Stack Exchange for Emacs

by masolino • 12 years ago

143 51 12 years ago

VLM• 12 years ago

Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

(just kidding. I don't like SE but I'm sure this is a great tool for people who do like SE.)

gaalze• 12 years ago

Please don't have an opinion when posting on StackExchange. Democracy and committees are what make America great and why we chose XML over S-Expressions.

wtbob3• 12 years ago

This is Yet Another Example of the amazing utility of being able to easily and stably extend one's environment. emacs is just a text editor, but this project is changing it into a Stack Exchange client. That's useful!

agumonkey• 12 years ago

So you can ask question about emacs on emacs.stackexchange while using stackexchange for emacs in emacs.

tuhdo10• 12 years ago

Emacs certainly is not just a text editor. Emacs is just a big REPL, a REPL with a powerful text editor instead of minimal command line interface. Right on the homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/, it is written that:

"GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing."

Text editing is a subset of Emacs and Emacs Lisp, not the other way around.

wtbob3• 12 years ago

Emacs certainly is not just a text editor.

I know. But it was written as just a text editor—but an extensible one, and so it has grown to be a lot more. Which is really pretty awesome.

Chris911• 12 years ago

I build something similar for Atom a few months ago[1] and while some people liked the idea a lot of comments were negative and turned around that fact that programming is not about copy/pasting and plagiarism. Now a similar project is built but for emacs and comments about the concept of having a client inside an editor is interesting and powerful.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7931667

psp• 12 years ago

I never fully "got" emacs even though it was the popular editor during university times and I occasionally use it for quick server admin stuff.

Today I feel it has missed its boat with good looking and user friendly stuff available like Sublime Text, Atom, Eclipse and even cloud IDEs.

I cant help but to laugh quietly to addons like this.

tuhdo10• 12 years ago

Can Sublime Text/Atom do all of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8639804 ?

I want to jump to any file at any time regardless of where I am in the project instantly, can Sublime do it? And even if a project has 30-40k files, it must be fast and make me jump instantly. See the demos in this guide for details: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html

Atom has a limit of 2MB text file which is worse than Vim in the 90s.

thrw1q• 12 years ago

Those videos on the Idris mode are also very impressive:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsON_8vogp4nCQFTnfu43kA

(Other languages also have nice modes for context-aware completion (and more), like Haskell's ghc-mod and Rust's racer, which is incomplete but is already very nice)

giovannibajo15• 12 years ago

I want to jump to any file at any time regardless of where I am in the project instantly, can Sublime do it? And even if a project has 30-40k files, it must be fast and make me jump instantly

Yes, Sublime handles that smoothly. Do a linux tree clone, enter the directory, run "subl .", then ctrl+p (or cmd+p) and start typing whatever. It fuzzy-completes your typing and immediately displays your selection as a preview in the background as well.

Video here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjc9k8ocwiukq5t/sublime-linux.mov?...

(note the percentage in the footer, it was indexing in background the files for code completion and other stuff, since I had just cloned it, but the file jumping still works smoothly).

I skimmed through your other videos, and I didn't instantly see anything that I couldn't do with a recent editor as well.

alexk• 12 years ago

Probably you have never seen a good emacs setup, that turns it into powerful customized IDE with great usability. Emacs is like minecraft for editors, you never stop building on it.

barrkel• 12 years ago

Emacs can be made prettier, but that's not its forte - power and extensibility are. It's a better text editor, IMO, than any of the three you mention.

However, it's not particularly suited to quick server admin stuff. If you're using emacs as its intended, you'll have a lot of packages to load on startup, making it sluggish for ad-hoc editing with sudo (precluduing use of emacsclient). Emacs -q or mg would be faster. Personally, I'm fond of joe for this purpose - more functionality than mg while far smaller an install than emacs.

hollerith• 12 years ago

ad-hoc editing with sudo (precluding use of emacsclient)

It looks to me like you're probably unaware that an Emacs not running as root can edit files owned by root. The way it goes about it (in a word, TRAMP) is a little complicated under the hood, but (at least for files residing on the same machine as the Emacs process) reliable.

Specifically, both C-x C-f /sudo::/etc/hosts and `emacsclient /sudo::/etc/hosts` work.

adlpz• 12 years ago

There's nothing to "get" really. If you feel that Sublime Text, Atom, Eclipse, etc. are sufficient for your workflow, and wholly capture your needs, then you don't need emacs (or any other editor for that matter).

It just happens that there are people out there, like me, that want more out of their software and really enjoy tweaking and improving our editor. For us, there's emacs :).

latiera• 12 years ago

You are a fool.

tmalsburg22• 12 years ago

You shouldn't blame him. The truth is that Emacs does a great job at hiding its potential from users. Editors like Atom are ultimately much less powerful but they make it easy to discover and use the features that they provide. When I started using Emacs (after a decade of Vim), it took me two years to make myself fully feel at home in Emacs. Part of the reason was that you can't really use Emacs to its fullest without learning a good deal of Elisp. This is the part were other editors do much better.

unknownian• 12 years ago

What's the point in being so condescending?

abroncs• 12 years ago

Good. You seem to favor form over functionality, nothing wrong with that. Emacs is the complete opposite of that.

endgame2• 12 years ago

It's hard to explain when there are all these reasonably featureful programming editors and IDEs going around. The key realisation to have is that even today I spend a huge amount of time just editing text. Commenting on HN? Editing text. Emails? Editing text. Coding? Editing text.

Once you have that "everything is text" realisation, there are two ways to make the most of it. One is to have an editor that's easily called from other places (e.g., vim) and the other is to have an editor that can be integrated into everything (e.g., emacs).

I started using emacs over a decade ago, and it keeps growing and changing to best suit my workflow. And yes, that includes reading mail.

catern• 12 years ago

One is to have an editor that's easily called from other places Emacs is even better than vim at this, ironically. emacs --daemon makes it easy to call emacsclient anywhere I want without worrying about the file already being open - a common pain in vim, at least for me before I switched.

JeremyBanks• 12 years ago

As it happens, the Emacs Stack Exchange site launched in public beta a couple months ago.

http://emacs.stackexchange.com/

(After first seeing the title, I assumed that's what this post was about!)

Lrigikithumer• 12 years ago

That's certainly what the title implies, perhaps "Stack Overflow on Emacs" would have been a better title.

sayemm• 12 years ago

This is a killer idea! Looking forward to seeing where it goes... will be as helpful, if not more, than ERC has been for me while searching for answers.

tjradcliffe• 12 years ago

Emacs makes complex things possible and simple things hard: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=74

That post is the fifth most popular thing on my blog, all from search-hits looking for how to count words in Emacs.

chongli• 12 years ago

What's your definition of simple, in this case? A million different users want a million different simple things. An editor that gives all of these functions equal weight is not an editor anyone would want to use.

omouse• 12 years ago

if you're only using StackOverflow, I created a small mode called sos-mode: https://github.com/omouse/emacs-sos

The difference is that sos-mode is made for getting answers quickly and being able to copy/paste any code snippets. The output buffer of answers uses org-mode so it's easy to tag the list.

A full-blown stackexchange mode may be good if you're answering questions or looking for a lot of answers but I don't see that happening a lot. Most users are anonymous (sos-mode doesn't require login) and just want to get some answer.

Stack Exchange for Emacs

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