EmacsConf 2020: State of Retro Gaming in Emacs | Hacker News Reader

EmacsConf 2020: State of Retro Gaming in Emacs

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79 pointssohkamyung31 comments

Worth noting that Emacs has several builtin games already, including Tetris, Gomoku, Lights Out, Pong, dunnet, maybe a few others as well. All of which are implemented in Emacs Lisp!

Love `M-x tetris RET`. Beautifully made.

After many years of love for beautiful interfaces ("oh, look, how beautiful and shiny (i.e.) `PCalc` is"), I realize that what matters to me is my data and a versatile interface that allows me interact with my data. Emacs + Lisp are this minimalist, yet extremely versatile and powerful interface to get almost everything done in working with a computer: Write text of any kind (from code to novels), manage projects and keep a personal wiki with org-mode, create overviews with (ascii)tables, write documentation, automate all kinds of workflows using Emacs Lisp.

In a sense the ZEN or essence of interfaces.

Definitely. The notion that "everything is a buffer" is a powerful one. Take something as simple as the incremental search functionality. Interfaces in other programs often don't have searchable content, OTOH any buffer you use in Emacs can be searched, sorted, and processed just as you would in a text file.

> Interfaces in other programs often don't have searchable content

Don't even mention the luxury of "searchable", isn't it just frustrating that Windows still forbids you from selecting and copying text on a message box? If a program displays an error message, you have to transcribe everything by hand before you can do a web search...

ctrl-C Has worked in message boxes for years.

Interesting, appears to be a feature since Windows 7. TBH, I migrated to Gnome 2 back in the days of Windows XP, so never noticed it. Thanks for the tip!

Don’t quote me (I haven’t used Windows in years), but I believe this feature has existed for much longer than Windows 7.

Yeah, it was there in Windows XP too. Though TBH this assumes an application uses the native dialog box for messages and many applications make their own. For example Delphi (at least the older ones) applications do not seem to support it. However some applications may implement it themselves (e.g. Lazarus does support it but it uses its own formatting).

I think at least windows 2000 had that for native dialog boxes.

Heh, then I could easily say the same for the lack of regexp search/undo tree and so on in text boxes. When will Windows ever add those functionalities? Extensibility really makes all the difference. Emacs is perhaps the most successful Lisp machine.

Thank you for killing all my productivity.

Emacs Tetris is infringing copyright, as are all Tetris clones. I'm surprised the maintainers have not pulled it the way they pulled the Zippy quotes. (I believe Fedora excludes Tetris from its Emacs distribution, based on trademark issues.)

I wish I worked around people that used emacs so I could pick some of it up by watching them and asking small dumb questions. It seems so cool, but the decades of history make it daunting to get started on your own.

r/emacs is a wonderful community. Also, many young people are picking it up and starting youtube channels, demonstrating beautifully how to use it. Magnar Sveen has done many excellent videos (http://emacsrocks.com/). Also, Protesilaos Stavrou on Youtube: Wonderful videos, albeit a little academic for some (but I like it a lot). Also, System Crafters on youtube: From basic to sophisticated videos.

Emacs (with its beautiful language `Lisp`) is a tool that will be with you for the rest of your life. I have seen many many tools come and go, but Emacs (just like Lisp) has the potential to be around in many decades. So it's well worth investing time in it.

Ive been trying, it's just that it seems like there are hundreds of things that can take 10 minutes or 10 weeks to research and learn, if you can even find out about them.

I just wish I had people in my daily life who could give me answers like "oh that's easy just do this" or "yeah this thing rules but buckle up it's gonna take some time to get down".

message me on reddit, vale_fallacia. I'll be that person for you :)

Not the GP, but I will take up that offer if you don't mind! :)

Absolutely! I hope I am able to help you out.

#emacs on Freenode is full of those people, including the author of the talk in the article. Friendly fellow. It's really one of the best IRC channels left.

Wow, that Protesilaos Stavrou guy has just so many interesting things on his web site. Gets me excited to just read about all the different cool projects and technologies.

He seems to be a thinker and philosopher who uses Emacs extensively to write and organize his thougts, and he is willing to share his learnings in excellently made videos. Btw: He seems to be an excellent Lisp hacker as well.

A good way to get started might be with a curated emacs configuration like doom emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Emacs flexibility means it's as daunting as you want it to be. I taught myself the basics years ago and ever since it has completely changed the way I view programming. Lately I'm mostly using it for ad-hoc text processing with macros, but I would love to use it as my Python / C++ IDE again some day.

I use python-lsp... No that bad. Still have to figure out how to turn off the PEP 8 code style warnings because there are too many of them (I prefer to clean the code style after having working code). It's not as good as PyCharm though, but nice for a start, and rather stable.

Curious what you prefer about PyCharm over emacs + LSP.

I'm a pretty poor PyCharm power-user, so wondering what I"m missing.

PyCharm, like most IntelliJ IDEs, has excellent refactoring capabilities, much better than what LSP currently offers.

E.g. extract method, extract class, advanced navigation like "data flow to here" etc

They may not work in extremely dynamic Python code (e.g. they will obviously not work past an `exec`).

This is the biggest flaw in LSP (for Python at least), right now.

How difficult is it to implement basic extract function/method functionality?

I'd be tempted to try doing it, as I would absolutely love to have this in Emacs.

I'd be happy to help here too, let me know. I can try to hack some elisp together tomorrow.

Looks like rope would be a decent place to start.

I think some basic extract method has made it into lsp-mode or some enhancement, I have been seeing it for Go at least. That could serve as an inspiration.

I haven't honestly played around with it though to see if it successfully converts local variables to parameters/return values though, which would be the biggest time saver.

will you pplease speak your name, screen-name,esp? bit fan, might screw it up it later anyway. please downpayment accept apology.

The ZMachine interpreter is a must.

Get malyon.el .

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