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[[!meta title="M-x Forever: Why Emacs will outlast text editor trends"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2021 David Wilson"]]
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# M-x Forever: Why Emacs will outlast text editor trends
David Wilson
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The computer software industry has seen many "popular" text editors come
and go, often due to the mercurial fashions of software development. In
this talk, we'll take a look at why popular editors fade and the
specific aspects of Emacs that will ensure it remains relevant
regardless of mainstream popularity.
# Discussion
BBB:
- Hey Daviwil, I'm curious if you'll do a video showing your personal workflow?
- What do you think about Guix or Nixos + emacs videos ?
- It's nice to watch your videos and grab ideas from your workflows, or your code.
- That happens whenever I've used magit at work :D.
- Any thoughts on the idea that the best tool to use is the one which is easiest to leave? Possibly this is now even more relevant now that there is a heavy push to cloud services.
- I guess it also depends on who owns said tool (given that most cloud services aren't owned by the user).
- Do you think that there should an updated initial configuration for fresh Emacs installations with more "modern" (UI) features, or even CUA-like shortcuts?
- I really appreciate the live-video format: non-edited, live, thinking aloud videos - compared to all the polished super-edited "artificial" videos are more a show-of (see me!) as opposed to actually want to share knowledge...
- Hm. Will you do live pair-programming in the future? I believe you did that with JT some weeks ago.
- I would be very interested in summaries!
- Transcript remark: name mentioned by iLemming is written "John Lindquist".
- I think (possibly) emacs content might have been statistically relevant enough for bots to generate videos and upload them. For the last few months there seemed to be a constant stream of videos with the same intro and outro, plus some text to video in the middle.
- Sound like Tony's videos, which are user generated, but seem very automatic generated.
- 2 min videos will be *too* short - event for a short video. I think 5-10 min will allow for a good short intro to a specific functionality..
IRC:
- My anecdotal evidence, is introducing my coworkers to org mode, and the intracacies of doing more and more in Emacs. It becomes an overwhelming advantage.
- lots of really popular editors are primarily maintained by companies and dies when the backing companies stop maintaining it
- Popularity also adds to people breaking features that long time users like me use everyday but they don't see as popular and so they feel the need to break for something different.
- I think a lot of popularity could be gotten from introducing more people in academic fields to Emacs. Org-Mode is such a game changer on that front.
- Now, Emacs is based on another mind-blowing idea. The idea of practical notation for lambda calculus, what is known as Lisp. Lisp, probably can be crowned as the most important idea in computer science. It just hard to think of something more influential than Lisp. Emacs is just a practical implementation (and frankly, not the best one) of that idea.
- Yes. Emacs is an editor for creating domain specific editors.
- my only problem with the Emacs community is that the community in other language is non-existen
- Would there be any way to have other Lisps like Guile be compatible with Emacs?
- Guile has an Elisp interpreter in its compiler tower, however it's afaik not up to snuff for actually running Emacs.
- the problem is the "big datatypes" like buffers and strings, which guile either doesn't do at all or which need expensive bidirectional transcoding across the boundary
- some like this? https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/docs-1.8/guile-ref/Using-Guile-in-Emacs.html
- I think seeing power users do the things they do with Emacs and Org-mode and how prolific they are is a major selling point (thinking of *so* many people, but say John Kitchin comes to mind)
- To piggy back on a previous comment, I think if people kept seeing the top people in their fields (be in science/academic, software engineering, devops, etc.) use Emacs and Org-mode and especially their uniquely powerful features (literate style with org-babel, etc), Emacs would start taking over beyond it's historically low single digit % adoption
- luckily for me, John Kitchin shows a lot of engineering applications of emacs and org-mode and I love those videos, but I can understand that a lot of people won't find someone like that for their profession
- The concurrent pushes for reproducible science, literate programming, literate devops, and so on, also contribute to making the case for Emacs & Org-mode
- the performance point is spot on. That is one of the main reason why the neovim community is thriving
# Outline
- Discuss the core thesis, the features that make Emacs
desirable for long-term use (extensibility, day-to-day 'life' features)
- Include more background on the text editor landscape and
how the scope of various editors is more narrow and doesn't compare to Emacs.
- Talk about specific instances where editors were popular, fell out
of popularity, and why (due to changing fashions, not usually
better features).
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