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Stack Exchange for Emacs

143 points by masolino 12y ago

VLM 12y ago
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it. (just kidding. I don't like SE but I'm sure this is a great tool for people who do like SE.)
- gaalze 12y ago
  Please don't have an opinion when posting on StackExchange. Democracy and committees are what make America great and why we chose XML over S-Expressions.
wtbob 12y ago
This is Yet Another Example of the amazing utility of being able to easily and stably extend one's environment. emacs is just a text editor, but this project is changing it into a Stack Exchange client. That's useful!
- agumonkey 12y ago
  So you can ask question about emacs on emacs.stackexchange while using stackexchange for emacs in emacs.
- tuhdo 12y ago
  Emacs certainly is not just a text editor. Emacs is just a big REPL, a REPL with a powerful text editor instead of minimal command line interface. Right on the homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/, it is written that: "GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing." Text editing is a subset of Emacs and Emacs Lisp, not the other way around.
  - wtbob 12y ago
    > Emacs certainly is not just a text editor. I know. But it was written as just a text editor—but an extensible one, and so it has grown to be a lot more. Which is really pretty awesome.
    - tuhdo 12y ago
      > But it was written as just a text editor No it's not. It is really a big REPL optimized for text processing. You compare Emacs to the like of Python, not just some random editor. Unlike other editors that have an optional extension language, if you remove Emacs Lisp, effective you remove Emacs. Even file opening is written in Emacs Lisp.
      - wtbob 12y ago
        Dude, I get what you're saying, but you're like a guy who comments on a Facebook picture of a newborn with 'The reason you think he's cute is purely evolutionary.' Yes, of course emacs is a big REPL optimised text processing. But it's optimised for text processing because…it started out as a text editor. The whole point of what I wrote is that emacs started out as a simple text editor (yes, I'm aware that its origin was as text editing macros for TECO) and due to its extensibility it can and has become so much more. Really, I think you got way too hung up on the word 'just.' We both love emacs. We both love having a fully-extensible text editing environment.
        tuhdo 12y ago
        Fair enough :) I just wanted to clarify in case someone read your comments and have a wrong impression that Emacs is a text editor like Vim. Nothing more, nothing less.
- Chris911 12y ago
  I build something similar for Atom a few months ago[1] and while some people liked the idea a lot of comments were negative and turned around that fact that programming is not about copy/pasting and plagiarism. Now a similar project is built but for emacs and comments about the concept of having a client inside an editor is interesting and powerful. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7931667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7931667
psp 12y ago
I never fully "got" emacs even though it was the popular editor during university times and I occasionally use it for quick server admin stuff. Today I feel it has missed its boat with good looking and user friendly stuff available like Sublime Text, Atom, Eclipse and even cloud IDEs. I cant help but to laugh quietly to addons like this.
- tuhdo 12y ago
  Can Sublime Text/Atom do all of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8639804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8639804 ? I want to jump to any file at any time regardless of where I am in the project instantly, can Sublime do it? And even if a project has 30-40k files, it must be fast and make me jump instantly. See the demos in this guide for details: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html Atom has a limit of 2MB text file which is worse than Vim in the 90s.
  - thrw1q 12y ago
    Those videos on the Idris mode are also very impressive: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsON_8vogp4nCQFTnfu43kA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsON_8vogp4nCQFTnfu43kA (Other languages also have nice modes for context-aware completion (and more), like Haskell's ghc-mod and Rust's racer, which is incomplete but is already very nice)
    - pmoriarty 12y ago
      Or take a look at the videos at Emacs Rocks.[1] [1] - http://emacsrocks.com/ http://emacsrocks.com/
  - giovannibajo1 12y ago
    > I want to jump to any file at any time regardless of where I am in the project instantly, can Sublime do it? And even if a project has 30-40k files, it must be fast and make me jump instantly Yes, Sublime handles that smoothly. Do a linux tree clone, enter the directory, run "subl .", then ctrl+p (or cmd+p) and start typing whatever. It fuzzy-completes your typing and immediately displays your selection as a preview in the background as well. Video here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjc9k8ocwiukq5t/sublime-linux.mov?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjc9k8ocwiukq5t/sublime-linux.mov?... (note the percentage in the footer, it was indexing in background the files for code completion and other stuff, since I had just cloned it, but the file jumping still works smoothly). I skimmed through your other videos, and I didn't instantly see anything that I couldn't do with a recent editor as well.
JeremyBanks 12y ago
As it happens, the Emacs Stack Exchange site launched in public beta a couple months ago. http://emacs.stackexchange.com/ http://emacs.stackexchange.com/ (After first seeing the title, I assumed that's what this post was about!)
- Lrigikithumer 12y ago
  That's certainly what the title implies, perhaps "Stack Overflow on Emacs" would have been a better title.
sayemm 12y ago
This is a killer idea! Looking forward to seeing where it goes... will be as helpful, if not more, than ERC has been for me while searching for answers.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Emacs makes complex things possible and simple things hard: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=74 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=74 That post is the fifth most popular thing on my blog, all from search-hits looking for how to count words in Emacs.
- chongli 12y ago
  What's your definition of simple, in this case? A million different users want a million different simple things. An editor that gives all of these functions equal weight is not an editor anyone would want to use.
omouse 12y ago
if you're only using StackOverflow, I created a small mode called sos-mode: https://github.com/omouse/emacs-sos https://github.com/omouse/emacs-sos The difference is that sos-mode is made for getting answers quickly and being able to copy/paste any code snippets. The output buffer of answers uses org-mode so it's easy to tag the list. A full-blown stackexchange mode may be good if you're answering questions or looking for a lot of answers but I don't see that happening a lot. Most users are anonymous (sos-mode doesn't require login) and just want to get some answer.

143 points by masolino 12y ago

VLM 12y ago

Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it. (just kidding. I don't like SE but I'm sure this is a great tool for people who do like SE.)

gaalze 12y ago
Please don't have an opinion when posting on StackExchange. Democracy and committees are what make America great and why we chose XML over S-Expressions.

wtbob 12y ago

This is Yet Another Example of the amazing utility of being able to easily and stably extend one's environment. emacs is just a text editor, but this project is changing it into a Stack Exchange client. That's useful!

agumonkey 12y ago
So you can ask question about emacs on emacs.stackexchange while using stackexchange for emacs in emacs.
tuhdo 12y ago
Emacs certainly is not just a text editor. Emacs is just a big REPL, a REPL with a powerful text editor instead of minimal command line interface. Right on the homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/, it is written that: "GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing." Text editing is a subset of Emacs and Emacs Lisp, not the other way around.
- wtbob 12y ago
  > Emacs certainly is not just a text editor. I know. But it was written as just a text editor—but an extensible one, and so it has grown to be a lot more. Which is really pretty awesome.
  - tuhdo 12y ago
    > But it was written as just a text editor No it's not. It is really a big REPL optimized for text processing. You compare Emacs to the like of Python, not just some random editor. Unlike other editors that have an optional extension language, if you remove Emacs Lisp, effective you remove Emacs. Even file opening is written in Emacs Lisp.
    - wtbob 12y ago
      Dude, I get what you're saying, but you're like a guy who comments on a Facebook picture of a newborn with 'The reason you think he's cute is purely evolutionary.' Yes, of course emacs is a big REPL optimised text processing. But it's optimised for text processing because…it started out as a text editor. The whole point of what I wrote is that emacs started out as a simple text editor (yes, I'm aware that its origin was as text editing macros for TECO) and due to its extensibility it can and has become so much more. Really, I think you got way too hung up on the word 'just.' We both love emacs. We both love having a fully-extensible text editing environment.
      - tuhdo 12y ago
        Fair enough :) I just wanted to clarify in case someone read your comments and have a wrong impression that Emacs is a text editor like Vim. Nothing more, nothing less.
Chris911 12y ago
I build something similar for Atom a few months ago[1] and while some people liked the idea a lot of comments were negative and turned around that fact that programming is not about copy/pasting and plagiarism. Now a similar project is built but for emacs and comments about the concept of having a client inside an editor is interesting and powerful. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7931667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7931667

psp 12y ago

I never fully "got" emacs even though it was the popular editor during university times and I occasionally use it for quick server admin stuff. Today I feel it has missed its boat with good looking and user friendly stuff available like Sublime Text, Atom, Eclipse and even cloud IDEs. I cant help but to laugh quietly to addons like this.

tuhdo 12y ago
Can Sublime Text/Atom do all of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8639804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8639804 ? I want to jump to any file at any time regardless of where I am in the project instantly, can Sublime do it? And even if a project has 30-40k files, it must be fast and make me jump instantly. See the demos in this guide for details: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html Atom has a limit of 2MB text file which is worse than Vim in the 90s.
- thrw1q 12y ago
  Those videos on the Idris mode are also very impressive: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsON_8vogp4nCQFTnfu43kA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsON_8vogp4nCQFTnfu43kA (Other languages also have nice modes for context-aware completion (and more), like Haskell's ghc-mod and Rust's racer, which is incomplete but is already very nice)
  - pmoriarty 12y ago
    Or take a look at the videos at Emacs Rocks.[1] [1] - http://emacsrocks.com/ http://emacsrocks.com/
- giovannibajo1 12y ago
  > I want to jump to any file at any time regardless of where I am in the project instantly, can Sublime do it? And even if a project has 30-40k files, it must be fast and make me jump instantly Yes, Sublime handles that smoothly. Do a linux tree clone, enter the directory, run "subl .", then ctrl+p (or cmd+p) and start typing whatever. It fuzzy-completes your typing and immediately displays your selection as a preview in the background as well. Video here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjc9k8ocwiukq5t/sublime-linux.mov?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjc9k8ocwiukq5t/sublime-linux.mov?... (note the percentage in the footer, it was indexing in background the files for code completion and other stuff, since I had just cloned it, but the file jumping still works smoothly). I skimmed through your other videos, and I didn't instantly see anything that I couldn't do with a recent editor as well.

JeremyBanks 12y ago

As it happens, the Emacs Stack Exchange site launched in public beta a couple months ago. http://emacs.stackexchange.com/ http://emacs.stackexchange.com/ (After first seeing the title, I assumed that's what this post was about!)

Lrigikithumer 12y ago
That's certainly what the title implies, perhaps "Stack Overflow on Emacs" would have been a better title.

sayemm 12y ago

This is a killer idea! Looking forward to seeing where it goes... will be as helpful, if not more, than ERC has been for me while searching for answers.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

Emacs makes complex things possible and simple things hard: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=74 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=74 That post is the fifth most popular thing on my blog, all from search-hits looking for how to count words in Emacs.

chongli 12y ago
What's your definition of simple, in this case? A million different users want a million different simple things. An editor that gives all of these functions equal weight is not an editor anyone would want to use.

omouse 12y ago

if you're only using StackOverflow, I created a small mode called sos-mode: https://github.com/omouse/emacs-sos https://github.com/omouse/emacs-sos The difference is that sos-mode is made for getting answers quickly and being able to copy/paste any code snippets. The output buffer of answers uses org-mode so it's easy to tag the list. A full-blown stackexchange mode may be good if you're answering questions or looking for a lot of answers but I don't see that happening a lot. Most users are anonymous (sos-mode doesn't require login) and just want to get some answer.