Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto]

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=emacs editor,eclipse ide

  Since 2004 Eclipse (Emac's primary competiton for my use case) has lost some
71% of its "trendiness" according to Google.  But Emacs has lost more,
dropping from 25 to 4 (84% less).

  Does this Google Trends graph reflect reality?

  I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs user (not
counting people I only talked to via the Internet).  Of course, popularity is
far from the only criteria, I don't have to obey fashion (if I did, I wouldn't
be using GNU/Linux).  But I do want my development environment to be
reasonably active, improving and well supported.  Can I reasonably trust Emacs
to be active and improving by 2018?  At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++,
Python, Javascript and Java, and general text editor.

  Thank you for your attention.  Sorry for any bad English, I am Brazilian.

--
The sooner we fight global heating, the lesser the cost.
--
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Perry Smith]

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On Aug 26, 2013, at 5:43 PM, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=emacs editor,eclipse ide
> 
>  Since 2004 Eclipse (Emac's primary competiton for my use case) has lost some
> 71% of its "trendiness" according to Google.  But Emacs has lost more,
> dropping from 25 to 4 (84% less).
> 
>  Does this Google Trends graph reflect reality?
> 
>  I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs user (not
> counting people I only talked to via the Internet).  Of course, popularity is
> far from the only criteria, I don't have to obey fashion (if I did, I wouldn't
> be using GNU/Linux).  But I do want my development environment to be
> reasonably active, improving and well supported.  Can I reasonably trust Emacs
> to be active and improving by 2018?  At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++,
> Python, Javascript and Java, and general text editor.
> 
>  Thank you for your attention.  Sorry for any bad English, I am Brazilian.

I've used GNU emacs since it was first released.  From my own personal perspective,
there was a time -- seems like version 18? where it got stuck for a very long time.

Version 22 came out it appears in 2007, 23 came out in 2009.  Now 24 came out
in 2012.  To me, the pace of change has picked up substantially relative to 1995
to 2000 -- but I'm just basing that off of my gut feel recollections.

giggle... I just noticed that Google's trend starts in 2005... thats really funny.  
I guess that is a "trend".  But Emacs isn't trendy.

Emacs is old school.  Very old school with the ability to drive real tty's over
300 baud modems with spectacular  efficiency.  Its on X11, windows, and Mac.
Folks have added emacs key mappings inside browsers and countless other
tools.  Indeed... I bet Eclipse had an emacs key binding option in it.

If you use emacs, you love it.  If you don't, you hate it.  That may explain the 
lack of searches.  Those who know it, already know it. And those who don't 
are not looking for it.

I just don't see it dying off.  Things like TextMate come and will probably fade
away long before emacs dies.

And... its 100% open source and free.  Emacs is the original open source GNU
release that Richard developed and deployed and eventually became the
genesis  of FSF.  You are *almost* asking will FSF be around forever -- which is
also *almost* like asking if Linux will be around forever.  I'm thinkings its a
pretty safe bet that it will be around my entire lifetime and probably yours as well.

Perry


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Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 9:05 PM, Perry Smith <pedzsan@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> I just don't see it dying off.  Things like TextMate come and will probably fade
> away long before emacs dies.
> [...]

Thank you for your answer.  I like Emacs, and I am inclined to continue
improving my Emacs skill (currently I am a humble beginner).

Thank your for your attention

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rustom Mody]

On Tuesday, August 27, 2013 4:13:20 AM UTC+5:30, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto > 
> At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++,
> Python, Javascript and Java, and general text editor.

The same question could be asked for all the above, viz, C++, Python, Java, Latex, general text editing... [Javascript is the obvious exception]

Yeah seriously, in the last month Ive been asked/told about 4 times "... isnt programming as such passe??..."

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 27.08.2013 um 00:43 schrieb Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto:

> Can I reasonably trust Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?  At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++, Python, Javascript and Java, and general text editor.

Yes! That's the reason why GNU Emacs isn't trendy. Trendy things vanish within a short period. (Have you heard from The Strokes recently? And from Os Mutantes?) Untrendy things don't die.

--
Greetings

  Pete

To be is to do.
			– I. Kant
To do is to be.
			– A. Sartre
Yabba-Dabba-Doo!
			– F. Flintstone

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Suvayu Ali]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 07:43:20PM -0300, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
> 
>  Can I reasonably trust Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?  At
> least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++, Python, Javascript and Java, and
> general text editor.

Decide for yourself:

  <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?h=emacs-24>

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> writes:

> Since 2004 Eclipse (Emacs' primary competiton for my use case)

If you are a programmer, Eclipse is *not* Emacs' primary
competitor (by a longshot). It is *vim*. vim and Emacs are
probably just about equally good for programming, but Emacs is
better for every other writing you do: for example, I write this
very text in Emacs, and I wouldn't want to do that in vim. vim is
a tool to write code - Emacs is that, and everything else. vim is
in line with the Unix philosophy of software (one tool - one task
- a common interface - add complexity by *combining* tools - the
pipes, redirects, etc.) while Emacs is perhaps the most advanced
human-computer interface.

> has lost some 71% of its "trendiness" according to Google.  But
> Emacs has lost more, dropping from 25 to 4 (84% less).

Eclipse is torture, and those digits from Google don't say
anything.

> Does this Google Trends graph reflect reality?

No, they are moronic. Trust me.

> I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs
> user (not counting people I only talked to via the Internet).

All programmers use Emacs or vim. Assange uses Emacs, and he has
been hunted into virtual house arrest by the CIA. Serious, what's
the hesitation? Why don't you just start Emacs and see if you like
it? Again, but this time without me losing my head, why do you
care so much what other people use? A lot of people are morons,
and those don't use Emacs. But some people are very good, and they
use Emacs or vim. What group do you want to be in?

> Of course, popularity is far from the only criteria, I don't
> have to obey fashion (if I did, I wouldn't be using GNU/Linux).

That's right you don't. So my advice: don't do it, at all.

> But I do want my development environment to be reasonably
> active, improving and well supported.  Can I reasonably trust
> Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?

100%

> At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++, Python, Javascript and
> Java, and general text editor.

Yes, but probably you should not spend so much time with Python,
and drop Javascript and Java altogether, and replace C++ with C :)
But as for LaTeX, I love it and Emacs is great for doing it. Check
out [1] if you are into LaTeX - and yes, I did all that in Emacs.

> Sorry for any bad English, I am Brazilian.

Your English is very good. Emacs can do spellchecking with aspell,
but I didn't see a single mistake so perhaps you don't need it.

[1]

http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/latex/matte.tex
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/about/matte.pdf

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 01:59:30 +0200
Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:
> Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs
> > user (not counting people I only talked to via the Internet).
> 
> All programmers use Emacs or vim. Assange uses Emacs, and he has
> been hunted into virtual house arrest by the CIA.
[innocent snip]
> What group do you want to be in?

Well, I'd say it's a tough call. I certainly don't want to be put into
house arrest by the CIA, while using vim is... well... an equally bad
form of torture... ;-)

// Sorry, couldn't resist... :-D //

Best, :-)
Marko

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Marc Weber]

> If you are a programmer, Eclipse is *not* Emacs' primary
> competitor (by a longshot). It is *vim*. vim and Emacs are
I've been starting to learn Vim in the first place because I felt
hitting meta- and ctrl- all the time would hurt my fingers in the long
run (That time I neither knew either editor well).

You cannot compare Vim & Emacs, neither should you. Also there is no
longer Vim vs Emacs due to "modal editing in Emacs" (additional plugins)
Both have strength and weaknesses.

Both are well suited to edit "text", thus to write emails.
If anybody prefers one over the other its a very personal preference.

> probably just about equally good for programming, but Emacs is
> better for every other writing you do: for example, I write this
> very text in Emacs, and I wouldn't want to do that in vim. vim is
So this thread might end up being yet another flame war.
Without giving reasons your sentence looks like being a personal
preference only. So we should not comment on it.

> All programmers use Emacs or vim. 
WTF - never heared about IDEA, Eclipse, Netbeans, JEdit, notepad++ and
what not ? Eg for JEdit there is lilypond support with PDF rendering.
I don't know Emacs that well, but eventually nobody has done similar
work for Emacs (yet).
And there are many many many blogs which get written in browsers
probably (?) (Think about the facebook community alone)

Also there are "multiple forks of Emacs" - talking about one Emacs could
be too limited.

Let's say it differently: Just because you cannot imagine programmers
using tools others than Emacs/Vim, it doesn't mean that no such
programmers/programs exist. "The black swan" is a book dedicated to this
topic.

Eg one thing which comes to my mind is "disassemblers", there are some
dedicated tools which eventually outperform Emacs.

So it depends on the task.

> > But I do want my development environment to be reasonably
> > active, improving and well supported.  Can I reasonably trust
> > Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?
Define improving !?

Eg have a look at this one case:
http://slawekk.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/goodbye-proofgeneral/
and you'll understand that your question is too general to be replied
to. It depends on what you do. (I don't know about current state of that
case ..)
(Neiter do I want to say its representative - I cannot judge)

> > At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++, Python, Javascript and
> > Java, and general text editor.
Well - emacs can display images, Vim cannot. So yes, Emacs eventually is
better for some latex tasks.

I'd stop thinking in terms of "vim or emacs", I'd start thinking in
terms of features, such as 
  - modal editing
  - extensible
  - ...

And depending on what you need, neither Vim nor Emacs should be the tool
of your choice, or can Emacs do VBA completion !? :-)
(I didn't look it up, maybe it even can, but I think writing Word macros
should still be done using the Word Macro editor)

If you have any problem, question, task, join any of both communities
and try to estimate what exsisting solutions will give you, then make a
choice.

What Emacs eventually is better at:
  - using <m-*> like mappings in console
  - debugging (due to much better async support in Emacs), although you
    can come close enough in Vim. I wrote my own solutions because I
    didn't find any fitting my needs
  - async io solutions such as interactive grep (eg get results in a
    window while grep is still running)
  - ..

For Vim there are some workarounds, so start to get your job done, too.

Neither Vim nor Emacs have "statically typed extension language" such as
Scala. Vim eg has eventually a nicer regular expression syntax for some
cases etc. There are many differences.

I don't want to start a flame war, I just want to say "This topic is
much more complicated that you can think about in a single day".

Thus unless there is a particular use case the whole discusion is pretty
much void IMHO.

Marc Weber

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Marc Weber <marco-oweber@gmx.de> writes:

> I've been starting to learn Vim in the first place because I
> felt hitting meta- and ctrl- all the time would hurt my fingers

Yes, it hurt my fingers bad for a while. I solved it by wearing
gloves with cut fingers (like the one burglar use), and, instead
of the Meta key, I setup another prefix key, C-o [1], as well as
the shell-like-CLI described in another thread, on M-i. It is
actually not the Meta key, but M-x, that is my problem.

> You cannot compare Vim & Emacs, neither should you.

Why not?

> Both are well suited to edit "text", thus to write emails.

Are there vim equivalences for rmail and Gnus?

> If anybody prefers one over the other its a very personal
> preference.

No, it can be analyzed. I haven't used vim 1% of my Emacs time, so
I'm not the person to do it, though.

> So this thread might end up being yet another flame war.

All threads might end up in flame wars. But we are not flaming
now, and I'm not about to, either.

> Without giving reasons your sentence looks like being a personal
> preference only. So we should not comment on it.

So your comment is that we should not comment on it...

> WTF - never heared about IDEA, Eclipse, Netbeans, JEdit,
> notepad++ and what not?

I've heard of Eclipse, Netbeans, and notepad++, and I know enough
about them to never, *ever* trade Emacs for that. I mean... sure,
you can program on my TI-83 calculator (in Basic) - or you can do
O's and 1's in a cave well, with a stone axe. But I never met a
programmer who did that, and I don't think that is by chance.

> And there are many many many blogs which get written in browsers
> probably (?) (Think about the facebook community alone)

I hate FB and blogs (the technology that is, I know there are good
blog posts), and the bare thought of writing in a browser is
repulsive. (Unless the browser is Emacs-w3m.)

> Also there are "multiple forks of Emacs" - talking about one
> Emacs could be too limited.

I talk about GNU Emacs on a Linux or otherwise Unix system.

> Let's say it differently: Just because you cannot imagine
> programmers using tools others than Emacs/Vim, it doesn't mean
> that no such programmers/programs exist. "The black swan" is a
> book dedicated to this topic.

Let's put it this way: all the programmers I've met who I have
respect for, as programmers and otherwise, use Emacs or Vim.

> Eg one thing which comes to my mind is "disassemblers", there
> are some dedicated tools which eventually outperform Emacs.

What's that?

> Well - emacs can display images, Vim cannot. So yes, Emacs
> eventually is better for some latex tasks.

The LaTeX mode is very helpful. I don't use Emacs to show the
PDFs, as I always use Emacs in a Linux VT. I just switch to X with
M-u and check the PDF file in xpdf.

> And depending on what you need, neither Vim nor Emacs should be
> the tool of your choice, or can Emacs do VBA completion !? :-)
> (I didn't look it up, maybe it even can, but I think writing
> Word macros should still be done using the Word Macro editor)

It *is* Emacs or Vim. 100%. Why on earth would you use Word (?!) -
at all, ever? What would you need it for?

> Thus unless there is a particular use case the whole discusion
> is pretty much void IMHO.

For a void discussion, you sure had a lot to say.

[1]

(defun init-C-o-prefix ()
  (interactive)
  (define-prefix-command 'C-o-prefix)
  (global-set-key "\C-o" 'C-o-prefix)
  (init-C-o-keys) )
(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'init-C-o-prefix)

(defun init-C-o-keys ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((map (current-global-map)))
    (define-key map "\C-o1" 'delete-other-windows)
    (define-key map "\C-o2" 'split-window-vertically)
    (define-key map "\C-os" 'web-search)
    ; etc.
    ))

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Jorge]

Thank you for your considerations.  I will learn more Emacs after my
dissertation.  Until then, I will continue to use Emacs sub optimally (even
then, I find it fun and productive).

Regards

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Stefan Monnier]

>> All programmers use Emacs or vim. Assange uses Emacs, and he has
>> been hunted into virtual house arrest by the CIA.
> Well, I'd say it's a tough call. I certainly don't want to be put into
> house arrest by the CIA,

Huh?  Why not?  Think about it: you can then focus 100% on hacking on
Emacs rather than waste your time outside.


        Stefan

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Huh?  Why not?  Think about it: you can then focus 100% on
> hacking on Emacs rather than waste your time outside.

It doesn't work that way for me. Doing fun things that has nothing
to do with programming give the ideas time to mature, and
surface. And when I *do* program, I do it with energy and
focus. If I only did programming, that would be a disaster for the
production of ideas, not to mention what it would do to the body
and mind.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Yagnesh Raghava Yakkala]

> Decide for yourself:
>
>   <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?h=emacs-24>

Why not looking at master/trunk.?
  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/

-- 
ఎందరో మహానుభావులు అందరికి వందనములు.
YYR

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Emanuel Berg's message of Wed Aug 28 03:08:27 +0200 2013:
> Are there vim equivalences for rmail and Gnus?
It was not about "managing mail", but about "writing" mails.
Even mutt can use vim as editor. (I use sup).
I agree that managing mail with Vim might be a lot harder.
I never tried the notmuch interface for Vim.

> I hate FB and blogs (the technology that is, I know there are good
> blog posts), and the bare thought of writing in a browser is
> repulsive. (Unless the browser is Emacs-w3m.)
:-) 
Maybe its time to advertise yet another project:
http://plover.stenoknight.com/

I'm pretty sure you'll have a hard time to beat those speeds with
either Emacs or Vim (Luckily you could use both :)

> Let's put it this way: all the programmers I've met who I have
> respect for, as programmers and otherwise, use Emacs or Vim.
:-) I tend to agree.

> > Eg one thing which comes to my mind is "disassemblers", there
> > are some dedicated tools which eventually outperform Emacs.
> What's that?
http://www.ollydbg.de/ (I bet it has features emacs does not have).
Wether "programming assembler" or hacking executables for educational
purposes is a common task is debatable. I'd be interested in whether the
author used Vim/Emacs to write that tool :)

> It *is* Emacs or Vim. 100%. Why on earth would you use Word (?!) -
To read .doc files which people may have sent you.

I tried switching to Emacs for two weeks, but in the end it was too
hard, I was addicted to Vim (and my custom extensions) too much.
The price was high: I had to rewrite quite a lot of plugins from
scratch, such as ruby debugging, php debugging, plugin management,
ruby/python repl with completion and such. I had to write a Vim version
of scion, of ensime, ... and I've been unable to maintain all of this
due to lack of time, and some of the code is not portable.

Eventually I would have wasted less time if I had started with Emacs.
Who knows?

Simple list of extensions I tried using in the past (I had to write Vim
support code for - but which I was unable to maintain due to lack of
time):

Started by Emacs users:
- scion (Haskell compilation server)
- ensime (Scala support)
- blender python patch (so that you can code blender python code in
  emacs)

Started by Vim users:
- eclim (headless Eclipse as server for Vim to get completion, error
  checking and the like). There is a port for Emacs (no idea about its
  current state)

Of course this list is incomplete, yet it shows that Emacs users are
active and writing support code for new stuff.

Marc Weber

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rustom Mody]

[To the OP]:
In 1990 the main competition to emacs was vi
In 2000 it was Word
Today it is google-docs.

Which also suggests a direction for increasing the emacs user-base -- add an org-mode input mode to google docs.
[My own estimates] : This will increase the number of people who have heard of emacs 100-fold.  If even 1% of those start to actually use emacs, it will double the user-base

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Ken Goldman]

On 8/26/2013 6:43 PM, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
> http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=emacs editor,eclipse ide
>
>    Since 2004 Eclipse (Emac's primary competiton for my use case) has lost some
> 71% of its "trendiness" according to Google.  But Emacs has lost more,
> dropping from 25 to 4 (84% less).
>
>    Does this Google Trends graph reflect reality?

This trend can be interpreted however you like.  E.g.,

People don't search for emacs because it already comes with Linux 
distros.  One has to download Eclipse.

Installing emacs is trivial.  Installing Eclipse on Windows requires 
googling for help.

emacs is easy to use and the docs are helpful.  Eclipse users need more 
help.

And finally ...

emacs users use bing.  :-)

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Marc Weber <marco-oweber@gmx.de> writes:

>> It *is* Emacs or Vim. 100%. Why on earth would you use Word ...
> To read .doc files which people may have sent you.

Can't you extract the data somehow? That would require some OH
work but it would still be one million times better than using
Word.

> I tried switching to Emacs for two weeks, but in the end it was
> too hard, I was addicted to Vim (and my custom extensions) ...

Yes, this is a very good point. If I switched to Vim, I would
probably think Emacs is so much better. But that would be unfair,
because I spent countless of nights customizing and extending
Emacs to be exactly what I'd like it to be. So it is not Emacs,
but MyEmacs (although the "My" in MySQL isn't a possessive pronoun
but a female name).

On the other hand, this is one of Emacs base pillars - that is is
"the world's most customizable, extendable editor". (On the third
hand, I did it so much I'm not letting Emacs off with all the
credit :))

Really, if I switched to Vim, I would probably spend time making
it behave like MyEmacs, which would be unproductive. The only
scientific way would be to wipe out my whole Emacs experience from
my brain and start anew with Vim. But relax, I'm not going to do
that anytime soon.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> In 1990 the main competition to emacs was vi
> In 2000 it was Word

What, Word? Word isn't even an editor, it is a bloody word
processor. You can't program or do any scientific or technical
work in Word. You can't even write a lousy crime novel in Word -
when you are done, the people at the publishing house has to
typeset it before they turn it to the people who (physically)
produce the books.

I have never heard of Google-docs or how that could be used as a
programming and/or document-producing interface, but I don't like
web programming, web tools, or the like. I did Javascript, PHP,
CGI, etc., at school, and besides HTML/CSS (which isn't
programming) I don't see the point in any of that.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Ken Goldman <kgoldman@us.ibm.com> writes:

> People don't search for emacs because it already comes with
> Linux distros.  One has to download Eclipse.

Is Eclipse even a GP editor, isn't it just a lousy IDE for the
equally-lousy Java?

All this talk about the alternatives to Emacs and Vim, makes me
even more firm in my conviction that there are no alternatives to
Emacs and Vim.

Remember, if there is nothing to see in a bottomless pit, you
can't change that be squeezing your eyes.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[W. Greenhouse]

Jorge,

Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> writes:

> http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=emacs editor,eclipse ide
>
>   Since 2004 Eclipse (Emac's primary competiton for my use case) has
> lost some 71% of its "trendiness" according to Google.  But Emacs has
> lost more, dropping from 25 to 4 (84% less).
>
>   Does this Google Trends graph reflect reality?

I don't think Google Trends is an accurate measure of how many people
are using Emacs, because Emacs is largely self-documenting, not just
through the Info manuals but also from the dynamically generated
documentation from Elisp programs themselves.  So I would expect Emacs
users to Google their programming environment far less than editors of
other platforms.

>   I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs user
> (not counting people I only talked to via the Internet).  Of course,
> popularity is far from the only criteria, I don't have to obey fashion
> (if I did, I wouldn't be using GNU/Linux).  But I do want my
> development environment to be reasonably active, improving and well
> supported.  Can I reasonably trust Emacs to be active and improving by
> 2018?  At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++, Python, Javascript and
> Java, and general text editor.
>
>   Thank you for your attention.  Sorry for any bad English, I am Brazilian.

I think that Emacs is one of very few pieces of software which we can
expect will still be active and improving by 2018.  This prediction is
based on its last 30 years of steady development (40+ if we count the
many non-GNU Emacsen).  It has a longer development history than most
operating systems running people's personal computers, and it continues
to evolve, both in terms of user experience as an editor and in terms of
extensibility as one of the most popular Lisp runtimes.  Some time
before 2018 we can hopefully see the fruition of features currently
being developed such as integration with the Guile runtime [1] and full
concurrency. [2]

I think the Emacs developer community is currently experiencing a
renaissance.  See http://j.mp/emacs2013videos for what some Emacs Lisp
developers are working on right now, from the London Emacsconf this
year.

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git;a=summary

[2]  http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/emacs/concurrency/files

--
Regards,
WGG

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

wgreenhouse@riseup.net (W. Greenhouse) writes:

> I don't think Google Trends is an accurate measure of how many
> people are using Emacs, because Emacs is largely
> self-documenting, not just through the Info manuals but also
> from the dynamically generated documentation from Elisp programs
> themselves.

I've heard that Emacs is self-documenting numerous times, and, if
this refers to the docstrings of Elisp functions, I have to say
"self-documenting" is stretching the truth. The docstrings are a
handy way to provide documentation, and the Emacs access to that
documentation is provided instantly upon evaluation of the defun
(of if it is some other thing: a variable, perhaps). This is all
well and good, but the documentation has to be written
nonetheless, like any other documentation.

Emacs can also tell you the parameters of a function, where it is
defined (and provide hyperlinks), etc., and this is indispensable
knowledge, for sure - but perhaps not "documentation" as much as a
specification for a person who already knows the workings.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Stefan Monnier]

> emacs users use bing.  :-)

Some users at least have switched from Google to DuckDuckGo.


        Stefan "who'd rather use something like Yacy"

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Suvayu Ali]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 12:03:58PM +0900, Yagnesh Raghava Yakkala wrote:
> 
> > Decide for yourself:
> >
> >   <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?h=emacs-24>
> 
> Why not looking at master/trunk.?
>   http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/

By mistake :-).

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Kevin Montuori]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013, at 17:55, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> wgreenhouse@riseup.net (W. Greenhouse) writes:
> 
> > I don't think Google Trends is an accurate measure of how many
> > people are using Emacs, because Emacs is largely
> > self-documenting, not just through the Info manuals but also
> > from the dynamically generated documentation from Elisp programs
> > themselves.
> 
> I've heard that Emacs is self-documenting numerous times, and, if
> this refers to the docstrings of Elisp functions, I have to say
> "self-documenting" is stretching the truth. 

I always took self documenting to mean that what documentation there is
(and there's a lot of it!) is installed with the application.  There
seems to be a trend of documentation wikis or online-only docs (the
otherwise very useful Ansible project is a recent example) where you
can't trivially download it all or print it easily (or search it with
your own tools).  Hell ... a beginner can learn to program ("An
Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp") from the included info docs. 

None of that diminishes how useful having comments associated with funs
and vars is -- I find the unit level documentation excellent and handy
when I'm hacking up advice or a fun (or a new mode).  

That said: the blogs, wikis, and documentation that's available
elsewhere are great supplementary material.  I'd still be mired in
org-mode docs without some nifty examples on the web.  (Bill Clemenson's
notes about slime also come to mind -- I'm really in debt to the folks
who take the time to expound.) 

k.

-- 
  Kevin Montuori
  montuori@gmail.com

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Kevin Montuori <montuori@gmail.com> writes:

> I always took self documenting to mean that what documentation
> there is (and there's a lot of it!) is installed with the
> application.  There seems to be a trend of documentation wikis
> or online-only docs

Actually, it is the Emacs documentation that is "on-line" (as
opposed to printed on paper) :) (You might remember the company
Sierra On-Line who did the horribly bad Kings Quest games.)

I agree whatever documentation there is should always be included
with the software itself. You should never need Internet access to
get the manual. If you have Internet access, you should be able to
find errata, or (optimally) be able to update your static manual
on your HDD.

I remember some applications of the distant past - when you stroke
the "help" command, what you saw was

Connecting to the help server...

and you never got what you needed.

As for wikis, I think the idea is great, but it has to be a
complement (as you say) because it only works on the Internet,
which you cannot access (again, as you say) with your own
razor-sharp tools, *and*, it must be dedicated to something *big*,
so that many people use it. The "real" wiki, Wikipedia, is great,
as so many people use it (although some of the articles are a bit
boring to read, IMHO), and an Emacs wiki is a great idea, because
it is a big subject, with lots of details, and an active and
creative (to say the least) user base - but, for each company or
piece of software to has its own wiki - with 20 articles, all
stubs - that's ridiculous.

I wrote something cool recently to make Wikipedia searches from
Emacs. It is actually only the last couple of lines that do it -
the rest is just fancy stuff - it will default to the region, if
there is one, or the word at point, and it will show it if it
isn't too long, etc. Anyhow:

(defun wiki-search (str)
  "Search Wikipedia for STR. Show the \"printable\" version."
  (interactive
   (let*((default-search (if (region-active-p) (region-to-string)
                           (thing-at-point 'word) ))
         (max-len 20)
         (peek (if (> (length default-search) max-len)
                   (format "%s..."
                           (substring default-search 0 max-len) )
                 default-search) ))
     (list (read-string
            (format " Search string (%s): " peek)
            nil nil default-search ))))
  (w3m-new-tab)
  (w3m
   (format "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%s\&printable=yes" str) )
  )

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> I wrote something cool recently to make Wikipedia searches from
> Emacs. It is actually only the last couple of lines that do it -
> the rest is just fancy stuff - it will default to the region, if
> there is one, or the word at point, and it will show it if it
> isn't too long, etc. Anyhow:

Made some improvements. First, it is not "search", it is
"show". Second, now it doesn't show "(nil)" in the PS when there
isn't a default (neither region or word at point).

(defun wiki-article (str)
  "Show the Wikipedia article STR, the \"printable\" version."
  (interactive
   (let*((default-search (if (region-active-p) (region-to-string)
                           (thing-at-point 'word) ))
         (max-len 20)
         (peek (if (> (length default-search) max-len)
                   (format "%s..."
                           (substring default-search 0 max-len) )
                 default-search) )
         (ps " article"))
     (list (read-string
            (if peek (format "%s (%s): " ps peek)
              (format "%s: " ps))
            nil nil default-search ))))
  (w3m-new-tab)
  (w3m
   (format
    "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%s\&printable=yes"
    str) ))

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[W. Greenhouse]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> I've heard that Emacs is self-documenting numerous times, and, if
> this refers to the docstrings of Elisp functions, I have to say
> "self-documenting" is stretching the truth. The docstrings are a
> handy way to provide documentation, and the Emacs access to that
> documentation is provided instantly upon evaluation of the defun
> (of if it is some other thing: a variable, perhaps). This is all
> well and good, but the documentation has to be written
> nonetheless, like any other documentation.
>
> Emacs can also tell you the parameters of a function, where it is
> defined (and provide hyperlinks), etc., and this is indispensable
> knowledge, for sure - but perhaps not "documentation" as much as a
> specification for a person who already knows the workings.

Right, I was referring to the describe-* family of commands, the
apropos-* commands, and the
find-function/find-library/find-variable/find-face-definition commands,
as well as the Customize system.  I realize that documentation doesn't
write itself, that the parameters of a function on their own may be
rather mysterious, and that machine-generated documentation generally
sucks.  Nonetheless, Emacs provides the user with an unusually rich set
of ways of finding out about the environment's current state and the
workings and customization possibilities of a program, as well as
discovering things you didn't know you were looking for.  I take
"self-documenting" to mean "capable of introspection in a variety of
context-useful ways".  If we updated the Emacs one-line description for
2013, we'd probably call it the "extensible, customizable, introspective
editor".  Or not--that makes it sound like a neurotic existentialist
writer!

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

wgreenhouse@riseup.net (W. Greenhouse) writes:

> Right, I was referring to the describe-* family of commands, the
> apropos-* commands, and the
> find-function/find-library/find-variable/find-face-definition
> commands, as well as the Customize system.  I realize that
> documentation doesn't write itself, that the parameters of a
> function on their own may be rather mysterious, and that
> machine-generated documentation generally sucks.  Nonetheless,
> Emacs provides the user with an unusually rich set of ways of
> finding out about the environment's current state and the
> workings and customization possibilities of a program, as well
> as discovering things you didn't know you were looking for.  I
> take "self-documenting" to mean "capable of introspection in a
> variety of context-useful ways".  If we updated the Emacs
> one-line description for 2013, we'd probably call it the
> "extensible, customizable, introspective editor".  Or not--that
> makes it sound like a neurotic existentialist writer!

Ha ha, no, let's keep "self-documenting". To me, that *sounds*
like "you don't have to write documentation, Emacs does that for
you, all the while you extend Emacs", but I never was fool enough
to believe that (for Emacs, or any system), so I thought it was
just an exaggeration of the docstring etc. functionality, and
especially its "immediate" update property, or, likewise an
exaggeration of the prototypes you get, even if there is no
docstring - I guess you could include lots of stuff in
"self-documentation", with some imagination - autocompletion, for
example (which I never use for speed, only when I don't remember
some part of whatever name).

I agree the whole framework around the Emacs documentation is
great, apart from one thing, that you (or somebody else) possibly
can help me with:

When I bring up the help for find-file (just an example, this
happens all the time), some of the lines are too long. For
example, one line looks like this:

Interactively, [cut] type RET is the current director

That is, "y," has overflowed the width. Is there a way to "fill"
all help? I tried to manually change some of the docstrings with
line breaks ("\n", same as in C, or otherwise in Elisp
strings). That worked, but I'm not going to do that for each and
any function (or whatever).

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

RE: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Drew Adams]

> I agree the whole framework around the Emacs documentation is
> great, apart from one thing, that you (or somebody else) possibly
> can help me with:
> 
> When I bring up the help for find-file (just an example, this
> happens all the time), some of the lines are too long. For
> example, one line looks like this:
> 
> Interactively, [cut] type RET is the current director
> 
> That is, "y," has overflowed the width. Is there a way to "fill"
> all help? I tried to manually change some of the docstrings with
> line breaks ("\n", same as in C, or otherwise in Elisp
> strings). That worked, but I'm not going to do that for each and
> any function (or whatever).

Doc strings are supposed to be shorter that some limit.
(elisp) `Documentation Tips' says this:

  Format the documentation string so that it fits in an Emacs window
  on an 80-column screen.  It is a good idea for most lines to be no
  wider than 60 characters.  The first line should not be wider than
  67 characters or it will look bad in the output of `apropos'.

  You can fill the text if that looks good.  However, rather than
  blindly filling the entire documentation string, you can often
  make it much more readable by choosing certain line breaks with
  care.  Use blank lines between sections if the documentation
  string is long.

Likewise, *Help* output, in general.

Wrt filling doc strings, see also user option
`emacs-lisp-docstring-fill-column'.

It sometimes happens that someone writes a doc string that is too
wide.  That is what `M-x report-emacs-bug' is for.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> Format the documentation string so that it fits in an Emacs
> window on an 80-column screen.  It is a good idea for most lines
> to be no wider than 60 characters.

It seems, I have a 70-column (or char) screen when using Emacs, so
if people stuck to the "good idea", that'd work for me. But the
line I mentioned (in the documentation of find-file) is below the
hard-limit of 80 chars, so I can't really bang them in the head
with the above quote, can I?

> `emacs-lisp-docstring-fill-column'

Cool, will check that out!

> It sometimes happens that someone writes a doc string that is
> too wide.  That is what `M-x report-emacs-bug' is for.

You always tell me I should report all problems as bugs. I don't
think that is a good attitude, I rather examine how to fix the
problem myself. So you don't need to repeat that all the
time. Only if I find really obvious bugs, I'll report them, and
you don't need to tell me to. I stopped go on and on about the
mouse, remember? So relax. But I appreciate the other info you
provided. Or, put it like this: Thanks for the -- help.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> Wrt filling doc strings, see also user option
> `emacs-lisp-docstring-fill-column'.

OK, that is simply the fill-column, for docstrings (in Elisp
code), so you can fill it to be 67 (as is recommended) while
filling everything else much wider, if you have this huge monitor
(with tiny fonts). Yes, I see the benefit in that.

As for me, with a 70-char Emacs screen, I have it like this

; t (non-integer) -> same as fill-column (which I have 66)
(set-variable 'emacs-lisp-docstring-fill-column t)

But that is only related to this problem in the sense that I can
visit a function's definition, and fill the docstring. I don't
think that is smart, as the docstrings are probably line broken
with some pedagogic thought in mind, that filling will screw.

That is, on the other hand, worth it, as horizontal scrolling is
royal pain. Still, it had to be done for so many docstrings, it
would be unbearable to do!

And if I were to update Emacs, would the changes I made manually
to the -- manual, would they be persistent - for example, in the
case of find-file?

No, if I'm to change the docstrings themselves, I'll do it once
and for all with some batch script. I wonder, though, if I should
hold that thought for a couple of days, and perhaps something
better will surface. It seems a little heavy-handed.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

RE: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Drew Adams]

> You always tell me I should report all problems as bugs.

No, I do *not* tell you or anyone else that.

Use your *judgment*.  If *you* think something is not as it could be
& should be in Emacs, then *you* can think about whether or not *you*
might want to make an enhancement request or report a bug.  That's
the point.

I only point out to people that `report-emacs-bug' is one way (a
good way; a recommended and expected way) to communicate change
requests to Emacs Dev.

> I don't think that is a good attitude, I rather examine how to fix
> the problem myself.  So you don't need to repeat that all the time.

Good for you.  You are a big boy now; it's clear.

But I am not trying to help only you, Emanuel.  I have found that
reminding readers of this list of the possibility of reporting to
Emacs Dev can be helpful - for Emacs and for Emacs users generally.

IOW, for me it is not just about getting you an answer to your
little problem.  If what I say happens to help you too, so much the
better.

> Only if I find really obvious bugs, I'll report them, and
> you don't need to tell me to.

I don't need to read or reply to your emails at all.  I reply
to messages when I think what I have to say might help someone.
It's not about you.

> I stopped go on and on about the mouse, remember?  So relax. 
> But I appreciate the other info you provided. Or, put it like
> this: Thanks for the -- help.

You're welcome.  Now, because Emacs is a self-documenting editor,
you can also *just ask Emacs*.  That's the point in pointing people
to the doc instead of just providing an answer: learn to fish.
Emacs is a fertile fishing ground.

My recommendation - for anyone - is to ask Emacs first (e.g., check
doc and source code).  Ask `help-gnu-emacs', or stack overflow, or
whatever else only after asking Emacs itself.

In the long run, doing that will be the most helpful, IMHO.  Emacs
knows more and usually explains better, when it comes to questions
about Emacs.

(Yes, asking Emacs can be harder for someone for whom English is
not so easy.  And yes, anyone is free to ignore my advice and ask
a help list first - no problem.)

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto]

>   I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs user (not
> counting people I only talked to via the Internet).
Since sending that email I have personally met another Emacs user and found
out that an old friend uses Emacs.

Anyway, I think Emacs is fun and powerful, and I will learn more of it.

Thank you for your attention
--
The sooner we fight global heating the lesser the cost.
--
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> You always tell me I should report all problems as bugs.
>
> No, I do *not* tell you or anyone else that.

You have told me that at least three times.

> Use your *judgment*.  If *you* think something is not as it
> could be & should be in Emacs, then *you* can think about
> whether or not *you* might want to make an enhancement request
> or report a bug.  That's the point.

Yes, the concept of reporting bugs is not that radical.

> Good for you.  You are a big boy now; it's clear.

And you are dismissive and negative.

> But I am not trying to help only you, Emanuel.  I have found
> that reminding readers of this list of the possibility of
> reporting to Emacs Dev can be helpful - for Emacs and for Emacs
> users generally.

I think it is much better if you work actively with them to solve
the problem, than to encourage them to just report it. OK, say
that you report a bug. What's next? Do you wait for a new version
of Emacs, in which the bug is fixed? Do you aptitude new
libraries? What do you do?

> IOW, for me it is not just about getting you an answer to your
> little problem.

Again, you are dismissive and disrespectful to other people's
efforts.

> I don't need to read or reply to your emails at all.

Right, and *you* are in my KILL file. I decided not to take part
in any more flame wars after my computer broke. Meta discussion is
not productive in almost all of the cases, including this one. I'm
not saying anything more than this message, and thanks to Gnus I
won't see any more or your messages - but hey, don't let that stop
you, you can still solve my "little problems", all to the benefit
of everyone else still taking part of your bitterness.

> I reply to messages when I think what I have to say might help
> someone.  It's not about you.

Wrong. It is about me. I have *one life* and I'm not letting you
waste another minute of it.

> Now, because Emacs is a self-documenting editor, you can also
> *just ask Emacs*.  That's the point in pointing people to the
> doc instead of just providing an answer: learn to fish.  Emacs
> is a fertile fishing ground.

That point is moronic. The point of communication is that is is
enjoyable and productive. It is a way to be active, it is a way to
think, to live. If you don't appreciate that, why are you here?
Are you here to be dismissive of people's efforts, and to bark at
them they should read the manual? Is this a role you think is
honorable? And why do you always assume that answering is of more
value than asking? I don't see you in a position to learn me
anything apart from babbling variables and quoting the sacred
scrolls. For that, I agree, I prefer the manual!

> My recommendation - for anyone - is to ask Emacs first (e.g.,
> check doc and source code).  Ask `help-gnu-emacs', or stack
> overflow, or whatever else only after asking Emacs itself.

Yes, you are an asocial, non-communicative computer geek. Well,
I'm not, and I will not be.

> In the long run, doing that will be the most helpful, IMHO.
> Emacs knows more and usually explains better, when it comes to
> questions about Emacs.

Why is there this newsgroup? Why are you here? Why aren't we all
just alone, quiet, with Emacs, and the Emacs manual?

> (Yes, asking Emacs can be harder for someone for whom English is
> not so easy.  And yes, anyone is free to ignore my advice and
> ask a help list first - no problem.)

See you when you get there, Drew.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> writes:

> Since sending that email I have personally met another Emacs
> user and found out that an old friend uses Emacs.

Jorge, again, why do you worry so much what other people use? Are
you afraid to be left alone? You will not be. I triple-guarantee
you. Emacs will involve a lot of people, in the close and distant
future alike. If you worry too few people use it, why don't you
start using it yourself - that way, we'll be one more! :)

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Jorge]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 9:28 PM, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:

> Jorge, again, why do you worry so much what other people use? Are
> you afraid to be left alone? You will not be. I triple-guarantee
> you. Emacs will involve a lot of people, in the close and distant
> future alike.
OK.

> If you worry too few people use it, why don't you
> start using it yourself - that way, we'll be one more! :)
I already use it, to edit LaTeX, configuration files, general text files (I
should learn org mode to organize my text files), C++ and Bash source code,
and compose emails.  Currently I use compose emails in Emacs and copy/paste
them into gmail.  Maybe in the future I will configure Emacs as a proper mail
client.

I am a beginner; although I have been using Emacs for years, I have never
learned all its power - I only read the tutorial and the beginning of the
reference manual, I have much more to read.

Thank you for your attention

--
The sooner we fight global heating the lesser the cost.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[MBR]

C-h is the main entry point to Emacs' extensive documentation.  When you 
type C-h, the minibuffer at the bottom says "C-h (Type ? for further 
options)".  Typing ? produces an extensive list of help commands.  Good 
places to start are:

    C-h t        start the Emacs tutorial
    C-h i        start the "info" documentation reader.  From here you
    can choose to read documentation on Emacs and about 50 other programs.

That's what is meant by self-documenting.

    Mark Rosenthal

On 8/28/2013 5:55 PM, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> I've heard that Emacs is self-documenting numerous times, and, if
> this refers to the docstrings of Elisp functions, I have to say
> "self-documenting" is stretching the truth.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Jorge <1gato0a@gmail.com> writes:

> I already use it, to edit LaTeX, configuration files, general
> text files (I should learn org mode to organize my text files),
> C++ and Bash source code, and compose emails.

(Warning. Long post. Don't be in a rush to read it.)

That sounds great!

If you do lots of configuration, like me, you'll notice that it is
a circus of the same files being edited, over and over. I found
this help me a lot - you may use another keystroke than C-j,
though J, K, L, and ; on the right hand, as requiring no reaching
whatsoever, will make for ultra fast transitions.

Note that the register names are mnemonic - 'a' for "aptitude",
etc. Also, the shortcuts are case sensitive, so there are quite a
lot of them, for lots of configuration. Last, note how to get
superuser access to files not in your PATH - namely, once set up,
by using the C-j IF exactly the same way :)

(global-set-key (kbd "C-j") 'jump-to-register)

(set-register ?a (cons 'file "/sudo::/etc/apt/sources.list"))
(set-register ?C (cons 'file "/sudo::/etc/default/console-setup"))
(set-register ?D (cons 'file "~/.emacs-man"))
(set-register ?d (cons 'file "~/.emacs-dired"))
(set-register ?K (cons 'file "/sudo::/etc/console-setup/remap.inc"))
(set-register ?k (cons 'file "/sudo::/etc/default/keyboard"))
; etc. etc;
(set-register ?x (cons 'file "~/.xinitrc"))
(set-register ?X (cons 'file "~/.Xresources"))
(set-register ?Z (cons 'file "~/.zprofile"))
(set-register ?z (cons 'file "~/.zshrc"))

Another great function for configuration, that I did in
collaboration with a guy here on GEH, is su-edit:

(defun su-edit ()
  "Edit the current buffer file as superuser."
  (interactive)
  (let ((window-start (window-start))
        (point        (point))
        (mark (if mark-active (region-beginning) nil)) )
    (find-alternate-file (format "/sudo::%s" (buffer-file-name)))
    (if mark (set-mark mark))
    (goto-char point)
    (set-window-start nil window-start) ; nil - the selected window
    ))

It even keeps the region - but for some reason, it gets
invisible...

Last, often in documentation, in the man pages, or on the web (if
you use W3M), you find paths and file names - like, "Configure
this /important/file to get a gorgeous interface", then, simply
place point at the beginning of the path, and use

(defun goto-file ()
  (interactive)
  (let*((file (thing-at-point 'filename))
        (in-home (string= "~" (car (split-string file "/"))))
        (final-file (if in-home file
                      (format "%s%s" "/sudo::" file) )))
    (find-file final-file) ))

To make config files more pleasant to watch when editing, you may
use any of two different methods to the buffers in a certain modes
- it is not so picky what mode it is, actually, as long as you get
highlighting (and not too unorthodox shortcuts, shadowing those
you are used to). The methods are - either by filename extension
(e.g., the "txt" in diary.txt), *or* by a comment, at the top of
the file (a hashbang - sort of).

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist  '("\\.inc\\'" . conf-unix-mode))
(add-to-list 'magic-mode-alist '("# conf"    . conf-mode))

There you have some new toys to try out :)

> Currently I use compose emails in Emacs and copy/paste them into
> gmail.  Maybe in the future I will configure Emacs as a proper
> mil client.

I did the same when I was active on the Linux/Unix Q&A site. It
worked for a long time but I stopped, it was just to boring, no
matter how many shorthands I set up (like Emacs always to a
particular file, etc.). To find a "proper mail client" in Emacs
isn't the easiest of tasks, I'm afraid.

The send part - with the Message-mode - try it with `C-x m' just
to feel its power - is the best part. I made it even better, if I
may, by writing a function that lets you iterate the headers with
the TAB and backtab keys, that you may find here [1] - along with
this little darling, that'll save all outgoing mails:

(defun save-sent-mail ()
  "Save sent messages."
  (write-file
    (format-time-string "~/Mail/sent/%Y-%m-%d_%T.m") nil) )
(add-hook 'message-sent-hook 'save-sent-mail)

Also, a system for aliases, as well as a signature (in a file),
are features that are very handy and practical (and in particular
the aliases). I wrote about this at gnu.emacs.gnus, if you are on
that group.

*Reading* mail, though, is another ball game. Getting Gnus to do
it would probably be the best. Right now, I use rmail, and it
doesn't do HTML that well, there are no threads, and sometimes you
cannot quit it because the "wrong" message is highlighted. It
seems that case-sensitive search breaks rmail. Also, rmail saves
all mails in *one* huge file (called RMAIL), so you cannot get to
them by you precious batch CLI-tools. Apart from those minor
distractions, that are a-typical for Emacs, rmail is great, and
especially compared to the web-UIs everyone else uses for mail.

> I am a beginner; although I have been using Emacs for years, I
> have never learned all its power - I only read the tutorial and
> the beginning of the reference manual, I have much more to read.

While it is great that you read, perhaps it is time to grab the
bull by his horns, and twist his neck? Just do it. Instead of
reading tutorials, you can just observe - how does this work? do I
want it like this? if not, can I remedy it by setting some
variable, or even rewriting (part of) it myself? The most
important thing is not that you read one page or even one chapter
every day, the most important thing is that you are active with
what you do - and each day learn a new command, a new shortcut,
how two thing stick together, and so on. Do it every day for a
year, you'll have 365 new pieces of knowledge.

Good luck!

[1] http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/gnus/index.html

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

> That's what is meant by self-documenting.

OK. And that's great. But, Irssi have that and - actually, that's
not uncommon at all. But perhaps Emacs implemented it in the most
exhaustive and consistent way, and that's why they push for it?

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>
> Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 22:53:14 +0200
> 
> Ha ha, no, let's keep "self-documenting". To me, that *sounds*
> like "you don't have to write documentation, Emacs does that for
> you, all the while you extend Emacs", but I never was fool enough
> to believe that (for Emacs, or any system), so I thought it was
> just an exaggeration of the docstring etc. functionality

It's not an exaggeration, and Emacs produces some minimal
documentation even if the programmer didn't provide any doc string.
It tells you the argument list and the file in which the function or
variable is defined, providing hyperlinks to that definition.  The
'apropos' family of functions, most of which do not depend on doc
strings, also automatically reacts to changes in the code.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>
> Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 04:22:03 +0200
> 
> [...] rmail, and it doesn't do HTML that well

You are welcome to add that, by using the new eww.el package available
on the development trunk.  The infrastructure for rendering specific
MIME content types is in rmailmm.el.

> there are no threads,

Try "C-c C-n" and "C-c C-p".  Alternatively, try "C-M-t TOPIC RET".

> and sometimes you cannot quit it because the "wrong" message is
> highlighted.

Never happened to me.  If you can reproduce this, or even just
describe the details of the problem when it happens, a bug report
would be appropriate.

> It seems that case-sensitive search breaks rmail.

Ditto.

> Also, rmail saves all mails in *one* huge file (called RMAIL), so
> you cannot get to them by you precious batch CLI-tools.

Try the 'o' command, it lets you file the mails in different files.
You can configure that, such that messages with specific matches in
subject and body are classified semi-automatically to belong to
certain files, and 'o' offers those files as the default.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Stefan Monnier]

>> That's what is meant by self-documenting.
> OK. And that's great. But, Irssi have that and - actually, that's
> not uncommon at all. But perhaps Emacs implemented it in the most
> exhaustive and consistent way, and that's why they push for it?

It's also because Emacs introduced the notion of docstring, which is now
fairly common is all programming languages (javadoc, etc...).


        Stefan

RE: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Ludwig, Mark]

> From: Emanuel Berg, Wednesday, August 28, 2013 4:55 PM
> 
> wgreenhouse@riseup.net (W. Greenhouse) writes:
> 
> > I don't think Google Trends is an accurate measure of how many
> > people are using Emacs, because Emacs is largely
> > self-documenting, not just through the Info manuals but also
> > from the dynamically generated documentation from Elisp programs
> > themselves.
> 
> I've heard that Emacs is self-documenting numerous times, and, if
> this refers to the docstrings of Elisp functions, I have to say
> "self-documenting" is stretching the truth. The docstrings are a
> handy way to provide documentation, and the Emacs access to that
> documentation is provided instantly upon evaluation of the defun
> (of if it is some other thing: a variable, perhaps). This is all
> well and good, but the documentation has to be written
> nonetheless, like any other documentation.

You need to remember that the term "self-documenting" was applied
to EMACS by RMS in the late '70s.  At the time, it was
innovative.  Consider that EMACS back then was a "real-time
display editor" in a world in which the vast majority of
computing was being done on punch cards!

Looking at Emacs today, with things like javadoc, as others have
pointed out, calling it "self-documenting" invokes a yawn as much
as anything else -- but that's what it means.  I also think the
point of view for the term "self-documenting" is from the
"outside looking in."  When I started using EMACS in college in
1980, I remember being amazed and incredibly impressed.  (I
imagine no college student would have any such reaction today,
because the rest of computing has caught up!) 

Cheers,
Mark

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Ludwig, Mark" <ludwig.mark@siemens.com>
> Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 12:21:16 +0000
> 
> Consider that EMACS back then was a "real-time display editor" in a
> world in which the vast majority of computing was being done on
> punch cards!

Punch cards were not the issue, where "real-time display editor"
nature of Emacs was contrasted with the other editors.  The issue was
that back then (and many years after that), a garden variety text
editor required you to issue what was essentially batch-style editing
commands.  For example, to replace "FOO" with "BAR" at position 20 of
line number 10, you'd say something like L10M20D3IBAR, which means "in
line 10, move 20 places, delete 3 characters, then insert "BAR"".  And
after issuing this command, you'd typically need another command to
actually _display_ the line that was edited -- and only that line
(i.e., no full-screen display).  With such editors, you'd generally
need to hold the entire file in your head, rather than see it on the
screen.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Jorge]

Thank you for all your tips.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Ken Goldman]

On 8/28/2013 4:53 PM, Emanuel Berg wrote:
>
> Is Eclipse even a GP editor, isn't it just a lousy IDE for the
> equally-lousy Java?

It actually is.  My current email client is based on Eclipse.

IMHO, Eclipse is the best IDE for Java.  For other languages, I think 
there are better choices.

For all languages, I tend to do the heavy coding in emacs and just fix 
minor compiler errors in the IDE.  emacs autorevert keeps everything in 
sync.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Ken Goldman <kgoldman@us.ibm.com> writes:

>> Is Eclipse even a GP editor, isn't it just a lousy
>> IDE for the equally-lousy Java?
>
> It actually is.  My current email client is based on
> Eclipse.

OK, thanks, I didn't know that. It wasn't a rhetorical
question, although I thought Eclipse was an IDE for Java
and nothing more.

> IMHO, Eclipse is the best IDE for Java.

Well, if it wasn't, that would be *really* bad! As for
me, I don't like Java at all but if I ever had to do it
I would use Emacs, because I always use Emacs so I can't
dispense with everything I configured/added (and
programmed into my muscle memory), besides I don't think
I could make Eclipse look a way that would make it
possible for me to use. So, in my case, any highly
Java-specialized features of Eclipse would amount to
nothing anyway. (But that's me.)

> For other languages, I think there are better choices.

Me too ;)

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Luca Ferrari]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto
<jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> wrote:

> Can I reasonably trust Emacs
> to be active and improving by 2018?

I don't even trust myself having a job in 2018!
Quite frankly, I'm fine in being even the only one using a tool, if
such tool simplifies my work. And this is true for Emacs, at least for
my job, therefore I'm fine with it even if <any-big-company> trends'
will say nobody else is appreciating Emacs.
By the way, I don't see the problem here: have you ever changed a car,
a phone, a television or something else? Changes happen, and in the
unlucky case Emacs will not be supported (to the extent you care), you
will simply change tool.
Don't pretend to use a single tool for any job, use the right one.
And today Emacs is pretty much good for a lot of job, but it does not
mean it will be the only one or the better one forever.

Luca

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Luca Ferrari <fluca1978@infinito.it> writes:

>> Can I reasonably trust Emacs to be active and
>> improving by 2018?
>
> I don't even trust myself having a job in 2018!

I agree, it doesn't make sense to plan that far into the
future. If you are productive and active *today*, be
happy, chances are much better you'll be the same
tomorrow, than if you sit idle, contemplating what will
happen in the future. (Which, by the way, is a very
difficult task.)

The past is the past; there is no changing it. As for
the future, it will come sooner or later, rest
assured. Only the present is up for grabs.

Remember, "Advance too fast, you catch up with
death. But advance too slow, death catches up with
*you*."

> Quite frankly, I'm fine in being even the only one
> using a tool

Yes, 100% the correct attitude. Don't doubt yourself!

> By the way, I don't see the problem here: have you
> ever changed a car, a phone, a television or something
> else? Changes happen, and in the unlucky case Emacs
> will not be supported (to the extent you care), you
> will simply change tool.

Well, in general, true, but that won't happen.

> Don't pretend to use a single tool for any job, use
> the right one.  And today Emacs is pretty much good
> for a lot of job, but it does not mean it will be the
> only one or the better one forever.

Again, in general, I agree, but I just can't see some
other tool for general computing will surpass Emacs. I
use Emacs and zsh/tmux, with M/Alt-j and -l to switch
between them. Unless I would switch direction in
computing, and do games, GIS, etc. (which I hope won't
happen), with as much assurance that I can muster
without being a fanatic, I really can't-can't see any
tool surpassing Emacs/zsh for my general purposes.

I mean, is there work on such a tool being carried out,
which I am unaware of?

On the other hand, I am very much aware of the work
being carried out on Emacs. And the zsh has an active
community as well, though one would think the CLI has
reached a very high level of maturity by now. Even more
so than Emacs, not because Emacs isn't as "good", but
because there is so much more to an editor than to a
shell.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 521 bytes --]

() Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>
() Fri, 04 Oct 2013 19:45:34 +0200

   I mean, is there work on such a tool being carried out,
   which I am unaware of?

You can grep the net for "emacsy", which is not a particular
program per se, but a component that could go into programs.

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen
   GPG key: 4C807502
   (if you're human and you know it)
      read my lisp: (responsep (questions 'technical)
                               (not (via 'mailing-list)))
                     => nil

[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 197 bytes --]

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnu.org> writes:

>    I mean, is there work on such a tool being carried
>    out, which I am unaware of?
>
> You can grep the net for "emacsy", which is not a
> particular program per se, but a component that could
> go into programs.

That project must be in its absolute infancy because
there isn't even a Wikipedia page on it. I have no idea
what it is all about, but I am prepared to swallow
poison that Emacs, without the text editor, for
non-textual applications, will *never* replace my Emacs.

But I confess, I *was* "thinking in Emacs" back when I
still used X. Whenever I wanted something to happen, I
always thought I'd add a hook, or make two events into
one by stacking them in a defun, just for a split
second...

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Jude DaShiell]

On Fri, 4 Oct 2013, Luca Ferrari wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto
> <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Can I reasonably trust Emacs
> > to be active and improving by 2018?
> 
> I don't even trust myself having a job in 2018!
> Quite frankly, I'm fine in being even the only one using a tool, if
> such tool simplifies my work. And this is true for Emacs, at least for
> my job, therefore I'm fine with it even if <any-big-company> trends'
> will say nobody else is appreciating Emacs.
> By the way, I don't see the problem here: have you ever changed a car,
> a phone, a television or something else? Changes happen, and in the
> unlucky case Emacs will not be supported (to the extent you care), you
> will simply change tool.
> Don't pretend to use a single tool for any job, use the right one.
> And today Emacs is pretty much good for a lot of job, but it does not
> mean it will be the only one or the better one forever.
> 
> Luca
> 
Probably emacs is the only text editor on the internet with its own 
podcast (emacs rocks).

> 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net> Avoid the Gates Of Hell, use Linux!

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Bob Proulx]

Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Probably emacs is the only text editor on the internet with its own 
> podcast (emacs rocks).

Even though I prefer to use emacs over vim I must admit that vim
probably has more podcasts about it than emacs does.  :-(

But remember it isn't a popularity contest.  Trying to be popular
often causes problems.  Let's avoid that trap.

Bob

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:

>> Probably emacs is the only text editor on the
>> internet with its own podcast (emacs rocks).
>
> Even though I prefer to use emacs over vim I must
> admit that vim probably has more podcasts about it
> than emacs does.  :-(
>
> But remember it isn't a popularity contest.  Trying to
> be popular often causes problems.  Let's avoid that
> trap.

People today are brain damaged. They are content with
hammering on their "smart"phones (with their thumbs,
*on* the display) to get their quick fix from YouTube
(two cats fighting, or a guy dropping his donut in the
coffee, perhaps) - they can't use any serious software,
let alone Emacs.

You may think that I am mean and ironic about it, but
I'm not, I'm dead serious, and I think it is a very sad
state, not just for them but for me. I remember when
everyone who used a computer was creative about
it. Today, almost the only people that are not *moronic*
about it are hacker fanatics, hunted across the galaxy
like some unbelievers.

So I don't think it matters one bit what we do, Emacs
(or any serious software) will never capture the
imagination of the masses, and it will never be popular
- actually, I have a hard time seeing that even among
computer people (or among people who pretends to be).

The only group that I see a small hope for are
professional writers, translators, and such. I don't
know how they typically do their stuff, but I think they
would *love* Emacs!


-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rustom Mody]

About the original question in the subject line:

Just saw this on the python list (a screenshot)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1933476/screenshots/emacs.png

What it is saying is that if you google for emacs, vi puts up a sponsored ad.
At least a partial explanation about why emacs is slipping so far behind vi??

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Evans Winner]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1933476/screenshots/emacs.png

Pretty funny.  Perhaps someone ought to take out an ad for
Emacs when people search for "Eclipse."

    At least a partial explanation about why emacs is
    slipping so far behind vi??

Is it less popular than vi?  That's hard to believe.  I have
never been able to totally shake the feeling that vi really
originated as a practical joke.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rustom Mody]

On Friday, October 4, 2013 11:15:34 PM UTC+5:30, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Remember, "Advance too fast, you catch up with
> death. But advance too slow, death catches up with
> *you*."

Nice quote! Thanks! Is there a well known source?

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> What it is saying is that if you google for emacs, vi
> puts up a sponsored ad.

Ha ha, who cares, no one clicks ads anyway. What do you
think this is, the 90s? Hey, let's trade banners and
create web rings :) I'll even add a rotating skull, and
a burning barrel!

> At least a partial explanation about why emacs is
> slipping so far behind vi??

How so? Can that be quantified somehow? What do you
mean?

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Evans Winner <ego111@gmail.com> writes:

> Perhaps someone ought to take out an ad for Emacs when
> people search for "Eclipse."

Oh no, don't do that, then we will have an invasion of
Java/OO people :)

> Is it [Emacs] less popular than vi?  That's hard to
> believe.

Yeah, I don't believe that either. Vim is even more
focused on programming. Or, to be exact, Emacs is as
much focused on programming. Only Emacs is focused on
everything else, too: Usenet, mail, the file system, you
name it. (Or so I've heard. I didn't use Vim to a
fraction of my Emacs time, so any Vim user may elaborate
on this.)

> vi really originated as a practical joke.

Some people say you type less with Vim, that Vim is
faster, and, you configure/extend *less*, so you
actually get more *work* done with much less strain on
your fingers. (Again, rumors perhaps.)

But... I couldn't live without
configuration/extension. That's what I love about Emacs.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

>> Remember, "Advance too fast, you catch up with
>> death. But advance too slow, death catches up with
>> *you*."
>
> Nice quote! Thanks! Is there a well known source?

I read it in the comic book "The Metabaron" by Alejandro
Jodorowsky. He also did "The Incal". If you ever read
them, mail me about it.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Tom Davey]

Emmanuel Berg writes:

> The only group that I see a small hope for are
> professional writers, translators, and such. I don't
> know how they typically do their stuff, but I think they
> would *love* Emacs!

You are right. I am not a programmer, but rather a director-level business
manager who runs an in-house Web development agency within a larger
organization. I do all my writing and task management in Emacs. Org-mode is
indispensable. I spend most of my day working in Emacs and Org. Emacs's
extensibility is the other killer feature. I've taught myself a fair amount
of elisp to customize Emacs to my workflow.

So for me, the vim vs. Emacs debate is irrelevant. Emacs is far more than a
programming editor. When I show my colleagues what Emacs can do as a
quotidian business productivity tool they are surprised and impressed.

By the way, I run Emacs happily on Windows 7 in a corporate environment
that is 100% Microsoft. The native Windows binaries for Emacs are superb.
Many thanks to whoever builds them. I do not use, nor really have any need
for, Cygwin.

Thanks to all for the interesting thread.

--
Tom Davey
tom@tomdavey.com
New York NY USA

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Tom Davey <tdavey@gmail.com> writes:

>> The only group that I see a small hope for are
>> professional writers, translators, and such. I don't
>> know how they typically do their stuff, but I think
>> they would *love* Emacs!
>
> You are right. I am not a programmer, but rather a
> director-level business manager who runs an in-house
> Web development agency within a larger organization. I
> do all my writing and task management in
> Emacs. Org-mode is indispensable. I spend most of my
> day working in Emacs and Org. Emacs's extensibility is
> the other killer feature. I've taught myself a fair
> amount of elisp to customize Emacs to my workflow.
>
> So for me, the vim vs. Emacs debate is
> irrelevant. Emacs is far more than a programming
> editor. When I show my colleagues what Emacs can do as
> a quotidian business productivity tool they are
> surprised and impressed.
>
> By the way, I run Emacs happily on Windows 7 in a
> corporate environment that is 100% Microsoft. The
> native Windows binaries for Emacs are superb.  Many
> thanks to whoever builds them. I do not use, nor
> really have any need for, Cygwin.
>
> Thanks to all for the interesting thread.

No, thank *you* for this very interesting story!

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rustom Mody]

On Thursday, October 10, 2013 1:01:39 AM UTC+5:30, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Rustom Mody  writes:
> 
> > At least a partial explanation about why emacs is
> > slipping so far behind vi??
> 
> How so? Can that be quantified somehow? What do you
> mean?

Quantified?? No idea
A hunchy feeling?  The only things I see used (in the physical world, leaving aside net forums like this one) are
- vi
- sublime text
- eclipse

roughly in that order.

I know enough (about) statistics to know that converting my hunch into a hard statement would require considerably more data than I can muster.
I know enough good business folk to also know that sharp guys use a right combo of hunches and numbers.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Teemu Likonen]

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Emanuel Berg [2013-10-09 21:41:45 +02:00] wrote:

> Evans Winner <ego111@gmail.com> writes:
>> Is it [Emacs] less popular than vi? That's hard to believe.
>
> Yeah, I don't believe that either.

That's hard to measure. One way for estimating popularity is Debian's
automatic popularity contest.

http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacsen-common%2Cvim-common&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1

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Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rustom Mody]

On Thursday, October 10, 2013 9:57:48 AM UTC+5:30, Teemu Likonen wrote:
> Emanuel Berg [2013-10-09 21:41:45 +02:00] wrote:
> 
> 
> > Evans Winner writes:
> >> Is it [Emacs] less popular than vi? That's hard to believe.
> >
> > Yeah, I don't believe that either.
> 
> 
> That's hard to measure. One way for estimating popularity is Debian's
> automatic popularity contest.
>  
> http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacsen-common%2Cvim-common&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1

Thanks for that picture.
It confirms my personal hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were kind of neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in the category: "Whazzat??" for young programmers.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Andreas Röhler]

Am 10.10.2013 07:25, schrieb Rustom Mody:
> On Thursday, October 10, 2013 9:57:48 AM UTC+5:30, Teemu Likonen wrote:
>> Emanuel Berg [2013-10-09 21:41:45 +02:00] wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Evans Winner writes:
>>>> Is it [Emacs] less popular than vi? That's hard to believe.
>>>
>>> Yeah, I don't believe that either.
>>
>>
>> That's hard to measure. One way for estimating popularity is Debian's
>> automatic popularity contest.
>>
>> http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacsen-common%2Cvim-common&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1
>
> Thanks for that picture.
> It confirms my personal hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were kind of neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in the category: "Whazzat??" for young programmers.
>

Maybe the story of bazaar versus git tells something for this case too?

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Phillip Lord]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:
>> That's hard to measure. One way for estimating popularity is Debian's
>> automatic popularity contest.
>>  
>> http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacsen-common%2Cvim-common&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1
>
> Thanks for that picture.
> It confirms my personal hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were kind of
> neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in the category: "Whazzat??"
> for young programmers.


Not sure that this is a good conclusion. I have vi installed on every
linux box I use, but Emacs on only some. But I use Emacs far more than I
use vi.

The other point to remember is that there are more programmers now than
20 years ago. I would be shocked if Emacs popularity as a percentage had
not dropped.

Phil

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rainer M Krug]

phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:

> Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:
>>> That's hard to measure. One way for estimating popularity is Debian's
>>> automatic popularity contest.
>>>  
>>> http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacsen-common%2Cvim-common&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1
>>
>> Thanks for that picture.
>> It confirms my personal hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were kind of
>> neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in the category: "Whazzat??"
>> for young programmers.
>
>
> Not sure that this is a good conclusion. I have vi installed on every
> linux box I use, but Emacs on only some. But I use Emacs far more than I
> use vi.
>
> The other point to remember is that there are more programmers now than
> 20 years ago. I would be shocked if Emacs popularity as a percentage had
> not dropped.

Not only more programmers, but also more IDE, source code editors (in
the widest sense) - i.e. alternatives to emacs. 

I love emacs and  will stick with it (even if I am the last one using
it), but I see the difficulty to sell it to new programmers. By the way:
I see the same problem with vi.

Rainer

>
> Phil
>
>
<#secure method=pgpmime mode=sign>

-- 
Rainer M. Krug

email: RMKrug<at>gmail<dot>com

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Carson Chittom]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thursday, October 10, 2013 9:57:48 AM UTC+5:30, Teemu Likonen wrote:

>> That's hard to measure. One way for estimating popularity is Debian's
>> automatic popularity contest.
>>  
>> http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacsen-common%2Cvim-common&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1
>
> Thanks for that picture.
> It confirms my personal hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were
> kind of neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in the
> category: "Whazzat??" for young programmers.

It's been a while (several years) since I've used Debian, but as I
recall, the vim-common package is installed by default; whereas you have
to explicitly install Emacs.  I'm not saying your "hunchy feel" is wrong
(I have no idea about that), just that you can't get to your conclusion
from the graph alone.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 10.10.2013 um 13:00 schrieb Rainer M Krug:

> I love emacs and  will stick with it (even if I am the last one using it)

Then you must stay younger than me!

--
Mit friedvollen Grüßen

  Pete

Ich bin dafür, die Dinge so weit wie möglich zu vereinfachen.
Aber nicht weiter.
				(Albert Einstein)

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[henry atting]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> [...]
> The only group that I see a small hope for are
> professional writers, translators, and such. I don't
> know how they typically do their stuff, but I think they
> would *love* Emacs!

Oh yes, I'm a writer and I use emacs only. Since writing, art in
general, ought to be free I would not let some proprietary behemoth
handle my words. If the group of emacs users would melt down to a
handfull of steadfest people I'd be happily one of these. :)

henry

-- 
      web: http://literaturlatenight.de
      jabberID: atting@jabber.at

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Carson Chittom <carson@wistly.net> writes:

>> Thanks for that picture.  It confirms my personal
>> hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were kind of
>> neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in
>> the category: "Whazzat??" for young programmers.
>
> It's been a while (several years) since I've used
> Debian, but as I recall, the vim-common package is
> installed by default; whereas you have to explicitly
> install Emacs.  I'm not saying your "hunchy feel" is
> wrong (I have no idea about that), just that you can't
> get to your conclusion from the graph alone.

Yeah? Debian is the only distro I used and I can't
recall installing Emacs, but then again, installing with
aptitude is so fast it is nothing you'd remember
anyway. If Emacs isn't on Debian by default (the coolest
and most classy of distros ;) then Emacs lobbyists
should try to make that so. (But I have a hard time
believing that's the case. If so, *why*?)

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> writes:

> Maybe the story of bazaar versus git tells something
> for this case too?

What's that story?

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Bob Proulx]

Andreas Röhler wrote:
> Maybe the story of bazaar versus git tells something for this case too?

I don't think that applies here.  If you use bazaar for version
control then everyone needs to use it to interact with your project.
Same thing for git.  If you use git then everyone needs to use git to
interact with your project.  Today git is very popular and so everyone
is needing to use git to interact with many projects.  You can't use
bzr on a git project.

But that doesn't apply to editors.  If you post a C source project
then we can all use different editors to interact with it.  The choice
of editors is something that only affects the person driving it
privately.  It doesn't matter to anyone else what editor you use.

Bob

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> Thanks for that picture.  It confirms my personal
> hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were kind of
> neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in
> the category: "Whazzat??" for young programmers.

I don't know how young "young programmers" are. Lots of
guys start at 12 and they don't know what an editor or
an IDE is, they just code whatever they have, be it
Visual Basic 5.0 (because that's installed on their
parent's PC), HyperCard (ditto Mac), or the BASIC for
their TI-83 calculator (actually, those examples are
probably outdated, but you get the idea).

Those kids can code pretty advanced stuff reading
tutorials on the web, and those "Learn X in zero
time"-books. But all the terminology ("recursion",
"nested", etc. etc.), as well as all the Unix stuff
(aliases, the shell, etc. etc.) are typically lost for
those kids. But it's no big deal because they can pick
that up much faster than a general scientist, who cannot
write code, will pick up programming (which might even
be impossible). A lot of math people are worthless
programmers, for example, because the reason in terms of
"pure", "clean", etc., which isn't what programming is
about.

But I digress... what I wanted to tell you is: when I
started study CS, we all got a book on Unix. It was
written by students, which was noticeable, and a lot of
the details I didn't like. But I read it two times, so I
guess I liked it, on second thoughts. In that book,
there were *two* ambitious chapters on Emacs. There
weren't much Elisp but general usage was covered
well. Vim wasn't mentioned. I'm not making a point, I'm
just saying it, because that was the case.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

>> Thanks for that picture.  It confirms my personal
>> hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were kind of
>> neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in
>> the category: "Whazzat??" for young programmers.
>
> I don't know how young "young programmers" are. Lots
> of guys start at 12 and they don't know what an editor
> or an IDE is, they just code whatever they have, be it
> Visual Basic 5.0 (because that's installed on their
> parent's PC), HyperCard (ditto Mac), or the BASIC for
> their TI-83 calculator (actually, those examples are
> probably outdated, but you get the idea).

I forgot! The *PlayStation* had a demo CD, with lots of
worthless demos for games, but it also had a BASIC
editor. I remember you could plug in an ordinary
keyboard, write code, and then save it on one of those
memory cards!

As a kid, there were just so many things to program and
the thought never stroke me that once I would use *one*
application for everything, and that the interface would
be the same, and configurable... Actually, that whole
concept was so far beyond me, I couldn't have verbalized
it by a longshot. I just never thought about such
things...

I wonder if people that *still* write code all over the
place, are they aware that they are at a severe
deficiency? No common cursor movements,
search-and-replace, no setting up all the keys, learning
everything anew every time they switch IDE, etc.?

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:
>
> The only group that I see a small hope for are
> professional writers, translators, and such. I don't
> know how they typically do their stuff, but I think they
> would *love* Emacs!

I'm a writer *and* a translator, and I do everything in Emacs.
Specifically, I do all my writing in org mode, which is shaping up to be
something like Emacs' "killer app," if that concept applies. I think org
mode is doing quite a bit to draw in new users, particularly those who
don't necessarily count as "real" programmers.

E

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 913 bytes --]

() Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>
() Fri, 11 Oct 2013 02:05:00 +0200

   I wonder if people that *still* write code all over the place,
   are they aware that they are at a severe deficiency?

This will be the case forever; for most, awareness comes slowly if
at all.  Subsequently and likewise, deep understanding (perhaps).
Subsequently and likewise, joy, love, hate, indifference, etc.
Above all, the tendency for water to flow downward is never
guaranteed to be significantly countered by the water-bearer
trundling back and forth to tend the hill-top garden.

Still, some of us yoke and joke, poke and smoke,
so that others might (perchance) "dig" the well.

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen
   GPG key: 4C807502
   (if you're human and you know it)
      read my lisp: (responsep (questions 'technical)
                               (not (via 'mailing-list)))
                     => nil

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Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Andreas Röhler]

Am 11.10.2013 00:18, schrieb Bob Proulx:
> Andreas Röhler wrote:
>> Maybe the story of bazaar versus git tells something for this case too?
>
> I don't think that applies here.  If you use bazaar for version
> control then everyone needs to use it to interact with your project.
> Same thing for git.  If you use git then everyone needs to use git to
> interact with your project.  Today git is very popular and so everyone
[ ... ]

Which precisely points at the question.

BTW I'm using bazaar daily and I like it. It's much easier for beginners than git etc.
Git isn't and wasn't the better one per se - nonetheless bazaar lost the race.

While still preferring Emacs, not Vim, there are comparable setbacks.

Bazaar is blamed being slow, Emacs is blamed that.

There are felt inconsistencies, which I wouldn't expect at Vim.

It might be my mistake, `defvar' for example seems to have changed it's meaning since Emacs-23.

While it was used to initialize a global variable, now it's told to signal a dynamic scope WRT to let-bound ones - which is quite a different issue.
Emacs Lisp was fast to hack, as variables must not be passed around explicitly. If I must defvar every let-bound, that's much more to write and also confusing, as a global 
var might not be intended.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Andreas Röhler]

Am 10.10.2013 22:57, schrieb Emanuel Berg:
> Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> writes:
>
>> Maybe the story of bazaar versus git tells something
>> for this case too?
>
> What's that story?
>

I'm referring to a speech by Martin Pool,

Somewhere here:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2013q1/075475.html

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Phillip Lord]

Rainer M Krug <Rainer@krugs.de> writes:
>> The other point to remember is that there are more programmers now than
>> 20 years ago. I would be shocked if Emacs popularity as a percentage had
>> not dropped.
>
> Not only more programmers, but also more IDE, source code editors (in
> the widest sense) - i.e. alternatives to emacs. 
>
> I love emacs and  will stick with it (even if I am the last one using
> it), but I see the difficulty to sell it to new programmers. By the way:
> I see the same problem with vi.


Sure. It has a start up hump. I basically bullied some of my students
into using it; it takes a few months before they start to appreciate it.


But, as I say, there are more programmers than ever; I suspect that
actual number of Emacs users is increasing. Especially since org-mode
got invented which is bringing in lots of people.

Phil

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnu.org> writes:

> Still, some of us yoke and joke, poke and smoke, so
> that others might (perchance) "dig" the well.

Well, you didn't "fool" me with all your yokes and
poems, let me tell you.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Bob Proulx]

Andreas Röhler wrote:
> Am 10.10.2013 22:57, schrieb Emanuel Berg:
> >Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> writes:
> >
> >>Maybe the story of bazaar versus git tells something
> >>for this case too?
> >
> >What's that story?
> 
> I'm referring to a speech by Martin Pool,
> 
> Somewhere here:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2013q1/075475.html

I had been thinking of this reference.  I found it an interesting
"post mortem" of the project.  Good reading.

  Bazaar-NG: 7 years of hacking on a distributed version control system
  http://stationary-traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html

Bob

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Andreas Röhler]

Am 11.10.2013 21:06, schrieb Bob Proulx:
> Andreas Röhler wrote:
>> Am 10.10.2013 22:57, schrieb Emanuel Berg:
>>> Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> writes:
>>>
>>>> Maybe the story of bazaar versus git tells something
>>>> for this case too?
>>>
>>> What's that story?
>>
>> I'm referring to a speech by Martin Pool,
>>
>> Somewhere here:
>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2013q1/075475.html
>
> I had been thinking of this reference.  I found it an interesting
> "post mortem" of the project.  Good reading.
>
>    Bazaar-NG: 7 years of hacking on a distributed version control system
>    http://stationary-traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html
>
> Bob
>
>

Ahh, thanks!

BTW assume we all here agree these are difficult and complex matters.
If other do better at a certain field, doesn't mean we are bad, just we could learn something :)

Cheers

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Kai Grossjohann]

On Tuesday, August 27, 2013 12:43:20 AM UTC+2, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:

> Can I reasonably trust Emacs
> to be active and improving by 2018?

Emacs was written in 1985, so it will be 30 years old soon.  I think it can go on another 30 years :-)

Kai

RE: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Drew Adams]

> > trust Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?
> 
> Emacs was written in 1985, so it will be 30 years old soon.  I
> think it can go on another 30 years :-)

It's really more like 40 years that people have been using Emacs.
GNU Emacs will be 30 in two more years (soon, but not that soon).

Emacs was developed in the early-to-mid 70s.  RMS wrote the
original "Emacs" (adding "macros" to editor TECO) in 1976.

GNU and GNU Emacs date from the mid 80s.  GNU was announced as
a proposed project in 1983, and development started in 1984.
FSF dates from 1985.  GNU Emacs was first released in 1985.

In the early-to-mid 80s people used Emacs, but not GNU Emacs.
There were some (non-GNU, non-RMS) Emacsen written in Lisp and 
available since the late 70s, but not on Unix (and there was
no GNU/Linux).

On Unix, there was only Gosling Emacs through much of the 80s.
It had neither Lisp (!) nor real lists (!), and arguments were
passed using a strange workaround.  Nevertheless, people hacked
with it, customized their init files, shared their code, used
TAGS files and Info (IIRC), and did most of the other things we
still do with Emacs.

So **40** years, and counting...

[http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory,
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs]

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> writes:

> Ahh, thanks!
>
> BTW assume we all here agree these are difficult and
> complex matters.  If other do better at a certain
> field, doesn't mean we are bad, just we could learn
> something :)

Yes, there's that, and also, in general, we wish the Vim
people, and everyone else all the best with their
efforts. Even projects like Ubuntu and Eclipse which I
really don't care for, and to some degree think are even
destructive (enormous human resources put on more or
less reinventing the wheel), when it comes down to the
Ubuntu/Eclipse programmers as well as users, I wish them
all the best, and if they do some things even better
than Emacs I have absolutely no problem with that, on
the contrary.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Kai Grossjohann <kai.grossjohann@gmail.com> writes:

> Emacs was written in 1985, so it will be 30 years old
> soon.  I think it can go on another 30 years :-)

Well, no disrespect to the 1985 people, but didn't
countless of people work on Emacs, every single day
since, and still do?

I know RMS was the sole maintainer for a long time. Is
there any data on how many people, from what countries,
etc., etc., worked on Emacs? Where did it start? Some
Lispers at MIT?

I know that Emacs-w3m is done by Japanese programmers.

On Usenet, most people seem to be from northern
Europe. (I have to admit that Sweden's contribution
cannot compare to our neighbours. That's why *I* am so
active, ha ha.) USA, of course.

The excellent Russian (and ex-USSR) and the very skilled
Latino hackers are not here, for the ridiculous reason
they are not comfortable with the English language!
That's a huge loss for *us*, so *speak*!

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Kai Grossjohann]

On Saturday, October 12, 2013 10:39:40 PM UTC+2, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Kai Grossjohann <kai.grossjohann@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> 
> 
> > Emacs was written in 1985, so it will be 30 years old
> > soon.  I think it can go on another 30 years :-)
> 
> Well, no disrespect to the 1985 people, but didn't
> countless of people work on Emacs, every single day
> since, and still do?

Apologies.  I meant to say that _the first version_ of (GNU) Emacs was published in 1985.

Kai

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> Well, no disrespect to the 1985 people, but didn't
> countless of people work on Emacs, every single day
> since, and still do?
>
> I know RMS was the sole maintainer for a long time. Is
> there any data on how many people, from what
> countries, etc., etc., worked on Emacs? Where did it
> start? Some Lispers at MIT?
>
> I know that Emacs-w3m is done by Japanese programmers.
>
> On Usenet, most people seem to be from northern
> Europe. (I have to admit that Sweden's contribution
> cannot compare to our neighbours. That's why *I* am so
> active, ha ha.) USA, of course.
>
> The excellent Russian (and ex-USSR) and the very
> skilled Latino hackers are not here, for the
> ridiculous reason they are not comfortable with the
> English language!  That's a huge loss for *us*, so
> *speak*!

Perhaps I should have said... those are generalizations,
and should not be "applied", and certainly not to any
one individual or whatever, if you get my thinking.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Kai Grossjohann]

On Saturday, October 12, 2013 5:30:16 PM UTC+2, Drew Adams wrote:
> > > trust Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?
> 
> > Emacs was written in 1985, so it will be 30 years old soon.  I
> > think it can go on another 30 years :-)
> 
> 
> 
> It's really more like 40 years that people have been using Emacs.
> GNU Emacs will be 30 in two more years (soon, but not that soon).

Yes, yes.  Not good.  I was thinking of GNU Emacs but didn't say it.

I believe that GNU Emacs was never rewritten.  It was incrementally refactored, and it's quite possible that every line of code has changed since the original version was published in 1985, but what I mean here is that as far as I know there was never a complete rewrite of the whole thing.

I find that to be very impressive, and hence I mentioned 1985 as the date.

Does anyone know whether this is true?  It would be quite the impressive feat!

Kai

RE: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Drew Adams]

> > > > trust Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?
> >
> > > Emacs was written in 1985, so it will be 30 years old soon.  I
> > > think it can go on another 30 years :-)
> >
> > It's really more like 40 years that people have been using Emacs.
> > GNU Emacs will be 30 in two more years (soon, but not that soon).
> 
> Yes, yes.  Not good.  I was thinking of GNU Emacs but didn't say it.

No, no.  Good!  Your point was that Emacs has been around a long
time and will likely be around for a long time to come.  Thank you
for saying it, Kai.  What I wrote just nitpicked to add a few details.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Kai Grossjohann <kai.grossjohann@gmail.com> writes:

> I believe that GNU Emacs was never rewritten.  It was
> incrementally refactored, and it's quite possible that
> every line of code has changed since the original
> version was published in 1985, but what I mean here is
> that as far as I know there was never a complete
> rewrite of the whole thing.
>
> I find that to be very impressive, and hence I
> mentioned 1985 as the date.
>
> Does anyone know whether this is true?  It would be
> quite the impressive feat!

"A complete rewrite..." Wouldn't that be a total
disaster? Why would you do that? Because of hardware
changes? Portability? Please explain :)

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Christopher Ritsen]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 12:06:54PM +0100, Phillip Lord wrote:
> But, as I say, there are more programmers than ever; I suspect that actual
> number of Emacs users is increasing. Especially since org-mode got invented
> which is bringing in lots of people.

org-mode is the reason I started using emacs and was completely worth it.  I use
both vim (2.5 years) and emacs (4 months) every day, which seems to be extremely
uncommon. (this is my first post to a listserv, let me know if I'm doing it
wrong.)

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, October 13, 2013 3:31:55 AM UTC+5:30, Christopher Ritsen wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 12:06:54PM +0100, Phillip Lord wrote:
> 
> > But, as I say, there are more programmers than ever; I suspect that actual
> > number of Emacs users is increasing. Especially since org-mode got invented
> > which is bringing in lots of people.
> 
> org-mode is the reason I started using emacs and was completely worth it.  I use
> both vim (2.5 years) and emacs (4 months) every day, which seems to be extremely
> uncommon. (this is my first post to a listserv, let me know if I'm doing it
> wrong.)

Hi Christopher!
Good to hear your voice -- you are welcome here!
What do you use emacs/vi for?

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Kai Großjohann]

Emanuel Berg wrote:
> 
> "A complete rewrite..." Wouldn't that be a total
> disaster? Why would you do that? Because of hardware
> changes? Portability? Please explain :)

If the programmers don't know how to write maintainable code and don't
know how to refactor, then the code gets worse and worse and at one
point needs to be rewritten.  I heard that's not so uncommon for
commercial software projects.

Kai

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Eric Brown]

Perry Smith <pedzsan@gmail.com> writes:

> Emacs is old school.  Very old school with the ability to drive real
> tty's over 300 baud modems with spectacular efficiency.  Its on X11,
> windows, and Mac.

(For the purpose of the OP, no surprise to grizzled Emacs users)

I run into "300 baud modem" situations all the time.  Often I work in
cafes, where the wireless can be spectacularly bad.

Usually I run Emacs in X over ssh, but when the latency is high, I fire
it up in text mode.  The cursor may jump a little bit, but it is usable.

I run on Mac, Windows, Linuxes, and OpenBSD--pretty much the same
configuration files.

For me, Emacs is simply the best in perfect situations of fast network
and fast computer.  It leaves the others in the dirt when it comes to
imperfect situations -- slow network, slow computer, and heterogeneous
environments.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Eric Brown <eric.c.brown@mac.com> writes:

> Usually I run Emacs in X over ssh, but when the
> latency is high, I fire it up in text mode.  The
> cursor may jump a little bit, but it is usable.
>
> I run on Mac, Windows, Linuxes, and OpenBSD--pretty
> much the same configuration files.
>
> For me, Emacs is simply the best in perfect situations
> of fast network and fast computer.  It leaves the
> others in the dirt when it comes to imperfect
> situations -- slow network, slow computer, and
> heterogeneous environments.

That's interesting. Why do you use all those systems? I
was "like that" when I always got computers from
everyone I knew, when I "found" them, etc. Then I was
under the incorrect impression that installing a Linux
distro was difficult or at least tedious. Now I do it
first thing, if you have a comic book or newspaper next
to you it is fine. Just like you, I try to keep portable
config files (not just for Emacs), which works "in
theory" :) No, that works to 85-95%, really. I also do
lots of stuff with ssh (but without X). First, I did
everything local and then scp the files, now I run Emacs
on the remote Solaris/SunOS with 99% identical
experience.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Kai Großjohann <kai.grossjohann@gmx.net> writes:

>> "A complete rewrite..." Wouldn't that be a total
>> disaster? Why would you do that? Because of hardware
>> changes? Portability? Please explain :)
>
> If the programmers don't know how to write
> maintainable code and don't know how to refactor, then
> the code gets worse and worse and at one point needs
> to be rewritten.  I heard that's not so uncommon for
> commercial software projects.

FOSS code is in general better than commercial code. Not
by much, but it has been affirmed. Also, Emacs is
written in C with Lisp on top of it. It seems like a
solid architecture. Also, lots of people say C++, and
not C, is the modular, reusable, etc., etc., programming
language. But that's no my experience.

But, all that techno-techno-science amount to close to
zero in incapable hands. But in this case, didn't RMS
even wrote the C compiler? He is the only guy I know (by
name), but I think there was a, ehm, "herd" of very
dedicated (fanatical perhaps) programmers.

If Emacs will run into a dead-end and had to be
rewritten because of poor software I will be chocked!

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Eric Brown]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> Eric Brown <eric.c.brown@mac.com> writes:
>
>> I run on Mac, Windows, Linuxes, and OpenBSD--pretty
>> much the same configuration files.
>> heterogeneous environments.
>
> That's interesting. Why do you use all those systems? I
> was "like that" when I always got computers from
> everyone I knew, when I "found" them, etc. Then I was
> under the incorrect impression that installing a Linux
> distro was difficult or at least tedious. Now I do it
> first thing, if you have a comic book or newspaper next
> to you it is fine. Just like you, I try to keep portable
> config files (not just for Emacs), which works "in
> theory" :) No, that works to 85-95%, really. I also do
> lots of stuff with ssh (but without X). First, I did
> everything local and then scp the files, now I run Emacs
> on the remote Solaris/SunOS with 99% identical
> experience.

I use a Mac 11-inch Air, because it fits in my man-purse and runs the
various proprietary software that I can't live without (Citrix,
Mathematica).  I spend most of my time in Emacs and the terminal, but
those proprietary apps (necessary for my earning a living) preclude me
from using:

My preferred OS is OpenBSD, which I run on an old laptop (my previous
Macbook) as my home server/firewall.

At work, I use CentOS as these are managed by the UNIX administrators
and that is what they prefer.  When I need a Linux, I use Debian
GNU/Linux.

Occasionally, I am involved in a special project that uses Windows 2008
as the server platform.

I use Emacs Starter Kit (eschulte's version) as my base: then, I make
use its convention of loading machine name and username .el files in
order to customize for work vs. home and all machines.  It's all tied
together with git/gitolite.  Generally, it is straightforward to supply
different paths, etc. for different operating systems and machine
peculiarities.

I think that Emacs is a great way to unify my environment over radically
different underlying architecures.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Alex Schroeder]

This thread seems appropriate to repost the following important message.

From: PerAbrahamsen
Newsgroups: news:comp.emacs, news:alt.religion.emacs
Subject: Re: what's so fun about emacs?
Date: 06 Mar 2000 10:03:44 +0100
Organization: The ChurchOfEmacs
User-Agent: Gnus/5.0804 (Gnus v5.8.4) Emacs/20.4
 
 [...]
 
 Emacs has so much power that nobody will ever master it
 completely. You can always be a stronger user with Emacs. With a
 "simple" editor like pico or notepad, you will quickly master it
 completely, which means that it will not allow you to grow
 further. Sure, it will take a new user a little longer to be
 productive with Emacs than Pico, but by starting with Emacs he will
 have an editor that will grow with him for the rest of his life.
 
 [...]
 
 20 MB is 1 cent worth of disc space. For that 1 cent, you get the
 most powerful text editor in the world, an IDE that supports more
 programming languages "out of the box" than all other IDEs in the world
 combined, the most feature-rich News and Mail reader ever, a web
 browser, a calendar that knows more cultures than you have heard of,
 and your own personal psychotherapist. If you think 1 cent is too
 much for a text editor that has been specially optimized for every
 text processing need in your remaining life, you ought to reevaluate
 your value system.
 
 [...]
 
 What you call "Windows" is just one of many window systems that has
 come in and out of fashion during the lifetime of Emacs. Emacs (in one
 version or another) has supported most of them,
 SunView, NeWS, X10, X11 (Open Look, Athena, Motif), PM,
 Win32, Mac. Emacs has provided a sound foundation that has allowed
 programmers to be productive with all these, and will also provide a
 foundation for whatever window system will be hot tomorrow. 
 
 What Emacs doesn't do is to give up that foundation in order to follow
 the latest trend. Instead, it incorporates what is good and
 compensates for the rest. This -- of course -- will make Emacs feel
 "old" for the followers of hype, but the wise will see its intrinsic
 power and lasting value.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Alex Schroeder <alex@gnu.org> writes:

> What you call "Windows" is just one of many window
> systems that has come in and out of fashion during the
> lifetime of Emacs. Emacs (in one version or another)
> has supported most of them, SunView, NeWS, X10, X11
> (Open Look, Athena, Motif), PM, Win32, Mac. Emacs has
> provided a sound foundation that has allowed
> programmers to be productive with all these, and will
> also provide a foundation for whatever window system
> will be hot tomorrow.

The way I see it, Emacs doesn't have that much to do
with all that. I don't use Emacs because I use an OS
with (or without) a GUI or a window system, I use Emacs
(and the shell) to get away from all that, and if I
*were* to use Emacs in X, I don't see that changing my
Emacs ways. But yes, there have to be some very minor
changes (or things enabled) that have mostly to do with
the interface - the clipboard is a good example, do you
want that integrated with the kill ring? Perhaps, if you
write LaTeX, you'd like xpdf (or evince) in a separate
window to display updates (almost) on the
fly. Installation, the fonts... But all that stuff would
still be considered minor, don't you think?

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Phillip Lord]

Christopher Ritsen <chris.ritsen@gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 12:06:54PM +0100, Phillip Lord wrote:
>> But, as I say, there are more programmers than ever; I suspect that actual
>> number of Emacs users is increasing. Especially since org-mode got invented
>> which is bringing in lots of people.
>
> org-mode is the reason I started using emacs and was completely worth it.  I use
> both vim (2.5 years) and emacs (4 months) every day, which seems to be extremely
> uncommon. 

It's not that uncommon I suspect. I use vim for most systems
adminstration. I do as little sys admin as I can get away with, so I
don't use vim every day!

> (this is my first post to a listserv, let me know if I'm doing it
> wrong.)

Nope, everythings good so far!

Phil

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Stefan Monnier]

> It's not that uncommon I suspect. I use vim for most systems
> adminstration. I do as little sys admin as I can get away with, so I
> don't use vim every day!

Nowadays I use Zile for sysadmin work.


        Stefan

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Christopher Ritsen]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 12:04:24PM +0100, Phillip Lord wrote:
> It's not that uncommon I suspect. I use vim for most systems
> adminstration. I do as little sys admin as I can get away with, so I
> don't use vim every day!

The common refrain seems to be that people use vim over emacs on remote servers
they don't control where it is usually installed by default, but I was referring
to being willing to take the time to configure the programs themselves to be as
useful as possible to me for whatever they are best at.  Right now, that is
strictly org-mode for emacs, and vim for most of my text-editing and coding.
I'm not planning on dropping one for the other, but my assumption is that most
people wouldn't want or have the time to configure both (especially if it's not
possible to use either at work) and lose objectivity about using the best tool
for the job.  I want to avoid that.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Christopher Ritsen <chris.ritsen@gmail.com> writes:

> Right now, that is strictly org-mode for emacs, and
> vim for most of my text-editing and coding.

Yeah, that would be one division that is possible (and
even sensible, if there isn't anything like org-mode for
Vim), but I think the "gosh wow" reaction is of *mixing*
Vim and Emacs for *the same type* of task, or tasks that
are very similar (e.g., two programming languages).

And I think that is a bad move. If we (humans) lived for
400 years, perhaps.

In general, isn't it true that "what works" is obvious
from day one, and then it is much better perfecting it,
than jumping between different things? Even a king of
Ithaca, that is so creative in solving the island's
zillion problem, for the same task, I think he uses the
same method every time, as long as it works.

> I'm not planning on dropping one for the other, but my
> assumption is that most people wouldn't want or have
> the time to configure both (especially if it's not
> possible to use either at work) and lose objectivity
> about using the best tool for the job.

Yeah, but it is not *only* the tool, is it? It is the
*hands*, *eyes*, and *brain*, as well. If those are as
good for any tool, yes, but isn't that unrealistic,
perhaps even impossible?

Am I making any sense here? :)

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Bob Proulx]

Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Christopher Ritsen writes:
> > Right now, that is strictly org-mode for emacs, and
> > vim for most of my text-editing and coding.
> 
> Yeah, that would be one division that is possible (and
> even sensible, if there isn't anything like org-mode for
> Vim), but I think the "gosh wow" reaction is of *mixing*
> Vim and Emacs for *the same type* of task, or tasks that
> are very similar (e.g., two programming languages).

I don't know.  I have always switched back and forth between emacs and
vi as made sense for me at the moment.  If the machine didn't have
emacs then I used vi.  If I wanted to *quickly* start an editor and
edit something like /etc/fstab and exit it then I would use vi.  But
if I were going to spend several hours in an editor writing C code
then I would always use emacs for that type of activity.

Being bilingual is not that difficult if you are actually fluent in
the two.  I don't even think about it.  My fingers just go.

> And I think that is a bad move. If we (humans) lived for
> 400 years, perhaps.

Why?  Because of the time for the learning curve?  That is, it takes a
long time to learn something well?

> In general, isn't it true that "what works" is obvious
> from day one, and then it is much better perfecting it,
> than jumping between different things?

If you look at a workbench of a wood craftsman you will find a variety
of chisels, a variety of hammers, saws, planes, and other tools.
There isn't a single tool that does everything best.  It is often good
to have a variety of tools available.

Also language shapes the way you think.  If all you have is a hammer
then every problem looks like a nail.

>                                        Even a king of
> Ithaca, that is so creative in solving the island's
> zillion problem, for the same task, I think he uses the
> same method every time, as long as it works.
> 
> > I'm not planning on dropping one for the other, but my
> > assumption is that most people wouldn't want or have
> > the time to configure both (especially if it's not
> > possible to use either at work) and lose objectivity
> > about using the best tool for the job.
> 
> Yeah, but it is not *only* the tool, is it? It is the
> *hands*, *eyes*, and *brain*, as well. If those are as
> good for any tool, yes, but isn't that unrealistic,
> perhaps even impossible?
> 
> Am I making any sense here? :)

Sorry.  You lost me along the way.  I think I didn't make that left
turn at Albuquerque.  :-)

Bob

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Phillip Lord]

Christopher Ritsen <chris.ritsen@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 12:04:24PM +0100, Phillip Lord wrote:
>> It's not that uncommon I suspect. I use vim for most systems
>> adminstration. I do as little sys admin as I can get away with, so I
>> don't use vim every day!
>
> The common refrain seems to be that people use vim over emacs on remote servers
> they don't control where it is usually installed by default, but I was referring
> to being willing to take the time to configure the programs themselves to be as
> useful as possible to me for whatever they are best at.  Right now, that is
> strictly org-mode for emacs, and vim for most of my text-editing and coding.
> I'm not planning on dropping one for the other, but my assumption is that most
> people wouldn't want or have the time to configure both (especially if it's not
> possible to use either at work) and lose objectivity about using the best tool
> for the job.  I want to avoid that.


"Best tool for the job", of course, means "best tool for the job that
*I* am doing". Emacs is a better tool for me to use for most jobs
because I know how to use it. I don't think that it's a question with an
objective answer. Still, I can see your point, in terms of what works
for you.

Phil

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:

> Being bilingual is not that difficult if you are
> actually fluent in the two.  I don't even think about
> it.  My fingers just go.

OK, you realize I speak of "bilingual" in the sense of
Emacs and Vim, right? If you are (as fluent), then
that's really cool.

> Why?  Because of the time for the learning curve?
> That is, it takes a long time to learn something well?

Yes. And then you have to "re-learn" when you go back
(although that will be much faster). Again, you realize
I'm not talking learning as in intelligence etc., I'm
talking the, I don't know, mental-physical bound. Like
if you put your hand in the fire, you don't think "the
heat will disintegrate my hand, so I must save it by
removing it", instead the skin - I don't know exactly
how it works... the skins sends "fear" and pain to your
brain, which sends a command to get away from the source
of danger right away?

> If you look at a workbench of a wood craftsman you
> will find a variety of chisels, a variety of hammers,
> saws, planes, and other tools.  There isn't a single
> tool that does everything best.  It is often good to
> have a variety of tools available.

Yes, but the saw and the hammer are not that difficult
to master. I don't think those can be compared to Emacs
or Vim. It is more like people fighting at the
Colosseum. I would rather have one guy who has perfected
swordplay his entire life, and one guy who did the same
with the spear, than two guys who were pretty good with
lots of weapons.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:

> "Best tool for the job", of course, means "best tool
> for the job that *I* am doing".

"... the *way* *I*'m doing it, *when* I'm doing it..."

I don't think this is so much "of course"! :)

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Rustom Mody]

On Tuesday, October 15, 2013 11:20:28 PM UTC+5:30, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Bob Proulx writes:

> Yes. And then you have to "re-learn" when you go back
> (although that will be much faster). Again, you realize
> I'm not talking learning as in intelligence etc., I'm
> talking the, I don't know, mental-physical bound. Like
> if you put your hand in the fire, you don't think "the
> heat will disintegrate my hand, so I must save it by
> removing it", instead the skin - I don't know exactly
> how it works... the skins sends "fear" and pain to your
> brain, which sends a command to get away from the source
> of danger right away?
> 
> 
> > If you look at a workbench of a wood craftsman you
> > will find a variety of chisels, a variety of hammers,
> > saws, planes, and other tools.  There isn't a single
> > tool that does everything best.  It is often good to
> > have a variety of tools available.

Sometimes I have to drive a car with 'European' controls (wiper on left, lights on right) and sometimes (less frequently) with American (wiper and lights flipped).

[And if I have a choice I'd rather walk or take the bus but thats a different question :-) ]

Usually I manage the switch. However in the more demanding traffic I often end up switching on the wipers when I wanted to show a turning light --  mutter an expletive and get on... So far there have been no serious mishaps, but its not inconceivable that it could get worse.

I can see and ideally agree with Emanuel -- use only the tool you are good at.
However I find I live in a world that does not always and exactly agree with me and Ive to muddle on somehow or other.

Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> I can see and ideally agree with Emanuel -- use only
> the tool you are good at.  However I find I live in a
> world that does not always and exactly agree with me
> and Ive to muddle on somehow or other.

Point. Let me tell you, when I did my degree work they
had me do *Microsoft Access 2003*! I haven't had such a
negative computer experience since I played
"Phantasmagoria" while under the influence.

But, when I wrote my report about it, I wrote how much
MS Access sucked and I even included a screenshot of
Emacs as a counterpunch. I don't know if the supervisor
felt guilty, but he didn't ask me to remove that whole
chapter, which was what I expected.

Begins - page 27, Emacs dump - page 31. (If you have
read my posts here you have more or less read the
article already.) That's Emacs in X, in a tabbed urxvt,
by the way, which isn't standard but has to be setup - a
Perl module, and then tweak looks in .Xresources, and
shortcuts... - I remember all those details, but hardly
what was the point of the entire degree project.

http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/about/degree/x.pdf

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573