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Comment by playing_colours | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, Emacs is a very flexible platform powered by Lisp. Users can change and extend it to their needs, make smaller adjustments on the fly. That’s the source of its attractiveness and longevity.

On the other hand, it seems to look confusing for potential adopters, use archaic terminology and keybindings, it takes time to setup a dev environment comparable to VSC. Elisp has its problems and disliked by many users. Emacs slowly loses its appeal and audience, and, in my opinion, this will not change beyond small improvements.

What do you think, is there a potential niche for like NeoEmacs, a test editor written in a modern Lisp / Scheme (maybe, creating such a language would be the first goal), with the same flexibility, but with modern features included by default, modern keybinding and terminology?

Once I hoped Lighttable ( http://lighttable.com/ ) would become that, but it did not happen.

Edit: grammar.

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> On the one hand, Emacs is a very flexible platform powered by Lisp. Users can change and extend it to their needs, make smaller adjustments on the fly. That’s the source of its attractiveness and longevity.

And at the same time the source of most grievance and pain with emacs. It's so flexible that it seems many people fell into that hole where they invest to much time with tinkering. I'm curious how much of the customizing-disease in the emacs-world is driven by survivorship bias of other peoples "heroic" quest in taming and forging their emacs to their demand.

> What do you think, is there a potential niche for like NeoEmacs, a test editor written in a modern Lisp / Scheme (maybe, creating such a language would be the first goal), with the same flexibility, but with modern features included by default, modern keybinding and terminology?

There always will be a niche, if someone does the work on good enough quality-levels. But if you want it to be more than a one-men-show, something that can take over GNU emacs crowd, then you need to be more than filling a niche.

The focus on lisp seems like a fail from the start. That world is just to niche for great success. Today the best solution would be to take electron and build something like atom or vscode. Webstack is more than flexible enough for what most people wanna do, lisp would not give much benefit over this for most people. And most of emacs flexibility comes from the architecture anyway.

Somewhere I can see lisp really winning is performance. Everyone complains about bloated IDEs, but if you base your system on Chez Scheme you'll be able to write your scripts in a high level, easy-to-learn language which compiles immediately to machine code that runs at nearly C-speed, and even supports true multithreading. That's a huge win. And if you build it using an actual GUI toolkit instead of Electron, you get another huge win in not using up so much darn RAM.

Basically, Emacs's success (such as it is) comes from being an application platform. Make a better application platform than Electron and you're onto a winner I reckon.

> Somewhere I can see lisp really winning is performance.

Possible. But the language does not make the platform. Especially if we are talking about flexibility, not performance. If you just want performance, and just enough flexibility, then there are far better editors around.

> Make a better application platform than Electron and you're onto a winner I reckon.

I highly question whether this is even possible. A platform is far more than just a funky language and satisfying random benchmarks. Webstack is in terms of flexibility, support, recognition and optiomization on a level that no other platform can generally compete with today. You can compete on individual aspect, but will still lose out on most others. And this will not change in the next years. The money and time invested into the webstack is nothing any other community can even compete with.

IDEs like xcode and Visual Studio are mostly written in native languages, the "bloat" comes from the out of the box experience and available plugins in the box.

As for Emacs, if one wants the full Lisp Machine experience, there are Allegro and LispWorks left.

Emacs is only a subset of the experience.

I may be biased (as you point out), but I think that the flexibility Emacs’ architecture (and Lisp) provides is what makes Emacs such a great editor. It’s effectively a canvas for you to create your ideal text editor on. (Although not everyone wants to do that, I know.)

Re: Electron, I personally feel like Electron would be the opposite of the solution. Rather, I’d be excited to see a new high-performance Emacs GUI with graphics acceleration, greater visual fidelity, etc. similar to Sublime Text. ST is the only editor I’d consider switching back to. It just feels so snappy and smooth to use.

The only other thing I’d desire in a “NeoEmacs” would just be better performance defaults — many configs including my own have plenty of lines dedicated to tweaking obscure settings to squeeze more performance out. Ideally that wouldn’t be required.

> I may be biased (as you point out), but I think that the flexibility Emacs’ architecture (and Lisp) provides is what makes Emacs such a great editor. It’s effectively a canvas for you to create your ideal text editor on. (Although not everyone wants to do that, I know.)

Yes, emacs is a great tool, hardly possible to deny this. But this is not the bias I meant. I just question whether the benefit people get's from this flexibility, outweights the price most people pay for it.

> Re: Electron, I personally feel like Electron would be the opposite of the solution. Rather, I’d be excited to see a new high-performance Emacs GUI with graphics acceleration, greater visual fidelity,

This would indeed be cool to have. But is it realistic that someone will materialize this dream? The amount of work to make this is enourmous, and GNU emacs-project has not even enough manpower to fix their existing GUI-problems.

If you wanna see a high-performance editor GUI, just take a look at Sublime Text. It's an insanly optimized and very good editor. But it also took them over a decade of regular work with a small company behind it. Not to mention that it's not as flexible as emacs. How long would you think an open source-project of free workers will need to build a modern emacs that will saisfy enough people?

That's the point of electron: it's here, now. It takes away all the hard work of build the important and costly groundbase and will save you a decade of investment. And it will stay and improve in the future. This makes it the ugly but realistic solution where you take the tradeoff of a slower platform to get the chance to actual get something done on a high level.

Personally, I agree that base Emacs is not ideal for most users. Ultra-customizers will feel out home, but the typical dev will not.

On the other hand, I am a huge proponent of Spacemacs. It's technically just a custom Emacs config, but it is a significant enough departure from the base functionality that it is managed as its own project.

It brings Vim keybindings (as well as an improved package management system and a bunch of other stuff) to Emacs in a very intuitive and seamless way. That way you get access to the very rich Emacs ecosystem, as well as the endless potential for customization, all with the, IMO, superior text editing experience of Vim.

I've tried VSCode, and it doesn't hold a candle to Spacemacs IMO.

I do occasionally envy some of the goodies the VSCode ecosystem benefits from, however. In particular the new Github Codespaces, for example. Still not enough to make me leave Spacemacs though.

I think this is the future of emacs -- distributions/configs. I'm doom emacs user, and I'm very happy with it. It's an easy and pleasant transition for vim users and it works well out of the box, while still giving you the option to customize it to your heart's desire.

There's no way that emacs will ever reach VS Code's level of popularity, but it doesn't need to. Desktop Linux, for instance, represents a teeny-tiny share of the desktop OS market, but it's a vibrant community (or communities, really) that's constantly improving the software and desktop linux user's will let you pry the OS from their cold dead hands. Not everything needs to have an 80% market share to succeed.

> What do you think, is there a potential niche for like NeoEmacs, a test editor written in a modern Lisp / Scheme

I think that's a non-starter because you instantly lose the entire ecosystem of elisp packages out there and nobody's config would work anymore. The latter is especially important when for some people that's a decades-developed init.el file in a repo that's migrated from CVS to subversion then git.

I've git bisected (mercurial at the time, but whatever) my .emacs repo to figure out what I did to break my Python config, so there's that.

You may have a misunderstanding here. Neovim, while it is a ground up rewrite of vim, didn't break people's configs. The team made it a point to maintain backwards compatibility while positioning themselves to be able to move towards using lua as their config language.

Yes, but then Vimscript wasn't a very good language; whereas Lua, Python (and many others Neovim enabled support for) are great languages.

The benefit of a much better language is enticing; making a language much better than Emacs Lisp, however, is not so easy.

Except the specific rewrite the op was talking about was moving from elisp to scheme. It's one thing to support a limited language like vimscript, it's a whole other thing to reproduce the semantics of elisp in scheme.

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