jtbnyc69, 5 months ago

@mattsheffield The emacs interface is not junk. For better “discoverability” try using helm. Or maybe try one of the preconfigured configs to get more useful packages installed by default. There is also a pop up menu that shows you possible completions for the current context that is from spacemacs I think. I feel you need to look into more options before making blanket statements like that.

mattsheffield, 5 months ago

@jtbnyc69 The interface looks far worse than the Borland IDEs. In graphical mode, emacs looks better, but in text mode it makes no real use of ncurses for interface design.

But even in graphical mode, the difference between emacs and aquamacs is night and day.

I don't mean to single out emacs either. Almost all Unix text editors follow 1970s user interface design conventions which is a bit absurd.

harish, 5 months ago

@mattsheffield As someone who cut his teeth on Turbo C++, this article brought back so many feels when I read it a few days ago.

mattsheffield, 5 months ago

@harish Yeah it was a lot of fun!

jnpn, 5 months ago

@mattsheffield as much as i love and revere dos era TUI (and yeah turbo pascal is a shining example)

emacs ergonomics are far from junk, mouse support has never been a need for "us", meanwhile extensibility and adaptability was. try to extends turbo pascal :)

mattsheffield, 5 months ago

@jnpn I use emacs every day and definitely appreciate its extensibility.

What TUIs provide to power users though is discoverability. There are so many emacs features that most people can't possibly discover because they are hidden away.

Good interface design makes the power accessible.

jnpn, 5 months ago

@mattsheffield I kinda beg to differ. Even though I recognize that discoverability matter, it's a culture difference. Emacs has m-x plus fuzzy match, it's not menu driven much. For some brains it's perfect (and emacs embeds so much packages that I think there's no way to show it easily).

For funsies, another hybrid gem from the dos era: quattro pro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e9WRrLrbDA

it's not TUI per se (VGA) but the feature set and polish is mind boggling

mattsheffield, 5 months ago

@jnpn I think meta-x discovery is convenient but it's poorly implemented with the searching and making buffers or pane splits disappear.

I have seen Quattro Pro fairly extensively because it became part of the Corel WordPerfect suite, which I used loyally for many years.

Interestingly enough, there's a guy who is adapting WordPerfect for DOS and a once-lost WP for UNIX into today's Linux environments: https://github.com/taviso/wpunix

I'm using it for a book project and it works fabulously.

jnpn, 5 months ago

@mattsheffield I agree there are papercuts to remove. some efforts are made (isearch is getting contextual ui now)

I did know about wpunix but never tried it, i'm curious now.

mattsheffield, 5 months ago

@jnpn Definitely worth checking out WP for Unix. It's incredibly powerful. Not as comprehensive as WPDOS 6.2, but it's a lot more stable when running in a modern-day Linux VT. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/123814/187083922-d1c38e75-734d-4161-853c-407ec38bc9d4.gif

jnpn, 5 months ago

@mattsheffield that's indeed fancy