Emacsy: An Embeddable Toolkit of Emacs-like Functionality 127
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from the ignoring-preexisting-projects-for-fun-and-profit dept.
from the ignoring-preexisting-projects-for-fun-and-profit dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Emacsy is 'a Guile library that provides Emacs-like facilities — keymaps, minibuffer, tab completion, recordable macros, and major/minor modes — for applications natively.' However, to my eyes, it looks more like an attempt to revive the development style done on Symbolics Lisp Machines that survives to some extent in Emacs. Might be a boon to Emacs users, but where's a comparable VIM alternative?"
The skeptic in me asks what benefit this would have over just using libguile directly, and how it fits in with efforts to port Emacs itself to Guile and things like Englightenment's pluggable event loop. The example code seems to imply Emacs-like APIs will be used (despite not intending to replace parts of Emacs), even when better alternatives exist. Some of the proposed components seem orthogonal to existing interface toolkits; others seem to compete with components provided by various Free desktop environments.
They cannot though... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let the point-and-click gui-using critics learn a thing or two about why making everything programmable
No-one can really understand this without years of use though. Key bindings (which are widespread) are nice and all but it is as you say, the sheer ease of programability of the thing that makes Emacs so amazingly useful that I still turn to it even these days (though I mostly use integrated text editors now).
Only when emacs becomes really embedded in something modern will other people see the light.
Really, you call that "recording a macro"? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have no idea what REAL macro recording is. Sigh.
Tell me exactly, how do you record a search and replace based on text you found around the result of another search?
Or a search that gathers disparate results from multiple files and places the results in a extra comma delimited file?
Or a macro that executes a shell command and uses the output to open a third file?
And then how do you save the macros for later reuse and edit them?
Re:The critics can learn a thing or two about emac (Score:2, Insightful)
But I *can* blame it for not giving up and joining the crowd.
First, emacs bindings are more customizable than quite possibly anything else.
Second, they are more efficient than the "standard bindings" if you're a touch typist (you don't have to move your hands to the arrow keys to move around with the keyboard, for example), and they provide far more features than same.
It's a power user tool. If you don't have power user needs, and don't want to deal with the steep learning curve, that's fine - there's nothing wrong with that at all. There are plenty of other tools out there, from notepad on up through emacs. You can pick whatever point you want on that curve, I think.
I'm pretty good at the "standard bindings", having been using them since they existed in a wide range of environments, but they just aren't as efficient. I have never - I'll stress this, *never* - been able to watch someone using tools that use those bindings without cringing at how slow they're doing things. Conversely, people who are used to those tools always seem completely blown away by what I can do in emacs.
Not saying the steep learning curve is for everybody. It's clearly not for most people.
Re:Good Idea (Score:2, Insightful)
This is mainly a compiler related features rather than complaining Emacs. There is no magic behind Eclipse but just use a compiler front-end to analyse (sort of compiling) your code on-the-fly. For example Clang already provides function completion features to Emacs: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/cfe/trunk/utils/clang-completion-mode.el . By examing the size of such code you will sooner understand why people stick to it even it lacks a good editor :-).
What part of RECORD.... (Score:4, Insightful)
While I'm not an IDE fan, but google before you troll:
I'm not trolling, I just wish people could read the damn text before responding.
I said RECORD. As in RECORD. As in not SCRIPT OR PROGRAM OR DEVELOP. As in RECORD.
Like I said, I can record in emacs searching for something, using some value located around the search (say a quick regex on that line), then copy that and go to some pre-saved point in the file to paste the result.
That may sound contrived but I have for example easily created long list of variable names or altered things like comma separated data in partial ways that would have been hard otherwise, simpler even than using sed or the like... all because I could record a simple transformation to occur, then re-run it on command wherever I liked.
Basically I found it incredibly useful and it is the reason I still sometimes go back into emacs when even SCRIPTABLE editors are just too weak to get something done.