8 ms·

Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

202 points by hpaone 1y ago

billfruit 1y ago
While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration. Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in. If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.
- internet_points 1y ago
  I don't think lsp servers should be bundled, they're often huge, and e.g. for haskell you need the one that matches your ghc version, so you'd need ..all of them? and they need to be kept up-to-date etc. There is an emacs LSP server package manager at https://github.com/deirn/mason.el https://github.com/deirn/mason.el though – maybe something like that could be included, and Emacs could suggest how to install an appropriate LSP server (and enable eglot). I know many of the old hackers bristle at this, but I think it should be possible to do some kind of helpful but non-intrusive hinting for new users (one can always `setq clippy nil`) They could at least change the default theme to one of the already-bundled modus-themes or something.
  - billfruit 1y ago
    Once we get a modern IDE like PyCharm or Intellij Idea, the auto complete is essentially built in, without needing to deal with installing LSP servers, clients, and their dependencies. Out of the box, project and context aware auto complete is an essential feature in a modern IDE.
    - worthless-trash 1y ago
      Except pycharm won't work with my erlang lsp.
    - internet_points 1y ago
      Last I checked, an IDE like Android Studio (based on IDEA) needs to download a hogshead of java before it can even begin to build anything. And if you switch compiler versions, it needs to download even more. Sure it makes installing java as easy as clicking a few buttons, and it'd be great if Emacs made it as easy, but still: it doesn't bundle every version. No one would have the drive space for that. And now consider that emacs has support for not just java/kotlin, but pretty much every programming language in existence..
    - binary132 1y ago
      Emacs is not a “modern IDE” and expecting it to be one is a recipe for not only confusion and irritation but also for watering down the goodness that it really is.
- teddyh 1y ago
  Why not instead blame Windows for not having the standard tools “grep” and “find”?
  - positron26 1y ago
    The criticism makes sense when you consider that yeah, while posix tools are okay, needing them everywhere means you have something wrong in your programming ecosystem, and Elisp has many things wrong.
    - mickeyp 1y ago
      Emacs can easily work with non-posix tools. Many people use ag, ripgrep, or ack in lieu of grep. You change the command string Emacs uses for finding and grepping to your tool of choice.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    UNIX standard tools, and not every operating system is supposed to be a UNIX clone. There are ways to search and grep files on Windows.
    - teddyh 1y ago
      Feel free to add the code to use something else by default on Windows: <https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/progmodes/grep.el?h=emacs-30.2#n842 https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/p...>
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Why should I bother, when I share James Gosling opinion regarding using Emacs on the 21st century? https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/dont-use-emacs-says-javas-father/ https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/dont-use-emacs-says-jav... Given that was in 2008, I would update his remark from Netbeans, to any of JetBrains products, Eclipse or whatever. In any case, you can get those features using Windows Resource Toolkit on the old days, a mix of findstr and other similar improvements on Windows NT linage, nowadays Powershell will be enough.
- positron26 1y ago
  WSL2. While it's a fair criticism, the underlying issue here is that there aren't enough Windows users who program and upstream things for individual users to get support. Lean on the Linux ecosystem and things are fine. The reason there aren't programmers targeting the large market is a tangent into why I'm building PrizeForge, but the answer now doesn't change.
- mickeyp 1y ago
  What? Emacs has eglot built in. It has had native grep and find stuff for decades. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Grep-Searching.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Gr... You can change the exec-path to point to your cross compiled grep tool --- or you can change the command string to your tool of choice.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    I think for grep in emacs, the only thing require is the interface: - result on standard output - path and line numbers on each line A lot of emacs reliance on other tools follow the same pattern. While the default is posix, it has enough options to twist it to fit whatever OS.
  - internet_points 1y ago
    parent is talking about the external dependencies, grep.exe and java and jdtls etc., and in particular how they need to be installed separately from Emacs
    - pooyamo 1y ago
      Do other editors and IDEs bundle-in these external language servers? I don't think so, unless they are specifically tied to the language like Eclipse or PyCharm
- kqr 1y ago
  I think the mistake is looking at Emacs as an editor. It's an Emacs Lisp VM, and the editor that comes bundled with it is good, but not great. Fortunately there are many ways to improve it, and make it go beyond what other editors can.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Emacs isn’t battery-included. It’s a platform for textual interfaces with a focus on text editing. It may not includes some tools, but if the tools works with text (at least on the standard in/out) hooking it in emacs can be done really quickly. More so if it’s something that: - have result that can be formatted in a tabular fashion - do stuff with files then present some diagnostics (especially if errors and warnings are related to the files) - Have an REPL interface It’s not preconfigured like VS Code, but it’s much more versatile. Cursor having to fork VSCode is one such example. In Emacs, anything is just another package.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Define modern. IDEs with such capabilities were already available in the 1990's. I became an XEmacs user in the 1990's, because there was hardly anything better in UNIX systems. Remember, Emacs still lacked many niceties only available on XEmacs, and vim was yet to be invented. This is how old such IDE features have been available.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    XEmacs only came about because Lucid needed a front end to their IDE, Energize, which was extremely comprehensive and could even do "edit and continue" style development of C++ on Unix but, as jwz has it, the Unix community preferred its stone-knives-and-bearskins approach with command line tools.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Yeah, Solaris and NeXTSTEP were the only UNIXes that had an IDE tooling story from the vendors. Thanks to its origin, XEmacs also had for several years many graphical capabilities, that if I am not mistaken only landed on main Emacs during the late 2000's, by then I was back into IDE land.
- kragen 1y ago
  I've never used grep-find or LSP, despite using Emacs for 32 years. Maybe I should; is grep-find better than M-x grep? Apparently I've sometimes improvised an equivalent: "Run grep via find, with user-specified args COMMAND-ARGS. ... This command uses a special history list for its arguments, so you can easily repeat a find command." My out-of-the-box autocomplete is M-/, which works in environments where LSP doesn't, like writing English. It works sort of poorly in all of them, but I write production code slowly enough that my typing speed isn't close to being a bottleneck. It's more of a bottleneck when writing English, but even there, generally any of my good writing was good rewriting. Where I've found LSP-like functionality really useful in the past in IDEA and later Eclipse was not autocomplete, which is mostly an annoyance, but in automated refactoring (extract variable, extract method, inline method) and in rapidly iterating through the implementors of a method whose semantics I'm changing.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
    To be fair, running grep from Emacs is a mistake - you should be using ag, or some other parallelized version of grep :) Ardour has around 800k lines of code, and ag (not even the fastest of the new greps) can search it all more or less faster than I can type. The idea of some system that analyzes/caches/indexes the code just isn't necessary anymore.
    - kragen 1y ago
      That seems reasonable, yeah. ripgrep, etc., are definitely faster. Somehow I never twigged that you wrote Ardour and JACK. Thanks for JACK! (My audio editing needs are very modest and so I haven't actually tried Ardour.)
    - paddy_m 1y ago
      I customized grep-find on my setup. I have a shell script so that it does the following (in typescript-mode) first search ts, tsx, js, jsx files in the current project. Exclude .git, node_modules... then search node_modules with the ts.. extensions, still exclude .git finally search the whole tree for .py files still exclude .git, /dist... This is coupled with consult-find-grep. I basically want to find a string in the most relevant file type. I never want a result from node_modules first in the results. It took some work, but the results are quite nice!
- ubermonkey 1y ago
  >If you install emacs for windows... ...you are a second class citizen in the emacs republic. I mean, I don't endorse this position, but it's the way things are.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    >If you install emacs for mac... ...you are a third class citizen in the emacs republic. In spite of the fact that you can't spell emacs without mac. Also: >If you install emacs for linux... ...you get flamed for not calling it gnu/linux.
    - slowmovintarget 1y ago
      Emacs for Mac is fine though?: https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds That build has native compilation, and if you go for a Doom install you may need to build ripgrep yourself, but... that's also not difficult.
      - jpfromlondon 1y ago
        they mean you live within the walled garden, that you are playing make-believe.
        ubermonkey 1y ago
        That's not true, either, but I understand it's important for a certain sort of FOSS person to believe it anyway.
        jpfromlondon 1y ago
        take it up with the fundamentalists, I'm a Mac Emacs user.
        ubermonkey 1y ago
- pton_xd 1y ago
  I don't think I've ever heard emacs described as "batteries included" -- maybe more like "batteries available." If anything it has the opposite reputation, that doing anything requires extensive and continual config adjustments, which isn't accurate either. There are plenty of emacs "starter kits" that do aim to provide more of a batteries included experience. My favorite is doom, it's worth checking out and does setup all the features you mention. Pointing new users at those more advanced default configs as an option would be pretty helpful, I think.
  - billfruit 1y ago
    But many features, even obscure ones are packaged by default in modern emacs, including I think a pdf viewer.
  - binary132 1y ago
    Tbh even though I got my start with Emacs Live I really do think at this point the simplest way to get started is to start vanilla and stay as vanilla as possible as you slowly build up your config based on simple and straightforward examples. The main problem is the utter lack of such examples in the community. I had to figure it out for myself for the most part. KISS!
- soupy-soup 1y ago
  For most modern programming languages, LSP servers are trivial to install. You can usually get them through your language or distro's package manager in one command line invocation. Considering that there are sometimes multiple servers with their own pros and cons for a language, this can be kinda nice. The only one I've ran into that is different is Java, but considering how underdeveloped Java LSP servers are, you probably don't want to be using emacs for Java development.
- binary132 1y ago
  the total lack of “getting it” on display here is simply flabbergasting.
- iLemming 11mo ago
  Emacs in its half-a-century existence afaik never had "batteries included" narrative. Whatever comes bundled in Emacs, either practical or not so much (e.g. tetris) - are recipes and guides for extending it.
lll-o-lll 1y ago
Umm. Is this some sort of troll article? It sucks you in with nerd nostalgia and slowly becomes more and more esoteric and insane. Here’s the final two lines: > We should know better than to prematurely optimize for order when all of all time arrowpoints in and down to the absolute return 0. Words of wisdom, let it be: your world is a fine stream of consciousness, lacking only a decent editor. If that feels like your jam, go for it, but personally I feel in need of an exorcist after letting my computer load this…
- binary132 1y ago
  Author is a lapsed Catholic, it checks out (speaking as a former lapsed Catholic who knows lapsed Catholics)
- anthk 1y ago
  Under Unix the norm is to return 0 if everything it's OK.
frou_dh 1y ago
To me the charming thing about Emacs is how introspective a program it is. This goes beyond all the documentation being built-in, and being able to redefine things on the fly. For instance, it's easy to define a keybinding that does "Take me to the source code of the command that's bound to the next keybinding I type". When you use that and land at a destination, it will probably be Elisp code, but in some cases will even be C code - it works either way.
- username223 1y ago
  That and how smooth the customization curve is, from tweaking settings, to recording keyboard macros, to writing small helper functions, to creating whole packages. Compare that to something like Eclipse or IntelliJ, where there's a huge gap between changing settings and creating plugins. It's a sweet spot between semi-configurable text editors and full-blown "living ball of mud" systems like Lisp and Smalltalk.
- skeezyjefferson 1y ago
  I have never once thought Visual Studio needs some way to edit its own source code on the fly... whats the actual use case?
  - brettermeier 1y ago
    Good question, you may have to be the ultimate power user to need this feature? What are those people doing?
    - theflyinghorse 1y ago
      Vibing. It's a state of zen and connection to the technology that you use.
    - micik 1y ago
      anything. we're doing anything.
  - iLemming 1y ago
kragen 1y ago
This essay is amazing and delightful, but it is rather densely allusive, like classical Chinese literature; ultimately it is more allusion than plain language. I suspect that most people will find it somewhat impenetrable. But if you want to see Emacs explained by references to Dune, Harry Potter, Gormenghast, Star Wars, A Rape in Cyberspace, Neuromancer, The Matrix, Crowleyian magick, and so on, this essay is for you. Ultimately such storytelling seems to be the best means that we as humans have to convey our subjective experiences, which purely objective descriptions are not very good at. (This is one of the weak points of the engineering mindset that I was criticizing in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45650941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45650941.) So I sympathize with the project. But I wonder if it may end up preaching to the choir a bit: if you remember the intoxication of reading Barlow's Declaration of Independence, probably you already have a settled relationship with Emacs, whether intimate or traumatic, or both?
- eyeundersand 1y ago
  I was shocked by the reference to Navidson's house from the House of Leaves. The ending to your first paragraph is also interesting in that HoL starts with "This is not for you."
  - kragen 1y ago
    House of Leaves is something I've been wanting to read since I first saw it, but I've never had the chance. Unlike most books, I feel that I'd be missing out on a lot if I didn't read it in physical form. Emacs, too, is bigger on the inside.
    - eyeundersand 1y ago
      Yes, it's definitely something you want to experience in the physical form! It's hard to describe what reading it feels like towards the latter parts of the book- you feel like you're lost in the book like how the Navidson gets lost in the house.
      - 1y ago
jpfromlondon 1y ago
I didn't want the post to end I didn't want to return to an existence where people don't share these transgressive impulses with me. This is a robust and comprehensive antidote to nihilism and anyone who has ever missed the internet of the nineties or early 00s as I have would be doing themselves an enormous favour by reading it, and then rereading it as I intend to. It lost me for a moment at Implicity and I was worried the spell had be broken but the profound blows didn't stop.
- anthk 1y ago
  I think the same. Even if today I'm a die hard HJKL user, Emacs' doctor and the whole nerdiness world from M-x doctor to M-x fortune among M-x dunnet (and the rest of the games) opened a total new world instead of the damn boring Microsoft world with their own obscure terms making things nearly undiscoverable and very difficult to understand because there was no complete documentation for the end user. Later, in mid-2000's, the 3 DVD based Debian Sarge came with everything. Documentation, serious software, programming tools, mega nerd/geek games, the Anarchist FAQ, crazy fortune files, nerd lore and whatnot. You could snoop your BTTV and later DVB signals on the fly (even decode some channels my normal TV wasn't able to do), break tons of limits on cable TV sets (even override them)... it was magical.
  - jpfromlondon 1y ago
    I too am an apostate, however the post has gone a long way to encouraging me back into the fold, couldn't find my old .emacs when I had a quick look yesterday, dread starting again but maybe that's a meditation in itself.
sexyman48 1y ago
That he burned 11,000 words on his text editor tells you why emacs users are unemployable.
- _benj 1y ago
  Since employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to, this post and emacs users in general, must be of such lesser value I guess? /s
  - sexyman48 1y ago
    employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to Your words, not mine. But gene propagation is up there, and steady wages is a sufficient if not necessary condition for that to happen.
    - vkazanov 1y ago
      Never in my 20 years of programming, data engineering, engineering management of games, search engines, dating apps and machine learning systems I had a problem of people not wanting to hire me because I prefered Emacs (and linux). In fact, in was the opposite. So what are you even talking about?
      - jsonBorn 1y ago
        ==WARNING== Palantir's `blackbriar' uber-flag alert cycling 24/7, must include: hacker news, linux, emacs, mathe... and.. likely off-ed before the morrow..best sto
      - iLemming 1y ago
        The opposite is also true. I have never heard anyone climbing the ladder specifically because they are "so fucking good" with [insert whatever IDE/editor] Dude is saying nonsense. "Emacs users are unemployable" sounds like "Tesla drivers unregisterable" - what an imbecilic, utter bullshit that has zero sense to say. Ever.
    - 1y ago
7e 1y ago
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bitwize 1y ago
Man, I totally get this. I've been an Emacs user for 30 years and counting; back in the mid-90s when I started on Linux, I learned that the truly wizardly hackers usually used one of vim or Emacs and because I disliked modal editing, I chose Emacs—only to find myself tumbling down a deep, deep rabbithole that opened into an unfathomable warren network it would take me decades to begin to make any sense of. When I open Emacs, it's like I'm five years old again, seated at my VIC-20, confronted with the infinite possibilities of the machine, challenged to explore them. Except the possibilities are so much greater because computers can do so much more and Emacs—as the programmable way to program—puts them virtually all at my fingertips. It's all a bit overwhelming, and this essay does a good job of capturing that overwhelm and the shift in perspective needed to cope. That said, it's likely to send most people screaming back whence they came, clinging ever more firmly to their Visual Studio Codes and IntelliJs, if they be programmers at all and if not, it may turn them off programming altogether. Because that perspective shift looks like utter madness from the outside. I don't think we as a species are ready for computers yet. The possibilities, the implications.
alyandon 1y ago
They say there’s no Emacs — only your Emacs. This hit home for me. I spent about 6 months working exclusively with emacs to get past the "this is weird/hard because it is unfamiliar to me" stage. At the end of the experiment, I went back to using vim and IDEs. My take personal takeaways from the experience: 1) capslock/ctrl switching is helpful in so many other areas - so I kept that 2) emacs is something you want to "live in" (e.g. learning to rely on eshell) if you want to really become proficient with it 3) emacs is something you have to be willing to tweak/adjust via elisp to suite your personal preferences if you want to really really really be proficient with it I didn't hate emacs but it also wasn't for me.
- michaelcampbell 1y ago
  > e.g. learning to rely on eshell Or vterm if you don't want to be proficient with eshell.
- skydhash 1y ago
  2) I have eshell bound to a keybind, but I've never use it. I prefer shell-mode and shell-command. They make it easy to use cli utilities. TUI is something that I find myself no longer needing. And I've become so accustomed with the cli that the only two I'm using in a terminal is `less` and `top`. 3) I think the best way is to find some vanilla base config that will smooth out the rough parts, then, once you understand the internal concepts, tweak them to your liking. It's certainly a long term plan, but the pro is not having to wait on "features" from another company or group.
  - iLemming 11mo ago
    > I have eshell bound to a keybind, but I've never use it For years, I had a similar feeling about it. And then I learned that in eshell you can pipe in and out of buffers. So you can for example grep the content of one buffer and pipe results into another. Or pipe the output of a command to a buffer, and you even can chain them pipes. That often comes extremely handy.
deleted 1y ago
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eduction 1y ago
I've been using emacs for over 20 years and had no idea about `M-x tetris`. Worth reading just for that!
- anthk 1y ago
  M-x dunnet too. And,if you are into text adventures, there's M-x dunnet and, also, malyon under MELPA, and you can play some good ones such as the ones from Infocom, or the modern ones made from the community such as Tristam Island, Anchorhead, Spider and Web, Spiritwrak... the IF archive has them all (on Tristam Island, I can send you a better ZMachine V5 version, instead of a shortened V3 one made for the 3rd version of the Z-Machine, the one for small microcomputers such as the C64, MSX, the 8086, the Kaypro with CP/M 2.2...) And, if you are curious, you can install the inform6 compiler and inform6lib (the English grammar library) and, under Emacs, inform-mode and create your own text adventure in a very easy OOP like language (inform6), much more than Python. Inform Beginners' Guide: https://inform-fiction.org/manual/IBG.pdf https://inform-fiction.org/manual/IBG.pdf DM4, the low level stuff, raw inform6 without the English library. Advanced stuff: http://inform-fiction.org/manual/download_dm4.html http://inform-fiction.org/manual/download_dm4.html Creating a text adventure might look silly in these times, but if you pay attention to the article, it's these kind of environments what changed the world back in the day, from MUDs/MOOs to roguelikes (in the case or Rogue, literally). Curses was a library to play Rogue and update the terminal lest often (just send what changed in the screen to the terminal) so the connection wasn't cluttered back in the day with frequent menu displaying where the changes were minimal. With Inform6 you don't need to be a music composer, a drawing artist or some 3D modeller with tons of linear algebra background. Just write. And, yes, it can be loads of fun with very little. Look how easy can be the old 'advent' game under Inform6: https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/inform6/examples/games/Advent.inf https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/inform6/exa... The game itself in order to be played with M-x malyon: https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5 https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5 Now compare it to the C ports under BSD's or GNU/Linux.
tinkelenberg 1y ago
I struggled with a complex manuscript for years and tried all sorts of tools from Word to Scrivener in the process with no luck. Emacs w/org mode was the only program that helped me make sense of the mess and finish the darn thing. I have never seen a program so elegant and yet so powerful, and I am forever grateful it exists if only as a counterweight to the modern tech paradigm.
DonHopkins 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699 The original terminal emulator terminal.el in gnu emacs, written by mly (Richard Mlynarik), was particularly salty. I finally tracked down a copy, but it looks like somebody complained and in 1990 it was begrudgingly cleaned up a bit, so some of the worst stuff was moved out into a separate file called term-nasty.el for posterity (you, here, now), so as not to give "in to the pressure to censor obscenity that currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US" (oh, Richard <3 ): [original broken link] https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emacs/lisp/ChangeLog.3 https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emac... [term-nasty.el source] https://jason.zzq.org/git/emacs/plain/lisp/term-nasty.el?h=scratch/widen-limits&id=b2c3b7ffed48b820d9492387ebfdeafed96b0670 https://jason.zzq.org/git/emacs/plain/lisp/term-nasty.el?h=s... 1990-08-26 Richard Stallman (rms@mole.ai.mit.edu) * terminal.el: Move possibly offensive comments to term-nasty.el. https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/terminal.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... [...] ;; disgusting unix-required shit ;; Are we living twenty years in the past yet? (defun te-losing-unix () nil) [...] ;; (A version of the following comment which might be distractingly offensive ;; to some readers has been moved to term-nasty.el.) ;; unix lacks ITS-style tty control... (defun te-process-output (preemptable) ;;>> There seems no good reason to ever disallow preemption (setq preemptable t) [...] ;; I suppose if I split the guts of this out into a separate ;; function we could trivially emulate different terminals ;; Who cares in any case? (Apart from stupid losers using rlogin) [...] (?\C-b . te-backward-char) ;; should be C-d, but un*x ;; pty's won't send \004 through! ;; Can you believe this? [...] ;; Did I ask to be sent these characters? ;; I don't remember doing so, either. ;; (Perhaps some operating system or ;; other is completely incompetent...) [...] ;;-- Not-widely-known (ie nonstandard) flags, which mean ;; o writing in the last column of the last line ;; doesn't cause idiotic scrolling, and ;; o don't use idiotische c-s/c-q sogenannte ;; ``flow control'' auf keinen Fall. "LP:NF:" ;;-- For stupid or obsolete programs "ic=^p_!:dc=^pd!:al=^p^o!:dl=^p^k!:ho=^p= :" ;;-- For disgusting programs. ;; (VI? What losers need these, I wonder?) "im=:ei=:dm=:ed=:mi:do=^p^j:nl=^p^j:bs:"))) [...] (setq te-process (start-process "terminal-emulator" (current-buffer) "/bin/sh" "-c" ;; Yuck!!! Start a shell to set some terminal ;; control characteristics. Then start the ;; "env" program to setup the terminal type ;; Then finally start the program we wanted. (format "%s; exec %s" te-stty-string (mapconcat 'te-quote-arg-for-sh (cons program args) " "))))) [...] ;;;; what a complete loss [...] https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/term-nasty.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... ;;; term-nasty.el --- Damned Things from terminfo.el ;;; This file is in the public domain, and was written by Stallman and Mlynarik ;;; Commentary: ;; Some people used to be bothered by the following comments that were ;; found in terminal.el. We decided they were distracting, and that it ;; was better not to have them there. On the other hand, we didn't want ;; to appear to be giving in to the pressure to censor obscenity that ;; currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US. ;; So we decided to put the comments here. ;;; Code: These comments were removed from te-losing-unix. ;(what lossage) ;(message "fucking-unix: %d" char) This was before te-process-output. ;; fucking unix has -such- braindamaged lack of tty control... And about the need to handle output characters such as C-m, C-g, C-h and C-i even though the termcap doesn't say they may be used: ;fuck me harder ;again and again! ;wa12id!! ;(spiked) ;;; term-nasty.el ends here Note to the gentle readers: "wa12id" stands for "with a 12 inch dildo". Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty: https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m/xek-XhmQ9eoJ https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m... Noah Friedman, Aug 3, 1992, 4:54:20 AM In article <15i2n9...@hal.com> wood...@hal.com (Nathan Hess) writes: >In article <FRIEDMAN.9...@nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, friedman@gnu (Noah Friedman) writes: >>It's by no means necessary, but it's funny. >Along the same lines, look at lisp/terminal.el Of course, terminal.el is actually useful, albeit not terribly powerful. (and terminal.el is pretty mild compared to some of the other things I've seen written by mly. :-)) Incidentally, a lot of terminal.el has been rewritten in version 19. Too bad... I liked all the variable names and comments in the original. Jamie Zawinski, Aug 5, 1992, 12:40:38 AM In the FSF-distributed Emacs 19, the obscenities (will) have been stripped from terminal.el, though they are preserved in a file called term-nasty.el, to avoid appearing to bow to the censors. In Lucid GNU Emacs, terminal.el will remain as nasty as it ever was. -- Jamie "Truth, Justice, and the Fucking First Amendment" Zawinski
jmclnx 1y ago
I had to use Emacs eww to read the article :)
- iLemming 11mo ago
  I'm using Emacs to read these comments. Because... why not?
  - jmclnx 11mo ago
    true, why not. I was making a funny comment to let people know eww works.
    - iLemming 11mo ago
      Haha. What's really cool about eww, that you can just open any page, and then change the major-mode of it - I read org-mode, markdown readme's like that, or explore CI logs, etc.

202 points by hpaone 1y ago

While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration. Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in. If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.

internet_points 1y ago
I don't think lsp servers should be bundled, they're often huge, and e.g. for haskell you need the one that matches your ghc version, so you'd need ..all of them? and they need to be kept up-to-date etc. There is an emacs LSP server package manager at https://github.com/deirn/mason.el https://github.com/deirn/mason.el though – maybe something like that could be included, and Emacs could suggest how to install an appropriate LSP server (and enable eglot). I know many of the old hackers bristle at this, but I think it should be possible to do some kind of helpful but non-intrusive hinting for new users (one can always `setq clippy nil`) They could at least change the default theme to one of the already-bundled modus-themes or something.
- billfruit 1y ago
  Once we get a modern IDE like PyCharm or Intellij Idea, the auto complete is essentially built in, without needing to deal with installing LSP servers, clients, and their dependencies. Out of the box, project and context aware auto complete is an essential feature in a modern IDE.
  - worthless-trash 1y ago
    Except pycharm won't work with my erlang lsp.
  - internet_points 1y ago
    Last I checked, an IDE like Android Studio (based on IDEA) needs to download a hogshead of java before it can even begin to build anything. And if you switch compiler versions, it needs to download even more. Sure it makes installing java as easy as clicking a few buttons, and it'd be great if Emacs made it as easy, but still: it doesn't bundle every version. No one would have the drive space for that. And now consider that emacs has support for not just java/kotlin, but pretty much every programming language in existence..
  - binary132 1y ago
    Emacs is not a “modern IDE” and expecting it to be one is a recipe for not only confusion and irritation but also for watering down the goodness that it really is.
teddyh 1y ago
Why not instead blame Windows for not having the standard tools “grep” and “find”?
- positron26 1y ago
  The criticism makes sense when you consider that yeah, while posix tools are okay, needing them everywhere means you have something wrong in your programming ecosystem, and Elisp has many things wrong.
  - mickeyp 1y ago
    Emacs can easily work with non-posix tools. Many people use ag, ripgrep, or ack in lieu of grep. You change the command string Emacs uses for finding and grepping to your tool of choice.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  UNIX standard tools, and not every operating system is supposed to be a UNIX clone. There are ways to search and grep files on Windows.
  - teddyh 1y ago
    Feel free to add the code to use something else by default on Windows: <https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/progmodes/grep.el?h=emacs-30.2#n842 https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/p...>
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Why should I bother, when I share James Gosling opinion regarding using Emacs on the 21st century? https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/dont-use-emacs-says-javas-father/ https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/dont-use-emacs-says-jav... Given that was in 2008, I would update his remark from Netbeans, to any of JetBrains products, Eclipse or whatever. In any case, you can get those features using Windows Resource Toolkit on the old days, a mix of findstr and other similar improvements on Windows NT linage, nowadays Powershell will be enough.
positron26 1y ago
WSL2. While it's a fair criticism, the underlying issue here is that there aren't enough Windows users who program and upstream things for individual users to get support. Lean on the Linux ecosystem and things are fine. The reason there aren't programmers targeting the large market is a tangent into why I'm building PrizeForge, but the answer now doesn't change.
mickeyp 1y ago
What? Emacs has eglot built in. It has had native grep and find stuff for decades. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Grep-Searching.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Gr... You can change the exec-path to point to your cross compiled grep tool --- or you can change the command string to your tool of choice.
- skydhash 1y ago
  I think for grep in emacs, the only thing require is the interface: - result on standard output - path and line numbers on each line A lot of emacs reliance on other tools follow the same pattern. While the default is posix, it has enough options to twist it to fit whatever OS.
- internet_points 1y ago
  parent is talking about the external dependencies, grep.exe and java and jdtls etc., and in particular how they need to be installed separately from Emacs
  - pooyamo 1y ago
    Do other editors and IDEs bundle-in these external language servers? I don't think so, unless they are specifically tied to the language like Eclipse or PyCharm
kqr 1y ago
I think the mistake is looking at Emacs as an editor. It's an Emacs Lisp VM, and the editor that comes bundled with it is good, but not great. Fortunately there are many ways to improve it, and make it go beyond what other editors can.
skydhash 1y ago
Emacs isn’t battery-included. It’s a platform for textual interfaces with a focus on text editing. It may not includes some tools, but if the tools works with text (at least on the standard in/out) hooking it in emacs can be done really quickly. More so if it’s something that: - have result that can be formatted in a tabular fashion - do stuff with files then present some diagnostics (especially if errors and warnings are related to the files) - Have an REPL interface It’s not preconfigured like VS Code, but it’s much more versatile. Cursor having to fork VSCode is one such example. In Emacs, anything is just another package.
pjmlp 1y ago
Define modern. IDEs with such capabilities were already available in the 1990's. I became an XEmacs user in the 1990's, because there was hardly anything better in UNIX systems. Remember, Emacs still lacked many niceties only available on XEmacs, and vim was yet to be invented. This is how old such IDE features have been available.
- bitwize 1y ago
  XEmacs only came about because Lucid needed a front end to their IDE, Energize, which was extremely comprehensive and could even do "edit and continue" style development of C++ on Unix but, as jwz has it, the Unix community preferred its stone-knives-and-bearskins approach with command line tools.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Yeah, Solaris and NeXTSTEP were the only UNIXes that had an IDE tooling story from the vendors. Thanks to its origin, XEmacs also had for several years many graphical capabilities, that if I am not mistaken only landed on main Emacs during the late 2000's, by then I was back into IDE land.
kragen 1y ago
I've never used grep-find or LSP, despite using Emacs for 32 years. Maybe I should; is grep-find better than M-x grep? Apparently I've sometimes improvised an equivalent: "Run grep via find, with user-specified args COMMAND-ARGS. ... This command uses a special history list for its arguments, so you can easily repeat a find command." My out-of-the-box autocomplete is M-/, which works in environments where LSP doesn't, like writing English. It works sort of poorly in all of them, but I write production code slowly enough that my typing speed isn't close to being a bottleneck. It's more of a bottleneck when writing English, but even there, generally any of my good writing was good rewriting. Where I've found LSP-like functionality really useful in the past in IDEA and later Eclipse was not autocomplete, which is mostly an annoyance, but in automated refactoring (extract variable, extract method, inline method) and in rapidly iterating through the implementors of a method whose semantics I'm changing.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  To be fair, running grep from Emacs is a mistake - you should be using ag, or some other parallelized version of grep :) Ardour has around 800k lines of code, and ag (not even the fastest of the new greps) can search it all more or less faster than I can type. The idea of some system that analyzes/caches/indexes the code just isn't necessary anymore.
  - kragen 1y ago
    That seems reasonable, yeah. ripgrep, etc., are definitely faster. Somehow I never twigged that you wrote Ardour and JACK. Thanks for JACK! (My audio editing needs are very modest and so I haven't actually tried Ardour.)
  - paddy_m 1y ago
    I customized grep-find on my setup. I have a shell script so that it does the following (in typescript-mode) first search ts, tsx, js, jsx files in the current project. Exclude .git, node_modules... then search node_modules with the ts.. extensions, still exclude .git finally search the whole tree for .py files still exclude .git, /dist... This is coupled with consult-find-grep. I basically want to find a string in the most relevant file type. I never want a result from node_modules first in the results. It took some work, but the results are quite nice!
ubermonkey 1y ago
>If you install emacs for windows... ...you are a second class citizen in the emacs republic. I mean, I don't endorse this position, but it's the way things are.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  >If you install emacs for mac... ...you are a third class citizen in the emacs republic. In spite of the fact that you can't spell emacs without mac. Also: >If you install emacs for linux... ...you get flamed for not calling it gnu/linux.
  - slowmovintarget 1y ago
    Emacs for Mac is fine though?: https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds That build has native compilation, and if you go for a Doom install you may need to build ripgrep yourself, but... that's also not difficult.
    - jpfromlondon 1y ago
      they mean you live within the walled garden, that you are playing make-believe.
      - ubermonkey 1y ago
        That's not true, either, but I understand it's important for a certain sort of FOSS person to believe it anyway.
        jpfromlondon 1y ago
        take it up with the fundamentalists, I'm a Mac Emacs user.
        ubermonkey 1y ago
pton_xd 1y ago
I don't think I've ever heard emacs described as "batteries included" -- maybe more like "batteries available." If anything it has the opposite reputation, that doing anything requires extensive and continual config adjustments, which isn't accurate either. There are plenty of emacs "starter kits" that do aim to provide more of a batteries included experience. My favorite is doom, it's worth checking out and does setup all the features you mention. Pointing new users at those more advanced default configs as an option would be pretty helpful, I think.
- billfruit 1y ago
  But many features, even obscure ones are packaged by default in modern emacs, including I think a pdf viewer.
- binary132 1y ago
  Tbh even though I got my start with Emacs Live I really do think at this point the simplest way to get started is to start vanilla and stay as vanilla as possible as you slowly build up your config based on simple and straightforward examples. The main problem is the utter lack of such examples in the community. I had to figure it out for myself for the most part. KISS!
soupy-soup 1y ago
For most modern programming languages, LSP servers are trivial to install. You can usually get them through your language or distro's package manager in one command line invocation. Considering that there are sometimes multiple servers with their own pros and cons for a language, this can be kinda nice. The only one I've ran into that is different is Java, but considering how underdeveloped Java LSP servers are, you probably don't want to be using emacs for Java development.
binary132 1y ago
the total lack of “getting it” on display here is simply flabbergasting.
iLemming 11mo ago
Emacs in its half-a-century existence afaik never had "batteries included" narrative. Whatever comes bundled in Emacs, either practical or not so much (e.g. tetris) - are recipes and guides for extending it.

lll-o-lll 1y ago

Umm. Is this some sort of troll article? It sucks you in with nerd nostalgia and slowly becomes more and more esoteric and insane. Here’s the final two lines: > We should know better than to prematurely optimize for order when all of all time arrowpoints in and down to the absolute return 0. Words of wisdom, let it be: your world is a fine stream of consciousness, lacking only a decent editor. If that feels like your jam, go for it, but personally I feel in need of an exorcist after letting my computer load this…

binary132 1y ago
Author is a lapsed Catholic, it checks out (speaking as a former lapsed Catholic who knows lapsed Catholics)
anthk 1y ago
Under Unix the norm is to return 0 if everything it's OK.

frou_dh 1y ago

To me the charming thing about Emacs is how introspective a program it is. This goes beyond all the documentation being built-in, and being able to redefine things on the fly. For instance, it's easy to define a keybinding that does "Take me to the source code of the command that's bound to the next keybinding I type". When you use that and land at a destination, it will probably be Elisp code, but in some cases will even be C code - it works either way.

username223 1y ago
That and how smooth the customization curve is, from tweaking settings, to recording keyboard macros, to writing small helper functions, to creating whole packages. Compare that to something like Eclipse or IntelliJ, where there's a huge gap between changing settings and creating plugins. It's a sweet spot between semi-configurable text editors and full-blown "living ball of mud" systems like Lisp and Smalltalk.
skeezyjefferson 1y ago
I have never once thought Visual Studio needs some way to edit its own source code on the fly... whats the actual use case?
- brettermeier 1y ago
  Good question, you may have to be the ultimate power user to need this feature? What are those people doing?
  - theflyinghorse 1y ago
    Vibing. It's a state of zen and connection to the technology that you use.
  - micik 1y ago
    anything. we're doing anything.
- iLemming 1y ago

kragen 1y ago

This essay is amazing and delightful, but it is rather densely allusive, like classical Chinese literature; ultimately it is more allusion than plain language. I suspect that most people will find it somewhat impenetrable. But if you want to see Emacs explained by references to Dune, Harry Potter, Gormenghast, Star Wars, A Rape in Cyberspace, Neuromancer, The Matrix, Crowleyian magick, and so on, this essay is for you. Ultimately such storytelling seems to be the best means that we as humans have to convey our subjective experiences, which purely objective descriptions are not very good at. (This is one of the weak points of the engineering mindset that I was criticizing in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45650941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45650941.) So I sympathize with the project. But I wonder if it may end up preaching to the choir a bit: if you remember the intoxication of reading Barlow's Declaration of Independence, probably you already have a settled relationship with Emacs, whether intimate or traumatic, or both?

eyeundersand 1y ago
I was shocked by the reference to Navidson's house from the House of Leaves. The ending to your first paragraph is also interesting in that HoL starts with "This is not for you."
- kragen 1y ago
  House of Leaves is something I've been wanting to read since I first saw it, but I've never had the chance. Unlike most books, I feel that I'd be missing out on a lot if I didn't read it in physical form. Emacs, too, is bigger on the inside.
  - eyeundersand 1y ago
    Yes, it's definitely something you want to experience in the physical form! It's hard to describe what reading it feels like towards the latter parts of the book- you feel like you're lost in the book like how the Navidson gets lost in the house.
    - 1y ago

jpfromlondon 1y ago

I didn't want the post to end I didn't want to return to an existence where people don't share these transgressive impulses with me. This is a robust and comprehensive antidote to nihilism and anyone who has ever missed the internet of the nineties or early 00s as I have would be doing themselves an enormous favour by reading it, and then rereading it as I intend to. It lost me for a moment at Implicity and I was worried the spell had be broken but the profound blows didn't stop.

anthk 1y ago
I think the same. Even if today I'm a die hard HJKL user, Emacs' doctor and the whole nerdiness world from M-x doctor to M-x fortune among M-x dunnet (and the rest of the games) opened a total new world instead of the damn boring Microsoft world with their own obscure terms making things nearly undiscoverable and very difficult to understand because there was no complete documentation for the end user. Later, in mid-2000's, the 3 DVD based Debian Sarge came with everything. Documentation, serious software, programming tools, mega nerd/geek games, the Anarchist FAQ, crazy fortune files, nerd lore and whatnot. You could snoop your BTTV and later DVB signals on the fly (even decode some channels my normal TV wasn't able to do), break tons of limits on cable TV sets (even override them)... it was magical.
- jpfromlondon 1y ago
  I too am an apostate, however the post has gone a long way to encouraging me back into the fold, couldn't find my old .emacs when I had a quick look yesterday, dread starting again but maybe that's a meditation in itself.

sexyman48 1y ago

That he burned 11,000 words on his text editor tells you why emacs users are unemployable.

_benj 1y ago
Since employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to, this post and emacs users in general, must be of such lesser value I guess? /s
- sexyman48 1y ago
  employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to Your words, not mine. But gene propagation is up there, and steady wages is a sufficient if not necessary condition for that to happen.
  - vkazanov 1y ago
    Never in my 20 years of programming, data engineering, engineering management of games, search engines, dating apps and machine learning systems I had a problem of people not wanting to hire me because I prefered Emacs (and linux). In fact, in was the opposite. So what are you even talking about?
    - jsonBorn 1y ago
      ==WARNING== Palantir's `blackbriar' uber-flag alert cycling 24/7, must include: hacker news, linux, emacs, mathe... and.. likely off-ed before the morrow..best sto
    - iLemming 1y ago
      The opposite is also true. I have never heard anyone climbing the ladder specifically because they are "so fucking good" with [insert whatever IDE/editor] Dude is saying nonsense. "Emacs users are unemployable" sounds like "Tesla drivers unregisterable" - what an imbecilic, utter bullshit that has zero sense to say. Ever.
  - 1y ago

7e 1y ago

[dead]

bitwize 1y ago

Man, I totally get this. I've been an Emacs user for 30 years and counting; back in the mid-90s when I started on Linux, I learned that the truly wizardly hackers usually used one of vim or Emacs and because I disliked modal editing, I chose Emacs—only to find myself tumbling down a deep, deep rabbithole that opened into an unfathomable warren network it would take me decades to begin to make any sense of. When I open Emacs, it's like I'm five years old again, seated at my VIC-20, confronted with the infinite possibilities of the machine, challenged to explore them. Except the possibilities are so much greater because computers can do so much more and Emacs—as the programmable way to program—puts them virtually all at my fingertips. It's all a bit overwhelming, and this essay does a good job of capturing that overwhelm and the shift in perspective needed to cope. That said, it's likely to send most people screaming back whence they came, clinging ever more firmly to their Visual Studio Codes and IntelliJs, if they be programmers at all and if not, it may turn them off programming altogether. Because that perspective shift looks like utter madness from the outside. I don't think we as a species are ready for computers yet. The possibilities, the implications.

alyandon 1y ago

They say there’s no Emacs — only your Emacs. This hit home for me. I spent about 6 months working exclusively with emacs to get past the "this is weird/hard because it is unfamiliar to me" stage. At the end of the experiment, I went back to using vim and IDEs. My take personal takeaways from the experience: 1) capslock/ctrl switching is helpful in so many other areas - so I kept that 2) emacs is something you want to "live in" (e.g. learning to rely on eshell) if you want to really become proficient with it 3) emacs is something you have to be willing to tweak/adjust via elisp to suite your personal preferences if you want to really really really be proficient with it I didn't hate emacs but it also wasn't for me.

michaelcampbell 1y ago
> e.g. learning to rely on eshell Or vterm if you don't want to be proficient with eshell.
skydhash 1y ago
2) I have eshell bound to a keybind, but I've never use it. I prefer shell-mode and shell-command. They make it easy to use cli utilities. TUI is something that I find myself no longer needing. And I've become so accustomed with the cli that the only two I'm using in a terminal is `less` and `top`. 3) I think the best way is to find some vanilla base config that will smooth out the rough parts, then, once you understand the internal concepts, tweak them to your liking. It's certainly a long term plan, but the pro is not having to wait on "features" from another company or group.
- iLemming 11mo ago
  > I have eshell bound to a keybind, but I've never use it For years, I had a similar feeling about it. And then I learned that in eshell you can pipe in and out of buffers. So you can for example grep the content of one buffer and pipe results into another. Or pipe the output of a command to a buffer, and you even can chain them pipes. That often comes extremely handy.

deleted 1y ago

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eduction 1y ago

I've been using emacs for over 20 years and had no idea about `M-x tetris`. Worth reading just for that!

anthk 1y ago
M-x dunnet too. And,if you are into text adventures, there's M-x dunnet and, also, malyon under MELPA, and you can play some good ones such as the ones from Infocom, or the modern ones made from the community such as Tristam Island, Anchorhead, Spider and Web, Spiritwrak... the IF archive has them all (on Tristam Island, I can send you a better ZMachine V5 version, instead of a shortened V3 one made for the 3rd version of the Z-Machine, the one for small microcomputers such as the C64, MSX, the 8086, the Kaypro with CP/M 2.2...) And, if you are curious, you can install the inform6 compiler and inform6lib (the English grammar library) and, under Emacs, inform-mode and create your own text adventure in a very easy OOP like language (inform6), much more than Python. Inform Beginners' Guide: https://inform-fiction.org/manual/IBG.pdf https://inform-fiction.org/manual/IBG.pdf DM4, the low level stuff, raw inform6 without the English library. Advanced stuff: http://inform-fiction.org/manual/download_dm4.html http://inform-fiction.org/manual/download_dm4.html Creating a text adventure might look silly in these times, but if you pay attention to the article, it's these kind of environments what changed the world back in the day, from MUDs/MOOs to roguelikes (in the case or Rogue, literally). Curses was a library to play Rogue and update the terminal lest often (just send what changed in the screen to the terminal) so the connection wasn't cluttered back in the day with frequent menu displaying where the changes were minimal. With Inform6 you don't need to be a music composer, a drawing artist or some 3D modeller with tons of linear algebra background. Just write. And, yes, it can be loads of fun with very little. Look how easy can be the old 'advent' game under Inform6: https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/inform6/examples/games/Advent.inf https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/inform6/exa... The game itself in order to be played with M-x malyon: https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5 https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5 Now compare it to the C ports under BSD's or GNU/Linux.

tinkelenberg 1y ago

I struggled with a complex manuscript for years and tried all sorts of tools from Word to Scrivener in the process with no luck. Emacs w/org mode was the only program that helped me make sense of the mess and finish the darn thing. I have never seen a program so elegant and yet so powerful, and I am forever grateful it exists if only as a counterweight to the modern tech paradigm.

DonHopkins 1y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699 The original terminal emulator terminal.el in gnu emacs, written by mly (Richard Mlynarik), was particularly salty. I finally tracked down a copy, but it looks like somebody complained and in 1990 it was begrudgingly cleaned up a bit, so some of the worst stuff was moved out into a separate file called term-nasty.el for posterity (you, here, now), so as not to give "in to the pressure to censor obscenity that currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US" (oh, Richard <3 ): [original broken link] https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emacs/lisp/ChangeLog.3 https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emac... [term-nasty.el source] https://jason.zzq.org/git/emacs/plain/lisp/term-nasty.el?h=scratch/widen-limits&id=b2c3b7ffed48b820d9492387ebfdeafed96b0670 https://jason.zzq.org/git/emacs/plain/lisp/term-nasty.el?h=s... 1990-08-26 Richard Stallman (rms@mole.ai.mit.edu) * terminal.el: Move possibly offensive comments to term-nasty.el. https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/terminal.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... [...] ;; disgusting unix-required shit ;; Are we living twenty years in the past yet? (defun te-losing-unix () nil) [...] ;; (A version of the following comment which might be distractingly offensive ;; to some readers has been moved to term-nasty.el.) ;; unix lacks ITS-style tty control... (defun te-process-output (preemptable) ;;>> There seems no good reason to ever disallow preemption (setq preemptable t) [...] ;; I suppose if I split the guts of this out into a separate ;; function we could trivially emulate different terminals ;; Who cares in any case? (Apart from stupid losers using rlogin) [...] (?\C-b . te-backward-char) ;; should be C-d, but un*x ;; pty's won't send \004 through! ;; Can you believe this? [...] ;; Did I ask to be sent these characters? ;; I don't remember doing so, either. ;; (Perhaps some operating system or ;; other is completely incompetent...) [...] ;;-- Not-widely-known (ie nonstandard) flags, which mean ;; o writing in the last column of the last line ;; doesn't cause idiotic scrolling, and ;; o don't use idiotische c-s/c-q sogenannte ;; ``flow control'' auf keinen Fall. "LP:NF:" ;;-- For stupid or obsolete programs "ic=^p_!:dc=^pd!:al=^p^o!:dl=^p^k!:ho=^p= :" ;;-- For disgusting programs. ;; (VI? What losers need these, I wonder?) "im=:ei=:dm=:ed=:mi:do=^p^j:nl=^p^j:bs:"))) [...] (setq te-process (start-process "terminal-emulator" (current-buffer) "/bin/sh" "-c" ;; Yuck!!! Start a shell to set some terminal ;; control characteristics. Then start the ;; "env" program to setup the terminal type ;; Then finally start the program we wanted. (format "%s; exec %s" te-stty-string (mapconcat 'te-quote-arg-for-sh (cons program args) " "))))) [...] ;;;; what a complete loss [...] https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/term-nasty.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... ;;; term-nasty.el --- Damned Things from terminfo.el ;;; This file is in the public domain, and was written by Stallman and Mlynarik ;;; Commentary: ;; Some people used to be bothered by the following comments that were ;; found in terminal.el. We decided they were distracting, and that it ;; was better not to have them there. On the other hand, we didn't want ;; to appear to be giving in to the pressure to censor obscenity that ;; currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US. ;; So we decided to put the comments here. ;;; Code: These comments were removed from te-losing-unix. ;(what lossage) ;(message "fucking-unix: %d" char) This was before te-process-output. ;; fucking unix has -such- braindamaged lack of tty control... And about the need to handle output characters such as C-m, C-g, C-h and C-i even though the termcap doesn't say they may be used: ;fuck me harder ;again and again! ;wa12id!! ;(spiked) ;;; term-nasty.el ends here Note to the gentle readers: "wa12id" stands for "with a 12 inch dildo". Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty: https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m/xek-XhmQ9eoJ https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m... Noah Friedman, Aug 3, 1992, 4:54:20 AM In article <15i2n9...@hal.com> wood...@hal.com (Nathan Hess) writes: >In article <FRIEDMAN.9...@nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, friedman@gnu (Noah Friedman) writes: >>It's by no means necessary, but it's funny. >Along the same lines, look at lisp/terminal.el Of course, terminal.el is actually useful, albeit not terribly powerful. (and terminal.el is pretty mild compared to some of the other things I've seen written by mly. :-)) Incidentally, a lot of terminal.el has been rewritten in version 19. Too bad... I liked all the variable names and comments in the original. Jamie Zawinski, Aug 5, 1992, 12:40:38 AM In the FSF-distributed Emacs 19, the obscenities (will) have been stripped from terminal.el, though they are preserved in a file called term-nasty.el, to avoid appearing to bow to the censors. In Lucid GNU Emacs, terminal.el will remain as nasty as it ever was. -- Jamie "Truth, Justice, and the Fucking First Amendment" Zawinski

jmclnx 1y ago

I had to use Emacs eww to read the article :)

iLemming 11mo ago
I'm using Emacs to read these comments. Because... why not?
- jmclnx 11mo ago
  true, why not. I was making a funny comment to let people know eww works.
  - iLemming 11mo ago
    Haha. What's really cool about eww, that you can just open any page, and then change the major-mode of it - I read org-mode, markdown readme's like that, or explore CI logs, etc.