Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Nathan Dehnel]

________________________________

>Hi, for some reason emacs has become the elephant in the room of the
discussion on contributing to guix.

>Regardless of one's opinion of emacs, I just want to add that this is
itself strange.  I have contributed some (package definition) patches
to guix, all without using emacs.

>I am not an emacs user, so emacs is not necessary for contributing to guix.
For what it's worth, the emacs-motif package in Guix was my addition.
I don't use it myself.

I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable), so I just use
kate instead, which isn't a great environment for me either. It has
rainbow parens, but it doesn't balance them, which is a hassle. I keep
using it though due to lack of time to browse through alternatives. I
heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
screwing around with it.

https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lispforeveryone/
This is the only setup for coding in lisp that has actually looked
attractive to me. (Coding in wisp with colored blocks that transpiles
to s-expressions) Though I haven't had the time (and probably
expertise) to set it up for myself.

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Janneke Nieuwenhuizen]

Nathan Dehnel writes:

> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable)

Emacs might be somewhat different from what you know, but this is utter
bollocks.

Switching to Emacs (from vi) took me three summers.  I kept trying
because I had seen how helpful it was, and well the statement that "the
GNU project will use it as its editor".

That was some 25y ago and it was time very well spent.  After I
switched, I taught it to my dad for his latex editing, who went on to
create patches for the Dutch tutorial because he wanted to give back
something..  If he could learn, most anyone should be able to pick it
up.

People are still indenting their code manually today, etc... it's
ridiculous.  Also, magit.

Greetings,
Janneke

-- 
Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>  | GNU LilyPond https://LilyPond.org
Freelance IT https://www.JoyOfSource.com | Avatar® https://AvatarAcademy.com

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[paul]

Dear Janneke,

On 9/23/23 09:37, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Nathan Dehnel writes:
>
>> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable)
> Emacs might be somewhat different from what you know, but this is utter
> bollocks.

Thank you for your opinion but it's just that: a subjective judgement 
based on your own episodic experience. Which is definitely valid but 
unrealistically shared by so many to be able to define Nathan's 
experience "utter bollocks".

I think this attitude (in my experience typical of GNU maintainers) 
where their way of doing computation is more blessed or holier or better 
sometimes really ruins the social interactions happening around Guix 
(which is the safest  community in the GNU project imho, probably also 
due to the distance they rightfully posed during the whole stallman drama).

It's especially problematic when people in power such as maintainers do 
not realize their role in the community. You have more power, probably 
due to your investment you have a clearer vision of where the project is 
going as well. You are supposed to be a role model for new users and 
contributors.

> If he could learn, most anyone should be able to pick it
> up.
> People are still indenting their code manually today, etc... it's
> ridiculous.
This behavior is not ok. Again, please, stop throwing your judgement on 
people. Potential users or contributors even.
> Also, magit.

I use Emacs, love magit, I used to use it daily also at $day_job on 
Windows because it's just so good, but I can assure you most of Git 
users never heard of it and live their life pretty happily.

giacomo

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:

> heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
> and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
> screwing around with it.

M-x modus-themes-toggle RET

i.e. hold Alt, press x, then type “modus-themes-toggle” and hit the
return key.

We can add a little toggle button to Guile Studio that does this.

-- 
Ricardo

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Janneke Nieuwenhuizen]

paul writes:

Dear Paul,

> On 9/23/23 09:37, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
>> Nathan Dehnel writes:
>>
>>> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable)
>> Emacs might be somewhat different from what you know, but this is utter
>> bollocks.
>
> Thank you for your opinion but it's just that: a subjective judgement
> based on your own episodic experience.

I'm sorry if my tone was too harsh, I now realise this is still
triggering old pain.

Why is it still OK to for people to keep spreading negative anecdotes
about Emacs, and problematic to refute them or counter them with
positive anecdotes?

It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away from
starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way; something I deeply
regret: this has to stop.

Greetings,
Janneke

-- 
Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>  | GNU LilyPond https://LilyPond.org
Freelance IT https://www.JoyOfSource.com | Avatar® https://AvatarAcademy.com

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
>> and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
>> screwing around with it.
>
> M-x modus-themes-toggle RET
>
> i.e. hold Alt, press x, then type “modus-themes-toggle” and hit the
> return key.
>
> We can add a little toggle button to Guile Studio that does this.

To affect the context menu and menu bar you’d also need to do set the
GTK_THEME variable when starting Guile Studio, e.g.

    GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark guile-studio

I’ll try to change Guile Studio so that it will automatically pick the
dark or light variant of the theme dependent on system preferences, but
for now this is the workaround that should get you most of the way to a
dark theme.

-- 
Ricardo

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
>> and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
>> screwing around with it.
>
> M-x modus-themes-toggle RET
>
> i.e. hold Alt, press x, then type “modus-themes-toggle” and hit the
> return key.
>
> We can add a little toggle button to Guile Studio that does this.

Actually, I just noticed that Guile Studio already tells you how to do
this in the help pane that is displayed on startup:

    Toggle between dark and light mode with F5.

-- 
Ricardo

The Giraffe; the Pelican et al (was Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang)

[indieterminacy]

I would assume that people who dont use Emacs are entitled to document 
their experiences using their weapon(s) of choice within the Guix 
knowledge corpus.

Sure, consider and discuss governance and workflows... but people 
complaining that Emacs users have documented their techniques to a 
better standard than non Emacs users within an operating system's 
documentation is bordering on the ridiculous.

On 23-09-2023 10:58, paul wrote:
> Dear Janneke,
> 
> On 9/23/23 09:37, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
>> Nathan Dehnel writes:
>> 
>>> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable)
>> Emacs might be somewhat different from what you know, but this is 
>> utter
>> bollocks.
> 
> Thank you for your opinion but it's just that: a subjective judgement 
> based on your own episodic experience. Which is definitely valid but 
> unrealistically shared by so many to be able to define Nathan's 
> experience "utter bollocks".
> 
> I think this attitude (in my experience typical of GNU maintainers) 
> where their way of doing computation is more blessed or holier or 
> better sometimes really ruins the social interactions happening around 
> Guix (which is the safest  community in the GNU project imho, probably 
> also due to the distance they rightfully posed during the whole 
> stallman drama).
> 
> It's especially problematic when people in power such as maintainers do 
> not realize their role in the community. You have more power, probably 
> due to your investment you have a clearer vision of where the project 
> is going as well. You are supposed to be a role model for new users and 
> contributors.
> 
>> If he could learn, most anyone should be able to pick it
>> up.
>> People are still indenting their code manually today, etc... it's
>> ridiculous.
> This behavior is not ok. Again, please, stop throwing your judgement on 
> people. Potential users or contributors even.
>> Also, magit.
> 
> I use Emacs, love magit, I used to use it daily also at $day_job on 
> Windows because it's just so good, but I can assure you most of Git 
> users never heard of it and live their life pretty happily.
> 
> giacomo

-- 
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Nathan Dehnel]

Oh, thank you, that's lovely.

On Sat, Sep 23, 2023 at 4:59 AM Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> wrote:
>
>
> Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
> > and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
> > screwing around with it.
>
> M-x modus-themes-toggle RET
>
> i.e. hold Alt, press x, then type “modus-themes-toggle” and hit the
> return key.
>
> We can add a little toggle button to Guile Studio that does this.
>
> --
> Ricardo

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Nathan Dehnel]

>I'm sorry if my tone was too harsh, I now realise this is still
triggering old pain.

>Why is it still OK to for people to keep spreading negative anecdotes
about Emacs, and problematic to refute them or counter them with
positive anecdotes?

It was a mistake to say that. I felt the reflexive need to justify why
I don't use emacs, or else people would just tell me to use it anyways
as a result of talking about not knowing of a decent (alternative)
lisp editor.

>It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away from
starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way; something I deeply
regret: this has to stop.

I want to clarify that I'm not just repeating rumors and I actually
have tried to use emacs.

On Sat, Sep 23, 2023 at 5:00 AM Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> paul writes:
>
> Dear Paul,
>
> > On 9/23/23 09:37, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> >> Nathan Dehnel writes:
> >>
> >>> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable)
> >> Emacs might be somewhat different from what you know, but this is utter
> >> bollocks.
> >
> > Thank you for your opinion but it's just that: a subjective judgement
> > based on your own episodic experience.
>
> I'm sorry if my tone was too harsh, I now realise this is still
> triggering old pain.
>
> Why is it still OK to for people to keep spreading negative anecdotes
> about Emacs, and problematic to refute them or counter them with
> positive anecdotes?
>
> It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away from
> starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way; something I deeply
> regret: this has to stop.
>
> Greetings,
> Janneke
>
> --
> Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>  | GNU LilyPond https://LilyPond.org
> Freelance IT https://www.JoyOfSource.com | Avatar® https://AvatarAcademy.com

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Liliana Marie Prikler]

Am Sonntag, dem 24.09.2023 um 02:37 -0500 schrieb Nathan Dehnel:
> > I'm sorry if my tone was too harsh, I now realise this is still
> > triggering old pain.
> 
> > Why is it still OK to for people to keep spreading negative
> > anecdotes about Emacs, and problematic to refute them or counter
> > them with positive anecdotes?
> 
> It was a mistake to say that. I felt the reflexive need to justify
> why I don't use emacs, or else people would just tell me to use it
> anyways as a result of talking about not knowing of a decent
> (alternative) lisp editor.
I mean, you could try using it anyways, whether it's vanilla emacs,
customized emacs, guile studio, or the heavily popularized spacemacs,
doom, etc. variants.  On the Guix side, it doesn't really matter, our
configuration works with packages based on Emacs.

It's fine if you prefer another editor, but don't count on us to write
documentation for every editor out there, especially when it almost
always turns out to be invoking "guix edit" followed by "git commit …"
or perhaps using that editor's built-in VC integration to do so.  I'm
also not convinced you need to bring the big guns of lisp editing to
the table.  From personal experience, an editor that autocompletes the
closing bracket and has parentheses matching capabilities suffices. 
The latter is even implemented by crude tools such as gnome-text-
editor.

> > It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away from
> > starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way; something I
> > deeply regret: this has to stop.
> 
> I want to clarify that I'm not just repeating rumors and I actually
> have tried to use emacs.
There is a wide span of "tried emacs".  I personally wouldn't say I've
"tried" vi after hitting ESC :q once and being done or even that I've
tried using ed after vaguely figuring out how you can make it actually
change the contents of a file.

Now whether you want to qualify your experience further or not is up to
you, and even if you do, your personal choice of a suitable editor
remains personal.  However, I don't think that repeating the age old
jokes of "herp derp, me no likes defaults" as has happened in other
branches of this topic is helpful.  *The defaults in Emacs do not
matter.*  You don't need to be happy with the editor you get out of the
box.  You can change it into the editor you want and there's ample
documentation on how to do so.  Coming full circle, this is why we
reference Emacs in the manual, enough people collaborated to suggest a
workflow that works for them or at least goes in the right direction. 
However, I think it's fair to say that most folks' setup will differ
ever so slightly from what is presented there.

Cheers

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Csepp]

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
>> and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
>> screwing around with it.
>
> M-x modus-themes-toggle RET
>
> i.e. hold Alt, press x, then type “modus-themes-toggle” and hit the
> return key.
>
> We can add a little toggle button to Guile Studio that does this.

Kinda tangential, but could Emacs be made to just use the system (GTK)
theme?
(In general there are a looot of places where Emacs should just stop
doing its own thing and properly integrate with the system services and
settings.)

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
>
>> Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
>>> and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
>>> screwing around with it.
>>
>> M-x modus-themes-toggle RET
>>
>> i.e. hold Alt, press x, then type “modus-themes-toggle” and hit the
>> return key.
>>
>> We can add a little toggle button to Guile Studio that does this.
>
> Kinda tangential, but could Emacs be made to just use the system (GTK)
> theme?

Yes, that’s my plan, but I don’t have enough time this month to work on
it.  My notes:

+ when =dconf read /org/gnome/desktop/interface/color-scheme= returns
  ’prefer-dark’ enable dark mode by default.

+ use =xprop= to change the theme variant *after* the frame has been created; see
  https://gist.github.com/itoshkov/850c46746705e32e2039fb0112a75ec7
  
+ we may also need to set =GTK_THEME= to =Adwaita:dark= before actually
  launching Guile Studio.  Or rather the value at
  =/org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/theme= followed by =:dark=.  This
  can be done in shell wrapper.

-- 
Ricardo

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[MSavoritias]

On 9/23/23 13:00, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> paul writes:
>
> Dear Paul,
>
>> On 9/23/23 09:37, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
>>> Nathan Dehnel writes:
>>>
>>>> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable)
>>> Emacs might be somewhat different from what you know, but this is utter
>>> bollocks.
>> Thank you for your opinion but it's just that: a subjective judgement
>> based on your own episodic experience.
> I'm sorry if my tone was too harsh, I now realise this is still
> triggering old pain.
>
> Why is it still OK to for people to keep spreading negative anecdotes
> about Emacs, and problematic to refute them or counter them with
> positive anecdotes?
>
> It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away from
> starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way; something I deeply
> regret: this has to stop.
>
> Greetings,
> Janneke
>
Depends what Emacs you mean.

The vanilla Emacs experience is traditionally horrible until you start 
tweaking it.

And it for years the maintainers of Emacs refuse to do anything to fix 
it. So I would say complaints are pretty valid

when its the same people that push Emacs as the "blessed" way to 
contribute (as in the guix manual) and then people see Emacs vanilla and 
cant use it.


The problematic is not that you say positive stuff about Emacs. I have a 
lot of positive stuff to say too :)

The problem part is the way you dismissed the persons experience as 
"bollocks". The knowledge that the Emacs community is pretty 
conservative in changing anything for decades in the default config also 
doesn't help.


MSavoritias

Re: The Giraffe; the Pelican et al (was Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang)

[MSavoritias]

On 9/23/23 15:59, indieterminacy wrote:
> I would assume that people who dont use Emacs are entitled to document 
> their experiences using their weapon(s) of choice within the Guix 
> knowledge corpus.
>
> Sure, consider and discuss governance and workflows... but people 
> complaining that Emacs users have documented their techniques to a 
> better standard than non Emacs users within an operating system's 
> documentation is bordering on the ridiculous.
>
The discussion at least the last couple of weeks have been on lessening 
the difficulty to contribute.

So saying that the people who don't know guile or guix need to first 
contribute docs is pretty ridiculous.

MSavoritias

> On 23-09-2023 10:58, paul wrote:
>> Dear Janneke,
>>
>> On 9/23/23 09:37, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
>>> Nathan Dehnel writes:
>>>
>>>> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable)
>>> Emacs might be somewhat different from what you know, but this is utter
>>> bollocks.
>>
>> Thank you for your opinion but it's just that: a subjective judgement 
>> based on your own episodic experience. Which is definitely valid but 
>> unrealistically shared by so many to be able to define Nathan's 
>> experience "utter bollocks".
>>
>> I think this attitude (in my experience typical of GNU maintainers) 
>> where their way of doing computation is more blessed or holier or 
>> better sometimes really ruins the social interactions happening 
>> around Guix (which is the safest community in the GNU project imho, 
>> probably also due to the distance they rightfully posed during the 
>> whole stallman drama).
>>
>> It's especially problematic when people in power such as maintainers 
>> do not realize their role in the community. You have more power, 
>> probably due to your investment you have a clearer vision of where 
>> the project is going as well. You are supposed to be a role model for 
>> new users and contributors.
>>
>>> If he could learn, most anyone should be able to pick it
>>> up.
>>> People are still indenting their code manually today, etc... it's
>>> ridiculous.
>> This behavior is not ok. Again, please, stop throwing your judgement 
>> on people. Potential users or contributors even.
>>> Also, magit.
>>
>> I use Emacs, love magit, I used to use it daily also at $day_job on 
>> Windows because it's just so good, but I can assure you most of Git 
>> users never heard of it and live their life pretty happily.
>>
>> giacomo
>

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[MSavoritias]

On 9/24/23 11:51, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:
> Am Sonntag, dem 24.09.2023 um 02:37 -0500 schrieb Nathan Dehnel:
>>> I'm sorry if my tone was too harsh, I now realise this is still
>>> triggering old pain.
>>> Why is it still OK to for people to keep spreading negative
>>> anecdotes about Emacs, and problematic to refute them or counter
>>> them with positive anecdotes?
>> It was a mistake to say that. I felt the reflexive need to justify
>> why I don't use emacs, or else people would just tell me to use it
>> anyways as a result of talking about not knowing of a decent
>> (alternative) lisp editor.
> I mean, you could try using it anyways, whether it's vanilla emacs,
> customized emacs, guile studio, or the heavily popularized spacemacs,
> doom, etc. variants.  On the Guix side, it doesn't really matter, our
> configuration works with packages based on Emacs.
>
> It's fine if you prefer another editor, but don't count on us to write
> documentation for every editor out there, especially when it almost
> always turns out to be invoking "guix edit" followed by "git commit …"
> or perhaps using that editor's built-in VC integration to do so.  I'm
> also not convinced you need to bring the big guns of lisp editing to
> the table.  From personal experience, an editor that autocompletes the
> closing bracket and has parentheses matching capabilities suffices.
> The latter is even implemented by crude tools such as gnome-text-
> editor.

How about we start with two editors then besides vanilla Emacs then?

Because we don't even have two now.

>>> It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away from
>>> starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way; something I
>>> deeply regret: this has to stop.
>> I want to clarify that I'm not just repeating rumors and I actually
>> have tried to use emacs.
> There is a wide span of "tried emacs".  I personally wouldn't say I've
> "tried" vi after hitting ESC :q once and being done or even that I've
> tried using ed after vaguely figuring out how you can make it actually
> change the contents of a file.
>
> Now whether you want to qualify your experience further or not is up to
> you, and even if you do, your personal choice of a suitable editor
> remains personal.  However, I don't think that repeating the age old
> jokes of "herp derp, me no likes defaults" as has happened in other
> branches of this topic is helpful.  *The defaults in Emacs do not
> matter.*  You don't need to be happy with the editor you get out of the
> box.  You can change it into the editor you want and there's ample
> documentation on how to do so.  Coming full circle, this is why we
> reference Emacs in the manual, enough people collaborated to suggest a
> workflow that works for them or at least goes in the right direction.
> However, I think it's fair to say that most folks' setup will differ
> ever so slightly from what is presented there.
>
> Cheers
>
>
That's the thing you are missing.

The default of Emacs absolutely do matter.

Because

1. not everybody has time to learn elisp and configure Emacs so it 
doesn't break.

2. By how the defaults are you see how the community around a program is.

If the defaults are good and empower the person using the program that 
means that the community is open

to suggestions and changes at the very least. which is not what happens 
with Emacs.

This is from someone who uses Emacs.


MSavoritias

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Liliana Marie Prikler]

Am Montag, dem 25.09.2023 um 14:19 +0300 schrieb MSavoritias:
> 
> On 9/24/23 11:51, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:
> > [...]
> > It's fine if you prefer another editor, but don't count on us to
> > write documentation for every editor out there [...]
> 
> How about we start with two editors then besides vanilla Emacs then?
> 
> Because we don't even have two now.
Well, assuming you count Emacs variants (given the "vanilla" prefix
it'd only be fair if you did), we actually have at least four covered
with the manual, if not more. :)

As for other editors, I point to the sign above, with "us" being folks
who are happy to contribute to Guix from Emacs.  I know there are vi
folk out there who could probably make our section on "The Perfect
Setup" less biased, but I neither want nor am able to speak on their
behalf when it comes to actually doing so.

> > > > It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away
> > > > from starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way;
> > > > something I deeply regret: this has to stop.
> > > I want to clarify that I'm not just repeating rumors and I
> > > actually have tried to use emacs.
> > There is a wide span of "tried emacs".  I personally wouldn't say
> > I've "tried" vi after hitting ESC :q once and being done or even
> > that I've tried using ed after vaguely figuring out how you can
> > make it actually change the contents of a file.
> > 
> > Now whether you want to qualify your experience further or not is
> > up to you, and even if you do, your personal choice of a suitable
> > editor remains personal.  However, I don't think that repeating the
> > age old jokes of "herp derp, me no likes defaults" as has happened
> > in other branches of this topic is helpful.  *The defaults in Emacs
> > do not matter.*  You don't need to be happy with the editor you get
> > out of the box.  You can change it into the editor you want and
> > there's ample documentation on how to do so.  Coming full circle,
> > this is why we reference Emacs in the manual, enough people
> > collaborated to suggest a workflow that works for them or at least
> > goes in the right direction.  However, I think it's fair to say
> > that most folks' setup will differ ever so slightly from what is
> > presented there.
> > 
> > Cheers
> > 
> > 
> That's the thing you are missing.
> 
> The default of Emacs absolutely do matter.
> 
> Because
> 
> 1. not everybody has time to learn elisp and configure Emacs so it 
> doesn't break.
> 
> 2. By how the defaults are you see how the community around a program
> is.
> 
> If the defaults are good and empower the person using the program
> that means that the community is open to suggestions and changes at
> the very least. which is not what happens with Emacs.
> 
> This is from someone who uses Emacs.
I share neither the experience nor the argument.  Now granted, I do see
the appeal of preconfigured Emacsen for those who don't want to go
through the trouble of configuring it for themselves; however, there is
no "one size fits all" solution among these offerings as far as I can
see.  In fact, I'd argue the opposite, as they themselves have to offer
customization so to appeal to a broader audience.  For all the rant
about how insane the defaults of Emacs are, the various "sane defaults"
offered by others sure tend in various different directions.  It's
almost as though coding for the common case leaves many people out and
the customization mechanism is what actually empowers users.

Cheers

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Mon, 25 Sep 2023 at 20:54, Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com> wrote:

>> The default of Emacs absolutely do matter.

[...]

> I share neither the experience nor the argument. 

[...]

Please, we are not on the emacs-devel mailing list. :-)  Or maybe, we
need to create some guix-tagents mailing list. ;-)

Cheers,
simon

Emacs and Guix (was Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang)

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Mon, 25 Sep 2023 at 14:09, MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me> wrote:

> when its the same people that push Emacs as the "blessed" way to 
> contribute (as in the guix manual)

Just to point 1. Guix is part of GNU – for the good, the bad and the
ugly – so 2. editors developed under the GNU umbrella are autopromoted –
GNU Emacs is one, GNU nano would be another one.  Well, for what it is
worth, I feel such autopromotion as some consistency.

BTW, Efraim is GNU Guix co-maintainer and demoed the use of Vim for Guix
development:

    https://10years.guix.gnu.org/video/using-vim-for-guix-development/

Somehow, when one co-maintainer publicly demoed using not-Emacs makes a
point that there is no “blessed“ editors – and the part dedicated for
Emacs in the manual seems just an autopromotion of GNU products that
contributors enjoy for cooking – dogfooding. ;-).

Contributions in the Guix manual or in the cookbook about how to setup
other editors than Emacs are very welcome.


> The problem part is the way you dismissed the persons experience as 
> "bollocks".

From where I stand, I feel a lot of negative rants, coming from
frustration or generating frustration.  The best against frustration,
from all sides, is to send positive feedback for being engaging and thus
unlock or tackle concrete issues.  Well, my 2 cents. :-)


Last, in all what I am reading in this thread or elsewhere about the
relationship between Emacs and Guix or between Guix and Emacs, I have
the bad taste that a part of the Guile manual had been lost in
translation:

    The Emacs Thesis

    The story of Guile is the story of bringing the development experience
    of Emacs to the mass of programs on a GNU system.

    [...]

    After the Emacs experience was appreciated more widely, a number of
    hackers started to consider how to spread this experience to the rest of
    the GNU system. It was clear that the easiest way to Emacsify a program
    would be to embed a shared language implementation into it.

    https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/The-Emacs-Thesis.html

Guix is this GNU System, isn’t it?

And then Ludo explicitly expressed such goal for Guix [1]: « What about
following that Emacs meme for a complete distro? That's what the GNU
Guix project has been trying to answer. »

Emacs principles and design are part of the Guix DNA.  Part of the DNA
does not mean twin, it means share some relative.  Emacs is not a
mandatory tool for contributing, obviously not!  The point is that many
of us are seeing a continuum between Emacs and Guix for doing their
computations and similarly as I am promoting Guix because it has
radically changed my view of package and system management, I am also
promoting Emacs because it has radically changed my view of interacting
with computers.  Because both are rooted in the same principles.

IMHO, this explains the place of Emacs in the Guix ecosystem.  Many
contributors had or still share this point of view between Emacs and
Guix.  And it is up to people that are not sharing « The Emacs Thesis »
to promote their tools; free software is not about consuming a product
but about sharing what you have.

1: https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/the_emacs_of_distros/


Cheers,
simon

Re: The Giraffe; the Pelican et al (was Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang)

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Mon, 25 Sep 2023 at 14:13, MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me> wrote:

> So saying that the people who don't know guile or guix need to first 
> contribute docs is pretty ridiculous.

Why?  Could you explain more why it appears to you “ridiculous”?

Cheers,
simon

Re: The Giraffe; the Pelican et al (was Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang)

[indieterminacy]

On 25-09-2023 22:35, Simon Tournier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, 25 Sep 2023 at 14:13, MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me> wrote:
> 
>> So saying that the people who don't know guile or guix need to first
>> contribute docs is pretty ridiculous.
> 
> Why?  Could you explain more why it appears to you “ridiculous”?
> 

My frustration seems to be that a lot of negative energy has been 
directed towards Emacs.
It has almost been straying towards anti elitist type discourse (that 
one is observing more increasingly in politics) -
*rather* than doOcracy style discourse that there is a problem and 
people are capable of autonomously resolving these things.

Emacs has not done something wrong here - it has merely had people who 
have had the capacity for exploration and reaching certain goals and 
insights then documenting their techniques within the Guix 
documentation.

It seems strange that people havent sooner expressed the concept of:
'well, I have this setup in /this/ editor, Ill put it up. Anybody else 
want to contribute and fill out gaps X Y and Z?'

It is worth noting that there has been a thread fork, starting this this 
subject title which is behaving more maturely and proactively:
RFC: add more setups to Guix docs

Similarly, there have been more sounds regarding Vim which are more 
proactive and constructive.

If people want a plurality of editors represented in the documentation 
they should be proactive about it, rather than lamenting and using 
divisive rhetoric.

> Cheers,
> simon

-- 
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:

> ________________________________
>
>> Hi, for some reason emacs has become the elephant in the room of the
>> discussion on contributing to guix.
>>
>> Regardless of one's opinion of emacs, I just want to add that this is
>> itself strange.  I have contributed some (package definition) patches
>> to guix, all without using emacs.
>>
>> I am not an emacs user, so emacs is not necessary for contributing to guix.
>> For what it's worth, the emacs-motif package in Guix was my addition.
>> I don't use it myself.
>
> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable), so I just use
> kate instead, which isn't a great environment for me either. It has
> rainbow parens, but it doesn't balance them, which is a hassle. I keep
> using it though due to lack of time to browse through alternatives. I
> heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
> and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
> screwing around with it.
>
> https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lispforeveryone/
> This is the only setup for coding in lisp that has actually looked
> attractive to me. (Coding in wisp with colored blocks that transpiles
> to s-expressions) Though I haven't had the time (and probably
> expertise) to set it up for myself.

Happy to see this talk get some attention.  It does advocate a variety
of possible approaches, one of them Wisp (and the wisp-mode colored
block stuff is pretty awesome).

If you like that approach and want to not have to do the
parenthesis-balancing as much yourself, there's an interesting overlap
between Wisp and parinfer, which automatically infers the parentheses
from whitespace but keeps them in the actual source.  I have personally
never tried using parinfer for serious tasks though.  It still requires
an editor set up for those features.

Since Spritely is also using Guile heavily, we have also spent a lot of
time talking about possible directions for helping non-emacs-users get
going with our tooling.  Personally I think the biggest path to success
is likely to be seeing Guile support (starting with parenthetical Guile)
also be very strong in mainstream editors.  A lot has changed in the
programming editor world recently: LSP looks like a very promising
direction for this.  (Anyway, there's no decisionmaking yet in terms of
what we're doing, it just has come up quite a bit.)

Has anyone tried using an LSP-like environment and seeing if they can
get something approximating the comfort that Guile and Geiser users in
emacs have, I wonder?  I have seen there are a couple of guile LSP
packages but I have not personally tried them.

 - Christine

Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Nathan Dehnel]

Which packages are those? I' ve only seen scheme-lsp-server, which
isn't merged yet


On Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 1:44 PM Christine Lemmer-Webber
<cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
>
> Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > ________________________________
> >
> >> Hi, for some reason emacs has become the elephant in the room of the
> >> discussion on contributing to guix.
> >>
> >> Regardless of one's opinion of emacs, I just want to add that this is
> >> itself strange.  I have contributed some (package definition) patches
> >> to guix, all without using emacs.
> >>
> >> I am not an emacs user, so emacs is not necessary for contributing to guix.
> >> For what it's worth, the emacs-motif package in Guix was my addition.
> >> I don't use it myself.
> >
> > I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable), so I just use
> > kate instead, which isn't a great environment for me either. It has
> > rainbow parens, but it doesn't balance them, which is a hassle. I keep
> > using it though due to lack of time to browse through alternatives. I
> > heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
> > and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
> > screwing around with it.
> >
> > https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lispforeveryone/
> > This is the only setup for coding in lisp that has actually looked
> > attractive to me. (Coding in wisp with colored blocks that transpiles
> > to s-expressions) Though I haven't had the time (and probably
> > expertise) to set it up for myself.
>
> Happy to see this talk get some attention.  It does advocate a variety
> of possible approaches, one of them Wisp (and the wisp-mode colored
> block stuff is pretty awesome).
>
> If you like that approach and want to not have to do the
> parenthesis-balancing as much yourself, there's an interesting overlap
> between Wisp and parinfer, which automatically infers the parentheses
> from whitespace but keeps them in the actual source.  I have personally
> never tried using parinfer for serious tasks though.  It still requires
> an editor set up for those features.
>
> Since Spritely is also using Guile heavily, we have also spent a lot of
> time talking about possible directions for helping non-emacs-users get
> going with our tooling.  Personally I think the biggest path to success
> is likely to be seeing Guile support (starting with parenthetical Guile)
> also be very strong in mainstream editors.  A lot has changed in the
> programming editor world recently: LSP looks like a very promising
> direction for this.  (Anyway, there's no decisionmaking yet in terms of
> what we're doing, it just has come up quite a bit.)
>
> Has anyone tried using an LSP-like environment and seeing if they can
> get something approximating the comfort that Guile and Geiser users in
> emacs have, I wonder?  I have seen there are a couple of guile LSP
> packages but I have not personally tried them.
>
>  - Christine

Re: Emacs and Guix (was Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang)

[Efraim Flashner]

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On Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 10:34:11PM +0200, Simon Tournier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, 25 Sep 2023 at 14:09, MSavoritias <email@msavoritias.me> wrote:
> 
> > when its the same people that push Emacs as the "blessed" way to 
> > contribute (as in the guix manual)
> 
> Just to point 1. Guix is part of GNU – for the good, the bad and the
> ugly – so 2. editors developed under the GNU umbrella are autopromoted –
> GNU Emacs is one, GNU nano would be another one.  Well, for what it is
> worth, I feel such autopromotion as some consistency.
> 
> BTW, Efraim is GNU Guix co-maintainer and demoed the use of Vim for Guix
> development:
> 
>     https://10years.guix.gnu.org/video/using-vim-for-guix-development/
> 
> Somehow, when one co-maintainer publicly demoed using not-Emacs makes a
> point that there is no “blessed“ editors – and the part dedicated for
> Emacs in the manual seems just an autopromotion of GNU products that
> contributors enjoy for cooking – dogfooding. ;-).

Oh no! My very embarrassing talk where I was missing that magic 1 or 2
packages from my manifest and then everything fell apart. I think I need
to watch it again myself and then try redoing it at home.

> Contributions in the Guix manual or in the cookbook about how to setup
> other editors than Emacs are very welcome.

This is the big part. I have a setup that works reasonably well for me
and I haven't done a good job sharing it with others so they can see
some of the other options.

IIRC one of the big things I wanted to show was using ctags with Guix to
jump quickly between packages or to other definitions. Right now the
tags make target is a stub, I (or someone else even) should see about
adjusting that so 'make tags' works for the project.


-- 
Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
GPG key = A28B F40C 3E55 1372 662D  14F7 41AA E7DC CA3D 8351
Confidentiality cannot be guaranteed on emails sent or received unencrypted

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Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Munyoki Kilyungi]

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Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> aliandika:


[...]


>>
>> Thank you for your opinion but it's just that: a subjective judgement
>> based on your own episodic experience.
>
> I'm sorry if my tone was too harsh, I now realise this is still
> triggering old pain.
>
> Why is it still OK to for people to keep spreading negative anecdotes
> about Emacs, and problematic to refute them or counter them with
> positive anecdotes?
>
> It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away from
> starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way; something I deeply
> regret: this has to stop.
>

This I agree with.  I got into Emacs about a
decade ago.  And what helped me I guess, was that
no one in my environment used Emacs nor knew too
much about it.  And the internet wasn't as fast as
it is now.  So in a sense, I got into the
ecosystem "by faith", and it stuck.  However, this
is not the case today.  I'm running a SICP reading
book club community locally, and the feedback I'm
getting from people who are trying it out, is that
it's "very difficult to learn", and most of these
sentiments are from the internet.


-- 
(Life is like a pencil that will surely run out,
    but will leave the beautiful writing of life.)
(D4F09EB110177E03C28E2FE1F5BBAE1E0392253F
    (hkp://keys.openpgp.org))

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