Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 8, 2020 6:57 UTC (Fri) by idrys (subscriber, #4347)
In reply to: Making Emacs popular again by mgedmin
Parent article: Making Emacs popular again

> I respect Emacs a lot -- it seems like a more capable engine, it just has poor usability. Vim, while it feels like a pile of hacks, tends to work well.
> Compare the keyboard commands to split the editor window vertically or horizontally so you could see two files at once: in vim it's Ctrl-w v or Ctrl-w h,
> while in Emacs is Ctrl-x 5 2 and Ctrl-x 5 4 or some such nonsense with absolutely zero mnemonic value.

That probably just shows how different people are: I've been using Emacs since the late 90s, and its choice of commands made more sense to me than those in vim (the first editor I used on Linux was joe, maybe that says something as well.) Even with a German keyboard layout.

Maybe Emacs vs vi(m) is like cat people vs dog people :)

> I've heard claims that the default Emacs keybindings are terrible on purpose, to force users to create custom mappings they would personally prefer.
> I'm not sure I believe that, but it's plausible and exactly the kind of abdication of responsibility towards user experience that hinders Emacs's
> acceptance.

Is changing the keybindings really that common? As said above, I'm happy with them (maybe I'm just used to them :); I also used firemacs in Firefox back when it still worked.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 8, 2020 9:23 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (2 responses)

> I've been using Emacs since the late 90s, and its choice of commands made more sense to me than those in vim

Can you explain this to me?

I understand and remember things like Ctrl+F/B (forward/back), Meta+f/b (same, but for word motions). I'm baffled by the Ctrl+X 5 2 sequences.

(I can remember Ctrl+X 5 1 for "leave only one window" and Ctrl+X 5 0 for "close the window", because 1 and 0 are mnemonic, although the Ctrl+X 5 part is still weird and unintuitive. In vim this would be Ctrl-W o for "window, only" and Ctrl+W q for "window, quit". Ok, there's also Ctrl+W c for "window, close", which differs from Ctrl+W q in that it won't quit vim if you have only one window open.)

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 8, 2020 12:27 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> Can you explain this to me?

I think it must be like an in-joke.

It starts out fairly mnemonic:
C-x 0 - close current window
C-x 1 - make this the only window
C-x 2 - split the window (top and bottom of course - terminal only have 80 columns, and 40 is really too narrow to be useful)

but then new features were added incrementally:

C-x 3 - split side-by-side, because megapixel displays makes this useful
C-x 4 - do something in the "other" window - because now that we have more than 2 windows, there are more things we want to do.
C-x 5 - do something in another frame (X11 window) because a real window system makes that meaningful.
C-x 6 - does something with text columns in a buffer ... OK, you have to squint a bit to see the connection now
C-x 7 ... nothing
C-x 8 - insert unicode chars ... squinting isn't sufficient any more

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 8, 2020 14:52 UTC (Fri) by idrys (subscriber, #4347) [Link]

>> Can you explain this to me?

> I think it must be like an in-joke.

> It starts out fairly mnemonic:
> C-x 0 - close current window
> C-x 1 - make this the only window
> C-x 2 - split the window (top and bottom of course - terminal only have 80 columns, and 40 is really too narrow to be useful)

Keep in mind that I started using it in the 90s.

> but then new features were added incrementally:

> C-x 3 - split side-by-side, because megapixel displays makes this useful
> C-x 4 - do something in the "other" window - because now that we have more than 2 windows, there are more things we want to do.

I rarely (if ever) use more than a horizontal split, as this is most useful to me, and I usually just switch between them ('o' is easy to remember for that.)

> C-x 5 - do something in another frame (X11 window) because a real window system makes that meaningful.

Ok, I always run it -nw (started doing so because I did not always have X available anyway, and stuck with it because I really prefer the look.)

> C-x 6 - does something with text columns in a buffer ... OK, you have to squint a bit to see the connection now
> C-x 7 ... nothing
> C-x 8 - insert unicode chars ... squinting isn't sufficient any more

These are indeed odd, but I've never used them :)

Regarding the vi(m) interface: Maybe I might find it easier now, but I was probably mostly confused by the interface back then.

(And I really like M-x <whatever> telling you if there's a shortcut available.)