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This is a great talk by Stuart Halloway on what sets emacs apart from typical editors/IDEs. It's 25 minutes and well worth the time.

http://vimeo.com/1013263

⬐ taeric

Thanks for the link. Is indeed a nice video. Amusingly touches on the "pretty" aspect mentioned side thread.

A well engineered lisp(and any other language actually) program isn't a stream of beautiful lines, but a set of components, any of which might have a complicated implementation, but all of which have a good clean interface. Lisp is beautiful not because it allows you to write beautiful 20 line programs, but because it allows you to design large systems that still have a chance to be maintainable, despite the complexity of the problem they are solving.

I can still show you examples of beautiful and horrible 20 line lisp programs, but I'd rather show you examples of large scale design. The most popular might be Emacs. Emacs has a million lines of elisp, imagine if it was written in java or C++, scary thought :)

In a large system like emacs you'll find many examples of beautiful and ugly code, but the overall system is still beautiful and maintainable. This talk by Stuart Halloway might explain what i mean by that: http://vimeo.com/1013263

In a nutshell, emacs is big, but small for its size, meaning that those 1000000 lines of lisp do much more than a million lines of java will ever be able to do. That property comes in part by using a lisp as an implementation language(and not a very good lisp at that :)

⬐ dmansen

Great talk, thanks for the link. The power of emacs isn't immediately obvious, until you try to use it for something it wasn't explicitly designed for.

⬐ wastedbrains

This just makes me feel like I really need to work on becoming a more advanced user of emacs. I don't utilize the built in power of emacs nearly enough.

⬐ yummyfajitas

I tried ido a few times, but never really liked it. I felt like it was jumping ahead of me, often in directions I didn't want to go.

I like Icicles much better. It offers lots of features like ido, but I actually need to press a key before they happen.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles

⬐ litewulf

As a counterpoint, I love ido, and it makes using the commandline so frustrating.

99% of the time it somehow seems to have read my mind, so I can tab my way to happiness.

⬐ d0mine

ido has advantage that it is included in Emacs22 (no third-party packages required)

⬐ zenspider

I'm still not sold on ido... I'm trying it out again, but thus far there are enough annoyances that I don't think I can activate it full-time. I may, however, use their completing read function standalone tho for other things I do.

So far, I've found that autotest.el + file-cache + ffap + some advice for ffap (see my emacswiki page) does 80-90% of what I need on a daily basis.

⬐ litewulf

Out of curiosity, what are the annoyances you have with it?

⬐ ajross

I'm in the same boat. And the number one annoyance is that it's not keystroke compatible. I have the standard editting keys in my fingers for loading files (C-x C-f C-a C-k pathprefix TAB path TAB etc..). That stuff breaks with ido and I get stalled and have to compose myself and figure out what I'm doing.

Wouldn't it have been possible to preserve both the classic editability of the path string and have fuzzy matching?

⬐ zenspider

that is CERTAINLY some of it... wtf were they thinking when they decided to take the regular find-file TAB key and replace it with RET???

to answer the question above: it is VERY intrusive. I've finally set it up to only ever take 1 line only, but even then it is a huge departure from the norm. The key incompatibility is a huge issue. The fact that all my muscle memory (17 years) is dead using it.

I have this peculiar belief that C-x C-f RET should _always_ open the parent dir of the current buffer's file. ido threw that out the window. Now that will load the alphabetically first file in the dir. Lame.

There are others, but I don't remember them currently.

⬐ ahold

Ah, Stuart showed us his typing abilities

⬐ ken

I was a little disappointed he never touched on the best use of fuzzy matching: function names. Lisp would probably look like APL or Perl if we actually had to type "with-open-file" instead of just "w o f TAB RET".

⬐ kylec

Interesting. I suppose we can, in part, blame Arc's brevity on the fact that Paul Graham uses vi:

http://paulgraham.com/pfaq.html