindings. There is a learning curve, but the GitHub documentation is excellent. Adding support for Ruby on Rails development, for example, is as simple as uncommenting '(ruby +rails +lsp)' line in the '~/.config/init.el' file, and then running 'doom sync'. There's a long list of supported languages and tooling [0]. [0] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/static/init.example.el https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/static/in...
kstrauser 2y ago
I second all this. I'm using Zed today, but I was using Emacs for 20 years, then Sublime/VSCode/etc. for a few, and now Zed. If it disappears, I'm going right back to Emacs without a moment's hesitation. And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.
rurban 2y ago
And with copilot.el you get access to all models, not just some. I'm using Claude
pjmlp 2y ago
I dedicated my time between 1995 and 2005 as my main UNIX editor, and don't miss installing Emacs.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  It’s gotten way more ergonomic, BTW. Even if you treat it as a toolkit to build your own editor, the building blocks are much nicer than they were back then.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for. I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000. Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      Speaking of old obsolete versions of Gosling Emacs, Lars Brinkhoff just posted this source code for UniPress Emacs 2.20 he got from from Hans Hübner! That's the version we called NeMACS, with support for NeWS (Gosling's PostScript based window system), tabbed windows and pie menus, etc: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/Hans%20H%C3%BCbner https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/... So the answer to DVRC's ("Adopter of orphaned technologies") question on June 3, 2023, is yes, finally! HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166642 DonHopkins on June 2, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser. Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets". HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... >HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.) Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript. DVRC on June 3, 2023 [–] Do any version of UniPress Emacs (that support the NeWS driver) or NeMacs survive? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989423 I wrote the following description of how NeWS relates to modern web browsers and "AJAX" in the NeWS article on Wikipedia, and I also worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) at Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS >NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: >- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. >- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. >- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. [...] HyperTIES Emacs Authoring Tool MockLisp code (Yet Another HyperTIES Implementation, This Time In Emacs): http://donhopkins.com/home/ties/yahtittie.ml http://donhopkins.com/home/ties/yahtittie.ml https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News: https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

by znpy 2y ago

lysace 2y ago

I spent 25 years using emacs before vscode (1997 to 2022-ish). I didn't go deep, I mostly just enjoyed the core parts of emacs + ccmode. I don't enjoy LISP but I still enjoy emacs, if that makes any sense. MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs. It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.

datadrivenangel 2y ago
What are the ways that VScode is better than Emacs?
- lysace 2y ago
  I listed my favorites above. Generalizing it: Having smart people who really understand UX helps a lot with minimizing those months of pain before the payoff.
- baq 2y ago
  vscode does three things extremely well: defaults, defaults and defaults. The most important ‘you just need M-x do-whatever after installing the whatever-doer package’ is supported out of the box (no details on purpose, try running emacs or vim without any config and compare to a clean fresh install of vscode).
  - znpy 2y ago
    Re: defaults. Sometimes i wonder if it’s worth giving those new emacs distributions a shot. I’m thinking about spacemacs or doom emacs. They look cool but so far i’ve been okay with stock emacs.
    - qubitcoder 1y ago
      I used Spacemacs for years and recommend it to others. It was fantastic in the early days, but the stability seems to have diminished. I encountered more bugs over time that I'd have to troubleshoot and fix myself. I switched to Doom Emacs a couple of years ago. It's well-maintained with regular updates, fantastic language support, and lightning fast. The CLI tooling is also nice (i.e., you can run 'doom upgrade' to update everything, or 'doom doctor' if you encounter an issue). It's the closest equivalent to VS Code in terms of working out of the box. Not to mention the advantages of Emacs with Vim keybindings. There is a learning curve, but the GitHub documentation is excellent. Adding support for Ruby on Rails development, for example, is as simple as uncommenting '(ruby +rails +lsp)' line in the '~/.config/init.el' file, and then running 'doom sync'. There's a long list of supported languages and tooling [0]. [0] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/static/init.example.el https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/static/in...

kstrauser 2y ago

I second all this. I'm using Zed today, but I was using Emacs for 20 years, then Sublime/VSCode/etc. for a few, and now Zed. If it disappears, I'm going right back to Emacs without a moment's hesitation. And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.

rurban 2y ago

And with copilot.el you get access to all models, not just some. I'm using Claude

pjmlp 2y ago

I dedicated my time between 1995 and 2005 as my main UNIX editor, and don't miss installing Emacs.

kstrauser 2y ago
It’s gotten way more ergonomic, BTW. Even if you treat it as a toolkit to build your own editor, the building blocks are much nicer than they were back then.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for. I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000. Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    Speaking of old obsolete versions of Gosling Emacs, Lars Brinkhoff just posted this source code for UniPress Emacs 2.20 he got from from Hans Hübner! That's the version we called NeMACS, with support for NeWS (Gosling's PostScript based window system), tabbed windows and pie menus, etc: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/Hans%20H%C3%BCbner https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/... So the answer to DVRC's ("Adopter of orphaned technologies") question on June 3, 2023, is yes, finally! HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166642 DonHopkins on June 2, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser. Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets". HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... >HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.) Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript. DVRC on June 3, 2023 [–] Do any version of UniPress Emacs (that support the NeWS driver) or NeMacs survive? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989423 I wrote the following description of how NeWS relates to modern web browsers and "AJAX" in the NeWS article on Wikipedia, and I also worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) at Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS >NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: >- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. >- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. >- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. [...] HyperTIES Emacs Authoring Tool MockLisp code (Yet Another HyperTIES Implementation, This Time In Emacs): http://donhopkins.com/home/ties/yahtittie.ml http://donhopkins.com/home/ties/yahtittie.ml https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News: https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...