New GNU Emacs website

http://gnu.org/software/emacs/index.html

by rvern • 10 years ago

547 225 10 years ago

satysin2• 10 years ago

Surprised to see the demo videos were captured on OS X and not GNU/Linux.

thomasahle• 10 years ago

Yup, but the main screenshot looks like Gnome, so I think it actually works quite well to show how cross platform Emacs is.

peatfreak5• 10 years ago

Hmm, I'm not so sure that's what the intention is. The FSF is adamant that non-free software should not be promoted if there is a free equivalent that can do the same thing. So I'm also surprised that OS X features prominently, like this, on the front page.

cm3• 10 years ago

The emacsrocks videos existed before the website refresh and weren't created for gnu.org, but I can imagine Richard asking for new videos to advertise the GNU platform instead.

satysin2• 10 years ago

Yeah this is what I figured, still kind of surprised to see the new site go live with them. It isn't all that difficult to make a simple screencast on Linux to show off some of the basics.

peatfreak5• 10 years ago

I can imagine Richard asking for new videos to advertise the GNU platform instead.

Me too. He often asks for corrections in light of these types of oversights (at least, it looks like an oversight to me).

Semiapies4• 10 years ago

I've seen that a lot in Emacs videos and screenshots, the last few years.

peatfreak5• 10 years ago

Even in videos and screenshots that are endorsed by the FSF? I find that hard to believe.

gosukiwi• 10 years ago

Most likely they were created by the one who made the website, which most likely used OS X like most designers :p

madeofpalk• 10 years ago

Designers rarely make a website - they just design it.

smonff3• 10 years ago

With explanations like this, guinea pigs could fly.

hellofunk• 10 years ago

Not too surprising, OSX is a common platform for devs who are linux/unix-oriented but want a high-level OS with all the sleek GUIs and mainstream features. OSX is a certified Unix OS, after all, so it tends to speak to emacs users in a way that you won't typically find among the Windows base.

Yes Unix is not Linux, but I see OSX widely used at hackathons and conferences because of its underpinnings.

lqdc132• 10 years ago

One of the points of FSF is to never use closed software. OSX is not GPL.

kleiba• 10 years ago

I think the OP's point was more targeted toward the fact that OSX is a non-free operating system, and Emacs is part of the GNU project.

webkike• 10 years ago

The issue is not that the OS is not Linux, it's that the OS is not free

criddell• 10 years ago

I'm surprised they weren't captured from within Emacs using some janky elisp video encoder.

Semiapies4• 10 years ago

Someone went for quality and not purity, actually picking interesting videos instead of clips of someone describing the basics in a monotone.

iKlsR• 10 years ago

As someone browsing hn in emacs atm, I chuckled.

S4M• 10 years ago

The videos are from emacsrocks.com, not from the GNU website itself.

sndean• 10 years ago

Your comment made me look again at the list of FSF endorsed OSs:

http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html

I'm still surprised at how few there are.

Normal_gaussian• 10 years ago

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html

This explains why many are not considered free, though the summary could simply be "the Linux kernel contains non-free blobs" and "they haven't promised not to allow non-free in their package repo's"

rafadc• 10 years ago

I hope that with the change of maintainer we, emacs users, can have some sanity regarding that concern and avoid the "emacs as a trojan horse so everyone switches to gnu" mentality.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

What kind of video capture options does a hurd user have available.

pjmlp• 10 years ago

This is nothing, what about attending FOSDEM and seeing the majority carrying iDevices?

indigo747• 10 years ago

The site seems to be having some trouble, so from the Wayback machine:

The previous site https://web.archive.org/web/20150522051725/http://www.gnu.or...

The new site on the 20th of April https://web.archive.org/web/20160420170002/http://www.gnu.or...

theunamedguy2• 10 years ago

https:// site is down, http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ is live.

tlb• 10 years ago

URL changed to http: version, thanks.

joshumax2• 10 years ago

Hmmmm, the website seems to be taking _forever_ to load

resists urge to make emacs joke about this

chris_wot6• 10 years ago

You think Apache is running mod_emacs perhaps?

chris_wot6• 10 years ago

Hmmm... the instant I wrote that I realised there's no way that would ever be likely. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's an Emacs powered Apache instance.

Duh. Don't know how I could have missed that.

mrmondo2• 10 years ago

Very good ;)

unhammer3• 10 years ago

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Elnode more like :)

sotojuan• 10 years ago

Seems like GNU is going through a brand/design update. First Guile[1] then this!

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

xvilka4• 10 years ago

They also have a good project [1] of migrating Emacs codebase and plugins support on Guile - partly by adding Elisp support in Guile, partly by rewriting Emacs itself.

[1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs

Ericson23142• 10 years ago

I followed this a bit during the GSOCs. Seems to have stalled unfortunately?

bitwize• 10 years ago

It looks real snazzy and nice. But I always liked that the GNU project did not try to look like the latest fad out of SV. Their low-fi HTML4 approach meant they could be browsed in anything and still be perfectly readable.

masolino• 10 years ago

The new site is responsive

oneeyedpigeon3• 10 years ago

The markup is very clean, and the page still works fine with css disabled.

jimjimjim• 10 years ago

I switched back to emacs last month after 10 years in ides, vim and sublime and my hands still remember the key combinations. It's nice, like going back to an old favorite pair of shoes. Also good to see the changes like the elpa/melpa stuff.

rpgmaker2• 10 years ago

What made you leave the IDE world?

benbristow• 10 years ago

Since when did FOSS have good design?

Joking aside, looks really nice!

rvern2• 10 years ago

Guile[1], Octave[2], Guix[3] and GRUB[4] have nice designs too.

[1] https://gnu.org/software/guile/

[2] https://gnu.org/software/octave/

[3] https://gnu.org/software/guix/

[4] https://gnu.org/software/grub/

jordigh• 10 years ago

Aw, Octave?

/me blushes

xvilka4• 10 years ago

It would be nice, if they will merge patches [1] for truecolor (16M colors) support in their console incarnation of emacs. Both Vim [2] and Neovim [3] already did this. Since most terminal emulators now support this mode [4], that will improve syntax highlighting and theme customizing to a new level.

[1] http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/RFC-Add-tty-True-Color-su...

[2] https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/8a633e3427b47286869aa4b96f...

[3] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/commit/8dd415e887923f99ab5d...

[4] https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728

jbmorgado• 10 years ago

+1 for this. It's basically impossible to get emacs colors to work correctly in the terminal.

cisstrd2• 10 years ago

And as soon as you complain you are confronted with "emacs is supposed to be run with the graphical interface, just install it with the gui and don't use -nw (no window) option"... yeah, right... no thanks.

technomancy2• 10 years ago

Weird; I've never needed to do anything more than "export TERM=xterm-256colors" provided I was using a high-color terminal emulator to begin with.

thinkpad20• 10 years ago

Even worse is running a terminal inside of emacs. ansi-term can only display 8 colors, even though the editor it's running in can support (at least) 256. As someone who runs a large percentage of their shells inside of emacs, this is a particular annoyance, especially because presumably adding in the remaining colors would be a trivial task for someone familiar with the code.

armitron• 10 years ago

http://github.com/atomontage/xterm-color

technomancy2• 10 years ago

I used to be bothered by this, and then I realized for every thing I wanted to do in the terminal, 5 minutes of searching would usually find a superior UI to do the same task in an Emacs-native way that I could effortlessly customize, rebind keys, add hooks for, and rewrite functionality live. About the only exception I can think for this is htop; M-x proced does most of the same things but doesn't look as nice doing it.

atdt• 10 years ago

By framing this is a matter of patches getting merged, you imply that there is nothing else in the way. In fact, there is no proper terminfo support for true color[1], nor even a standard, canonical way to detect true color support. All that exists now is an encoding convention which has promising adoption but which is by no means uncontroversial[2]. When you couple the portability issue with the increased memory footprint and the lack of a clear and compelling use-case, it is not surprising that this is not a priority for emacs developers.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2013-10/msg00...

[2] http://lists.schmorp.de/pipermail/rxvt-unicode/2013q3/001834...

xvilka4• 10 years ago

I wish it could be suppported by terminfo, but as long as its developer reject to do any work to extent terminfo to support truecolor, I'll promote this standard without dependency from terminfo. Also, speaking about 'modern' mechanism he means to use 'ncurses', but as you can see, a lot of console programs prefer not to use this library.

JdeBP2• 10 years ago

You can add console-terminal-emulator in the nosh toolset to the list. It's had this since its first version.

* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...

Its manual page (herewith a slightly outdated version) calls out the ISO/IEC 8613-6 parameter separator problem in its section on differences from real terminals and documented standards.

* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...

Faaak• 10 years ago

Looks nice, but having a 1.1MB webpage with 7 different fonts seems somewhat wrong to me... We should start thinking about mobile clients who have to pay these MB.

omni• 10 years ago

If there's one product whose website can probably get away with not caring about mobile, it's a power-user text editor from the 1970s.

yangyang2• 10 years ago

I run Emacs under termux on my Nexus 6P. Works great with exactly the same config I use on the desktop.

epidemian• 10 years ago

But the site has a responsive layout clearly designed to look nice on mobile screens (with hamburger menu and everything :), so, at least on some level, they are caring about mobile.

BTW, the website looks really nice. Kudos!

paulddraper• 10 years ago

Yeah, if you can't handle a meg of downloads, are you sure you can handle the hundreds of megs of memory? :)

mattl• 10 years ago

1980s :)

EMACS is from the 1970s, GNU Emacs 1980s...

gravypod• 10 years ago

Yea, it's a bit heavy of a load.

I clicked the link, came back, and read this commend. Doesn't mean much, but it would have helped if the site was a tad smaller.

adiabatty• 10 years ago

They use Fira Sans and Fira Mono in a bunch of different weights.

Looking at the source for <http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/fira.css>, I can't help but wonder if mobile^W OS vendors could make the Web faster for their users if they'd just bundle every single popular free (beer and/or speech) font with their OSs and keep the fonts up-to-date.

Of course, you should be sending along far-future Expires and Cache-Control headers, but this'll still be slower than local() accessing fonts that're bundled with the OS when someone visits a new site.

tuananh2• 10 years ago

Then the question: which fonts should they bundle!? etc...

Hello71• 10 years ago

they're working toward making it Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

jlg23• 10 years ago

I think they should start to consider mobile clients once those have a hyper key...

I'm all for lean sites but emacs' site is one of those where I just don't care. Emacs users are sitting in front of a workstation and if they don't have a proper internet connection, they just install it from their unix distribution's CD/DVD.

And it is also kind of adequate to have a bloated website... anyone remembers the joke to name a kernel "emacs" so that it says "LILO booting emacs..." at startup? ;)

lokedhs4• 10 years ago

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping (back when 8 MB was a lot)

Or, more appropriate when explaining why it's not a good fit for touchscreens:

Esc Meta Alt Control Shift

rtpg2• 10 years ago

For those who might not realise it, the distribution is 600kb(!) in fonts, 400k in images, 100k in other stuff

JdeBP2• 10 years ago

Given what people have observed about mean WWW page size ...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9980228

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548816

... what can be said now about the relative sizes of GNU emacs and its own WWW page? (-:

baby• 10 years ago

Do most plans not have unlimited data in America?

benkuykendall• 10 years ago

Looks good in eww!

http://i.imgur.com/5mLJdXb.jpg

mrmondo2• 10 years ago

Very slow to load on a mobile device, looking at the page size it seems quite heavy, especially for a site aimed at promoting or representing a text editor (and a lot more I know, I know).

madspindel• 10 years ago

What is the keyboard shortcut to exit the website?

lfx• 10 years ago

Ctrl + F4.

_asummers4• 10 years ago

Which, of course, is simply an alias for M-x close-current-tab.

justinsingh• 10 years ago

Just an anecdote about the older site. I was in a comp sci class at school a year ago. My classmate next to me asked what editor I use because it was a Beginning C++ class, and I said emacs. He went to the website which looked incredibly outdated to the expectations of new programmers, and just felt uncomfortable giving it a try. He opted for an editor with a more modern website.

So with the new website, which looks good, maybe emacs will seem more accessible and worth giving a try to new programmers who cross paths with it. At the same time, maybe that sense of accessibility is misleading given the learning curve of emacs that isn't exactly beginner-friendly. Nonetheless, I like the site!

flatline• 10 years ago

Hey, it's not called the Editor for Middle Aged Computer Scientists for no reason!

iamcreasy2• 10 years ago

What is the benefit for an existing CS student to switch to Emacs who is already comfortable with using IDEs like Visual Studio, Eclipse or IntellijIDEA?

TeMPOraL3• 10 years ago

Haven't seen that one before, but well, congratulations for making me feel old. ;).

Gratsby2• 10 years ago

As a middle aged computer scientist and emacs evangelist, I had to laugh pretty hard at this one. I hadn't actually heard that one before.

kkylin• 10 years ago

:-)

This was already true back when I started using Emacs in my teens. Now that I'm middle-aged myself...

agumonkey3• 10 years ago

I read Middle Aged as in medieval, and saw lots of alchemist scribing lisp on parchments.

NoGravitas• 10 years ago

Generally Not Used Except by Middle Aged Computer Scientists.

agumonkey3• 10 years ago

Today I had to use non emacs windows editors for an hour. All of them a subset of what I'd like. I grabbed a copy of emacs for windows build. My blood pressure lowered as I saw the splash screen. Freedom and extensibility. It's impossible to fully appreciate right away. But having an appealing website is always good.

ryandrake• 10 years ago

Talk about judging a book by its cover. Did he say anything specific about the source of his discomfort? If I'm looking for a text editor, I'm not sure how it matters whether or not its web site is full of images, fonts and colorful reactive javascript modern HTML. All I need is a download link.

thevibesman• 10 years ago

All I need is a download link.

A download link is less useful if you want to find out about an editor vs just trying it (especially with Emacs when you first open the program, the killer features are not immediately apparent).

The old site showed a change log, which seems much for like a site for current users than a site for new users.

sullyj3• 10 years ago

Prettiness signals professionalism and competence.

reedlaw• 10 years ago

I'm not sure the new design is a good thing because using Emacs is like entering another world. If newbies have the impression that it's just another editor like all the others with fancy websites they will be quickly disappointed. On the other hand, if they are looking for something that challenges their understanding of what an editor, or software for that matter, should be then they may be motivated to overcome more hurdles such as an archaic homepage.

maplant• 10 years ago

Personally it has never mattered to me how many people adopt Emacs because it has enough users to ensure development forever. I know for a fact that if the Emacs developers weren't doing a bang up job, which they are, then I would immediately allocate some of my time to help. Emacs is emblematic of the community aspect of software development that rms usually brings up when talking about free software, and I think it's a subtle notion that separates Emacs from a typical "open source" project. Projects that are as they say "Open Source" tend to be commercially oriented more than community oriented. Whether or not Emacs is a large or small community does not really matter to me, the software is pretty much stable enough that the future is bright even if everyone on the developer mailing list dropped dead.

I don't mean to complain about "open source" software nor do I claim that the way that Emacs is being developed is better than any other. What I mean to say is that Emacs is an old application and I found it on its old crusty website, decided to dedicate a bunch of time on learning macros, because that's simply the kind of person I am. Whether or not Emacs had a great website would not be the factor that swayed me, and frankly I'm not in the business of trying to sway people as an Emacs fan. Use what you want. I know I'm getting the best development environment for me, because I know me, and I've made Emacs mine.

rtpg2• 10 years ago

I think this is a good lesson to people whose projects aren't Emacs' size yet.

Of course Emacs can get away with it, but this sets a good example of what a nice, simple website can look like for your project.

Don't spend too much time on the website, of course (the core project is what's important), but first impressions affect adoption, right?

digi_owl• 10 years ago

It may not be that they are commercially oriented, but that they have adopted startup-like mentalities regarding "growth".

This in turn leads to all kinds of changes to appear more fashionable and appealing to the masses.

Frankly i think thats a fools errand. Seems to me that when it comes to fashionable in relation to computing, we are dealing with a Giffen Good (or perhaps even a Veblen Good). Meaning that to be a fashionable computing platform, it has to be an expensive one.

But in the process you end up with something similar to New Public Management for FOSS projects. Trying to evangelize and drum up attention as if they were pitching a for profit product, much like NPM tries to put market forces into public services.

jpfr• 10 years ago

  I know for a fact that if the Emacs developers weren't
  doing a bang up job, which they are, then I would
  immediately allocate some of my time to help.

Development is going great IMHO. However, the bug count is steadily increasing. Any time invested into emacs is well spent.

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/05/03/emacs-bug-trends/

AckSyn• 10 years ago

That's fairly shallow to base a decision to use an OS on.

All kidding aside though, it seriously is. It's not a bad piece of software.

smonff3• 10 years ago

the learning curve of emacs that isn't exactly beginner-friendly

I started to learn emacs in 2006 after a friend show it to me in it's no-window version in a OS X Teminal. We were at the time art students and most of us didn't have programing education. Some people were playing a bit of advanced flash or Max (proprietary Pure Data sound processing), but most of us were doing performing art, sculpture, sound or painting.

Honestly, I have been so motivated by what I discovered, that, the learning curve hasn't been so bad. The folkloric keyboard shortcuts were easy to memorize and the software never failed me. I stopped using Text Edit and the horrible .rtf format and I learned that plaintext was surely more appropriate to write poetry. And wait what is it? Markdown?

I started to open mp3s in text mode and grep into videos. It was really exciting. It was possible to open incredibly huge files in text mode, and the computer was still usable. Wait... Why common browsers slow the machine down when you try to open Gmail then?

I discovered a land of wonder full of funny animals, meaningful laws texts (I mean GNU license) and documentation to read until the end of your life.

In 2008 I ordered GNU Emacs Manual 16th edition with a tee shirt, the reference card is still on my desk.

This piece of software is usable, accessible, documented, and it is still possible to use it 30 years after it's creation. Let's be honest: what is the aim of having a fast-learning-curve if you learn tools that you won't use in 2 years. If the tool is a bit hard to learn but we'll designed, it maybe worth the effort.

wcummings• 10 years ago

He went to the website which looked incredibly outdated to the expectations of new programmers, and just felt uncomfortable giving it a try. He opted for an editor with a more modern website.

Sounds like a personal problem to me, I love most of the GNU projects' pages. Simple, readable, low-bandwidth, to the point.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160101125451/https://www.gnu.o... for ex

nanory• 10 years ago

I think Vims website could do with a facelift too: http://www.vim.org/

pwelch• 10 years ago

Thats the first thing I think every time I go there.

terda12• 10 years ago

Not just the website but the icon as well.

alain_gilbert• 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5458874 The vim website needs an update !

milkey_mouse• 10 years ago

Slick

_asummers4• 10 years ago

As someone semi-new to using emacs, (I knew basic keybindings but never bothered to set up init files, etc.) coming from the IDE world, my biggest complaint was the amount of things I had to do to get vanilla emacs to behave in a civilized way, even using the GUI version. I spent hours scouring peoples emacs files on GitHub to try and find all the things that looked "obvious in retrospect" and settings that looked silly to have turned off by default (e.g. commands that act on regions should act on lines when no region is selected). Then my second biggest complaint was the analysis paralysis of all the plugins. I'm starting to get a stable emacs file, after a few months, but there's still several pieces of functionality I miss from my IDEs that I chunk out time every now and then to research and add. I think having a "if you're coming from IDEs you may want to install X Y Z" page would be helpful, as well as package download rankings so that people can find the popular projects (e.g. helm, use-package). It should also be prominently encouraged to use something like guru-mode where it disables the arrow keys to force you to use ctrl and meta as your movement keys.

Also you can pry Magit from my cold, dead hands.

ZenoArrow• 10 years ago

I'd suggest Spacemacs offers a better set of defaults than vanilla Emacs. Spacemacs would be a better choice for many newbies IMO.

http://spacemacs.org/

_asummers4• 10 years ago

See it's a tough balance. To me, the fun of emacs is getting it exactly as you like and continually optimizing little things. By not having to do SOME painful stuff, you miss out on appreciating the minutia that goes into it. At the same time, many of emacs default settings are very strange so starting with some sanity would be better for newcomers. Maybe some sort of "these are common tweaks that people make right off the bat" page would be the way to go. That way people have to do it themselves (outside of using e.g. spacemacs or prelude) but they have a common place to go to find out about those things. Or at least link to some well known emacs files for developers that code in major languages (a C guy, a Java guy, ...) to give people a place to go to read some elisp and get a feel for what people to do to their editors.

michaelhoffman2• 10 years ago

Nothing wrong with using the arrow keys. I can't even remember how long I've been using Emacs and still use the arrow keys.

davem8• 10 years ago

Three weeks on my work machine I disabled the arrow keys and am now forced to use C-, M-, for navigation, the first week was a bit slow I had to keep stopping and thinking, But now just three weeks later my screen movements are much more efficient and faster. I recommend you give it a try.

lokedhs4• 10 years ago

There are historical reasons for pretty much all default settings. For example, you said:

    "e.g. commands that act on regions should act on lines when no region is selected"

This is because traditionally Emacs never had the concept of "no region selected". The way it Emacs works is that it has two markers: "point" (which is just the cursor) and "mark" which is another position somewhere in the buffer. You can set the position to mark to that of point by pressing C-SPC. In fully traditional mode, the position of mark nor the selection is ever actually displayed in the buffer. If you press C-x C-x, the locations of point and mark are swapped, allowing you to quickly jump to mark and then back again.

The way Emacs was (and is) designed to work is that all region-based commands simply apply their function on the characters between point and mark. Since there isn't any "selection" as such, talking about what commands do without the selection simply does not make sense.

Now, in (what I consider to be) a misguided appeal to users of "windows style" editors, Emacs introduced the concept of "active regions". The underlying concept of having a point and mark is still there, but there is now also a flag indicating whether a region is "active" or not. Commands can look at this flag to perform different operations whether or not this is the case. Since several years, active regions has been enabled by default in Emacs.

The problem when having active regions enabled is that in many cases the user has to reactivate the region before performing some operations, making many region-based operations much more complicated[1] to use.

I seem to have become to the go-to person for Emacs support at my workplace, and I have seen a lot of new users being confused about regions in Emacs. Instead of adding even more Elisp code to try to coerce the application into behaving more like Notepad, I typically recommend them to turn off active regions and learn Emacs the way it was meant to be used. It's certainly different from most other editors, but the behaviour makes a lot more sense once you pick it up.

Footnotes: [1] I used the word "complicated" to mean "needs more keypresses".

tiborsaas2• 10 years ago

There are historical reasons for pretty much all default settings

Don't you see it as a problem? Anyone new coming has to go through all the history to get an understanding of why things work the way they work. Other software evolve over time and follow practices that result in better UX.

catern• 10 years ago

I recommend using https://github.com/technomancy/better-defaults as it's just about the only customization I do to Emacs.

rkangel3• 10 years ago

The obvious point is that everyone disagrees about "settings that look silly to have turned off by default".

A lot of modern software uses the 'opinionated' approach. The designers come up with their preferred way of using the software product, and build the user experience around that. This gives great results a lot of the time - you get a consistent and unsurprising experience and you can build a very intuitive experience. To pick a silly example of this, Google Chrome tries very hard to prevent the expansion of extra 'settings'. That way everyone is using the browser in the same way (this has security benefits too).

Emacs goes completely the other way. It gives you the tools to tweak absolutely every aspect of your usage, and while it may have some defaults it isn't really opinionated about which is right. It's been said many times - emacs isn't a text editor, it's a platform on which developers can build their own ideal text editor.

That isn't to say that there aren't some silly things in the defaults, but the emacs developers appear to continue to actively tweak the defaults in the direction of being ever more sensible.

tiborsaas2• 10 years ago

Many times I find that sensible human beings can make sensible defaults. It tends to align with software I love to use. Being opinionated is not a sin if done right. Config hell is not a solution to this problem.

ktamura• 10 years ago

Another piece of "marketing" collateral that can help popularize Emacs is a "tour of Emacs" video. Awhile back, I watched Russ Cox's "Tour of Acme" video and became an Acme convert as a result.

In the end, an editor is a productivity tool, and the best way to evaluate it is seeing it in action as part of a workflow: video is an excellent format to capture and share this with newcomers.

rpgmaker2• 10 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Personally, that's why I can't justify spending all that time trying to figure out a text editor when I could be, I don't know, working.

typon• 10 years ago

This is the most beautiful thing I've seen from the GNU world. Usually all their websites and materials look like 1980s internet.

tetheno• 10 years ago

Guile is another exception.

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

highCs• 10 years ago

I'm in deep love with sublime. Can someone convince me that I should use emacs instead?

zeckalpha• 10 years ago

Better bus factor.

yadda_who• 10 years ago

Keep using sublime, if it works for you. I tried to do the soft sell of vim with tmux to my office, because watching them Alt-Tab between everything, losing or accidentally closing windows, missing little errors because they can't have the editor and terminal up at the same time... It was hard to watch, and made for ugly cluttered demos.

However, watching people try to use vim without wanting to, or taking the time to learn it, just made everyone less efficient, and even more painful to watch.

If you want to learn emacs, then do it. But do it because you want to, or have a need to.

zbobet2012• 10 years ago

The biggest reason is super simple. Emacs works in terminal mode (really well) and can be <insert pkg manager here> installed pretty much everywhere.

If you are ever in a situation where you are working on a remote system over SSH (possibly with low bandwidth) you will appreciate it. Also your terminal is in emacs mode by default, so all your shortcuts work there as well. Finally if you are an OSX user all of your _text fields_ understand emacs shortcuts as well :).

sspiff• 10 years ago

Learn once, use for a lifetime. Sublime or any other small team project that is closed source have a tendency to get neglected past a certain point.

Other than that, emacs has first class plugins for pretty much anything, is easy to extend, and your config and extensions are easy to back up or move to another machine, and can be expected to still work.

smonff3• 10 years ago

Read this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659718

Note: I tried Sublime for approximately one year and don't use it anymore.

mback00• 10 years ago

VI !!!

^_^

curryhowardiso• 10 years ago

Omg now can someone please fix the apex domain?

I don't want to live in a world where I can't like formal verification and modern website design

Twirrim• 10 years ago

It's interesting that they used jquery (MIT licensed) for the web page, and also interesting given RMS's dislike of the use of Javascript. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html. MIT is GPL compatible, admittedly, so his main concerns about Javascript probably don't really apply here.

rekado3• 10 years ago

There is no problem with using free software like jquery. Free software does not mean and has never meant "GPL only".

eulji• 10 years ago

Anyone have an opinion about emacs on Windows ? I am forced to work on Windows and have no idea about the setup here.

groovy2shoes• 10 years ago

It's really easy. You download a zip file and extract it somewhere. Then you launch "runemacs.exe".

Grue3• 10 years ago

I use it as my primary editor. Works pretty much out of the box, unless you need image support, in which case you have to download dozens of different dlls for each image type.

necessity• 10 years ago

"The best editor is not Emacs nor Vi, it's Vi + Emacs"

I've discovered [evil](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil) a few days ago and I'm in love.

topkekz• 10 years ago

There is also Spacemacs which is emacs + Evil with some sweets.

http://spacemacs.org/

kozikow• 10 years ago

There is lots of IDE vs emacs discussion in this subject. I have been using primarily (IntelliJ+IdeaVim) and sometimes (Emacs+evil) for the last few years.

If I want to write big, complex change in a codebase in Java/Scala/Python/Javascript I would use IntelliJ. Yet IntelliJ doesn't work well in many corner cases, like very big codebases, projects in C/C++ or languages not officially supported by Jetbrains, cross language projects (even with IJ Ultimate), remote editing or just quickly opening some github repo without spending time on any project setup. And extra emacs packages like magit and org-mode are irreplaceable.

Given the emacs flexibility I was able to configure Emacs to implement majority of IntelliJ keybindings. There usually is an equivalent emacs function of package for IntelliJ behavior, e.g. M-x and IntelliJ "Find Action". Emacs helm works a lot like fuzzy matching in IntelliJ. Sometimes I only implement the "similar" behaviour, e.g. "Show usages" vs "Grep for text at point in current project" in IJ. I will be writing a blog post about it at kozikow.wordpress.com, but if you are interested now now I can send you my .emacs.d.

In this setup I can just setup "fast, always works and easy to set up, but not too powerful" code navigation using ctags/ggtags, grep/ag and projectile in emacs and avoid packages like EDT, eclim-emacs or Jedi that are more powerful, but sometimes require custom per repository setup, or are slow. I usually have both emacs and IJ opened and switch between the two. I have a keybinding in both editors for "open current file in the other editor" (emacsclient + external tool in IJ).

So in the spirit of motto of Spacemacs - "The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim nor IntelliJ, it's Emacs and Vim and IntelliJ!"

unhammer3• 10 years ago

I haven't had to java in a long time, but for C++ I find ymcd (based off vim's YouCompleteMe) well worth a little effort to set up. Get the daemon at https://github.com/Valloric/ycmd and emacs package at https://github.com/abingham/emacs-ycmd It gives "intelligent" completion and code navigation, just like you'd expect from IDE's. For the per-project setup, I typically just copy-paste the config file from another project and perhaps tweak some include paths in it.

Apparantly ycmd can do C#, Rust, Go, JS etc. as well now. I like this way of putting such "IDE features" (meaning the programming language-specific features) into editor-agnostic deamons; that way good completion/navigation is available to all editors. The same idea is behind eclim (as you mentioned) for Java and merlin for OCaml.

Chattered• 10 years ago

And ensime for Scala.

The idea is at least as old as SLIME, which has been the defacto common lisp mode for Emacs for ages. When I was using it nearly fifteen years back it was easily the most comfortable development environment I had used in any language.

bitfox• 10 years ago

A lot of text editors have a 1% of emacs power but a great web site and a great interface. This help them to shine in the IDE/Editors jungle. So, this new interface, will help emacs (from a "marketing" point of view).

Personally, I think that Emacs is one of the best editors. Not so simple to use (you may think if you are going to start without a tutorial), but, definely... very strong and personalizable.

I prefer to not compare with IDEs. The advantages of IDEs is that they have a particular UI and a set of tools focused for a particular language/development tool. This will allow you to have an initial set of features. Ready to use. Without spending your time to work on personalization. You may think to IDEs as editors with a restricted set of features (compared with emacs).

soyuka• 10 years ago

shit now we need a better one for vim

ultim8k• 10 years ago

Cool! Congrats guys!

apatters• 10 years ago

Does anyone know of a fun and engaging way to learn emacs, like VIM Adventures? I sit and stare at a list of emacs hotkeys any time I want to give it a shot and my eyes glaze over.

rashkov3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure it's worth learning the emacs key bindings for text editing if you already know vim. Just turn on evil mode and use that. I could be totally wrong here but I haven't seen any real defenders of emacs key bindings. seems to me that people are used to them and they do the trick, but vim is considered more powerful for pure text editing. Using emacs is still great for a host of other reasons though.

rashkov3• 10 years ago

I did just come across this though: C-h t That'll bring up a tutorial file that's like vimtutor. Not quite vim-adventures but it's pretty helpful

howardabrams2• 10 years ago

While the web site is nice, and the links to Emacs Rocks are great, perhaps it should also include a more comprehensive video introduction to Emacs, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6jfrrwR10k

New GNU Emacs website

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