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macOS Real emacs at last.

yellow

yellow

Moderator emeritus
Oct 21, 2003
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Portland, OR
Emacs is a very powerful text editor.
Originally for UNIX (UNIX flavors) and later (more popularly, IMO) for X11.
 
bousozoku

bousozoku

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Jun 25, 2002
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Lard
bousozoku

bousozoku

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yellow said:
LOL.

I Heart Lisp.
Click to expand...

You know what I mean. LISP = Lots of Inane Stupid Parentheses (or List Processor.)

We didn't need a GUI to have editor windows. There were plenty of keyboard combinations but you could do anything with emacs. I could never get a warm and fuzzy feeling for vi or vim--they're awful, since they're based on ed.
 
yellow

yellow

Moderator emeritus
Oct 21, 2003
16,018
6
Portland, OR
bousozoku said:
LISP = Lots of Inane Stupid Parentheses (or List Processor.)
Click to expand...

LOL! I've never heard it called that, but hells yes you are right.

bousozoku said:
I could never get a warm and fuzzy feeling for vi or vim--they're awful, since they're based on ed.
Click to expand...

I am in the same boat. I used to have to edit Circle MUDs with ed. [shudder]. And vi.. well, let's just say I learned enough to :wq :)

Remember, you can't spell evil without vi!
 
stcanard

stcanard

macrumors 65816
Oct 19, 2003
1,485
0
Vancouver
yellow said:
And vi.. well, let's just say I learned enough to :wq :)

Remember, you can't spell evil without vi!
Click to expand...

Ooh, them's fighting words!

I used to be completely emacs, but the more I use it the more I'm getting to like vi. Fast, always available, and awesome search and replace capabilities.

That is, as long as you don't go nuts when typing :%s/^MySearch/Otherstuff/

I will admit on complex things I do fall back to the more user-friendly emacs.
 
yellow

yellow

Moderator emeritus
Oct 21, 2003
16,018
6
Portland, OR
Me, I'm a lamewad.

It's pico first, emacs second, wring my hands, stomp my feet, cry, beg, cry some more, eat a sandwich, vi.
 
bousozoku

bousozoku

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Jun 25, 2002
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yellow said:
LOL! I've never heard it called that, but hells yes you are right.

I am in the same boat. I used to have to edit Circle MUDs with ed. [shudder]. And vi.. well, let's just say I learned enough to :wq :)

Remember, you can't spell evil without vi!
Click to expand...

I'd rather use ed than vi. Actually, those of us who got involved in programming on the IBM PC early had to use edlin which was ed with a longer name.

Raven VII:

Yes, emacs is part of the developer tools in Mac OS X and works quite well but it doesn't have an GUI pieces and that really rattles some people's cages.
 
M

mwpeters8182

macrumors 6502
Apr 16, 2003
411
0
Boston, MA
I'm glad to see emacs is available for OS X, and it's not an X11 port. I've been using gvim at school for my coding, and TextWrangler at home (when I need to edit a thing or two), but maybe I'll try to switch to emacs, so things are the same on both sides.

MP
 
stcanard

stcanard

macrumors 65816
Oct 19, 2003
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yellow said:
Me, I'm a lamewad.

It's pico first, emacs second, wring my hands, stomp my feet, cry, beg, cry some more, eat a sandwich, vi.
Click to expand...

You'll laugh, but I always get lost in Pico/Nano. I can never figure out how to save or exit.

I do still far prefer emac's ability to split windows so easily, even when I'm in a terminal interface. It depends on what I'm doing -- quick and dirty = vi, anything more involved = emacs (or cursing that they didn't install it and back to vi).
 
iMeowbot

iMeowbot

macrumors G3
Original poster
Aug 30, 2003
8,634
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Raven VII said:
Hmm, isn't emacs already included in OS X? And it doesn't require X11 either?
Click to expand...

Sort of, but the stock one was limited to use inside the terminal. This port is a real live Aqua program, so you can have multiple full-sized buffer windows open, the font lock that isn't half-baked and so on. And lots of menus if you don't feel like typing Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift.

I swear I played Tetris on it once... :)
Click to expand...

I missed having a comfy place to run Gnus. This might even be enough to put Mail.app to bed.
 
iMeowbot

iMeowbot

macrumors G3
Original poster
Aug 30, 2003
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Loge said:
There is also this alternative version for aqua,

http://emacs-on-aqua.sourceforge.net/

It's a little while since I used Emacs, so I haven't really compared.
Click to expand...
That's not a bad port, but it's based on an old version of emacs (20.7, about five years old now). The version skew becomes annoying when you want to use newer lisp packages.
 
Loge

Loge

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Jun 24, 2004
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True it's an older version, but seems to support more OS X features, at least "out of the box".

Out of interest, how did you get the anti-aliased fonts that you mention in your first post?
 
iMeowbot

iMeowbot

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Aug 30, 2003
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Oh, I see what you mean. You get the old Carbon-style anti-aliasing normally, but the newer OS X type if you have Silk installed.
 
bousozoku

bousozoku

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Jun 25, 2002
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dav said:
What is so evil about vi?

It is efficient and I love it :)
Click to expand...

To me, it's the worst editor on UNIX, ed is slightly better because it doesn't have pretensions of being something else. vi was originally just a shell for ed anyway.
 
GeeYouEye

GeeYouEye

macrumors 68000
Dec 9, 2001
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State of Denial
SubEthaEdit for me if I can get away with it, then vim, then vi, then echo "..." > file.txt && (awk || sed), then emacs, then pico. As you might guess, I really don't like either emacs or pico, and emacs only a bit more because it's got tetris that i can play when i get frustrated trying to get the damn thing to work.
 
stcanard

stcanard

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Oct 19, 2003
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Vancouver
bousozoku said:
To me, it's the worst editor on UNIX, ed is slightly better because it doesn't have pretensions of being something else. vi was originally just a shell for ed anyway.
Click to expand...

It definitely takes a different mindset. I do still find the switch between command and editing mode annoying (especially when you accidentally delete 1/2 your document because you started typing while in command mode).

To me vi has one huge thing going for it. Wherever I am, on whatever unix or clone I am using, I can guarantee that vi is available. I started using it more and more out of habit just because of that, then finally started to get used to it. I used to hate it with a passion. Now that I've realized a lot of the navigation commands have roots in regex's (e.g. start of line is ^) its started getting easier.

Heh, bet you never thought you'd see an evil vs. Eight-hundred Mb Always Swapping (yeah, I've updated it) argument on a Mac board. Boy OSX has sure changed things :)
 
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