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About a year ago, someone decided that EmacsWiki was outdated and unorganized, to the detriment of the Emacs community.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."

Comments

The "emacs community"??

[Viol8]

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?

Re:The "emacs community"??

[joshki]

emacs is an editor? On what planet?

As far as I recall, emacs is a conglomeration of a lot of things, one of which happens to be an editor...

Re:The "emacs community"??

[Rik Sweeney]

Is there an "ls" or "rm" community just out of interest?

There used to be an "rm" community, but it got deleted :P

Re:The "emacs community"??

[vlm]

There used to be an "rm" community, but it got deleted :P

I'd link to the wikipedia article, but those deletionist aholes got to it first

Re:The "emacs community"??

[guacamole]

Well, the issue is that vi or rm, however dear to their users are mostly viewed as a tool, a damn good one but still a tool. But Emacs really does have a caring community around it. For example, most people in the Lisp/Scheme community use Emacs, and not by coincidence. Emacs is really a miniature programming platform for developing applications written in a version of Lisp, complete with a compiler, interpreter, debugger, and a virtual machine. Emacs's text editor itself is a Lisp application. As you can imagine, Lisp people take a special pride in this.

Next, it was already mentioned that Emacs is more than a text editor. It's almost a complete work environment. In a typical emacs session you can have multiple windows, buffers, frames open for editing multiple files, running shells, interpreters, build scripts, info sessions, etc all running at the same time.

Re:The "emacs community"??

[Viol8]

"It's almost a complete work environment. In a typical emacs session you can have multiple windows, buffers, frames open for editing multiple files, running shells, interpreters, build scripts, info sessions, etc all running at the same time."

I'm sure that was useful in 1980 before X Windows came along. But when I can have a dozen xterms open on my screen why on earth would I bother doing it all inside an editor?

Re:The "emacs community"??

[water-and-sewer]

Is this serious?

YES.

Is there a "vi community"?

YES.

Who the hell cares enough to even bother?

Anybody who uses these powerful and complex applications. Both apps are capable of highly complicated things, and somewhere out there are talented people who know how to do them. I'm not one of them, but I'm getting there. From custom syntax highlighting to macros, scripts, and more (hell, you can use emacs to read email and/or Usenet, etc.).

As for you, you can keep using whatever other software you like.

Re:The "emacs community"??

[Sockatume]

Emacs is somewhat more sophisticated than simply an editor. If there can be communities trading tips and advice for Microsoft Office there sure as hell can be communities for Emacs.

As a vim user I naturally don't have to talk to a community because this superior editor gives me telepathic powers and a glossy, easy-to-brush mane.

Re:The "emacs community"??

[SirGarlon]

Emacs is more like a text-based IDE than "a fscking editor." People write plugins (called "macros") for it in Lisp. Back in the acoustics lab, we had several folks who had written macros for code formatting, LaTeX formatting, and the like (we had several custom extensions to the beloved matlab-mode!). We used to trade macros around, modify them, help each other troubleshoot and improve them ... good times. So yes, Emacs users are a community, and the folks who are still in that lab are probably still part of that community. I use Eclipse now, but in the late '90s, emacs was the best (only?) zero-cost IDE out there.

Re:The "emacs community"??

[Sique]

The editor being M-x vi-mode?

Re:The "emacs community"??

[jrumney]

But when I can have a dozen xterms open on my screen why on earth would I bother doing it all inside an editor?

When I can have a dozen ttys open on virtual consoles, why on earth would I bother doing it all inside X?

Or more seriously, if I run a shell inside Emacs, then I have all the editing commands of Emacs at my fingertips. shell-command-on-region is an obvious one that saves a lot of head this/tail that to narrow down the part of the previous command that I want to operate on for the next command in the pipe.

Re:The "emacs community"??

[slim]

Aha, you want terminal war stories.

On my year out from university in the early 90s, I worked for a big IT multinational. We didn't have direct internet access from the office. To reach my university's newsgroups, I had to telnet across the Atlantic to a gateway machine, log into that, then from there telnet back across the Atlantic to a university server, and run the tin newsreader there. There was a minimum lag of a couple of seconds, and every few minutes there would be a lag of 20 seconds or more, during which all my keypresses would buffer up.

That's where I learned vi, probably to a higher standard than I've retained. Under those circumstances vi cursor movement is a real boon. You do not want to hit the arrow button 20 times to move 20 characters. You want to type '20', or '3w' to move 3 words, etc.

On about three occasions I've sat down to do an Emacs tutorial, but it never makes sense. I forget which key is "Meta" and which is "Ctrl"; I forget the long command names; I give up and return to the safety of vi. There's always been `screen` for running multiple shells in a terminal.

I don't tell other people what editor to use. I've just never wrapped my head around Emacs, while Vi made sense pretty much straight away.

) you forgot this!

[lemur3]

ok now i feel better..

i hate missing parantheses!

Improved everything except the owner's motivation.

[vovick]

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.

Re:Midnight Commander is the true text editor

[smittyoneeach]

Really? I thought it was Lynx.

Re:Improved everything except the owner's motivati

[SirGarlon]

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.

Re:Improved everything except the owner's motivati

[bozhidar]

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.

There are many reasons to use M-x shell

[tamyrlin]

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.

Re:Improved everything except the owner's motivati

[vovick]

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.

ctrl-shift-meta-supra-c ctrl-shift-meta-x

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Well what kind of organization did you expect from people who came up with 17 different kinds of keyboard shift keys?

The problem here...

[pongo000]

...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.