Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 10:20 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)
Parent article: Making Emacs popular again

25 years ago I studied physics in Bergen University in Norway. Most stuff and students were using Emacs for writing papers and thesis in LaTex and for various MatLab scripts and code. Emacs definitely lost that segment when desktops and notebooks with Windows replaced Unix workstations.

But I am rather unsure that it was due to Emacs not following platform conventions. Various IDE from Borland for DOS were much better than Microsoft offerings and popular. Then Borland released IDE for Windows that did followed platform conventions and that was still better than MS. But it still lost to MS.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 12:29 UTC (Thu) by jmclnx (guest, #72456) [Link] (4 responses)

I learned vi first and eventually moved through many versions to vim. The following is for my own personal workflow and buth vi[m]/emacs are great tools.

I have been using emacs a lot more over the last few years and this is what keeps me coming back. Remote editing using ssh is awesome. Editing encrypted text files via emacs so easy I use emacs for a password manager (via ccrypt). And source control (rcs/cvs), to me works better then what I have in vim (my own tool). I assume the same for git and will give that a try soon.

But the things that keep me from using emacs 100% are: Tag files, I tried many 'emacs plugins' for that and no matter what I try, i cannot get tags work exactly like vi, I am close though. Another 'killer' vi[m] function is how easy it is to pipe selected text into an external tool, which I use quite a bit. To be fair, I have not looked to see how to do that in emacs since vi[m] method is so easy.

Anyway will be interesting in seeing what happens in the near future with emacs.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 13:46 UTC (Thu) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link] (2 responses)

> Another 'killer' vi[m] function is how easy it is to pipe selected text into an external tool, which I use quite a bit. To be fair, I have not looked to see how to do that in emacs since vi[m] method is so easy.

Select text, M-x shell-command-on-region (which is fittingly bound to M-| by default).

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 22:17 UTC (Thu) by jmclnx (guest, #72456) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks, gave it a try and it kind of worked, but it put the results in a new buffer. But found info on slack exchange that had a list function that would work exactly as vi calling the command you gave me.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 22:42 UTC (Thu) by asjo (guest, #56570) [Link]

> but it put the results in a new buffer

If you want the selected text to be replaced, press C-u M-| instead of just M-| before entering the command.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 8, 2020 13:50 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

For remote editing I use lsyncd. It works with any editor and allows to edit files when offline. Surely it requires some setup on the client, but as long as the server has ssh and rsync, it works.