Frontmacs

https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs

by jimyl • 9 years ago

157 96 9 years ago

github.com

forvelin• 9 years ago

Some screenshots could be nice, probably most people are not tend to try it out until they see a screenshot.

Anyway, I am a simple man. I see people using Emacs and I become happy.

andanotherthing• 9 years ago

Agree! I am not a developer or an overly technical person and I recently started using Emacs because of an article here (using ido and org mode). I like it but I'm not fluent enough, or know enough of what it does to switch to it for everyday tasks - but there's a beauty in navigating file systems, creating files, switching windows all with your keyboard.

Does anyone know if you can actually write code on Emacs, like HTML/CSS/Javascript?

hultner• 9 years ago

If you mean using emacs as your code editor then yes, that's the main purpose of emacs for most users. However there's other hidden eastereggs such as M-x pong, M-x tetris or why not try M-x doctor if you're feeling a bit down.

declanqian2• 9 years ago

Actually this link is all about write front code in Emacs, that's why it's named `frontmacs` I guess. Yeah, currently I am write frontend code inside emacs. Nothing special. I just used few major modes. js2-mode/web-mode/css(sass)-mode, there is typescript mode. Only for syntax highlighting. I don't use auto-complete thing.

aerique• 9 years ago

Does anyone know if you can actually write code on Emacs, like HTML/CSS/Javascript?

Do you mean modifying Emacs while it is running?

If you switch to the "* scratch * "[1] buffer and type one of these and after each of these either press «Ctrl-J» or «Alt-x eval-print-last-sexp»:

  (message "Hello, World!")

  (setq cursor-type 'hbar)

  (setq cursor-type 'box)

  (setq indicate-empty-lines t)

  (setq show-trailing-whitespace t)

Is this what you meant?

[1] I have no idea how to get a normal asterisk on HN.

giancarlostoro3• 9 years ago

Your question seems to confuse some, do you mean run elisp interactively or edit HTML/CSS/JavaScript? If so I want to say yes to both.

gilmi• 9 years ago

Does anyone know if you can ... on Emacs?

Yes.

bhrgunatha• 9 years ago

I will (almost certainly) never switch from my current configuration to use any of these all-in-one package bundles, but I do like looking through them for ideas.

TeMPOraL• 9 years ago

Same here. My Emacs is always on configs of my own, but I do mine other peoples' configs for ideas like crazy.

cup-of-tea8• 9 years ago

Yeah, me too. I also love watching people use emacs. There's always something neat that I haven't seen before. Unfortunately that is a very rare pleasure for me. I've only seen emacs in the wild a few times and mostly they were old professors using it with the standard configuration.

johnbellone• 9 years ago

I had a configuration that I was nursing along for several years, but after seeing Prelude [0] I realized that it would be much simpler for me to let the community to most of the work for me. Now I have a consistent environment for most languages and I am able to make small tweaks on top.

[0] https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

jimyl2• 9 years ago

Yes, me too. I can always learn something new by reading others' configs.

Robdel122• 9 years ago

Hi forvelin! I'm one of the devs that helped create frontmacs. This is a great idea and something I generally like doing. I do it on my own emacs config: https://github.com/Robdel12/.emacs.d

Judging from the comments we didn't do a very good job at messaging that while this is a starter pack, it's also meant for you to build on top of and customize. My config does not use the default theme and tweaks a couple of settings.

We intended frontmacs to be something _like_ prelude but make updating the core packages easier (rather than pulling in the changes from upstream & solving merge conflicts). We wanted nice defaults that you could then build on top of.

bcfurtado• 9 years ago

Same here. I always feel a bit disappointed when I see an Emacs package without a screenshot or a gif.

vog2• 9 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but:

Most of the planet doesn't treat editor configuration as software. We do.

This is so true! And it applies to many, many other types of configuration as well.

hiker• 9 years ago

Reminds me of the evolution of Lua https://www.lua.org/history.html from a configuration language to a full blown programming language.

Awhile ago, we've used this code as data approach in a game development studio for everything. For example, maps/levels were stored as a Lua scripts that get executed on load and contain a sequence of PlaceObject, SetProperty, etc invocations.

It doesn't come without drawbacks, though. For example, Autodesk Maya stores scenes as Mel code (as a bunch of createNode, connectAttribute, setAttribute commands). This script gets executed on load in a single thread (utilizing a single from your N cores) and scene loading can take ~30 min on large scenes. Security is also an issue but it's fixable with proper environment sanitation and sandboxing.

vog2• 9 years ago

This is an interesting aspect, but slightly different from what I had in mind.

Just because you treat data as code doesn't mean you have to force it into a Turing-complete language. It just means that you should document it, format it properly, put it into version control and deliver it for deployment.

Moreover, Turing-complete languages are more of an anti-pattern here. The proper design pattern here is the Rule of Least Power:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power

It means you should choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

And this is where DSLs or "data as code" can play its advantages: Not just makes it things shorter and simpler, but you can also force it into a less powerful language, which allows you to eradicate certain types of bugs and security issues by not making them even expressible anymore. Moreover, you can run your data structure through different "interpreters" doing different things with it, which is completely inpractical of your data structure describes a too powerful language.

cup-of-tea8• 9 years ago

Emacs just used a full blown programming language right from the start. And one of the very best: Lisp.

Zitrax• 9 years ago

It claims to be "Awesome by default", but does not tell much about what that actually means.

andrewem• 9 years ago

I think what they mean is it's fully set up, so that if you've never used Emacs and you start using it, you won't encounter the situation where something stinks and your friend who's an experienced Emacs user says "oh, you need to customize such and such." So, "awesome by default" rather than "awesome after many hours of learning about and applying configuration changes." (I have no idea whether what they've done would meet that criterion for a large number of potential users.)

fergie• 9 years ago

I think (and I say this with love) that any sane person who starts using emacs will find it infuriating- its part of the appeal.

gtsteve• 9 years ago

It installs vim.

rootlocus• 9 years ago

booooo! /s

emacsgifs• 9 years ago

You mean evil-mode?

executesorder66• 9 years ago

If you look in frontmacs-config.el you can see this setting:

    (awesome-mode t)

vr46• 9 years ago

Great approach. Now what does it do? (Or rather, what can I do with it specifically compared to other distros, and how?)

skocznymroczny• 9 years ago

So many buzzwords and startup like speak but no "made with love"?

pdkl95• 9 years ago

(edit: reposted this comment in their bug tracker)

You might want to warn people that this enables auto-saving buffers on many buffer/frame events that are usually considered safe.

https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs/blob/master/frontm...

    (defadvice switch-to-buffer (before save-buffer-now activate)
      (when buffer-file-name (save-buffer)))

    ; the same defadvice is applied to:
    ;    other-window
    ;    windmove-{up,down,left,right}

This absolutely needs a warning.

    (add-hook 'focus-out-hook
              (lambda () (when buffer-file-name
                           (save-buffer))))

Also, maybe this should only happen to buffers that are already backed up in the VCS? Saving unknown changes back to the original file whenever the frame looses focus - which can happen due to external, unpredictable events - seems like an accident waiting to happen.

maaaats• 9 years ago

As a general fileditor, it may be scary, yes. But I have this in IntelliJ and love it. Saving is just a useless keystroke for most of my development time. Things are in VCS, and if not, I can also use local history to roll back.

jeremyjh• 9 years ago

Local history is the feature that makes this practical. Without it, there will be blood spilled.

pksadiq2• 9 years ago

(defadvice ...

For your information, defadvice is deprecated[0]. Alternatives like advice-add can be used instead.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Po...

zeveb3• 9 years ago

Prelude does this too (I'm guessing that's what inspired them), and I've gotten very used to it. Since emacs maintains a pretty deep edit history, it hasn't caused me issues. But it probably is worth mentioning.

I wouldn't go back now that I'm used to it.

michaelsbradley• 9 years ago

Agreed, and undo-tree-visualize is a nice tool for winding through Emacs edit history, with branching!

grewil2• 9 years ago

My prefered way to quickly test these things without having to mess with your own setup, elpa directories etc:

  mkdir /tmp/.emacs.d  
  wget -P /tmp/.emacs.d https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thefrontside/frontmacs/master/scripts/init-frontmacs.el
  echo '(load (expand-file-name "init-frontmacs.el" user-emacs-directory))' > /tmp/.emacs.d/init.el
  env HOME=/tmp emacs

cup-of-tea8• 9 years ago

I have mixed feelings about emacs starter kits. On the one hand I'm always happy that more people might discover emacs. It's quite simply the most powerful text editor out there. Hands down. I could not imagine using a computer seriously without emacs.

On the other hand, the power of emacs comes from the fact that it's essentially a lisp interpreter which is good at doing text editor stuff. If you abstract this away then what you get is an editor which is implemented in emacs, but is ultimately comparable to any other text editor.

Emacs really shines when you make it your own. And that goes far beyond the usual "customisation" that you see. I have files full of macros that help me write lisp which eventually changes the way the editor works. And some of that functionality helps me write the macros that help me write lisp that (...and so on).

For those that don't use emacs the above might sound bizarre. Maybe it's only attractive to a few programmers. Or maybe you have to try it before you really understand. I don't know. But that's why I have mixed feelings.

declanqian2• 9 years ago

They treated the whole frontmacs as a package and put it on https://elpa.frontside.io/ , I don't know whether it's good idea. Actually I proposaled the same concept for spacema\ cs, doesn't got approved back then. So this is not a starter kit I guess?

giancarlostoro3• 9 years ago

I use Spacemacs but it isn't always perfect and if Spacemacs doesn't wind up working I end up just using vanilla emacs because MELPA is a dice roll whether it will work or not every single time for me, usually regardless of OS. I just know enough basics of emacs to edit code, but I wish adding packages didn't involve so many hoops such as having to add a repository that everyone already goes out of their way to add to emacs and having said repository fail on you.

I'm not sure what reason the emacs team has for just not adding MELPA but it would change the game for me if it were an official addition and would require it's addition to work out of the box. Till then, emacs is a long way away from being my default editor, and VS Code and JetBrains are more of my defaults.

Out of the box functionality is key for any editor in my opinion.

cup-of-tea8• 9 years ago

I put melpa in my init file and never thought about it again. You don't need to keep adding it every time.

For me, my emacs config is my text editor, and it works out of the box on any system I install it to. Emacs is often very easy to install, but if I'm going to spend significant time on a machine I'll build it myself, and then my config is a simple git clone away and that's it. I'm working in an exact copy of my own personal text editor that I've built up over many years.

My instances of emacs also stay running for weeks at a time. I'll edit the config while it's running. If it's useful I'll commit it and pull it to other instances and run the modifications on them while they're running. It's a completely different way to work than most people are used to and it's liberating.

willtim3• 9 years ago

Why not use melpa-stable?

ajarmst• 9 years ago

I had similar feelings, but I've actually been using (an admittedly, somwhat tweaked version of) Batsov's Prelude for a couple of years now. It pulls in a lot of exceptional packages with sensible defaults (without trying to make it stop being Emacs, a common fault of such kits) and has very good facilities for customization and managing things like package loading order.

mroll2• 9 years ago

are your configs anywhere online? I'd love to read them.

mroll2• 9 years ago

I'm at the point in my emacs journey where I'm looking for places in my day-to-day editing that can be made more efficient by writing code that writes that code. I have implemented some helpful macros, but I think I would benefit a lot from reading macros written by a more experienced emacs programmer.

vinceguidry• 9 years ago

Emacs is a programming language with it's own text editor built in. Like every other programming language on the planet, it benefits from dependency management and source code management.

Getting all of our tools into similar management forms ultimately makes all of coding more accessible.

PurpleRamen4• 9 years ago

elisp ist the programming language. Emacs is an environment with text-oriented interface. Pretty much like modern browsers, just more mature. One could even say, Emacs is the spiritual ancestor of the electron-framework.

wyuenho5• 9 years ago

I've been using emacs for over a decade now and I have yet to reach this state of nirvana. I do want to understand every line of elisp and I've been doing a lot of elisp recently. But then again, I also have work to do, and I realize all I've been trying to achieve with my emacs config in the past 10 years is to make it work like a modern IDE. Which is perfect, because the reason I switched to Emacs in the first place is I just needed an IDE that I could fix.

However, ever since Sublime and now VS Code came about, I've been having this internal debate of whether I should just switch to a text editor that I can fix, but come configured sensibly OOTB, and let sunk time costs be. This used to be a tall order but VS Code seems to be really close to this ideal now.

brandonmenc• 9 years ago

Been there, done that, switched to JetBrains IDEs, and haven't looked back.

My gut feeling is that people who haven't looked up from emacs or vi for a decade or two have no idea what modern IDEs are capable of out of the box.

ghggu6666• 9 years ago

I guess I see it as a Spacemacs user or Frontmacs user decided that was the way to make Emacs “their own”, less in an emotional sense and more of a utilitarian “this will do the job nicely for me”.

I got into Linux with Mandrake. A year later I was running Slack.

Not everyone sticks with their first tool when starting out

PurpleRamen4• 9 years ago

I know what you mean. I started emacs spacemacs, be cause for me it was the better vim. But with time I got fed up with the bloat of spacemacs and so many details which I can't controll for my personal ways. Now I roll my own fork of spacemacs, tweak it the way I want and still have some external help with the occasional merge from spacemacs-repo.

If this frontmacs grown in the proper direction to support a effortless mix of own and external settings, then it could become even more important than spacemacs for the community and growth of emacs.

nukeop• 9 years ago

After years of using other people's configs, I found that they never really fit my way of working completely and they're filled with things I don't understand and/or don't use. I think most people will want to use their own configs after a while, and that's one of emacs's greatest strengths. Nowadays we have multiple package repositories and multiple ways of configuring it to suit your tastes.

I also find the description filled with buzzwords and buzz-phrases to the point where it becomes meaningless.

jimyl2• 9 years ago

I think most people will want to use their own configs after a while

"after a while". Agree. I think they are called "starter kits" for a reason :).

I also find the description filled with buzzwords and buzz-phrases to the point where it becomes meaningless.

I have looked into their config today. Nothing very amazing, but indeed a better default experience. It's much simpler (compared to Spacemacs) which I think is more beginner friendly.

wyuenho5• 9 years ago

This is very similar to what I have configured in my .emacs[1] and custom.el[2]. I like that this project is minimalist. If I were to start using emacs 2 years ago, I'd probably start with this.

A slight gripe I have with Frontmacs is everything is loaded eagerly on startup. I'd imagine this massively increases start up time given how heavy weight some of the packages are (yasnippet, magit, tide). I also find issues with it calling itself awesome without integrating with any emacs window management package.

Most config in emacs these days is just installing a couple of packages and toggling on and off a couple customizable variables, and occasionally a couple of `add-hook` calls. These are all low hanging fruits since packages became an official thing in Emacs. The most annoying and non-obvious part of Emacs is how it manages windows. To tame the totally insane default window management system, you pretty much have to shop for a layout manager of some sort, and in order to do that, you have to know what Emacs is doing under the hood. That's hard and I wish more of these Emacs distros would come integrated with some sane window management package.

I used to just rely on popwin and desktop mode mainly, and used golden-ratio and centered-window-mode for a while. Recently I've completely ripped them out of my config and replaced them with [purpose](https://github.com/bmag/emacs-purpose) and [perspective](https://github.com/nex3/perspective-el). I'm loving them so far, others seem to like e2wm, tile, rotate and others.

[1] https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs [2]: https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/cus...

finnjohnsen2• 9 years ago

"Most of the planet doesn't treat editor configuration as software. We do."

But I also wanna be the cool kid, and not a part of the herd :'(

mcguire• 9 years ago

What is the difference between this and spacemacs?

gyrgtyn• 9 years ago

Do any of the frontside people use evil mode ?

Robdel122• 9 years ago

I don’t believe so. We usually recommend spacemacs for that. (They do an excellent job with their config)

Myrmornis• 9 years ago

We don't want to maintain code, we just want to enter a few keystrokes and download more awesome.

The phrase "download more awesome" makes me very strongly doubt whether the authors are genuinely experienced with the difficulties of software engineering.

crimsonalucard2• 9 years ago

Clearly they are. One phrase like that has no bearing on someone's experience.

Frontmacs

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