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.) 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?
Emacs, too, is bigger on the inside.
I never thought that I can type just about any text, not in the input box of some app, but in my editor - with Emacs, if I need to type anything longer that three words - in Slack app, Zoom chat, browser window, etc., I'll do it in my editor, why have I never thought about this before?
Emacs has no business of taking screenshots, yet I use it to do just that - I'd insert a screenshot while taking notes, OCRing the text out of image when desired.
Before Emacs, I never thought of playing and controlling videos from my editor or driving my WM from it - I simply never thought how advantageous could that even be.
I can't really use anything else without feeling constrained specifically because [mostly] nothing else allows me to type some Lisp in just about any buffer, evaluate it in place and immediately affect not only my editor but any computational aspect on a local or remote machine.
In essence, Emacs is a mindset. Non-Emacs folk often don't see the "actual use cases" because their minds operate on a different plane. And for some, once they crack open that door of possibilities, there's really no turning back.
Writing Visual Studio, for example. Debugging Visual Studio. Extending Visual Studio in more than the ways it has already provided.
It means not being constrained to do only those things someone else had seen fit to permit you to do. It means freedom.
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.
They could at least change the default theme to one of the already-bundled modus-themes or something.
Out of the box, project and context aware auto complete is an essential feature in a modern IDE.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
There are ways to search and grep files on Windows.
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.
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.
...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.
...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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
They say there’s no Emacs — only your Emacs.
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.
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.
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.
Or vterm if you don't want to be proficient with eshell.
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 DM4, the low level stuff, raw inform6 without the English library. Advanced stuff: 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/exa...
The game itself in order to be played with M-x malyon:
https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5
Now compare it to the C ports under BSD's or GNU/Linux.
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/emac...
[term-nasty.el source] 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/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/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
Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty:
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
Today I have a way of using <termios.h> stuff to even control the Windows cmd.exe console.
It's the most portable thing there is for getting clean character-at-a-time input, with Ctrl-D and everything.
Your words, not mine. But gene propagation is up there, and steady wages is a sufficient if not necessary condition for that to happen.