3 ms·

I always get a chuckle out of people complaining that Emacs is too slow. Maybe I've just "gotten used to it", but when I first started using it I was sharing a

by treerex 13y ago

I always get a chuckle out of people complaining that Emacs is too slow. Maybe I've just "gotten used to it", but when I first started using it I was sharing a Sun 3 with ten or fifteen other people. I'd also argue that modes in other editors are ad hoc regexp parsers in some other form... regexps, in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, work well. And yes, virtually everything is implemented in Emacs Lisp. That's the whole point. People have been trying to build "another programmable editor" for 30 decades. It hasn't happened yet. Why do you think it will happen soon?

DennisP 13y ago
Yep, Ben Franklin worked on one, iirc.
omaranto 13y ago
There are definitely other programmable text editors available. I use Textadept, which is like Emacs with Lua and minimalism instead of Elisp and evrything-but-the-kitchen-sinkness. Of course it doesn't do nearly all that Emacs does but it feels as programmable to me.
jasonm23 13y ago
30 Decades!!! wow.
- James_Duval 13y ago
  Emacs didn't work very well on the Bouchon loom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basile_Bouchon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basile_Bouchon) but dammit, they tried.
artagnon 13y ago
You're not going to notice any lags if you use Emacs to work on toy projects. Try a non-trivial operation on a repository of respectable size, like linux.git: if you don't classify those operations as being "completely unusable", you're living in the dark ages. Incorrect. Several proprietary IDEs use real parsers. Which is precisely why they're able to provide all sorts of magic functionality like "refactor". And no, regular expressions don't "work well" by a stretch: even the common modes like shell-script-mode, perl-mode (cperl-mode is slightly better), python-mode are riddled with bugs. If you look at the relatively new js2-mode, you'll notice that the parser is an Elisp port of the Rhino parser. Also, Semantic Bovinator from the CEDET project was recently merged into emacs, although it doesn't have major users yet. Precisely because regular expressions aren't "good enough". The reason everything is implemented in Emacs Lisp is because there is no alternative: Elisp doesn't have an FFI to speak of. Otherwise, I don't see the problem with using existing parsers; unless your "point" is to take everyone back to the dark ages. No matter how you look at it, there are more alternatives to Vim/Emacs than there were 30 years ago. A lot of people are happy with TextMate, Coda, Visual Studio, Eclipse. It's not like there's something special about the year 2013, but what I meant is: Emacs will become extinct, and that is inevitable. And yes, I'm hoping for some kind of programmable editor to take its place soon.

by treerex 13y ago

DennisP 13y ago

Yep, Ben Franklin worked on one, iirc.

omaranto 13y ago

There are definitely other programmable text editors available. I use Textadept, which is like Emacs with Lua and minimalism instead of Elisp and evrything-but-the-kitchen-sinkness. Of course it doesn't do nearly all that Emacs does but it feels as programmable to me.

jasonm23 13y ago

30 Decades!!! wow.

James_Duval 13y ago
Emacs didn't work very well on the Bouchon loom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basile_Bouchon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basile_Bouchon) but dammit, they tried.

artagnon 13y ago

You're not going to notice any lags if you use Emacs to work on toy projects. Try a non-trivial operation on a repository of respectable size, like linux.git: if you don't classify those operations as being "completely unusable", you're living in the dark ages. Incorrect. Several proprietary IDEs use real parsers. Which is precisely why they're able to provide all sorts of magic functionality like "refactor". And no, regular expressions don't "work well" by a stretch: even the common modes like shell-script-mode, perl-mode (cperl-mode is slightly better), python-mode are riddled with bugs. If you look at the relatively new js2-mode, you'll notice that the parser is an Elisp port of the Rhino parser. Also, Semantic Bovinator from the CEDET project was recently merged into emacs, although it doesn't have major users yet. Precisely because regular expressions aren't "good enough". The reason everything is implemented in Emacs Lisp is because there is no alternative: Elisp doesn't have an FFI to speak of. Otherwise, I don't see the problem with using existing parsers; unless your "point" is to take everyone back to the dark ages. No matter how you look at it, there are more alternatives to Vim/Emacs than there were 30 years ago. A lot of people are happy with TextMate, Coda, Visual Studio, Eclipse. It's not like there's something special about the year 2013, but what I meant is: Emacs will become extinct, and that is inevitable. And yes, I'm hoping for some kind of programmable editor to take its place soon.