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After A Year, Emacswiki Alternative Shutting Down
About a year ago, someone decided that EmacsWiki was outdated and unorganized, to the detriment of the Emacs community. So, he started a new wiki (WikiEmacs, choosing Mediawiki instead of Oddmuse, and attempting to give it a saner organizational structure). In the end, his project failed to grain traction, and it's shutting down for the greater good of Emacs: "I want to extend a big public apology to Alex Schroeder for my harsh criticism of EmacsWiki. One year later I see that stewarding documentation projects and nurturing a healthy community around them is much harder than writing software. I’m but a humble software engineer and you’ll have to forgive me for my misguided actions. I hope that something good has(will) come up from all this drama. At the very least I urge everyone who cares for EmacsWiki to try and clean up, extend and improve at least a couple of articles on subjects that are of importance to him. I know that’s something I’ll be doing from now on."
Is this serious? Its a fscking editor for gods sake. Is there a "vi community"? Who the hell cares enough to even bother? Or perhaps I'm misguided and there are thousands of people out there who find editors the most fascinating programs ever written. Is there an "ls" or "rm" community just out of interest?
It's true that the "good old" EmacsWiki looks way too old. But to be honest I didn't even know that WikEmacs existed.
I probably, like many, did miss the memo. That's too bad because I just took a look and it looked much better.
...vi won. Move on, pals.
Wrong, it's an OS!
ok now i feel better..
i hate missing parantheses!
Emacs and Vi both suck, Midnight Commander is the true text editor.
Shutting down in less than a year because the project got too little attention is foolish as it takes years for most users to discover you. I had no idea it existed, if I knew, I would have tried it as I do believe that EmacsWiki has a fair amount of problems. Shutting down and dragging down all content and time that users were willing to contribute is just ridiculously irresponsible. EmacsWiki may not be perfect, but it has been around for years and I am fairly confident that the owner will not decide to shut it down tomorrow or next year on a whim like this guy.
Yeah, seriously, it makes me wince each time it happens. Most of the time I'm too lazy to edit Wikipedia pages, but when it comes to parentheses, I feel utterly compelled to.
And I even changed the title of this answer so that there isn't an excess closing parenthesis.
There's nothing like $HOME
Don't be so harsh. It's perfectly reasonable to shut down a project if it doesn't succeed on the schedule the organizer wants. It would be more foolish to continue to invest in the forked project after realizing it was a mistake at the outset.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I'm not shutting down the project on a whim, a lot of thought and discussions with members of Emacs community are involved in it. The content will be preserved on EmacsWiki and I'll continue to work with Alex and the other members of the EmacsWiki team to (hopefully) improve and clean it up.
Because there is a nice integration between the other buffers and your terminals. For example, say that you want to run a few commands in the same directory that the file you are editing exists. In that case you just type M-x shell to start a shell in that directory. (Note that this also works if you are working with a file on another computer via ssh. Your shell will then automatically start over an ssh session.)
If you are running commands that outputs a lot of text in the terminal the search capability of emacs is really useful as well.
Another use case is the integration between macros, text buffers, and terminals. Consider a use case where you are editing an HTML file and want to ensure that all images referred to in IMG tags are available at a remote location. It is then easy to create a macro in emacs that finds all IMG tags, extract the file name and copy the file name to a suitable scp command that you can paste into the terminal window.
However, I must admit that I still have a few xterms open, but I find myself gravitating towards running shell commands in a shell buffer in emacs, especially when programming. Also, there are of course other ways to solve all of these issues (scripting, file redirection, etc), but for myself I usually find myself preferring to use emacs in most of these cases.
That's why his Emacs wiki never took off: His Lisp syntax was bad!
I am officially gone from
I'm sad to hear that this wiki (that I didn't even know existed) is shutting down.
I've never even heard of WikiEmacs, but I wish I had. A MediaWiki site about Emacs sounds like a perfect match. Maybe lots of other Emacs users would become contributors if they knew it existed. Of all wiki systems, I've found MediaWiki sites to be much more likely to become well maintained and navigable.
I hope WikiEmacs doesn't shut down. I'll probably become a regular contributor.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I dug more deeply into your posts and see now that you planned your wiki as a temporal experiment from the very beginning (and quite explicitly said so). It's great that you intend to preserve the user-created data as well, so nothing of value will be lost. Still, I think your project would have grown much more popular in a few years if you didn't give up and gave some sort of a pledge that it won't be shut down in a year or two. Anyway, thank you for your attempt in improving this valuable source of information.
Of course the emacs wiki is outdated and disorganized - it has to reflect its editor and its users. We here in the organized, efficient and beautiful vi community just sit back with a condescending chuckle. We're actually quite good at that and do it often. :wq
It takes about a year or two for most businesses to break even. Unless your product is life-altering (most aren't), you have to work hard to get an audience. That's why it's quite an achievement if a biz stayed longer than that if you ever talk to any business owner.
http://xkcd.com/378/
You tried and failed. The lesson is, never try.
Well what kind of organization did you expect from people who came up with 17 different kinds of keyboard shift keys?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
A lesser-known alternative to something that itself I've never heard of? Fascinating!
personally I'm happy with nano.
*ducks*
...is the decision to go with MW. Seriously. Look at WikiEmacs, then at EmacsWiki. The main problem with WikiEmacs (the MW version) is that you are forced to read the content in order to find what it is you need. Compare that to EmacsWiki: Links are clearly defined, not embedded in a lot of cruft, and describe exactly what it is that the link points to.
I've said this before: MW is overbloated and has a horrible UI, to the point where navigating most MW sites are excruciatingly painful. Anyone who thinks that MW is actually a user-friendly experience that promotes quick and easy navigation and drill-down is obviously a glutton for punishment and knows nothing about proper UI design.
"'... EmacsWiki has a fair amount of problems ..."
Actually, I don't think it has any problems at all compared to a lot of other wikis out there. My big complaint is that it doesn't seem to have any google-juice to speak of, so if you do a websearch on a problem you're not immediately steered to the right EmacsWiki page.
If it works, then why aren't I using it?
Does emacs have a built in web browser? I think they should toss in both elinks and GNOME Web (for Xemacs). Have a key that would toggle between what are Windows or tabs in Chrome, Firefox or IE. Have an RSS reader as well. Once all this is there, one can browse /. from a good ole vt100 terminal
Maybe the pages could be moved to the libreplanet.org wiki that FSF hosts.
It's a Mediawiki site, and there's already a community of contributors and a big portion are surely Emacs users. How about it?
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Gotta hand it to you. You sure know how to eat crow! My hat is off to you. Wish you the best of luck, as you've learned a tough lesson the hard way.
Do, or do not. There is no try.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.