6 ms·

This is how Emacs is different from other editors. Like the blog posts show - you start with a need and try to find how the existing Emacs LISP code is written.

by arocks 14y ago

This is how Emacs is different from other editors. Like the blog posts show - you start with a need and try to find how the existing Emacs LISP code is written. Next, you try to customize it to your need. Finally, you assign it to a keyboard shortcut. You adapt Emacs to your workflow, just like you adapt Lisp to your problem domain.

kami8845 14y ago
Seems similar to Sublime Text 2. Except for the part where you're stuck trying to decipher existing Emacs Lisp. With Python I find I can express what I'm trying to do without too much thought.
- jlongster 14y ago
  Regarding sublime's API, can you split windows? Invoke subprocesses, and create REPLs? Genuinely curious, but I think you can do a lot more with Emacs' APIs, and modify core parts of the editor since most of it is written in ELisp and you can easily swap out functions.
  - josh-j 14y ago
    Yes, you can do all of those things with sublime's API (https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL, https://github.com/SublimeText/Origami https://github.com/SublimeText/Origami). Yes, emacs is more extensible, but not where it matters, really. I.e., I don't think you're going to see any cool feature made with elisp that can't be ported to sublime.
    - jlongster 14y ago
      Ok, that's pretty cool. Still doesn't seem as supported by the core APIs though. In Emacs I can run a REPL and attach it to any process with a few lines of code. I love Sublime Text, but I would argue that Emacs is more extensible in all sorts of places where it really matters.
    - xxpor 14y ago
      TRAMP. The sublime equivalent is terrible.
    - martinced 14y ago
      No latter than yesterday I did a search and replace in Emacs doing Lisp substitution to create the replacement string. Actually it was better than that: I did record a macro who switched back & forth with another buffer, executing something in another REPL, then doing the substitution. It was quite an hack but it worked perfectly. Can you do such things in Sublime? What about MuMaMo (Multi-Major-Mode)? Can you write something like Emacs' MuMaMo in Sublime? (basically it switched major mode depending on context inside a single file) What about org-mode, Magit and semi-structural editing with Paredit? Can you do all this with Sublime? And is Sublime open source? If you can do all this I may take a look. How easy is Sublime easy to extend and in which language do you code it?
    - zosima 14y ago
      You can probably add every single feature in emacs to sublime. The 30 earth-years and many, many man-years of features, additions and smoothing of interactions that has gone into emacs, will however take quite some time to come to par with. See e.g. tramp, org-mode, the vc-modes, gnus, magit, smart indenting etc. martinced: you have been hell-banned for some, to me, completely opaque reason.
- Cacti 14y ago
  ST2's plugin interface and Emacs's interpreter are about a similar as Excel is to R, or an Accord is to an F1 car. ST2's plugin interface may be nice and sufficient for most "normal" tasks, but there plenty of things you simply cannot do.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - cwlb 14y ago
    example?
    - stevekemp 14y ago
      A web-browser inside your editor? A mail client inside your editor? The ability to make HTTP-requests, parse their results, and format the results inside your existing editor window?
      - aerique 14y ago
        You forgot the web server :-) http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Elnode http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Elnode
      - reeses 14y ago
        Editor? I do not think that word means what you think it means! Emacs is an abstraction layer for a non-preemptively threaded virtual machine, one application of which involves editing text, sound, video, images, etc.
- stray 14y ago
  If you took the time to learn elisp, you'd experience the same ease with emacs. You didn't always know python. You learned it. I own and use Sublime Text 2 -- and I do enjoy it. I also use and enjoy emacs. Sublime Text 2 is far prettier...
  - ajross 14y ago
    I've played with it a few times, and just did again. The little "minimap" preview thing on the right side is cute (and disableable) -- it actually helps to provide an aesthetic indication as to when your file is Just Way Too Long. The visual display of tab characters is subtle and attractive, and probably useful to many people trapped in editors that do that stuff invisibly or wrong (it's not as good as dtrt-mode in emacs though, which will auto-guess whitepace conventions, but I'd certainly be pleased if emacs were to implement a similar thing). But at the same time, I can't actually use the thing. No cursor motion keys available from the home row, seriously? Opening a file brings me up a GUI dialog with minimal (and, relative to the editor, inconsistent) keyboard navigability? The waste of space is awful: six columns wasted on the right side of the screen just to tell me line numbers that emacs just puts in the modeline. It seems like the kind of editor someone from an IDE would want to use, and which would expose them to "serious programmer's editor" features. It's not going to pull away any emacs or vim users any time soon.
    - quiesce 14y ago
      People agreed re the minimap: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap
      - snotrockets 14y ago
        And Minimap can overlay the function names over the map, for even more usability.
    - rhizome31 14y ago
      > It seems like the kind of editor someone from an IDE would want to use, and which would expose them to "serious programmer's editor" features This is indeed what happens and I think it's a good thing : it brings the notion of efficient text editing to the masses. Recently in my town one of my coworker did a friendly Sublime vs. Vim battle : a Sublime user and him were sitting side by side with their laptop display on the wall and taking turn to show off their favourite editor's features. The audience was mostly web developers (no old Unix neckbeard around) and I could hear at the beginning of the session some condescending remarks toward the "archaic" Vim, which was obviously going to get smashed by the "modern" Sublime. Of course it didn't quite turn out like that and at the end everyone seem to think that while Sublime was more sexy and approachable, Vim was a valid choice as well. One of my coworker who was using exclusively Eclipse recently started to use Vim after trying Sublime. Sublime had opened his mind to efficient text editing and he started using Vim more often because it's free, ubiquitous and easy to use remotely. I know several long-time Eclipse users who got seduced by Sublime. They had no idea it was possible to edit text so efficiently. Of course Vim or Emacs can achieve the same level of efficiency and beyond, but Sublime makes it more discoverable. Sublime is good for the reputation of text editors as opposed to IDEs, therefore it's good for Vim and Emacs.
- ldh 14y ago
  Never try to use anything you're not already familiar with, got it.
  - kami8845 14y ago
    I used emacs every day for 2 years. Then I switched to Sublime Text.
    - gnuvince 14y ago
      Can you expand on your experience with both editors?
- ww520 14y ago
  No need to decipher elisp. It's pretty simple and straight forward. Being able to express something is not unique to Python. Any language would do.
  - cmpitg 14y ago
    Not really. Emacs Lisp is really powerful but not a beautiful language. The APIs are unnatural and sometimes inconsistent to those who come from non-Lisp background. I got to write tons of "immediate" APIs to make things prettier. No namespace-like feature and undocumented APIs (like the notorius CEDET or how to create a new mode...) are real pain.
- acomjean 14y ago
  One of the things about emacs is its on almost every machine you can find accessible by terminal. Except when its not, which is why I know enough vi commands to do really simple things. (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail). I'll fully admit that the configuration and lisp scripts are confusing in emacs. Its almost too configurable. But they are amazingly powerful. Plus emacs has the indispensable (M-x tetris)... I've looked at Sublime, its a beautiful editor though. It seems to have some good tricks up its sleave as well
  - gknoy 14y ago
    Even when it's not available, if vi is available chances are you can ask the administrator nicely to install emacs through a package manager. I just wish it were easier to use it on my local machine in a terminal but still maintain a GUI version as well.
    - zwass 14y ago
      > I just wish it were easier to use it on my local machine in a terminal but still maintain a GUI version as well. Emacs? I use a nice GUI build from http://emacsformacosx.com/ http://emacsformacosx.com/. It runs great in both the GUI and shell.
    - __david__ 14y ago
      emacs -nw
  - claudius 14y ago
    > (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail). I tend to uninstall vi and install ed on my machines, it is just enough and about 90% smaller! :)
    - cmpitg 14y ago
      TRAMP & eshell would help you achieve 100% your local Emacs productivity on remote machines, and 100% smaller (you actually don't need to install anything on remote machine) :-)
- tangue 14y ago
  For small plugins yes, it's on par with Emacs, but I've yet to see something like org-mode or tramp in Sublime Text, and it's not open, closed-souce text editor don't last long.

by arocks 14y ago

kami8845 14y ago

Seems similar to Sublime Text 2. Except for the part where you're stuck trying to decipher existing Emacs Lisp. With Python I find I can express what I'm trying to do without too much thought.

jlongster 14y ago
Regarding sublime's API, can you split windows? Invoke subprocesses, and create REPLs? Genuinely curious, but I think you can do a lot more with Emacs' APIs, and modify core parts of the editor since most of it is written in ELisp and you can easily swap out functions.
- josh-j 14y ago
  Yes, you can do all of those things with sublime's API (https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL, https://github.com/SublimeText/Origami https://github.com/SublimeText/Origami). Yes, emacs is more extensible, but not where it matters, really. I.e., I don't think you're going to see any cool feature made with elisp that can't be ported to sublime.
  - jlongster 14y ago
    Ok, that's pretty cool. Still doesn't seem as supported by the core APIs though. In Emacs I can run a REPL and attach it to any process with a few lines of code. I love Sublime Text, but I would argue that Emacs is more extensible in all sorts of places where it really matters.
  - xxpor 14y ago
    TRAMP. The sublime equivalent is terrible.
  - martinced 14y ago
    No latter than yesterday I did a search and replace in Emacs doing Lisp substitution to create the replacement string. Actually it was better than that: I did record a macro who switched back & forth with another buffer, executing something in another REPL, then doing the substitution. It was quite an hack but it worked perfectly. Can you do such things in Sublime? What about MuMaMo (Multi-Major-Mode)? Can you write something like Emacs' MuMaMo in Sublime? (basically it switched major mode depending on context inside a single file) What about org-mode, Magit and semi-structural editing with Paredit? Can you do all this with Sublime? And is Sublime open source? If you can do all this I may take a look. How easy is Sublime easy to extend and in which language do you code it?
  - zosima 14y ago
    You can probably add every single feature in emacs to sublime. The 30 earth-years and many, many man-years of features, additions and smoothing of interactions that has gone into emacs, will however take quite some time to come to par with. See e.g. tramp, org-mode, the vc-modes, gnus, magit, smart indenting etc. martinced: you have been hell-banned for some, to me, completely opaque reason.
Cacti 14y ago
ST2's plugin interface and Emacs's interpreter are about a similar as Excel is to R, or an Accord is to an F1 car. ST2's plugin interface may be nice and sufficient for most "normal" tasks, but there plenty of things you simply cannot do.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- cwlb 14y ago
  example?
  - stevekemp 14y ago
    A web-browser inside your editor? A mail client inside your editor? The ability to make HTTP-requests, parse their results, and format the results inside your existing editor window?
    - aerique 14y ago
      You forgot the web server :-) http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Elnode http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Elnode
    - reeses 14y ago
      Editor? I do not think that word means what you think it means! Emacs is an abstraction layer for a non-preemptively threaded virtual machine, one application of which involves editing text, sound, video, images, etc.
stray 14y ago
If you took the time to learn elisp, you'd experience the same ease with emacs. You didn't always know python. You learned it. I own and use Sublime Text 2 -- and I do enjoy it. I also use and enjoy emacs. Sublime Text 2 is far prettier...
- ajross 14y ago
  I've played with it a few times, and just did again. The little "minimap" preview thing on the right side is cute (and disableable) -- it actually helps to provide an aesthetic indication as to when your file is Just Way Too Long. The visual display of tab characters is subtle and attractive, and probably useful to many people trapped in editors that do that stuff invisibly or wrong (it's not as good as dtrt-mode in emacs though, which will auto-guess whitepace conventions, but I'd certainly be pleased if emacs were to implement a similar thing). But at the same time, I can't actually use the thing. No cursor motion keys available from the home row, seriously? Opening a file brings me up a GUI dialog with minimal (and, relative to the editor, inconsistent) keyboard navigability? The waste of space is awful: six columns wasted on the right side of the screen just to tell me line numbers that emacs just puts in the modeline. It seems like the kind of editor someone from an IDE would want to use, and which would expose them to "serious programmer's editor" features. It's not going to pull away any emacs or vim users any time soon.
  - quiesce 14y ago
    People agreed re the minimap: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap
    - snotrockets 14y ago
      And Minimap can overlay the function names over the map, for even more usability.
  - rhizome31 14y ago
    > It seems like the kind of editor someone from an IDE would want to use, and which would expose them to "serious programmer's editor" features This is indeed what happens and I think it's a good thing : it brings the notion of efficient text editing to the masses. Recently in my town one of my coworker did a friendly Sublime vs. Vim battle : a Sublime user and him were sitting side by side with their laptop display on the wall and taking turn to show off their favourite editor's features. The audience was mostly web developers (no old Unix neckbeard around) and I could hear at the beginning of the session some condescending remarks toward the "archaic" Vim, which was obviously going to get smashed by the "modern" Sublime. Of course it didn't quite turn out like that and at the end everyone seem to think that while Sublime was more sexy and approachable, Vim was a valid choice as well. One of my coworker who was using exclusively Eclipse recently started to use Vim after trying Sublime. Sublime had opened his mind to efficient text editing and he started using Vim more often because it's free, ubiquitous and easy to use remotely. I know several long-time Eclipse users who got seduced by Sublime. They had no idea it was possible to edit text so efficiently. Of course Vim or Emacs can achieve the same level of efficiency and beyond, but Sublime makes it more discoverable. Sublime is good for the reputation of text editors as opposed to IDEs, therefore it's good for Vim and Emacs.
ldh 14y ago
Never try to use anything you're not already familiar with, got it.
- kami8845 14y ago
  I used emacs every day for 2 years. Then I switched to Sublime Text.
  - gnuvince 14y ago
    Can you expand on your experience with both editors?
ww520 14y ago
No need to decipher elisp. It's pretty simple and straight forward. Being able to express something is not unique to Python. Any language would do.
- cmpitg 14y ago
  Not really. Emacs Lisp is really powerful but not a beautiful language. The APIs are unnatural and sometimes inconsistent to those who come from non-Lisp background. I got to write tons of "immediate" APIs to make things prettier. No namespace-like feature and undocumented APIs (like the notorius CEDET or how to create a new mode...) are real pain.
acomjean 14y ago
One of the things about emacs is its on almost every machine you can find accessible by terminal. Except when its not, which is why I know enough vi commands to do really simple things. (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail). I'll fully admit that the configuration and lisp scripts are confusing in emacs. Its almost too configurable. But they are amazingly powerful. Plus emacs has the indispensable (M-x tetris)... I've looked at Sublime, its a beautiful editor though. It seems to have some good tricks up its sleave as well
- gknoy 14y ago
  Even when it's not available, if vi is available chances are you can ask the administrator nicely to install emacs through a package manager. I just wish it were easier to use it on my local machine in a terminal but still maintain a GUI version as well.
  - zwass 14y ago
    > I just wish it were easier to use it on my local machine in a terminal but still maintain a GUI version as well. Emacs? I use a nice GUI build from http://emacsformacosx.com/ http://emacsformacosx.com/. It runs great in both the GUI and shell.
  - __david__ 14y ago
    emacs -nw
- claudius 14y ago
  > (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail). I tend to uninstall vi and install ed on my machines, it is just enough and about 90% smaller! :)
  - cmpitg 14y ago
    TRAMP & eshell would help you achieve 100% your local Emacs productivity on remote machines, and 100% smaller (you actually don't need to install anything on remote machine) :-)
tangue 14y ago
For small plugins yes, it's on par with Emacs, but I've yet to see something like org-mode or tramp in Sublime Text, and it's not open, closed-souce text editor don't last long.