[pietrasagh]

I use emacs and vim quite rarely, only when I see potential benefit of it. Both have some amazing features but also seems to be locked in stone age on IT. In my opinion this is most deterring for new user - not "steep learning curve". I wonder why they refuse to open their eyes to current (or at least 2000's) state of technology. They cling to ancient foundation of their programs as something unmovable and unchangeable. This just looks like appeal to tradition. Or they are total nerds that don't care about reality ;-)

[anthk]

Funny enough Emacspeak for the blind totally owns any new GUI technology. They can do everything from inside: IM, web, news, coding, playing music, reading ebooks, MUD's, check the mainstream news...

https://tvraman.github.io/emacspeak/applications.html

Your reality and bullshit applications such as Electron based bloatwares are a bad joke against disabled people.

[snazz]

They are also a bad joke against those of us who have underpowered or older machines. I love my 2006 MacBook (with OpenBSD) and I sure won't be running Electron on there even if it supported the OS. Emacs is wonderfully fast.

[anthk]

Also, I am an nvi/ed user, and I'd recommend yasr(1) for the blind, but, man, disabled people having a highly integrated textual env with sound icons, I can't just do nothing but to applaud them for the efforts.

[bitwize]

It's hilarious that "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" is considered light and fast by today's standards.

[pietrasagh]

My machine is from 2008 (partially) and doing fine.

[pietrasagh]

>Funny enough Emacspeak for the blind totally owns any new GUI technology. They can do everything from inside: IM, web, news, coding, playing music, reading ebooks, MUD's, check the mainstream news...

I didn't know this. For sure GUI are useless for persons with significant visual impairment. Thumbs up for Emacs developers for helping people in need.

> Your reality and bullshit applications such as Electron based bloatwares are a bad joke against disabled people.

"Electron" apps are not my reality. I didn't know what it is (until now).

[dmortin]

They are not against change, but someone has to do the work and it's a pretty big job rewriting the display internals.

Also, it has to support terminals and various OSs, so it's not like it's only the matter of slapping a graphical UI on it.

[anthk]

I don't care about reality. I don't use Emacs today, (I use nvi), but I had a lot of respect of what could I do with few MB of RAM compared to monstrosities today such as Atom, Slack and Sublime Text.

[TickleSteve]

SublimeText is not a heavy monstrosity at all, its really very lightweight. Certainly not in the category as Electron based apps.

[Asooka]

I would also like to know what exactly you mean. I've heard similar rants before and usually it boils down to 1) non-standard shortcuts, i.e. not implementing CUA; 2) being built around a terminal rather than designed around the capabilities of a raster display and a mouse.

Emacs might actually get away with switching to CUA, it's already halfway there - you're always in "insert mode" and use Ctrl/Alt+letter for advanced operations. But rejiggering Emacs's shortcuts will alienate current users while probably not attracting many new ones. This is always a problem for a minority-use product - your users don't want to use "standard" software for whatever reason and just blindly chasing the majority will have you fall between two stools. Vi(m) probably can't be built around CUA principles. Its modal editing language is completely alien to what CUA is and while you can add a few bespoke shortcuts (I used to have ctrl+s for save), they usually stick out like a sore thumb (I switched to <leader>s because it was more natural). I would love to see someone try though, it might work out.

For the second point, I'm inclined to agree that we should be able to show information in a better way than a pure text buffer on screen. There are neovim shells built around Electron which I'm keeping an eye on, because those should allow for rich GUI controls to be easily created. Though it might actually be better to adopt something like Tk in vimscript to give plugins a very simple way of showing GUI components.

Parent was very rude, but they do raise the correct point that our editors were built in a different time and we could adopt modern principles to make them better. VSCode is probably this generation's Emacs.

[pietrasagh]

> bch 1 day ago [-] > >What features or properties would you give them to pull them out of “the Stone Age”, and to what benefit?

In my opinion original blog post quite clearly point out what is wrong with "backbone" on Emacs.

> Asooka 1 day ago | parent | on: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016) > >I would also like to know what exactly you mean.

By requiring to give concrete examples you two gave me good reason to rethink my point.

> 1) non-standard shortcuts, i.e. not implementing CUA;

When I was writing my post I had in back of my head this well known feeling of frustration when struggling to do simplest thing I have to read vim help for 10 minutes or google random forums. It may be that most of it is due to intermittent use of both those editors and "muscle memory" from MS Office and alike. If new users are required to stop using their most common (good or bad) habits it reduce potential user base at least 100 times. I work in typical large office (everyone 95% of time do some kind of text editing) and nobody know what or use vim or Emacs. Maybe it would be better idea to "stupefy" those great editors for default install for new users and allow current users to easily revert "normal" settings. CUA mode in Emacs looks interesting, I will give it a try.

> Parent was very rude (...)

Really? Very rude??? I'm wondering why reaction to my comment was so harsh... It seems that Emacs users have really soft skin ;-)

[bitwize]

M-x cua-mode

[bch]

What features or properties would you give them to pull them out of “the Stone Age”, and to what benefit?