Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

As one of GNU's flagship products, why shouldn't Emacs remind users that it is not in agreement with Apple's treatment of its users? GNU has an agenda, just like Apple does. Intel cripples icc for non-Intel CPUs, making it emit pessimised assembler. Apple makes sure that its hardware only works with other Apple products and that macOS can only be legally virtualised on Apple hardware. Everyone has an agenda.

The difference is that GNU is a lot smaller and has a lot less power and resources than Apple and Intel. So much that it is relatively easy and, in fact, explicitly allowed by the GPL, for someone like Yamamoto to come along and decide that, by golly, Emacs will have unique macOS-only features and Apple deserves to have more money to do whatever it wants to its users because its users enjoy Apple's treatment, smelly GNU/Beards be damned. This is a lot easier than fixing icc for AMD CPUs or putting headphone jacks into iPhones 7.

> We are not welcome, and never will be.

You are welcome. You are very welcome. Apple is not. You should not identify yourself with Apple's operating system.

Deliberately crippling your product on Apple platforms does not in any way "remind users that it is not in agreement with Apple's treatment of its users". In fact, it's fairly ironic that, in an attempt to protest someone else's treatment of users, Emacs has decided to treat its users badly. Deliberately crippling Emacs will not make Apple change, and will not get people to switch away from Apple platforms. But what it might do is get people to switch away from Emacs.

is removing multicolor font support crippling emacs?

If you prefer it, or rely on it, yes. Yes, as far as a user is concerned it would be

It's a paper cut. On the right finger it could be crippling ️

I'd say it's a feature, not a bug. There is no place for colorful smileys in my text files.

Then don't put them there, or install an alternate font.

And therefore nobody else should be allowed to have them either. Which is the explicit justification given for this decision. Sheesh.

Emojis are characters in the Unicode specification, which have glyphs in the macOS default font, and are rendered by default in native macOS apps that display text. Why should Emacs make the decision that most characters are okay to display in their text editor, but these specific characters are a no-no?

You're sounding like "I'm not using this feature, why does it even exist?". If things worked like that, then everybody would be using Linux on all computers today.

"my" is the key word there...

Your argument sounds like "A man shouldn't be allowed to marry a man because I don't want to marry a man"

Defective by design...

Upstream GNU Emacs can no more be called "crippled" on macOS than it can be called "crippled" on linux, because on neither does it support multi-color emoticons. Maybe it seems "unfair" because macOS users could easily have the feature advantage over a free/libre OS user, but upstream GNU Emacs denies macOS the advantage.

It is kind of funny. But also funny because GNU's adherence to their licensing philosophy means it's just as easy for you to get the full macOS-enhanced fork. So the angst seems unreasonable to me.

(Also, the whole emoticon trend is pretty annoying, from an implementation perspective. First it was just B/W icons, fine. But then users wanted color, and now fonts have to do something they've never done before, embed multiple colors for a glyph. There were multiple proposals for font formats to do this, IIRC Microsoft proposed a new TrueType table with color references, and Mozilla proposed just stuffing most of SVG into OpenType, I didn't follow this story to the end. Fonts were already pretty complicated and prone to vulnerabilities, and this more than doubles that complication. But it gets better, now that there's color and high detail, in this brave new politically correct world we need to be able to have a range of skin tones and genders for all emoticons with a person in them! Now we need color and gender "zero-width" modifiers, multiple for small groups! More than double the complexity again! Can't we just go back to B/W symbols and let people use PNG/JPG/SVG if they want an arbitrary fucking picture?)

From the original article, Emacs had this feature, and then they removed it. That's crippling it. Deciding not to implement the feature in the first place, well, that's a reasonable decision given their desire for functionality to be cross-platform. But accepting it, then turning around and removing it later even though it was already implemented, that's just spite.

Crippling sounds like the entire software is unusable. If they stopped MacOS users being able to type the letter 's' that would be crippling. This is just disabling one small feature.

If crippled is a broken spine, then this is preventing some people from wearing a funny badge until everyone can wear funny badges.

I don't know...from what I can tell it sounds like they removed the usage of Mac OS specific APIs from mainline::

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-01/msg00...

Doesn't sound like crippling to me.

> Deciding not to implement the feature in the first place, well, that's a reasonable decision given their desire for functionality to be cross-platform. But accepting it, then turning around and removing it later even though it was already implemented, that's just spite.

Well this ignores the challenge of maintaining an open source project.

> Well this ignores the challenge of maintaining an open source project.

Presumably Emacs is still using platform-specific APIs for the actual drawing of the text, yes? So properly supporting Mac font rendering should not adversely affect maintenance of Emacs in general, and similarly it should not be any more work to maintain the correct Mac font renderer as it is to maintain the incorrect Mac font renderer.

AFAIK vanilla GNU emacs uses NeXTStep APIs, which are also implemented by the GNUStep project[1]. So if/when X11 (and the many libraries that sit on top of it) learns how to do color emoji, then GNUStep can implement the Mac OS API, and emacs will support it.

The GNU position wrt. Mac support is that only the APIs that GNUStep also supports can be used. You may disagree with the principles underlying that choice, but it is a long-standing policy of the project. It was a mistake (according to this policy) for them to merge the emoji support, and when the mistake was pointed out they removed it. So it's a bit more nuanced than your comment makes out.

[1] http://www.gnustep.org/

That is true. Similarly, you shouldn't identify yourself with the FSF or GNU or RMS either. Tribalism in general is a dead end for humanity.

Removing a feature that already existed is a slight against apple users, period. Work was done and committed to REDUCE the feature set for a group of users. There is no watering it down.

It was done for rather childish reasons... and it makes no sense. It doesn't serve them. It doesn't serve anyone...

But its what I expect from GNU, and the FSF hardcore community at large... you know, the PETA of software.

It's supposed to encourage people to bring the functionality to free OSes:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-12/msg01...

It's not like it's difficult to get Yamamoto's Emacs. So GNU's gesture is almost purely symbolic. If you don't care about getting a free OS and you like the conditions that macOS imposes upon you, you can easily use Emacs with macOS-only features.

"So GNU's gesture is almost purely symbolic"

Yeah... and pedantic. And childish. I support free software, I commit to open source projects, I love just about any form of Linux and I prefer OSS when its as good as proprietary (sometimes it is... like blender... and sometimes its crap in a bucket... like GIMP ...)

I think my aversion and disappointment comes from the fact that, like PETA, this group and the RMS brigade are very much the public face of a movement, but a movement that doesn't need a single face... but regardless, they are the what outsiders see, and when you turn every piece of software into a political statement, you end up hurting the cause.

There are people out there who will, through some sick twisting of the mind, treat animals poorly or not care about actual animal abuse because PETA has been the face of the animal cruelty movement (or GreenPeace, another great example of this effect, I'm sure it has a name) ... even though the cause is good, and there are good organizations (ASPCA)... the annoying, loud, politically charged reactionary groups like PETA, GreenPeace, GNU, RMS/FSF ... those groups turn people away from free software...

Maybe I'm ranting more about the politicalization of software... maybe its all tied together and one and the same... I just know that I've heard plenty of people say they don't use Linux because it doesn't have X application, or X drivers... when it really does, but the common distros don't include them because they aren't in-line with their political view of the situation...

Thanks for this dose of perspective. I found the idea of emacs in macOS being hobbled out of spite very annoying, but what you said also makes sense to me.

U+1F644 [1]

[1] http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f644

You should not identify yourself with Apple's operating system.

If I want I will identify myself with whatever I decide to identify myself with; I don't really care about Apple, but now you've turned it into a matter of principle, moralizing what people shouldn't do.

You should not identify yourself with GNU/Linux. How did you like that?

How about identifying oneself with JustWorks(SM), vertical integration, and things being purposely designed not to get in one's way?

Then you will find yourself compromised when using software made by another school of thought. shrug

Compromised in what way?

There are other, non-GNU free software alternatives out there.

And you are free to use them. Have fun.

I have, and I will. What about the rest of you?

Well, some will join you. Some will consider the lack of multicoloured emojis in emacs on mac a minor issue at best and continue to use what they do.

I wasn't referring to emojis, but to GNU and GNU/Linux. GNU and Stallman are the culprits here; Emacs is just a symptom.

I've always identified with ProDOS.

I always preferred SOS. More sophisticated.

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