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Emacsy: An Embeddable Toolkit of Emacs-like Functionality
An anonymous reader writes "Emacsy is 'a Guile library that provides Emacs-like facilities — keymaps, minibuffer, tab completion, recordable macros, and major/minor modes — for applications natively.' However, to my eyes, it looks more like an attempt to revive the development style done on Symbolics Lisp Machines that survives to some extent in Emacs. Might be a boon to Emacs users, but where's a comparable VIM alternative?"
The skeptic in me asks what benefit this would have over just using libguile directly, and how it fits in with efforts to port Emacs itself to Guile and things like Englightenment's pluggable event loop. The example code seems to imply Emacs-like APIs will be used (despite not intending to replace parts of Emacs), even when better alternatives exist. Some of the proposed components seem orthogonal to existing interface toolkits; others seem to compete with components provided by various Free desktop environments.
Behold, the horror.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
The only thing VI's good for is editing the configuration file used to make EMACS :-)
My personal feeling about emacs is it is very beautiful(yes). Let the point-and-click gui-using critics learn a thing or two about why making everything programmable(in a easy way, unlike eclipse) is an awesome idea.
You will never have experience until after you needed it.
Let the point-and-click gui-using critics learn a thing or two about why making everything programmable
No-one can really understand this without years of use though. Key bindings (which are widespread) are nice and all but it is as you say, the sheer ease of programability of the thing that makes Emacs so amazingly useful that I still turn to it even these days (though I mostly use integrated text editors now).
Only when emacs becomes really embedded in something modern will other people see the light.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...because EMACS is way too cumbersome for config file editing.
/* No Comment */
You have no idea what REAL macro recording is. Sigh.
Tell me exactly, how do you record a search and replace based on text you found around the result of another search?
Or a search that gathers disparate results from multiple files and places the results in a extra comma delimited file?
Or a macro that executes a shell command and uses the output to open a third file?
And then how do you save the macros for later reuse and edit them?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If your editor has a menu to toggle case of letters then it must have hundreds of menu entries to have something so infrequent show up there. If you really need it you can add it to an Emacs menu easily enough.
Emacs has very compatible short cuts! It is compatible with editing that existed before PCs and Macs existed! So I'd say the Windows editors are the ones who broke compatibility! And by the way I can use my common Emacs movement keys in Firefox just fine, they work in bash, some of them even work in Outlook.
And Ctrl-Z does undo in my emacs.
The interface in Emacs is nice: it's minimal. I don't have 2/3rds of my screen wasted in IDE fluff. I can put three Emacs windows side by side.
Variable width fonts are EVIL. Never use those for programming! If you've got variable width how do you make things line up, and how do you know you haven't exceeded 80 characters? Variable width is for natural language text.
Like C scope and Emacs, http://emacswiki.org/emacs/CScopeAndEmacs ? The "Find functions calling this function" option?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Another reason: keeping it at the 80 character limit allows you to open more than one source code window at a time and view them side by side.
I've found people who are opposed to the 80 character norm often do so because they are used to IDEs that take up the whole screen. If you only have one window to write code in, and that window fills up the whole screen no matter what else you do, what's the point of leaving that space blank? Might as well write longer lines.
If you have a real editor, the 80 character norm makes sense.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
While I'm not an IDE fan, but google before you troll:
I'm not trolling, I just wish people could read the damn text before responding.
I said RECORD. As in RECORD. As in not SCRIPT OR PROGRAM OR DEVELOP. As in RECORD.
Like I said, I can record in emacs searching for something, using some value located around the search (say a quick regex on that line), then copy that and go to some pre-saved point in the file to paste the result.
That may sound contrived but I have for example easily created long list of variable names or altered things like comma separated data in partial ways that would have been hard otherwise, simpler even than using sed or the like... all because I could record a simple transformation to occur, then re-run it on command wherever I liked.
Basically I found it incredibly useful and it is the reason I still sometimes go back into emacs when even SCRIPTABLE editors are just too weak to get something done.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley