Hacker News Reader

Comment by singular | Hacker News Reader

I deeply love emacs, but its crustier elements really bite on a regular basis. The amount of effort required to make it non-ugly is just... unpleasant (a problem I've noticed with a lot of gnu ui stuff, both with applications and websites - appearance matters guys), the lack of namespaces in elisp is quite horrid (though it's very nice to have a lisp as the language of choice), the weird annoying regex conventions, and just lots of little things (I'd have to sit down and record them as I go to be able to list 'em) which degrade the experience.

By the way, take that as intended - I love emacs very much, but as with people so with software - the little things a beloved gets wrong can be unbelievably annoying... :)

View on HN

I'm with you. Making Vim look pretty involves adding ":color <whatever>" to your .vimrc. Making Emacs look pretty involves installing color-theme, hopefully compiling it so it doesn't take forever to load, editing your .emacs.d/init.el since you can't customize that via customize-apropos (AFAIK), and so on. Likewise, I'm with you that the default regex implementation is...surreal, at best. Having reb-re-syntax be 'string should be the default.

On the bright side, look at what we're discussing here: the default regex syntax and pretty colors. Compare that to about five years ago, when we'd be instead discussing how to compile Emacs in a way that had fricking TrueType font support. Emacs has come a long way.

Yeah, both 21 -> 22 and especially 22 -> 23 were vast improvements. Appearance issues aside however, emacs is starting to feel a little like windows in a way (uh oh downvotes ahoy), in that it's lumbered by backwards compatibility considerations. Emacs with namespaces + a nicer lisp would be... something very special.

They've added lexical scoping in trunk in a fully backwards-compatible way; it wouldn't be hard to do namespaces and a "nicer Lisp" (by which I'm assuming you mean Guile?) in a similar manner.

That said, the number of people who hate on Elisp is surprising to me. No, a hacked-up version of Maclisp is not the best Lisp in existence. But, seriously, you're competing against vimscript. Will even the most diehard Vim addict actually argue that vimscript is even comparable to Elisp?

I think even with the existing lisp it would be interesting to keep the interpreter and rewrite a lot of the basic elisp modules. Another Emacs "distribution" would be quite interesting...

"standard" regex syntax for emacs would make me really happy.

I really don't see what namespaces would achieve. The way it is I can look at something and explicitly see which module it belongs to (e.g. dired-next-line, image-next-line vs. org-agenda-next-line).

In my experience namespaces only introduce notation to distinguish modules but so does a simple convention.

Namespaces are nice when the language lets you name a space at the top of a file or a block and then not repeat the name prefix on every identifier inside. They are not just used to add dots to identifier names, although that would often be NSNice in NSItself.

This is exactly my point: It isn't nice. I want to grep a file for a name and exactly that name, maybe I even want to replace it.

I just can't do that without any fancy tools as soon as namespaces introduce ambiguity that I can't resolve when I look at a narrow region of a file.

Should be nc-nice, we are talking lisp here.

Although this looks like a regular prefix. How does the namespaced elisp propose to refer to entities from other namespaces?

YMMV, but I find that the latest Emacs on OS X with a good color theme is quite nice looking. Anti-aliased font rendering is fine with me.

Agreed emacs 23 is a vast improvement, however the UI elements i.e. menubar, scrollbars, etc. still suck, as does the initial splash screen. OS X is better than linux for defaults, but no matter what you do have to work hard to get a decent appearance.

I just turn off all the chrome and use it as a text editor.

Me too, but my point is that you have to do that to begin with.

If anyone is interested, this gets rid of the splash screen + chrome:-

    (setq inhibit-splash-screen t)
    (if (fboundp 'scroll-bar-mode) (scroll-bar-mode -1))
    (if (fboundp 'tool-bar-mode) (tool-bar-mode -1))
    (if (fboundp 'menu-bar-mode) (menu-bar-mode -1))

Reply on news.ycombinator.com