Toward a "modern" Emacs [LWN.net]

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 27, 2020 23:20 UTC (Sun) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492)
In reply to: Toward a "modern" Emacs by Wol
Parent article: Toward a "modern" Emacs

> Emacs is a power tool. Like all power tools it has a steep learning curve.

Such crazy.

I was more or less, out of obligation of corporate windows desktop, Linux systems, and local culture to adopt VSCode as an editor on a gig last year.

It's mostly consistent with standards put on the world by the IBM PC standard. And because of that, and a bunch of actually existing plugins, I was as productive with it, in a few days, as I've ever been in any IDE. I'll grant I don't spend 40 hours a week refactoring code (data!), but I don't know who does.

I'll go as far as saying I did not learn VSCode at all. Because it just worked with they way one who uses computers would expect it to work.

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Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 6:59 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

I tried to use vscode last year. It did not work the way I expected, and I've been using computers for a long time.

Well, maybe I've just been using computers for TOO long and that's my problem. On the other hand my son also did some programming this summer and he also used vscode. He also had trouble getting various things to work (this was a large pre-existing C++ codebase, using a debugger, etc.) We spent a non-trivial amount of time searching the internet for the correct incantation of inscrutable JSON settings to add to various config files.

Yes, vscode is a good editor. It has some nice things. It does some things well. It also has some annoying things, and some things it doesn't do very well. If what you need to do is complex, then you will have to learn some new things, even with vscode. That's just a fact.

I get that some people are upset about the C-c/C-x thing. I agree, it's too bad that this conflict happened. But, "just change Emacs" is really a non-starter. C-c and C-x are two of the most fundamental keys in the entirety of Emacs. You can't just change those keys to something else! Well, I mean, of course you CAN just change them: it's Emacs after all. But no Emacs user who's been using the editor for more than a few weeks would be happy about that change. It's like telling a vi user that you are changing the colon key to mean something else.

The idea that resistance to the CUA change is simply RMS being an unreasonable autocrat is ludicrous.

Sure, have a mode that can enable CUA bindings (exists already, of course). Great. Maybe it could even be the default (on the assumption that experienced users will have an easier time resetting it than novice users will have setting it); I actually don't really care what the defaults are. But, the people who really KNOW Emacs, and the people who are DOCUMENTING Emacs, writing all the howto's, guides, wiki pages, providing help on StackOverflow, etc. etc. will all be using the traditional bindings. And probably 85% of solutions or improvements will involve using C-c or C-x at least once. Confusion will reign.

So it seems likely to me that anyone who wants to actually use Emacs as their editor that they program in all day every day will switch over to use the traditional bindings at some point anyway. Probably sooner rather than later.