System Crafters Live! - Planning the New Emacs From Scratch

In today's stream, let's talk about what an improved Emacs From Scratch series might look like! My goal is to make a new series to build a configuration from the ground up using only what comes in the box. I need your feedback on what I should cover and how to make it great!

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On the Flux Harmonic channel I do live coding twice a week using many of the tools we talk about on System Crafters!

CREDITS:

[agneshu]

Have been waiting for this for a long time!

[xvna]

Really looking forward this one David!

[tessiof]

I was planning to begin the emacs from scratch playlist this week!

[srinivasrg]

Thanks for this David. You are earning a lot of good Karma, you see.

[AndersJackson]

You can introduce and talk about different stuff that you already have talked about. Reference to those other videos in the video text under the video. Important to know what can be done, even if that isn't covered in the video with a reference where more can be found.

Important concepts: Buffers, windows and frames. That a buffer doesn't need a window, but a buffer can be shown in many frames at the same time. Cursor, that it is actually BETWEEN characters.

Manipulating text: The usual about handling chars, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs. And regions between mark and cursor. And here are also search an important thing to talk about. Maybe square regions and multiple cursors (as a show of 🙂)

Gather and find information: Explain C-h, about the tutorial (Ch-h t), and how to read manuals with info mode. Should probably be enough for half an hour. Some any-key function would be really, really good to have.

Variables: how there are different. Like global, default values and buffer-local variables.

Modes and hooks: Topics about the existence of major and minor modes. And that there are modes inherited by others. So Org-mode inherit text-mode. And there are prog-mode too for programming language modes. That would be helpful when you talk about hooks, for instance.

Editing files with sudo: And yes, Tramp for editing files with sudo would be a good thing to put in somewhere /sudo::/etc/motd for instance. And if you start a shell from a buffer that is open with Tramp, it will try to run that shell in same place as that buffer. So it will start a shell with root access. (Same as when opening remote with ssh and scp protocols instead of sudo)

Org-mode: Org-mode should probably have a short introduction to Org-mode and actually, to Babel-mode. You need to set some variables to be able to run any language that isn't emacs-lisp. Important concept that shown up, for me at last, is the concept of "do-what-I-mean', like C-c C-c is in Org-mode. Perform different tasks depending on context, what the cursor are. Org-mode is very useful for non programmers too, as it can export to so many other formats, like to web pages. And yes, literal programming can be shown here, and how that could be done for your Emacs config file.

Basic programming support: Yes, most people that will use Emacs is programmers, so support for programming should be there, at least to give some pointers.

Advanced stuff: Packages can be used to organize configuration, even with packages that are built into Emacs already, should probably mention that.

[voidmice]

I literally just set up a VM just to try configuring Emacs with what's builtin. So excited for this new series.

[PhlegmaTREEc]

Hey, I've been recently binging your videos. Has this new series ever been turned into reality? I may be missing something, but I don't see anything obvious like that?

[thelimatheou]

Thanks David - another informative stream, and looking forward to the new Emacs from scratch. I have to say the way you begin every time induces a feeling of nostalgia for a show I used to watch as a child called Romper Room. The hostess would always start (or end?) by bringing out her 'magic mirror' and greeting the audience, then going through a list of names for who might be watching. Might be showing my age a bit, but I love it!

[vrixphillips]

one thing that'd be really helpful would be a video about setting up/downloading emacs in WSL (windows subsys for linux) for those of us who aren't... fully converted to linux [yet lol]

[rockysmitt]

Emacs is really in most ways the worst of both worlds. The design is about as unimaginative as you can get. The old-fashioned UI hasn't fundamentally changed in decades, and it was pretty inept from the start. I don't think the team developing Emacs would know an original idea if it slapped them across the face (and in fact it has many times).

At the same time, the implementation of Emacs is shockingly incompetent. It's really a stand out in comparison to pretty much every significant app I've ever used.

What's desperately needed, is a successful, total fork. Emacs is on life support as it is. It's hard to see how an application this unimaginative and inept, can survive the next decade. Control needs to be ripped from the incompetent central committee currently responsible for the main development. This needs to be done with dispatch, without a second thought, and with very aggressive tactics to exclude everyone associated with the old Emacs from participating in the new project.

As dismal as the situation seems right now, I think it's actually exciting to think of what would be possible if Emacs were under the control of competent and imaginative developers. The fact that both Atom and VS Code were adopted in massive numbers, and surpassed Emacs in functionality in power, in a matter of months, is not necessarily a cause for demoralization among Emacs users. It shows us two important things: 1. There's still huge demand for a good text editor, 2. With the right development process, functionality and power far beyond the current capabilities of Emacs won't take decades, or even necessarily years. With modern tools, it can probably be done in a few months.