> Moreover it is supported out-of-the-box in emacs: `M-x list-packages`.
Or just use the menu; click on "Options” → “Manage Emacs Packages”. No need to scare people with “M-x” weirdness right out of the gate when it isn’t necessary since the option is right there in the menu.
Menus? Clicking? That doesn't seem very emacs-y of you. M-x weirdness - up to and including the fact that it refers to a "Meta" key not found on modern keyboards - is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that allows me to feel superior for knowing how to exit emacs gracefully.
But seriously you raise a good point. The OS-native menus in aquaemacs and similar go a long way toward making emacs more accessible and explore-able.
No joke, it is legitimately hard for a newbie to figure out how to close emacs, which is pretty ridiculous. (It's `C-x C-c` btw, but I honestly don't know how a first-time user could figure that out on their own without a menu. You need to be _told_. It's absolutely crazy that you need to consult the manual to know how it exit the program.)
EDIT: It looks like this thread is too deep for me to post a genuine reply, but just to respond to the "it's just plain emacs too" comment. Good point, and I was aware of that but I didn't know what to call the plain-vanilla Windowed/GUI-enabled emacs. I guess it's just "emacs". I actually hesitated on naming aquaemacs for exactly this reason, which is why I hedged with "or similiar".
I think it actually helps to present M-x to new people as being the "command palette" for Emacs. A modern starting Emacs setup should have a vertical completion setup and fuzzy matching, so hitting M-x and a few keys gives you a list of matching commands with their documentation next to them.
It’s also supported out of the box in SublimeText, though probably not as extensive as VSCode. Code completion, for example, is more like guessing in SublimeText. Though I can’t imagine either emacs or VSCode to respond as quickly to input as SublimeText, which is one of the reasons it will remain the text editor of choice for me. At least when writing some code in Lua.
I appreciate that perspective. Launching quickly and no input latency are probably my base demands from a text editor. Not sufficient, but necessary. I may need to give Sublime a closer look.
FWIW you _can_ get emacs to launch as quickly as, say, vi, and to respond to input as quickly as just typing in the terminal (but in my experience the default GUI doesn't have noticeable input latency):
* `emacs -nw` will launch emacs in a terminal rather than a OS-native GUI window. This has surprisingly little impact on the interface or usability, but it does make cosmetic tweaks like font-rendering more difficult.
* `emacs --daemon` will start an "emacs server" process running in the background, and `emacsclient` will connect a UI instance to it (so you don't need to re-process all your .emacs stuff each time)
That said you can probably introduce a lot of input latency by hooking a slow method to the keypress event, but that applies to Atom and VSCode as well as emacs. But all three of them seem to do OK suggesting auto-completions of one kind or another, which must be handled on keydown or similar, so maybe that's not as critical as I assume.
I usually have a text editor open all the time anyway (recently Atom, lately VSCode) so the time-to-launch isn't that big of a deal in practice (and isn't _that_ large to begin with) but I am disproportionately, irrationally annoyed every time I need to wait for the editor to start.
teddyh|3 years ago
Or just use the menu; click on "Options” → “Manage Emacs Packages”. No need to scare people with “M-x” weirdness right out of the gate when it isn’t necessary since the option is right there in the menu.
rodw|3 years ago
But seriously you raise a good point. The OS-native menus in aquaemacs and similar go a long way toward making emacs more accessible and explore-able.
No joke, it is legitimately hard for a newbie to figure out how to close emacs, which is pretty ridiculous. (It's `C-x C-c` btw, but I honestly don't know how a first-time user could figure that out on their own without a menu. You need to be _told_. It's absolutely crazy that you need to consult the manual to know how it exit the program.)
EDIT: It looks like this thread is too deep for me to post a genuine reply, but just to respond to the "it's just plain emacs too" comment. Good point, and I was aware of that but I didn't know what to call the plain-vanilla Windowed/GUI-enabled emacs. I guess it's just "emacs". I actually hesitated on naming aquaemacs for exactly this reason, which is why I hedged with "or similiar".
NoGravitas|3 years ago
wsc981|3 years ago
rodw|3 years ago
FWIW you _can_ get emacs to launch as quickly as, say, vi, and to respond to input as quickly as just typing in the terminal (but in my experience the default GUI doesn't have noticeable input latency):
* `emacs -nw` will launch emacs in a terminal rather than a OS-native GUI window. This has surprisingly little impact on the interface or usability, but it does make cosmetic tweaks like font-rendering more difficult.
* `emacs --daemon` will start an "emacs server" process running in the background, and `emacsclient` will connect a UI instance to it (so you don't need to re-process all your .emacs stuff each time)
That said you can probably introduce a lot of input latency by hooking a slow method to the keypress event, but that applies to Atom and VSCode as well as emacs. But all three of them seem to do OK suggesting auto-completions of one kind or another, which must be handled on keydown or similar, so maybe that's not as critical as I assume.
I usually have a text editor open all the time anyway (recently Atom, lately VSCode) so the time-to-launch isn't that big of a deal in practice (and isn't _that_ large to begin with) but I am disproportionately, irrationally annoyed every time I need to wait for the editor to start.