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GNU is Not Unix

The Annual Emacs Conference 'EmacsConf' is Livestreaming Now (emacsconf.org) 53

Posted by EditorDavid from the no-Vim-allowed dept.
It's "the conference about the joy of Emacs and Emacs Lisp." Started in 2013, the volunteer-run EmacsConf accepted 44 talks for this year — and Day Two has just started streaming online now.

Sunday kicks off with a talk counting on how the "hypertextual information manager" GNU Hyperbole can improve your Emacs productivity. (Click here for a list of all of Sunday's talks.) Or hang out in the #emacsconf channel on irc.libera.chat.

The Free Software Foundation provided fiscal sponsorship for this year's event, noting that "The conference has grown rapidly in the last few years" and "welcomes speakers of all backgrounds and all levels of experience from across the world.

"EmacsConf is rooted in the active, passionate community surrounding GNU Emacs, and like Emacs itself, it is committed to user freedom. It is organized and run using an entirely free software stack."
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The Annual Emacs Conference 'EmacsConf' is Livestreaming Now More

The Annual Emacs Conference 'EmacsConf' is Livestreaming Now

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  • Thanks! (Score:3)

    by bjoast ( 1310293 ) on Sunday December 03, 2023 @09:01AM (#64050697)
    Thanks for the warning, Slashdot!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      One could only imagine what that conference smells like

  • Thanks for the reminder (Score:3)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Sunday December 03, 2023 @09:13AM (#64050711) Homepage
    In it now using "ffplay https://live0.emacsconf.org/ge... [emacsconf.org]" on Slackware. No issues. Being a GNU stream, I knew it would work on Linux :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rufty ( 37223 )
      Yes, it works in Linux, but does it work in emacs?

      • Yes, it works in Linux, but does it work in emacs?

        Likely yes, or it could be made to. [github.com] Which is actually the problem.

        GNU has been (rightfully) a vocal proponent for the Unix philosophy of simplicity and co-operation. In almost every other way, including its vision for a kernel. With the very notable exception of Emacs.

        Emacs has been inexplicably and tortuously extended in strange and unusual ways for a generation, to the point where it's a Frankensoftware entity more than application. Hell, it's hard to describe what Emacs even is any more. Seriously,

        • Emacs proved that even in the unix world the mantra of do one thing and do it well isnt always adhered to. For an editor this isnt a problem as you can simply use another one. Unfortunately however this belief in the monolithic approach poisoned linux with systemd. Emacs and systemd might have little in common from a functionality POV , but the attitudes of their respective authors towards software development very much dovetail.

        • Re:Well, actually yes. Unfortunately. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Phillip2 ( 203612 ) on Sunday December 03, 2023 @12:36PM (#64051025)

          It's a text editor focused on technically complex text.

          It's far less complex and bloated than many IDEs, but it is more complex than vim or other power editors. What is interesting, is that many of the additions to Emacs over recent years have been to make it simpler. It uses external libraries for JSON parsing now, rather than using lisp. And the reason it needs JSON is so it can outsource more work to LSP. Likewise, it now supports incremental parsing externally, so no more mad regexps for detecting syntax.

          It used to be bloated and resource hungry, but that was decades ago. What it does do now is carry a long history; that's a problem in terms of technical debt, but also means that is a piece of software with a lifetime in decades. That's an interesting counter point to an environment where we mostly restart and relearn our tools every few years.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jmccue ( 834797 )

          I do not think you can call emacs bloatware any more unless comparing it to ed(1). From "ps -C !:1 -o vsz,rss,sz,cmd" for emacs and gvim both in "gui" mode:

          emacs: VSZ=445944, RSS=82500, SZ=111486 with 7 files loaded

          gvim: VSZ=426928, RSS=40272, SZ=106732 with the same 7 files in its own tab

          So not a big difference except for RSS, and RSS is only ~2x larger in emacs. These days 82m is not too bad for what you get :)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hawk ( 1151 )

            >These days 82m is not too bad for what you get :)

            *perhaps* only coincidentally, 82 minutes is also the average time for the muscles indoor pinky fingers to recover from a long EMACS session ,. . .

            (says the guy that once actually ended up needing medical treatment for this!)

            hawk

        • Emacs has been inexplicably and tortuously extended in strange and unusual ways for a generation, to the point where it's a Frankensoftware entity more than application. Hell, it's hard to describe what Emacs even is any more. Seriously, what is Emacs? Text editor? Authoring environment? Development environment? Scripting host? Screen manager? Gaming platform?

          There's a reason the original (or early) icon for GNU Emacs was/is a kitchen sink. :-) As it includes a full-fledged programming language (Emacs Lisp [wikipedia.org]) it can do almost anything the user wants. Not sure that's really a bad thing.

          [Said as someone who's used, and is very productive with, Emacs since the mid 80s.]

        • Actually EMACS is a nice OS.
          It only lacks a decent text editor.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ebh ( 116526 )

          The original Unix philosophy was that each program should "do one thing and do it well," and that has carried over into GNU. The reason Emacs doesn't follow this dictum is that it was not originally written on or for Unix. Its first release was in 1976 on an internally-developed OS at MIT. Steele and Stallman's Emacs wouldn't even be ported to Unix until 1984, and even then, it was enough of a resource hog that using it earned you an angry call from the sysadmins. Gosling's Emacs, which was much more lightw

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )
        They'll get that done by the end of the day.
    • Pffft. Real programmers [xkcd.com] would know the command to do that.

  • IDE users spend weekend actually, you know, getting some coding accomplished

  • :wq

    There. The gauntlet has been thrown.

  • How?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday December 03, 2023 @10:37AM (#64050807)

    How do I view the livestream in Emacs?! ;)

  • (Two Questions: (Can I watch it in vi? (or vim?))

    (Is there an emacs project to stream it to emacs))

  • But all I want to do with an editor is edit stuff. Yeah, wierd I know but bar a few bits of write once and never again settings (in .vimrc) I have absolutely no feckin interest whatsoever in programming it. If I want to do some hobby coding I'll code on top of the OS to create some useful app, game or utility.

    Can someone explain - wtf is the purpose of a version of Lisp in a text editor other than geek points?

    • Can someone explain - wtf is the purpose of a version of Lisp in a text editor other than geek points?

      I will attempt to answer this with an old joke that never gets old to me: Emacs is a good operating system, but it could use a better text editor.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by PoiBoy ( 525770 )
      vi (vim) lets you edit files without programming or weird coding. Once you use it a bit, it becomes second nature. Or just stick to nano.
    • It's like everything else in engineering that is purposely over-complicated: to make the users feel superior to lesser people.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kwerle ( 39371 )

      A long time ago there were editors without plugins or extensions. I don't know if emacs lead the way using lisp to make it all extensible, but back in the day, it was a fantastic way to make your editor more of an IDE.

      Once you've written thousands of lines of lisp code to make your editor/IDE just the way you like it, why would you change?

    • You want an editor that has programming language build in:
      a) to automate simple editing tasks
      b) let the user on the fly create his own scripts
      c) program simple things in that language as add on to the editor: you edit in the live running system, no make, compile, link bla bla

      JavaScript, Lua etc. did not exist at that time.
      As you do not find a "free Basic", you consider to write "your own language/interpreter" ... a running LISP you can probably write in a day. An LISP interpreter than can print "hello worl

      • Bourne shell existed 40 years ago so have a guess.

        • Yes?
          And?
          You want to use "shell scripts" to write addons to an text editor?
          Well, I basically hate lisp. Not really hate, but I have a huge dislike for it.
          But a shell programming language is most certainly not a clever way to integrate as a scripting language in any application.
          And most certainly: there is a keyboard shortcut and/or macro to run a shell script withe clipboard content/current selection or open file as input.

  • vi/vim: works ok, kind of annoying to use
    nano works great, no issues
    emacs: never used/never will
    sed/awk/grep: this is the way

  • Great conference! Loving how smooth the stream is when viewed in the native eMacs conference streamer.

  • Grown? (Score:4, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday December 03, 2023 @12:34PM (#64051019)

    The conference has grown rapidly in the last few years

    Not so much. It's just buried in more parentheses.

    • It keeps growing cuz nobody can figure out how to exit.

      • They need to keep their user audience *somehow*

      • Same with saving s file.

        I used (X)EMACS in the late 80s because one of my superiours was super good in it. First time I used it I could not figure how to save my file, nor how to exit it (in an X-Terminal, the X-Emacs obviously had a menu).

        Over weeks I went to his room, and kept asking questions about keyboard shortcuts. So I started to use X-Emacs, to see the hints for shortcuts in the menus on my machine ... so I knew what shortcut to use when I was in a remote session.

        Then at some time his coworker came

  • ...should be forced to watch in 80x25 ASCII, with modal context dependent video controls.

    • There is actually a video player I stumbled a few month ago about, that indeed can play videos from youtube etc. in a text terminal. If you step a yard away and get kind of immersed into the video, you stop noticing the odd colour flow from "pixel" to "pixel" and that it is all characters and only something like 16 colours.

  • I kept hearing that EMACS was an OS, that can also edit files. But is that OS Unix similar, (or out right compatible)?

    I mean, what is the point of another OS... We have tons of embedded OSes, some less embedded, like used on phones, (Apple's iOS). Plus, lots of active and retired Unix OSes, (IRIX anyone?).

    So any new OS should offer up something and Unix compatibility would be helpful. (Who'd want another MS-Windows compatible OS? We already have ReactOS... and that is not finished, or at least not featu
  • The world has moved on, VS Code and a bajillion other bloated IDEs exist with better GUI support and programmers can afford the computing power needed to run them. Emacs should do what it does best, i.e. serve as an easy to use and fast IDE that works the same way on both CLI and GUI. It needs to go back to competing with vi/vim. It should ship from the factory with plugins to support every possible programming language and should be quick to deploy cross-platform with all necessities installed. It should b

  • Emacs, the windowed operating system masquerading as a text editor.

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