Compatibility is important [LWN.net]

Compatibility is important

Posted Oct 4, 2020 11:53 UTC (Sun) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
Parent article: Toward a "modern" Emacs

For me the main problem with Emacs is its permanent breakage across upgrades. It's even my main blocker from upgrading my distro, because I *know* that I'll again have a terrible experience for 3 months, the time it takes to fix everything again. And I'm not using anything really custom, just basic stuff like trying to fix the broken auto-indent stuff that happily appends tabs and spaces after your last edited line, using a barely readable font, fixing tab-width etc. Many of these change and trigger errors upon upgrades.

There's no incentive for developers to actually *learn* how to master it since it will be worthless again 1 year later.

On the input side, I'm still very annoyed by the stubbornness in confusing tabs and spaces. Tabs are for indent, spaces for alignment, but I somewhat gave up and finally spend my time deleting wrong tabs and replacing them with spaces by hand. Having lost the ability to delete a region without copying it into the buffer when switching from Xemacs to emacs continues to annoy me as well, because I cannot easily use the same block to replace many occurrences of a seemingly identical block anymore.

Still it's the editor I find myself most comfortable with. But I also hate it for its strong refusal to adapt to my needs nor helping me perform rare operations. Very often I find myself saving my file an running sed or vi on it for a repetitive operation that would take hours to figure inside emacs. Contrary to its original author I don't live in ideology nor dogma and just want to get things done efficiently, so if I can do something easier with something else, I switch for the time it takes to do it.

The first thing to think about for future versions, instead of switching colors, is to think about *keeping* users by giving them less incentive to use other tools in the first place, even temporarily. There are extremely few emacs users around me, all others seem to be on gvim an to be mostly happy. Thinking that it's probably much easier to switch from emacs to gvim than the other way around suggests that not tempting to switch (even just for a small operation) is the most important thing to achieve.

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Compatibility is important

Posted Oct 4, 2020 21:15 UTC (Sun) by jhhaller (guest, #56103) [Link]

I hear you. I frequently remote into other machines. Emacs is rarely installed on those machines, and even if it was, it doesn't work the way I want it to without changing the configuration. I don't have the time or patience to address this. My first editor on Unix was ed on a printing terminal, so on those remote machines, I generally use vi as a visual tool. I can use the vi commands of a, d, i, and r. Everything else I do is prefixed with a ":" and an ed command. Yank and put on vi is a great mystery to me, and I have to reread the manual to figure out how to use it. I did learn to use emacs and became quite proficient with it, but tired of installing and configuring it to do what I wanted.