Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 10:28 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790)
In reply to: Making Emacs popular again by samroberts
Parent article: Making Emacs popular again

There's an element of "It's everywhere" that vi (not necessarily vim) has: vi compatible editors and keystrokes on networking and telecoms equipment etc. etc. If you're going to be in that environment, it's worth knowing vi keystrokes because that's what you'll get.

Text editing- maybe everything does markdown now?

IDEs are the curse/blessing of the age. They're a curse because they encourage lazy learning or will point out all the errors in your copy pasted code for you: they're a blessing because they are quick to use if you have access to the extensions. VSC is nice, if you like that sort of thing, because it has a terminal and SSH readily available from two extensions.

If you're really stuck using a Windows OS, then WSL allows you to drop a real Linux in and just work in Linux.

Emacs - works for that community of folk who want an extensible tool on their own machine, are happy to debug and write their own code in LISP. That's a larger community than the Linux distro Emacs packagers but maybe not by an order of magnitude. If distros can't package Emacs, it will die out in all likelihood.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 14:09 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

If you're going to be in that environment, it's worth knowing vi keystrokes because that's what you'll get.

I once saw a router which didn't even have vi, only ed... The actual recommended method to change configuration was to download the configuration via FTP, edit locally, then upload via FTP.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 10, 2020 13:39 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

That's basically what I do for Windows and macOS development except that `git diff > foo.patch && scp foo.patch` is the normal transport medium. Sure, there's Vim, but that's mostly just good enough to make the change; integrating it into the rest of the workflow ends up back on one of my main machines.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted Jul 8, 2020 8:03 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

If the device supports FTP, you can just using Emacs with TRAMP, I assume?