Hacker News Reader

Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

Yes, if you ask people who know how to use emacs what they would change, the answer is going to be very different from the answer you’d get asking people who have tried to use emacs and gave up.

The documentation does really suck. The terminology makes no sense to users not used to it. It does not explain that to make this into a functional system, some configuration needs to be done. It is terrible out-of-the-box. ‘Because this is how rms did it 45 years ago’ is not really a good excuse.

View on HN

The documentation does _not_ suck. It it literally the most well documented software in existence, a reason for which it has been used for many different things outside its original purpose of text editing.

Yes, it may not be for everyone. But just say that, that it uses certain conventions that are likely outdated for a reasonable set of the population. But you can't say the documentation sucks when you have the below:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/in...

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/in...

That documentation is thorough does not mean that it is good.

If anything, one might argue that Emacs documentation being so extensive while buing built around idiosyncratic conventions makes it worse, not better, for many cases: it means it is even harder for people to actually find relevant parts of the documentation.

Emacs itself is idiosyncractic. Being cute and using "standard" terminology would just confuse users.

This must be the funniest way to justify archaic terminology I've seen so far.

`You can also type Meta characters using two-character sequences starting with ESC. Thus, you can enter M-a by typing ESC a. You can enter C-M-a (holding down both Ctrl and Alt, then pressing a) by typing ESC C-a. Unlike Meta, ESC is entered as a separate character. You don’t hold down ESC while typing the next character; instead, press ESC and release it, then enter the next character. This feature is useful on certain text terminals where the Meta key does not function reliably.`

Taken from: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Us...

I'm really not sure that this counts as 'well documented'.

How would you phrase it? I find it to be quite clear.

Agreed. The paragraph above it explains that Meta is probably the alt key.

The terminology itself is kind of a relic from the past (it's gotta be Alt on 99.9% of emacs users' systems), but it's explained very clearly.

Emacs is the self-documenting editor for a reason. I always found the documentation very good. I submit that every sufficiently complex system will need some terminology specific to the system the user will have to learn. Not wanting to do so if a form of lazyness that the developers cant really do anything about.

Dude, Emacs had its own terminology for text editing, the rest of the world moved on, another terminology won.

If Emacs would be solving protein folding, I'd maybe understand the need for unique terminology, but this is just unnecessary smugness.

At this point Emacs is only doing a few user facing things which are unique, and I'm not even sure about those.

I have many times submitted jobs related to helping solve protein folding from within Emacs (shell buffers). It helps a lot to have the editor operating on the shell inputs and outputs.

You really didn't get my point, did you? For new research, protein folding was a random example, you need new terminology which everyone just accepts and uses, it becomes standard.

Emacs sort of tried to do that, failed, and now it's like Australian animals faced with animals from the rest of the world. It will never win, it should adapt.

I think that Emacs solved a lot of important problems before others did. The rest of the world decided to reinvent and rename things, and they popularized some of these things. Emacs held its ground, so now people who transition to Emacs from a different background might be confused. Emacs documents everything thoroughly, so it might take a whole weekend of reading to catch up and be productive. I think that Emacs is worth this extra time. The real number of confusing terminologies or technologies are probably only a dozen or two. And then there are hundreds of common concepts with a powerful implementation in Emacs. And some things that you still can’t do as cleanly with other tools. Especially things you’d need in cutting edge research.

SInce you mentioned "unique" features, Emacs is the only programmable editor which works mostly the same in terminal and GUI mode. You can write extensions (in elisp) which largely dont know about the UI used by the user. So you actually can write UI-independent programs in elisp. I dont know a single tool that got this right. Sure, you're going to tell me that termianl isn't relevant these days, and everyone has moved onto windowing systems. Yes young padawan, that might feel true to you. You will understand one day.

Emacs is great out-of-the-box.

Really its only problem is the annoying bugs you frequently run into. (Emacs Lisp really isn't meant for programming large, stable systems.)

> Emacs is great out-of-the-box.

Sure. And because the out-of-the-box is so great: 1. people actually create emacs distributions(!) like spacemacs, doom-emacs, etc. 2. the emacs wiki has https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DotEmacsBankruptcy

If Emacs is an OS, then of course there should be different distributions of it.

That's like complaining that Windows is broken because it doesn't come with MS Office out of the box.

Except Emacs is just a subset of the whole experience.

https://hanshuebner.github.io/lmman/frontpage.html

Emacs is so great out-of-the-box that, unless you're in a terminal, every time you launch it to edit a file, it will take up half its window with a welcome message, until you specifically create a configuration file to disable that. This is particularly frustrating if you just want to use it with its default settings, eg, as root to edit a file.

It's clearly not intended to be reasonable usable without user configuration.

> Emacs is great out-of-the-box.

"Slackware is friendly. It's just really picky about who its friends are."

I mean, I'm sure there are like seven, maybe eight, people in the world that think Emacs is great out of the box. Where we run into trouble is that most of those seven or eight people are the ones deciding what Emacs is like out of the box.

M-x shortdoc-display-group is quite nice.

> ‘Because this is how rms did it 45 years ago’ is not really a good excuse.

Not only do they use it as an excuse, they think it means Emacs is somehow enlightened. The people that want that can put (setq rms-mode t) in their .emacs and let the rest of us have sane defaults.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com