
New GNU Emacs website - rvern
http://gnu.org/software/emacs/index.html
======
justinsingh
Just an anecdote about the older site. I was in a comp sci class at school a
year ago. My classmate next to me asked what editor I use because it was a
Beginning C++ class, and I said emacs. He went to the website which looked
incredibly outdated to the expectations of new programmers, and just felt
uncomfortable giving it a try. He opted for an editor with a more modern
website.

So with the new website, which looks good, maybe emacs will seem more
accessible and worth giving a try to new programmers who cross paths with it.
At the same time, maybe that sense of accessibility is misleading given the
learning curve of emacs that isn't exactly beginner-friendly. Nonetheless, I
like the site!

~~~
flatline
Hey, it's not called the Editor for Middle Aged Computer Scientists for no
reason!

~~~
iamcreasy
What is the benefit for an existing CS student to switch to Emacs who is
already comfortable with using IDEs like Visual Studio, Eclipse or
IntellijIDEA?

~~~
dredmorbius
In 20 or 40 years, emacs will still exist, as will the hooks and tools you've
integrated and built up to support it.

VS, Eclipse, and IntellijIDEA very likely won't.

And I say that as someone who doesn't use Emacs much -- I'd learned it at one
point and used it pretty heavily for a job, with a very nice set of modes for
a proprietary software tool I was using at the time, but made the critical
career error of working for an idiot boss who didn't believe any software
other than what the vendor provided was necessary on corporate servers.

So yes, I use vim.

But I've learned ... at least a dozen editors and development environments
which are either dead or proprietary and not availa ble to me. Time which I
_could_ have devoted to learning persistent tools and extending them.

That's among the strongest arguments in favour of using Free Software tools
generally, from a technical PoV. Your knowledge tends to remain relevant far,
far longer.

~~~
simula67
>In 20 or 40 years, emacs will still exist, as will the hooks and tools you've
integrated and built up to support it.

> VS, Eclipse, and IntellijIDEA very likely won't.

Why do you think so ?

Intellij and Eclipse are both open source. I suspect they will be around as
well. The companies supporting them may go out of business, but there are
enough users for it at the moment that someone will be able to keep
maintaining it or build new businesses around it.

~~~
oblio
After witnessing many of these discussions, it's just FUD. Just because Emacs
is older doesn't mean that IntelliJ or Eclipse aren't likely to follow you
until retirement. Java hit critical mass a long time ago and both IDEs have
mass adoption and are also OSS, as you mentioned.

The POV presented in that comment is basically a sales pitch. It's too
standardized and common not to be (it pops up in most of these threads).

~~~
dredmorbius
There is an interesting rule from biological evolution of rates of extinction
with species age that I'd thought of in relation to this. Essentially: they're
constant. That is, a species is as likely ro go extinct when old as young:
there is no increased survival probability with age.

Leigh Van Valen's Law of Extinction, related to the Red Queen Hypothesis.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis)

I don't know how well this translates to areas such as software, but it does
give me pause.

------
_asummers
As someone semi-new to using emacs, (I knew basic keybindings but never
bothered to set up init files, etc.) coming from the IDE world, my biggest
complaint was the amount of things I had to do to get vanilla emacs to behave
in a civilized way, even using the GUI version. I spent hours scouring peoples
emacs files on GitHub to try and find all the things that looked "obvious in
retrospect" and settings that looked silly to have turned off by default (e.g.
commands that act on regions should act on lines when no region is selected).
Then my second biggest complaint was the analysis paralysis of all the
plugins. I'm starting to get a stable emacs file, after a few months, but
there's still several pieces of functionality I miss from my IDEs that I chunk
out time every now and then to research and add. I think having a "if you're
coming from IDEs you may want to install X Y Z" page would be helpful, as well
as package download rankings so that people can find the popular projects
(e.g. helm, use-package). It should also be prominently encouraged to use
something like guru-mode where it disables the arrow keys to force you to use
ctrl and meta as your movement keys.

Also you can pry Magit from my cold, dead hands.

~~~
lokedhs
There are historical reasons for pretty much all default settings. For
example, you said:

    
    
        "e.g. commands that act on regions should act on lines when no region is selected"
    

This is because traditionally Emacs never had the concept of "no region
selected". The way it Emacs works is that it has two markers: "point" (which
is just the cursor) and "mark" which is another position somewhere in the
buffer. You can set the position to mark to that of point by pressing C-SPC.
In fully traditional mode, the position of mark nor the selection is ever
actually displayed in the buffer. If you press C-x C-x, the locations of point
and mark are swapped, allowing you to quickly jump to mark and then back
again.

The way Emacs was (and is) designed to work is that all region-based commands
simply apply their function on the characters between point and mark. Since
there isn't any "selection" as such, talking about what commands do without
the selection simply does not make sense.

Now, in (what I consider to be) a misguided appeal to users of "windows style"
editors, Emacs introduced the concept of "active regions". The underlying
concept of having a point and mark is still there, but there is now also a
flag indicating whether a region is "active" or not. Commands can look at this
flag to perform different operations whether or not this is the case. Since
several years, active regions has been enabled by default in Emacs.

The problem when having active regions enabled is that in many cases the user
has to reactivate the region before performing some operations, making many
region-based operations much more complicated[1] to use.

I seem to have become to the go-to person for Emacs support at my workplace,
and I have seen a lot of new users being confused about regions in Emacs.
Instead of adding even more Elisp code to try to coerce the application into
behaving more like Notepad, I typically recommend them to turn off active
regions and learn Emacs the way it was meant to be used. It's certainly
different from most other editors, but the behaviour makes a lot more sense
once you pick it up.

Footnotes: [1] I used the word "complicated" to mean "needs more keypresses".

~~~
kowdermeister
> There are historical reasons for pretty much all default settings

Don't you see it as a problem? Anyone new coming has to go through all the
history to get an understanding of why things work the way they work. Other
software evolve over time and follow practices that result in better UX.

------
indigo747
The site seems to be having some trouble, so from the Wayback machine:

The previous site
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150522051725/http://www.gnu.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150522051725/http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/index.html)

The new site on the 20th of April
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160420170002/http://www.gnu.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160420170002/http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/index.html)

~~~
theunamedguy
[https://](https://) site is down,
[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) is
live.

~~~
tlb
URL changed to http: version, thanks.

~~~
jedberg
Heh, and now the http is down. I think HN might be the cause. :)

~~~
theunamedguy
Works for me, but it's slow

------
Faaak
Looks nice, but having a 1.1MB webpage with 7 different fonts seems somewhat
wrong to me... We should start thinking about mobile clients who have to pay
these MB.

~~~
omni
If there's one product whose website can probably get away with not caring
about mobile, it's a power-user text editor from the 1970s.

~~~
epidemian
But the site has a responsive layout clearly designed to look nice on mobile
screens (with hamburger menu and everything :), so, at least on some level,
they _are_ caring about mobile.

BTW, the website looks really nice. Kudos!

~~~
mih
Also looks nice on Emacs' built-in web wowser _(M-x eww)_

------
xvilka
It would be nice, if they will merge patches [1] for truecolor (16M colors)
support in their console incarnation of emacs. Both Vim [2] and Neovim [3]
already did this. Since most terminal emulators now support this mode [4],
that will improve syntax highlighting and theme customizing to a new level.

[1] [http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/RFC-Add-tty-True-Color-
su...](http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/RFC-Add-tty-True-Color-support-
td299962.html)

[2]
[https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/8a633e3427b47286869aa4b96f...](https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/8a633e3427b47286869aa4b96f2bfc1fe65b25cd)

[3]
[https://github.com/neovim/neovim/commit/8dd415e887923f99ab5d...](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/commit/8dd415e887923f99ab5daaeba9f0303e173dd1aa)

[4]
[https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728](https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728)

~~~
thinkpad20
Even worse is running a terminal inside of emacs. ansi-term can only display 8
colors, even though the editor it's running in can support (at least) 256. As
someone who runs a large percentage of their shells inside of emacs, this is a
particular annoyance, especially because presumably adding in the remaining
colors would be a trivial task for someone familiar with the code.

~~~
technomancy
I used to be bothered by this, and then I realized for every thing I wanted to
do in the terminal, 5 minutes of searching would usually find a superior UI to
do the same task in an Emacs-native way that I could effortlessly customize,
rebind keys, add hooks for, and rewrite functionality live. About the only
exception I can think for this is htop; M-x proced does most of the same
things but doesn't look as nice doing it.

------
jimjimjim
I switched back to emacs last month after 10 years in ides, vim and sublime
and my hands still remember the key combinations. It's nice, like going back
to an old favorite pair of shoes. Also good to see the changes like the
elpa/melpa stuff.

~~~
rpgmaker
What made you leave the IDE world?

------
satysin
Surprised to see the demo videos were captured on OS X and not GNU/Linux.

~~~
hellofunk
Not too surprising, OSX is a common platform for devs who are linux/unix-
oriented but want a high-level OS with all the sleek GUIs and mainstream
features. OSX is a certified Unix OS, after all, so it tends to speak to emacs
users in a way that you won't typically find among the Windows base.

Yes Unix is not Linux, but I see OSX widely used at hackathons and conferences
because of its underpinnings.

~~~
lqdc13
One of the points of FSF is to never use closed software. OSX is not GPL.

~~~
chris_wot
Makes me wonder why they have compatibility shims to allow their website show
in browers like IE6...

Yes, it's pedantic, but this GNU we are speaking about.

~~~
lqdc13
That would actually make sense. It might help more people see the light.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Really? You think if I recommend emacs to someone using IE6 and they go view
the site and it fails to display, that will somehow make them 'see the light'?
I suspect the complete opposite is true and, hence, why gnu support browsers
that aren't 100% GPLed.

~~~
chris_wot
Nobody is saying that it is practical, but GNU aren't known to make their
stance on practicalities alone. GNU are known for their ideological purity,
and a lot of people (some even quite grudgingly) admire them for their
consistent stance.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I'm sure they've addressed this very issue. They almost certainly just write
to the standards and don't bother putting in any browser-specific hacks, which
is pretty much the best way to do things anyway, IMHO.

~~~
chris_wot
I saw at least one IE6 specific hack in their pages.

------
bitwize
It looks real snazzy and nice. But I always liked that the GNU project did not
try to look like the latest fad out of SV. Their low-fi HTML4 approach meant
they could be browsed in anything and still be perfectly readable.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
The markup is very clean, and the page still works fine with css disabled.

------
ktamura
Another piece of "marketing" collateral that can help popularize Emacs is a
"tour of Emacs" video. Awhile back, I watched Russ Cox's "Tour of Acme" video
and became an Acme convert as a result.

In the end, an editor is a productivity tool, and the best way to evaluate it
is seeing it in action as part of a workflow: video is an excellent format to
capture and share this with newcomers.

~~~
rpgmaker
My thoughts exactly. Personally, that's why I can't justify spending all that
time trying to figure out a text editor when I could be, I don't know,
_working_.

------
sotojuan
Seems like GNU is going through a brand/design update. First Guile[1] then
this!

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/)

~~~
xvilka
They also have a good project [1] of migrating Emacs codebase and plugins
support on Guile - partly by adding Elisp support in Guile, partly by
rewriting Emacs itself.

[1]
[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs)

~~~
Ericson2314
I followed this a bit during the GSOCs. Seems to have stalled unfortunately?

~~~
xvilka
It's unclear for now. But from outside it looks like stalled, yes.

~~~
Ericson2314
Bummer.

------
nanory
I think Vims website could do with a facelift too:
[http://www.vim.org/](http://www.vim.org/)

~~~
alain_gilbert
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5458874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5458874)
The vim website needs an update !

------
kozikow
There is lots of IDE vs emacs discussion in this subject. I have been using
primarily (IntelliJ+IdeaVim) and sometimes (Emacs+evil) for the last few
years.

If I want to write big, complex change in a codebase in
Java/Scala/Python/Javascript I would use IntelliJ. Yet IntelliJ doesn't work
well in many corner cases, like very big codebases, projects in C/C++ or
languages not officially supported by Jetbrains, cross language projects (even
with IJ Ultimate), remote editing or just quickly opening some github repo
without spending time on any project setup. And extra emacs packages like
magit and org-mode are irreplaceable.

Given the emacs flexibility I was able to configure Emacs to implement
majority of IntelliJ keybindings. There usually is an equivalent emacs
function of package for IntelliJ behavior, e.g. M-x and IntelliJ "Find
Action". Emacs helm works a lot like fuzzy matching in IntelliJ. Sometimes I
only implement the "similar" behaviour, e.g. "Show usages" vs "Grep for text
at point in current project" in IJ. I will be writing a blog post about it at
kozikow.wordpress.com, but if you are interested now now I can send you my
.emacs.d.

In this setup I can just setup "fast, always works and easy to set up, but not
too powerful" code navigation using ctags/ggtags, grep/ag and projectile in
emacs and avoid packages like EDT, eclim-emacs or Jedi that are more powerful,
but sometimes require custom per repository setup, or are slow. I usually have
both emacs and IJ opened and switch between the two. I have a keybinding in
both editors for "open current file in the other editor" (emacsclient +
external tool in IJ).

So in the spirit of motto of Spacemacs - "The best editor is neither Emacs nor
Vim nor IntelliJ, it's Emacs and Vim and IntelliJ!"

~~~
unhammer
I haven't had to java in a long time, but for C++ I find ymcd (based off vim's
YouCompleteMe) well worth a little effort to set up. Get the daemon at
[https://github.com/Valloric/ycmd](https://github.com/Valloric/ycmd) and emacs
package at [https://github.com/abingham/emacs-
ycmd](https://github.com/abingham/emacs-ycmd) It gives "intelligent"
completion and code navigation, just like you'd expect from IDE's. For the
per-project setup, I typically just copy-paste the config file from another
project and perhaps tweak some include paths in it.

Apparantly ycmd can do C#, Rust, Go, JS etc. as well now. I like this way of
putting such "IDE features" (meaning the programming language-specific
features) into editor-agnostic deamons; that way good completion/navigation is
available to _all_ editors. The same idea is behind eclim (as you mentioned)
for Java and merlin for OCaml.

~~~
Chattered
And ensime for Scala.

The idea is at least as old as SLIME, which has been the defacto common lisp
mode for Emacs for ages. When I was using it nearly fifteen years back it was
easily the most comfortable development environment I had used in any
language.

------
benkuykendall
Looks good in eww!

[http://i.imgur.com/5mLJdXb.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/5mLJdXb.jpg)

------
bitfox
A lot of text editors have a 1% of emacs power but a great web site and a
great interface. This help them to shine in the IDE/Editors jungle. So, this
new interface, will help emacs (from a "marketing" point of view).

Personally, I think that Emacs is one of the best editors. Not so simple to
use (you may think if you are going to start without a tutorial), but,
definely... very strong and personalizable.

I prefer to not compare with IDEs. The advantages of IDEs is that they have a
particular UI and a set of tools focused for a particular language/development
tool. This will allow you to have an initial set of features. Ready to use.
Without spending your time to work on personalization. You may think to IDEs
as editors with a restricted set of features (compared with emacs).

------
apatters
Does anyone know of a fun and engaging way to learn emacs, like VIM
Adventures? I sit and stare at a list of emacs hotkeys any time I want to give
it a shot and my eyes glaze over.

~~~
rashkov
I'm not sure it's worth learning the emacs key bindings for text editing if
you already know vim. Just turn on evil mode and use that. I could be totally
wrong here but I haven't seen any real defenders of emacs key bindings. seems
to me that people are used to them and they do the trick, but vim is
considered more powerful for pure text editing. Using emacs is still great for
a host of other reasons though.

~~~
rashkov
I did just come across this though: C-h t That'll bring up a tutorial file
that's like vimtutor. Not quite vim-adventures but it's pretty helpful

------
joshumax
Hmmmm, the website seems to be taking _forever_ to load

 _resists urge to make emacs joke about this_

~~~
chris_wot
You think Apache is running mod_emacs perhaps?

~~~
chris_wot
Hmmm... the instant I wrote that I realised there's no way that would ever be
likely. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's an Emacs powered Apache instance.

Duh. Don't know how I could have missed that.

~~~
elektronaut
I'm sure you could run elisp scripts with mod_cgi.

But who needs Apache? Just M-x package-install elnode, and you've got yourself
a web server.

~~~
chris_wot
I guess they _could_ be forging the Server header...

------
benbristow
Since when did FOSS have good design?

Joking aside, looks really nice!

~~~
rvern
Guile[1], Octave[2], Guix[3] and GRUB[4] have nice designs too.

[1]: [https://gnu.org/software/guile/](https://gnu.org/software/guile/)

[2]: [https://gnu.org/software/octave/](https://gnu.org/software/octave/)

[3]: [https://gnu.org/software/guix/](https://gnu.org/software/guix/)

[4]: [https://gnu.org/software/grub/](https://gnu.org/software/grub/)

~~~
jordigh
Aw, Octave?

/me blushes

~~~
rvern
Yes. The website is clean and readable, makes everything important (except the
manual) easy to find, doesn't require JavaScript and has acceptable markup.

------
Twirrim
It's interesting that they used jquery (MIT licensed) for the web page, and
also interesting given RMS's dislike of the use of Javascript.
[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-
trap.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html). MIT is
GPL compatible, admittedly, so his main concerns about Javascript probably
don't really apply here.

~~~
rekado
There is no problem with using free software like jquery. Free software does
not mean and has never meant "GPL only".

------
typon
This is the most beautiful thing I've seen from the GNU world. Usually all
their websites and materials look like 1980s internet.

~~~
tetheno
Guile is another exception.

[http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/](http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/)

------
eulji
Anyone have an opinion about emacs on Windows ? I am forced to work on Windows
and have no idea about the setup here.

~~~
groovy2shoes
It's really easy. You download a zip file and extract it somewhere. Then you
launch "runemacs.exe".

------
howardabrams
While the web site is nice, and the links to Emacs Rocks are great, perhaps it
should also include a more comprehensive video introduction to Emacs, like
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6jfrrwR10k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6jfrrwR10k)

------
highCs
I'm in deep love with sublime. Can someone convince me that I should use emacs
instead?

~~~
zeckalpha
Better bus factor.

------
ultim8k
Cool! Congrats guys!

------
madspindel
What is the keyboard shortcut to exit the website?

~~~
lfx
Ctrl + F4.

~~~
_asummers
Which, of course, is simply an alias for M-x close-current-tab.

------
soyuka
shit now we need a better one for vim

------
necessity
"The best editor is not Emacs nor Vi, it's Vi + Emacs"

I've discovered
[evil]([https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil))
a few days ago and I'm in love.

~~~
topkekz
There is also Spacemacs which is emacs + Evil with some sweets.

[http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)

------
milkey_mouse
Slick

------
mback00
VI !!!

^_^

------
curryhowardiso
Omg now can someone please fix the apex domain?

I don't want to live in a world where I can't like formal verification and
modern website design

------
mrmondo
Very slow to load on a mobile device, looking at the page size it seems quite
heavy, especially for a site aimed at promoting or representing a text editor
(and a lot more I know, I know).

