Why people are excited about vs code. Emacs, not so much

[Edward K. Ream]

Imo, this video shows why some many people are excited about vs code.

The video demonstrates the Prettier plugin, and along the way demos vs code's superb configuration system. There is so much to like about vs code!

In contrast, this video laboriously shows how to Leonize a file using emacs org mode. It's pretty lame :-) Imo, emacs is on it's way out, and leoInteg will speed it along it's way :-)

Edward

[lun...@gmail.com]

TLDR; If LeoInteg is what brings Leo to the masses, more power to you and Felix and everyone else who gets to experience the wonder of Leo. But lets keep things factual and objective and keep the editor age-discrimination to a minimum, that's not why we're here.

These two videos are not a good comparison. They show two different features, tree-based editing vs settings. First off, vscode's settings system is pretty slick, but emacs has had literally the exact same feature since at least the year 2000 (I didn't look farther back than that); it's called customize-apropos. So let's not pat them on the back for re-implementing a 20+ year-old feature from emacs and then provide it as a reason why emacs is "on the way out". In addition, org-mode will never be as good at tree/graph based editing as Leo is, but that is because that is specifically what Leo is best at. Tangling in emacs is pretty clunky, but It's still better than almost everything else which has no tree-based editing. If you want to organize code as trees/graphs you have very few options, org-mode happens to be one of them. 

The soothsayers have been predicting emacs' death for a while now. Based on my investigations, emacs was never popular to begin with. I've heard it was once "far more popular" than it is now, but it never reach the popularity of a Borland or Microsoft product, or Eclipse. It never made its way out of the shadows. But everyone here (in the shadows) know how little that means. 

Emacs is niche. It appeals to "configuration nuts" who, once they get a taste for how much it can do out of the box and how much it can be configured tend to get hooked on it. I think Leo appeals to a similar audience. Each have a unique set of features that some find too good to pass up for more popular editors.

I work in a bandwidth constrained environment where usually the only tolerable editors are text only through ssh in a terminal. vim and emacs fall into that category, emacs having way more features. emacs, to this day, has most features available in terminal mode. This gives me a snappy, feature-filled editor that is available on most systems. Few full-featured editor-IDEs maintain terminal support. Vscode never will. 

I also share some of the caution that others here have expressed about vscode's affiliation with Microsoft. Modern corporate capitalism hasn't proven itself to be a friend of humanity.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Friday, July 24, 2020 at 10:17:10 AM UTC-5, lun...@gmail.com wrote:

TLDR; If LeoInteg is what brings Leo to the masses, more power to you and Felix and everyone else who gets to experience the wonder of Leo. But lets keep things factual and objective and keep the editor age-discrimination to a minimum, that's not why we're here.

Point taken. My apologies if I have offended. Emacs/org mode does not have to "fail" for vs code, Leo and leoInteg to thrive.

Edward

[Thomas Passin]

On Friday, July 24, 2020 at 11:17:10 AM UTC-4, lun...@gmail.com wrote:

I work in a bandwidth constrained environment where usually the only tolerable editors are text only through ssh in a terminal. vim and emacs fall into that category, emacs having way more features. emacs, to this day, has most features available in terminal mode. This gives me a snappy, feature-filled editor that is available on most systems. Few full-featured editor-IDEs maintain terminal support.

I remember using emacs on a 64 k cp/m machine around 1984 - 1985.  I didn't like it then, but it was about the only decent thing going to do text editing.

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Agreed. VS code is a pretty good bridge for Leo to the masses (what some proposed saw on Jupyter but finally after some exploration it was not). Despite of that niche tools are important too (Leo over native Python is a probe of that). Now that we are exploring the path to the masses, telling that niche tools are lame seems kind of the "new rich" approach talking bad about the poor (where the rich once belonged).

The more I use Spacemacs, the more I found appeal on it that I have not found in Leo (and viceversa, the more I understand Leo value propossals, despite of my minimal to null Leo usage this days). I hope at some point to incorporate the advantage of the tools I know and have used in my own outliner [1], which needs a lot of works, but also showcases possibilities not found on any of the those I have used so far, nor on VS Code. They still will have an appeal to the populations those tools congregate around and I will try to point my criticism towards particular (anti)features (ie MS data collection or its monopolic practices) instead of a general critic towards a "lame" tool or way of using it.

As digital artisans we take pride on our tools so open but specific criticism about them is better, acknowledging our bias and finding value where is due.

[1] https://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/en.html

Cheers,

Offray

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/86a4947e-f98c-4615-a261-4fca949e032an%40googlegroups.com.

[lun...@gmail.com]

@Offray, you touch on what I feel is one of the biggest misunderstanding of emacs, and more specifically of modern emacs. Many are uncomfortable calling emacs an "editor" or an "IDE". Some jokingly call it an "operating system disguised as a text editor". Even the GNU emacs website's main text in giant font calls it "An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor — and more." Do you notice now "text editor" seems to lack emphasis, as though they just need to throw a noun in there, any noun will do. 

What I would call it is "an extensible (text) buffer management framework." that just happens to be packaged with a text/code editor and a lot of other really cool tools. Perhaps the shinning example of why emacs is not an IDE/editor, but just happens to contain those tools, is exwm (or emacs X Window Manager). This "package", that extends emacs, turns emacs into a fully fledged tiling window manager; it literally turns emacs into your desktop and you can use it to open and manager all your GUI applications. What other "editor" or "IDE" do you know can do that? Keep in mind exwm is written 100% in elisp as it it's only dependency.

As Offray mentioned, spacemacs is another one of these transformative "packages". This is how spacemacs describes itself, " Spacemacs is a new way to experience Emacs -- a sophisticated and polished set-up focused on ergonomics, mnemonics and consistency." And honestly I couldn't have done a better job, spacemacs turns emacs in something that is almost not recognizable as emacs. 

spacemacs mostly relies on "completion frameworks" to accomplish this transformation. "completion frameworks" in the context of emacs are tools that help you discover what you can do with emacs and also in a lot of cases try to predict what or where you'd like to do/see/go next based on where you've already been and what you've done. At the end of the day they help you be way more efficient than you could ever have been with vanilla emacs. The two most popular completion frames are helm and ivy. I personally use emacs+ivy without spacemacs. I simply couldn't imagine emacs without ivy. Whatever task you could think of, helm/ivy will let you do it faster.

My point is to question your understanding of what emacs is. It's not really in competition with vscode to begin with, though if you wanted to compare their code editing capabilities you could. emacs is almost in a class of it's own, though I would say that Leo has snuggled in next to emacs in that regards. I think LeoInteg is great anecdotal proof that Leo is not merely an "IDE" or an "Editor" but instead is set of tools built for managing a DAG of text nodes that just happens to be used often for editing code.