What I'd like to see in Emacs

https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/rms/

by AJRF • 4 years ago

181 179 4 years ago

lxe4• 4 years ago

Welp... he hates JavaScript because of things he thinks he knows about JavaScript even though he's stating he knows nothing about JavaScript. Then he continues to ramble on about how browsers run JavaScript.

Someone so influential, and who sets the ethical standards for free software, should really do their homework.

ok_dad4• 4 years ago

I don't get why he didn't just say, "we won't support other languages because that's our vision for this software" and had to go into a bunch of unrelated bullshit. That's why no one listens to RMS's good ideas, because he talks about stupid, unrelated bullshit all the time. This talk was supposed to be about the future of Emacs, but the first part of it was dedicated to ranting about web JS?

teddyh8• 4 years ago

Presumably people often suggest the misguided notion that Emacs should run JavaScript, and he wants to explain why this would be bad.

BeetleB7• 4 years ago

Let's get some perspective. It's a 17 minute talk, of which he spent less than 2.5 minutes on JS. People shouldn't be so irritable.

lxe4• 4 years ago

Right? What does the browser's execution of JavaScript have to do with how it should or should not be used in emacs?

teddyh8• 4 years ago

Please state where he says that he hates JavaScript.

lxe4• 4 years ago

[00:03:46.280] However, the language that we above all shouldn't support is JavaScript. That's not because of the language itself. I don't know the JavaScript language, I've heard people say it's rather clumsy and not well designed

tsuujin5• 4 years ago

He also had to go out of his way to make sure that “improve emacs ergonomics” is conflated with “change everything we’ve ever done to be VS Code”. Which has been the standard refrain any time the topic of improving onboarding for new people comes up.

The guy is walking hyperbole, I will never understand why so many people idolize him.

BeetleB7• 4 years ago

He also had to go out of his way to make sure that “improve emacs ergonomics” is conflated with “change everything we’ve ever done to be VS Code”.

Not sure how you get that from:

Lots of people come to Emacs familiar with VS Code, and they say, "Please make Emacs more like VS Code. Change everything that you did in the 1980s and 90s to be like that other thing." That wouldn't be feasible even if we wanted to. Our goal is not to be... not resembling VS Code. Any resemblance is coincidental.

tharne• 4 years ago

The guy is walking hyperbole, I will never understand why so many people idolize him.

People admire those who put their morals before personal gain, which is exactly what RMS has done. With his intelligence and academic pedigree, he easily could have made gobs of money doing things he considered unethical, but instead he's devoted his life to protecting what he sees as an important aspect of human freedom. Even if you don't like him or agree with his views, the commitment he has to human human is admirable.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

idolize may be too strong. in my case i just see a dude who started a big project long ago with lots of good bits in it, which is worth a bit of respect

ergonaught• 4 years ago

"That's not because of the language itself. I don't know the JavaScript language, I've heard people say it's rather clumsy and not well designed, but I don't know this. In any case, it's not what my views are based on."

He's pretty clear in the, what, 2 minutes tops?, that he spends on the topic.

The complaints here mostly seem to be "I don't like RMS so I'm going to overstate some complaints about what I've decided he said instead of what he actually said."

It's wild.

om2• 4 years ago

His complaint about JavaScript doesn’t really make sense on several levels.

(1) Things websites do that he doesn’t like aren’t all done by JavaScript. Some of the most insidious tracking on the web is done with script-free methods like tracking pixels, link decoration parameters, redirect bounces, etc.

(2) his comments about the horror of downloading and running programs betray a lack of understanding of the security model of the web.

(2) His logic amounts to: “a language is used in a programming environment where some bad things sometimes happen. Therefore don’t use the language for anything else.” This is childish purity based non-logic. Should we also avoid HTTP? CSS? I hear a lot of browsers are implemented in combos of C, C++, and Rust. Should we avoid all those too?

aidenn03• 4 years ago

The problem comes not from the language JavaScript, but from the fact that browsers, by default, will pull in JavaScript code that gets sent to them and run it to do anything at all. Emacs is supposed to defend your freedom. It's supposed to help you to defend your freedom, and lead you to defend your freedom, which means it shouldn't lead you to throw your freedom away as soon as you visit a site that tries to send you a non-free program to run straight off of that other machine. So it's important not to lead users to do computing this way.

I don't know how this is related to extending Emacs with JavaScript, but it's more or less correct about how JavaScript works in the browser (modulo "anything at all" being "anything at all in the browser sandbox"). If you only want to run free software, you necessarily must disable JS in your browser.

BeetleB7• 4 years ago

Technically, elisp can do the same.

krapp• 4 years ago

I don't understand the argument that Javascript isn't free. Every library I'm aware of is MIT or otherwise FOSS licensed, and (at least before Node.js and NPM came along) it isn't owned or licensed by a specific corporation. It's probably the most free programming language ever created.

It's RMS, so I know he's going to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this, then throw out the bathtub, then disassemble the plumbing, brick up the bathroom and never bathe again on principle, but Javascript has probably served as a greater benefit for FOSS culture than any other language. Certainly more so than lisp. Making it out to be an implicitly evil language seems... out of touch?

quick edit: I know the argument about privacy invading javascript software, but software can be free and still invade your privacy. That's got nothing to do with the language.

jrockway2• 4 years ago

I think he's right for the wrong reasons.

Emacs Lisp (and its data model) is quite different from what programmers are traditionally used to. We typically write software that runs completely unattended for years at a time. We communicate with unknown servers and APIs that change randomly for no reason. Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, multiple times an hour. Thus, a programming language designed for that environment has to have error handling front and center, it's really all you're doing! Taking that to the extreme, code that refuses to compile because you didn't handle every possible eventuality is actually wonderful for making software that stands a chance of not being the ops team's (you these days) worst nightmare.

Emacs is not like that, however. The user of the code is likely a programmer, and the main data structure is the buffer of text that they're looking at. It's the one time in the world that you can just throw an exception and let the user handle it. They can just adjust the "memory" by typing stuff and trying the command again. Having written a lot of Emacs Lisp (and a fair amount of Javascript), I don't even know how you could make a nice API in Javascript that let you quickly put together quick editor tools, the fundamental design of the language just makes it more difficult than necessary. (You'll see this in the long tail of Emacs packages that the newer editors simply don't have. It's so easy to get started, and to finish!)

I'm honestly surprised that anyone has managed to write a text editor in a programming language other than Emacs Lisp. It's just such an impedance mismatch, it must be pain upon pain constantly.

RMS is right in the sense that users can't really inspect the code they get from websites. That is more of a webpack and browser issue than anything else. Emacs has great tools for inspecting the code you're going to run or are running (it's a keystroke away at all times), but I think you could build that for any language. And to be fair, I'm sure many Emacs users package-install stuff that they never look at, or even care that Emacs is free.

lxe4• 4 years ago

Yeah but what does browsers running JavaScript have to do with Emacs? Imagine if browsers ran lisp instead?

strken3• 4 years ago

The great thing about open source is that you can just ignore RMS's opinions and write whatever you want. The great thing about Emacs is that it's easy to extend, you don't even have to fork it.

In fact, Steve Yegge has already written an EMCA-262 interpreter in Emacs Lisp, and given it the unfortunate name "Ejacs".

ihatepython3• 4 years ago

Can you explain why that name is unfortunate?

AJRF2• 4 years ago

I find the idea of wanting a WYSIWYG doc editor in emacs a bit out of left field. I wish he went into a bit more how he envisions that working.

Would emacs developer builds some form a GUI toolkit or would it be built inside the existing concept of text buffers?

Seems odd and a bit unfocused, and seems like a big wasted engineering effort for when something like LibreOffice exists.

teddyh8• 4 years ago

Emacs is already able to display different fonts in various sizes and styles within the same buffer:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

I imagine that he simply wants this used to enable Emacs to be able to edit rich text in a WYSIWYG style.

donio• 4 years ago

You can already do that much with M-x enriched-mode which has been a part of Emacs for ages. I never felt the need to use it.

NoGravitas• 4 years ago

This has been the main thing RMS has wanted in Emacs since the late 90s or so. But I think not many Emacs users want it, nor many other Emacs developers. I think this is one of several cases where RMS is fixated on fighting the last war - in this case, vs. MS Word. But in the meantime, the importance of WYSIWYG document preparation as a main thing people use their computers for has greatly declined.

oblio2• 4 years ago

But in the meantime, the importance of WYSIWYG document preparation as a main thing people use their computers for has greatly declined.

No, it hasn't.

In developer circles, yes, slightly, because of Git, Markdown, etc.

For regular folks (90%+ of folks out there), not at all.

A doctor or biologist or quartermaster aren't about to write Markdown any day soon.

sys_64738• 4 years ago

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

lejalv• 4 years ago

What is odd is that he mentioned LibreOffice when *GNU* TeXmacs (https://texmacs.org) exists.

Edit: url

hcarvalhoalves• 4 years ago

I don’t think it’s that odd. It’s just that probably you, like many others, see Emacs as a programming editor / IDE, while RMS sees the much broader applicability of this software.

Nowadays if you want WYSIWYG you don’t even own the data anymore, it’s a Microsoft or Google editor as a SaaS in the browser. So Emacs covering this use case too would be extremely powerful and coherent from the software freedom angle.

lzaaz• 4 years ago

So the video ends with him asking for questions, which presumably he himself answers... are those posted somewhere?

Edit: seems like it's this https://pad.emacsconf.org/2022-rms but it's not complete (yet?)

jrm4• 4 years ago

On one hand, I'm aware that most of what he's saying is wildly divorced from the vast majority of tech reality.

That being said: I never want him to stop or change. I still find his ideas and notions incredibly valuable and extremely good sticking points to always consider seriously, even if (perhaps ESPECIALLY IF) there's not much of chance one could actually practice them.

I've learned to listen to him before I judge strongly.

deafpolygon5• 4 years ago

At first, a while ago, I thought he was quite eccentric and maybe similar to those wearing tin foil hats. But over time, I've learned to see that he is right about a number of things and I start to agree that we should have more control over our freedom when it comes to software and computing.

If we don't take an active approach in protecting our freedom, it will get removed before we ever knew we had that.

coliveira2• 4 years ago

It has already been in many areas. I have worked with computers for almost 30 years now, and the kind of things that we need to endure nowadays because of a company's decision is truly absurd. We have entire devices that are closed using cryptographic methods controlled by the company that sold it. In the very near future, we won't be able to program a single line of code for most devices without having our identity strictly controlled by companies and governments. It is a dystopian future for computing.

davidw• 4 years ago

I was thinking about RMS during the "spat" between Elon and Apple. Neither one of them have our interests at heart. Big platforms are bad in a lot of ways.

giraffe_lady3• 4 years ago

Stallman is a good example of the old "a stopped clock is right twice a day" thing. More interestingly to me, a stopped clock is precisely right in a way that a running clock never will be, for those two moments. But it isn't usefully right. A clock that is off by half a minute is useful all day for most applications. A stopped clock is useful only, maybe, for calibration but even then you have to wait half a day to get the chance.

Stallman is precisely right in a few very specific ways, but it's almost impossible to apply that precision to any real world problems we face. We can calibrate against it, and there's some value in that. But not that much I find.

d0mine• 4 years ago

I find that RMS predictions become true eventually (unfortunately). Just read something he said around 20-30 years ago (to have the benefit of hindsight).

Most people don't own a computer where they could install software freely (mobile). Personal data is collected in huge volumes.

DiggyJohnson3• 4 years ago

All I want for Emacs is support for proportional fonts. I don’t care if it’s a major hack, and I don’t want rich text or WYSIWYG. Just proportional fonts.

teddyh8• 4 years ago

Um, Emacs does support proportional fonts.

kstrauser2• 4 years ago

And has for quite a while.

DiggyJohnson3• 4 years ago

Well, I’m wrong and thank you.

tsm• 4 years ago

I wrote my master's dissertation in Emacs with proportional fonts and many other nice affordances. Here's one of the blog posts I used for inspiration: https://zzamboni.org/post/beautifying-org-mode-in-emacs/

martinpw• 4 years ago

Since it is not mentioned in the title or any of the comments (yet), thought it would be useful to say that this talk is by Richard Stallman and is from 2 days ago.

AJRF2• 4 years ago

Original title mentioned RMS, someone has changed it. Maybe "RMS's EmacsConf 2022 Talk - What i'd like to see in Emacs"?

sshine4• 4 years ago

Most interesting comment (on web browsers):

[...] starting around two decades ago, there was an explosion in the complexity of browsers as companies wanted to have more and more control over exactly what would appear on a user's screen. So they invented lots of features to control that, features where the user couldn't really customize how something would actually appear because the whole point was that the company could control that. And JavaScript was sort of the ultimate level of "the company controls everything." Because of this, going beyond the simple level of web page formatting features in Emacs is basically heading down a path that leads to subjugation. It's a path that we need to stay away from. It's a path to an unjust world of computing that you can easily see around you. Web browsers nowadays are designed to display ads that you may not want to see. They're designed for DRM. They're designed for companies to snoop on you in unobvious ways. And all of that we should protect ourselves from, protect our users from.

least6• 4 years ago

Users already have a lot of control over what sort of content they view on the web. They can choose not to navigate to websites they don't trust. They can choose not to run javascript. They can disable css. They can set the font size they want. They can modify the contents of the webpage in a multitude of ways. Perhaps web browsers should have more granular controls and easier ways for users to override the browser's default behavior of rendering things like they're asked to, but then wouldn't that be an argument for Emacs having its own web browser?

Stallman's argument simply doesn't make sense. If I make my own website, I should be able to control what's on it. It's a user's prerogative to ignore all those things or modify it on their end to make it more usable for them. Is it user-hostile for me to, say, require javascript for my site to function? Maybe, but that's still entirely my prerogative as the person making the website. There's no obligation for me to make a website for everyone and there's no obligation from anyone to use my website.

A person should be able to navigate to websites safely and navigate away safely since there's no way of knowing what the contents of a webpage are before navigating to it, but that's about it.

xcambar2• 4 years ago

They can choose not to navigate to websites they don't trust. They can choose not to run javascript. They can disable css.

How do you settle on (dis)trust about a website? Just as you do with a person, there are 4 ways:

* reputation (meaning someone else already visited it and had to pay with bad experience)

* your own experience (meaning you already visited and were victim of the website)

* intuition (very poor driver, full of biases)

* homogeneity: a checklist of norms and conventions (can easily be gamed)

So in any case, it's either very uncertain or relies on others to throw themselves over the cliff so you can benefit from their experience.

So no, you cannot simply choose to not navigate websites you don't trust. It's just blind navigation and that's what most people, uninformed as they are, do.

sshine4• 4 years ago

If it were trivial for anyone to disable unwanted behaviour in browsers, you wouldn’t see so much EU legislation being passed, forcing websites to make useless disclaimers.

On the one hand, browsers have a long history of breaking security principles. On the other, the web has been the most vibrant platform for enhancing user experience; the same commercial interests that RMS criticises have caused the world economy to flourish like nothing else.

If Emacs had somehow become the most popular VM in the world, I’m sure we’d see a lot more skepticism of it.

I do think browsers are more secure than Emacs today, because of the pressure of popularity.

But the criticism of the web being captured by commercial interests applies just as much: you are not ultimately safe from the government when you roam the web, because the technology is largely controlled by few actors.

zzo38computer5• 4 years ago

Perhaps web browsers should have more granular controls and easier ways for users to override the browser's default behavior of rendering things like they're asked to

Yes, I think that it would be good, but still the specifications and implementations of WWW are bad and tend to be trying to make the company to control everything, like they say.

Web browsers could be designed much better, although to compensate for bad specifications requires some messy details. (One thing that might help is for client software to use ARIA hints. They seem to want to use them for blind users, but I think they can help improve it for everyone.)

Instead, they make them worse, trying to hide stuff from end users, trying to believe they know better than the end users, etc. This makes things difficult to control, e.g. you cannot make non-tunneling proxies for HTTPS and therefore you need to take extra energy just to decrypt and reencrypt the communications, and the WebExtensions is rather limited, and you cannot usually make browser extensions in C, and the way that some things are core vs extensions makes many things difficult to change. And then, they will add spyware and stuff, and other inefficient stuff.

A web browser designed only for advanced users, who are assumed to know what they are doing, would be a good thing to have. (And, if you do not understand something, then read the documentation; programs must have good documentation, and unfortunately many do not, and that is what makes them difficult to understand.)

but then wouldn't that be an argument for Emacs having its own web browser?

Maybe; they can see if a better one can be made. It shouldn't be a built-in feature of Emacs, but it could be a file included with it, and maybe it might help. Variants of Chromium isn't the way to make a better one, so it must be made differently.

If I make my own website, I should be able to control what's on it.

Yes, but you shouldn't need to add all sorts of stuff just to concede to W3C's demand, to use Unicode, badly made HTML, etc (even if other file formats would be better, trying to serve them properly just makes a mess).

You can use just plain HTML, but it has many problems, and CSS/JavaScripts just makes even more problems.

Even if you can, it does not necessarily mean, that it is a good idea.

Is it user-hostile for me to, say, require javascript for my site to function?

It depends on the site. For documents, it shouldn't. For some types of games, it might make sense to require JavaScripts, but it should be possible to view the documentation (and the link to the documentation) even without it.

jhbadger• 4 years ago

But compare this "it's my website, I can be hostile to users with special needs if I want to" to the real world. In the real world many countries such as the US and the UK make having your shop accessible to people in wheelchairs a law. So you need to have ramps, or whatever to do this. We don't expect people in wheelchairs to carry the burden of this by requiring them to cart around their own ramps that they can place over stairs.

double_e• 4 years ago

Users already have a lot of control over what sort of content they view on the web.

This is true, but if you want to use most websites, you have to give up a lot of this control in order to have any sort of reasonable experience (reasonable for most people that is, not a reader of Hacker News).

simonmysun• 4 years ago

I believe though the authors of the websites should have control on how the contents are displayed, it's still more convenient if the raw contents or the contents following a specific standard of delivery is provided. And that's what I did for my website, by providing markdown source via git and web.

You actually got RMS's point: There's no obligation for you to make a website for everyone, but you could provide more convenience and compatibility by not _only_ making a website which needs javascript enabled. It shouldn't be assumed that everyone favors javascript and likes to execute javascript code from everywhere.

One may argue that would be easy to be scraped by bots. That's another issue.

medo-bear• 4 years ago

Is it user-hostile for me to, say, require javascript for my site to function? Maybe, but that's still entirely my prerogative as the person making the website

but that is exactly what he is talking about - ie the culture of user hostility (and also code obfuscation) in js front end development

deafpolygon5• 4 years ago

They can choose not to run javascript. They can disable css. They can set the font size they want.

Have you done that on "modern" websites?

m463• 4 years ago

I disagree. This has been eroded in a continual and unstoppable way.

It's annoying because years and years ago my view of computing was very very positive.

I would have viewed something like web assembly as better and faster! Now I view it primarily as a way of obscuring what happens on your computer. We can see that web pages load and run fast enough -- it is just that most do not because they load the maximum number of advertisements and trackers that the delay will bear.

eatonphil• 4 years ago

Since it's from RMS, I'm curious why you find it interesting. Isn't this what he's always said?

sshine4• 4 years ago

I find it interesting because I think a lot about computing on your own terms.

This is the norm: Vendor-locked hardware, operating systems that manipulate you into making choices that benefit others than you, software updates that remove functionality or render devices useless, access to multimedia that is revoked, services shutting down to make devices bound to them useless unless hacked.

And I think I seek problems when I insist on running Linux on known hardware. But I avoid. so. much. by doing do.

htag• 4 years ago

Namely, it's [javascript] been adopted as a way for a network server to send a program to your machine without your even noticing, so that this program, written by you don't know who, will run on your computer and do you don't know what.

Is there any practical difference between running obfuscated Javascript or compiled WebAassembly and running an closed source binary blob?

63• 4 years ago

Sandboxing and a limited api. As much as we love to hate on JavaScript for forcing the will of the company on the user, there are a lot of things you intentionally cannot do with it. Even something as simple as playing a sound without user interaction.

zzo38computer5• 4 years ago

I think WebAssembly requires explicitly linking which functions you will use, and does not have as complicated objects as JavaScript, so handling sandboxing will be simpler. It also is presumably might be able run more efficiently than a JavaScript code. (I think WebAssembly has some problems too, but there are some advantages.)

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks it's entirely obvious that JS is a bad idea for emacs? The beauty of emacs is that it's all in lisp. All of it, except a small C core which is mostly just the elisp implementation. If you don't like lisp, why on earth would you use emacs? There's an absolute fuckton of editors out there that support Javascript.

I don't even care what RMS' argument was, I think he's pretty out of touch most of the time. But putting Javascript in Emacs is just a stupid idea that would completely ruin it eventually. Let Emacs be Emacs and Vscode be Vscode.

Tistel• 4 years ago

Agree. The beauty of lisp dev is that it’s a REPL that maintains state. You can edit the editor while editing. without restarting Write a defun and evaluate and it’s there. All the state persists. Most JS involves restarting the whole app on script change. I don’t use MS VS code because I can’t stand MS (if you know their history … you understand) Maybe they have the same feature now. Don’t know. The WYSIWYG editors are all web based. Maybe make a open source cloud hosted office suite? Google and MS should not have the only offering there.

oblio2• 4 years ago

Sorry, but this comment is so funny, it feels like I'm reading something from back in 2005, on Slashdot.

EFreethought• 4 years ago

There are a lot of people who want to do everything in Javascript. Frankly I don't get why people want to do that. And Lisp is not that hard to learn anyway.

Javascript tends to ruin everything eventually.

shepherdjerred5• 4 years ago

And Lisp is not that hard to learn anyway.

Lisp is much, much harder to learn than JS is. Aside from that JS is a very transferrable skill, but Lisp is not.

otabdeveloper4• 4 years ago

It's the only programming language they know, since they grew out of being a "webmaster" but haven't learned properly about stacks of abstraction in computing.

theshrike79• 4 years ago

They have one tool in their toolbox: Javascript.

They don't want to have another, so they change the world around them so that Javascript can be used for anything.

Derbasti• 4 years ago

Let me be frank: ELisp is a terrible programming language. I have a number of Emacs packages (in ELisp) and Sublime Text packages (in Python), and the development effort difference between the two is not even funny.

That said, Emacs relies rather heavily on unique features such as dynamic binding, advice, and autoloads. These are more or less impossible to replicate in modern languages, so I don't think there's a reasonable path to rewriting major parts of Emacs in, say, Javascript.

But we should look at what Lua did for Neovim. There has been an explosion of development effort now that Neovim finally added a reasonable programming interface. A similar thing could happen in Emacs.

marklgr• 4 years ago

But we should look at what Lua did for Neovim. There has been an explosion of development effort now that Neovim finally added a reasonable programming interface.

It is very much debatable whether Lua is the "reasonable programming interface" causing the activity in Neovim. Vimscript has many flaws, one of them being that it doesn't look like other programming languages, but it does its specialized job pretty well. It is slow, but efforts are made in that area. Lua is well designed but it certainly has its shortcomings too, and many argue (me included) that programming in Lua is not that pleasant. The Lua bindings have been available in Vim for quite some time, but they never were popular, for some reasons.

Anyway, it is not directly related to your point, but I think that example is not that compelling.

klibertp4• 4 years ago

ELisp is a terrible programming language.

Why do you think so? My main gripe is the lack of namespaces and proper modules, but there are many languages in Top 10 on TIOBE that share this problem. The only other problem is a clunky, decades old standard library. Lack of consensus around async processing is less important, but also irritating.

Other than that, Elisp improved tremendously in the last 5 years, and it keeps improving with every release. The stdlib is getting some long overdue cleanups and sensible convenience modules are added regularly. The language features of other languages are being readily incorporated in the form of macros. The live environment along with "self documenting" code makes for a rapid dev feedback, and tools like built-in Edebug and 3rd party packages like Paredit and EROS make editing Elisp code more pleasant than most other languages.

Obviously, Elisp has many problems, it's not ideal, but it's nowhere near "terrible" in my opinion. At least not anymore.

olau• 4 years ago

Not everyone likes Emacs Lisp, but I think there are two main arguments - one is speed, and the other is familiarity.

Now that Emacs Lisp actually has native compilation, the speed issue is less of a problem, but it's a plain fact that a lot more people can do things with Javascript than Lisp.

I think usually if you have an application you'd prefer to reuse a programming language rather than having a language specific to the application. I think that was the main motivation for the failed port to Scheme.

rich_sasha2• 4 years ago

I love emacs and don't live Elisp at all. I can use it, if pushed, but don't love it for sure.

Do i prefer JS? Probably not. But to me the draw of emacs is nothing to do with Elisp. It is instead everything to do with customisation, one-editor-many-languages, and the ability to do absolutely everything from a keyboard-based, low-clutter GUI.

Part of it is of course that good people made plugins in Elisp and maybe you'd argue that without it they wouldn't come to be, but I'm not sure.

sph2• 4 years ago

But to me the draw of emacs is nothing to do with Elisp. It is instead everything to do with customisation

I keep hearing this argument but it is contradictory: the reason why Emacs is so customizable it is because it is written in a Lisp, a very versatile metaprogramming language.

You simply cannot have the flexibility of Emacs in anything less malleable than a Lisp. You'd have a regular editor with plugins.

I know many will want to prove me wrong, but where is the non-Lisp Emacs killer yet? VSCode is a great editor, but it's nowhere as flexible.

celeritascelery• 4 years ago

A problem with jumping over to the current popular language is that JavaScript will eventually fade in relevance, as all programming languages do. At that point Emacs would be saddled with two niche languages, and the advantage of using what is popular will be lost. Emacs is the “editor of a lifetime” and I expect it to be around for another 40 years. Best not make decisions based on what the current trends are.

wdkrnls• 4 years ago

He is looking for TeXmacs. Sadly it seems the porting of the GNU extensible editor to use the GNU extension language (guile) ship has sailed.

dleslie• 4 years ago

Mostly because the huge gains in speed that were desired were found in the native compilation fork.

That, and the R5/R6/R7 debacle has alienated many from scheme.

e3bc54b2• 4 years ago

Not to mention the humongous pile of Elisp written over 40 years of its existence is hard to be backwards compatible with for any new implementation.

Emacs' core isn't known to be the best codebase in existence, but it is battle hardened and hard to replicate.

guestbest• 4 years ago

I was thinking that applications like operating systems reveal the language they are written in as they are extended and there is too much c++ in texmacs to port it over to emacs which appears to be written in c. I can’t really comment on guile without researching it but the low level ideas are between scheme and lisp are incompatible with the lisp language, and I think he mentioned that when he said ‘non-Lispy language would be a mistake’.

zzo38computer5• 4 years ago

I do not use Emacs, although I can still comment, about the specific things they mentioned.

They are right it does not have to be VS Code; if you like that, then you can use VS Code. However, if you want specific features, then that is a different thing, and will have to be considered specifically.

If you want JavaScript in Emacs, it could be an external extension, maybe; it probably should not be included by default. However, if the model is different enough from Lisp then it might be hard to fit; nevertheless, such an extension might help if you need to run JavaScript codes designed for other editors that do use JavaScripts, without having to rewrite them (polyfills will be possible, if necessary). Lisp alone probably isn't ideal though, and you should be allowed to write extensions in C as well (I don't know if this is already possible; maybe it is).

WYSIWYG editing should have "reveal-codes" function also; without such thing, WYSIWYG isn't very good.

One thing I think would want to have in text editor is capability of non-Unicode text encodings which don't convert to/from Unicode. You just should not expect that everything is conversion in one unified character set; it does not really work.

zelphirkalt5• 4 years ago

People can make use of C dependencies from Emacs it seems. If we look at vterm, it uses libvterm, a C library.

bradjohansson• 4 years ago

No disrespect to Stallman, but it's hard for me to understand what problem he's trying to solve here. Various unofficial packages have made Emacs usable to me in my work as a software engineer, which combined with Emacs's unparalleled text editing capabilities and keyboard shortcuts make it a powerful tool indeed. Without many of those unofficial packages, I would be forced to use VS Code or some alternative.

In my observation, Emacs has been moving in the right direction, addressing outdated aspects and sources of lagging performance, and adding essential features like LSP support natively. I hope that Emacs contributors and maintainers can keep this focus.

What I'd like to see in Emacs

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