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GNU is Not Unix

Richard Stallman Answers Questions at EmacsConf 2020 (emacsconf.org) 57

Posted by EditorDavid from the sharing-the-software dept.
All the videos have now appeared online for the talks at this year's virtual EmacsConf 2020, "the conference about the joy of Emacs, Emacs Lisp, and memorizing key sequences." And among them are an appearance by 67-year-old Richard Stallman, reminding the audience he'd created the first Emacs editor in 1976 "with some help from Guy Steele," then created GNU Emacs in 1984.

Stallman was there to tell the history of the GNU Emacs Lisp Package Archive (and the licensing issues involved) — and how it's ultimately led to the creation of the NonGNU ELPA. "The fundamental plan of NonGNU ELPA is that we won't ask for copyright assignments for those packages, so we won't be able to put them into core Emacs, at least not easily — but we will have some control over how we distribute them. We can put any package into NonGNU ELPA as long as its free software.

"If we like it, we can set up that way for users to get it. We can put the package in exactly as it is, if there's no problem at all with it. We can make an arrangement with the package's developers to work on it with us and maintain it directly for distribution by NonGNU ELPA. But if they are not interested, we can put it in ourselves, and if we need to make any changes we can do so. So NonGNU ELPA is not meant to be just a way that others can distribute their packages. Its meant at least in a minimal, technical sense to work with GNU Emacs, and we will make changes if necessary so that it works smoothly with GNU Emacs...

"The idea is to have a single Git repository where you can download various packages, but they won't be maintained there. Each of those packages will be copied automatically from some other place, probably some other people have the right access to work on it. This way we can avoid giving a gigantic number of people access to it.

"So far NonGNU ELPA is just a plan. We need people to implement the plan, so if you'd like to help, please write to me. I think this is a very important step for progress, and it's got to be implemented. Thanks, and happy hacking."
Stallman provided a status update on NonGNU ELPA as part of the 46-minute Q&A that followed.

"The creation of it has started. There's an archive and you can download packages. There's a repository to put it in... Still working out the procedures, how to make the arrangements with developers, etc."

But he also answered questions on other topics. Some highlights:

Q: Which distro of GNU/Linux do you use? guix? or something else?

RMS: Trisquel.

Q: If you knew that you would get hit by a bus tomorrow, say because of a fortune-teller, what would you leave behind in terms of advice for stewardship of Emacs and its future?

RMS: Focus on keeping the community strong in defending freedom.

If given the choice to have more people developing the software or defending the software, choose the latter.

Guard your soul carefully... :P

Q: Would you mind sharing your Emacs configuration files?

RMS: Configuration files are personal and will not be shared.
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Richard Stallman Answers Questions at EmacsConf 2020 More

Richard Stallman Answers Questions at EmacsConf 2020

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  • I have been writing code for over 20 years and have never used Emacs. I have used everything from Kedit (Mansfield), vim, geany, atom, notepad++, code studio but never ever Emacs... and here is a bloody conference for Emacs. Is my fomo justified?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 )

      Emacs is like Windows: everybody hates it, but many people use that operating system. And like Windows, if you've never used it, you haven't missed anything.

      I will say this though: Emacs is a great tool for rehab after hand surgery.

      • It is in dire need of a good text editor though...

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I mucked about with Emacs a bit back in the mid-90s on Linux and liked it better than dealing with vi, but ended up with job doing UNIX administration a couple years later... vi was installed on every box I needed to touch (Linux and commercial UNIX variants of every flavor) and Emacs required digging up and installing. Vi(m) wins the day.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rthille ( 8526 )

          You don't need emacs installed on most busybox devices, you just use Tramp from the emacs on your main machine and edit the files and run the shell *as if* you were running emacs on the remote machine.

      • Emacs is like Windows

        minus the BSOD

    • Re: What am i missing? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @05:38PM (#60800942)
      Set the Wayback machine dial back another 15+ years: VAX under BSD 4.1, VT-100 terminals, Gosling Emacs. The terse keyboard operations were in line in arcane-ness with those of other editors, and the display management for a 9600 baud (or lower) serial terminal was better. Add a Lisp based extension language. I cannot take it farther back hand that from personal experience, because I was not at MIT in the 70s.

      • Ah, the "editor war" [see Wikipedia] of the 1970s. MIT was into 'emacs'; Berkeley was into 'vi'.
        Berkeley grabbed Unix early from AT&T with 'ed' (predating 'vi'). [Aside: try to say
        "deadhead Ed had edited it" fifty times fast.]

        Stallman was late to Unix, so spent (too much) time trying to clone it. The preceding has been ur-history.

        Bias: I was at Cal using Unix when Bill Joy was in knee pants.

    • Emacs is basically too powerful for its own good.

      Think of writing an editor in Lisp. Now Lisp already is very powerful, especially in terms of self-modification.
      Now you use all that elegant magic, to make it as reconfigurable as possible with the least bit of complexity.
      All well and good so far.

      Now, though, thousandsof thousands of modules and festures and stuff grow over the years, and get ingrained and become standard and whatnot. And while it grows insanely powerful, it also becomes impossible for anyone

    • I have used everything from Kedit (Mansfield), vim, geany, atom, notepad++, code studio but never ever Emacs

      Those are all nice, but they pretty much just.. edit. Or rather, they just record what you type for the most part, with some small additions here and there.

      Emacs is so, so much more powerful than that.

      It's really hard to explain unless you have used it in the ways that make it especially useful, but I'll describe a handful of things I've done over the years...

      Used it as a terminal
      Quickly switched betw

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        All this and a junior IOS developer too! Emacs power user AND Xcode jockey, such a natural combination. How did you ever find time for puberty, or have you yet?

        If you'd actually talk to programmers from whom you've pasted together the above observations, you'll find most all of those features above are common for many editors. I do agree that block mode is great, I've been using it since the mid 80's long before it was stolen by emacs. Emacs was obsolete before you were born.

      • "I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor."
        -- In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson

      • but they pretty much just.. edit

        That seems like the sort of thing you'd want an "editor" to do, no?

        • That seems like the sort of thing you'd want an "editor" to do, no?

          Would you be happy using a code editor that has no code completion? Or code formatting?

          After all, that would just... edit... also.

          Now imagine a thousand other things all equally or more powerful as code completion and formatting that Emacs can do also... only it can also apply to a vast range of document types beyond just code, and you can add support for new types as you come across them.

          So no I am not satisfied with an editor that can m

    • Having little experience with other editors (save vim -- it's everywhere and it's useful), I couldn't say (nor am I trying to change anyone's mind). It's non-trivial to use productively and in my opinion takes a good month to get to know. There's a reason user friendliness has been a hot topic of late.

      With that out of the way, I think there are some damn nice features. Tramp allows for remote work over more or less seamlessly over ssh (among other methods[1]). Magit is a git front-end that works well, in

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "Perhaps all of this is true of other editors as well; I'd hope so."

        Perhaps? Do you have any reason to think it's not true for literally every editor? Why on earth do you think any programmer would use an editor that they can't "pretty much rely on"?

        • I don't follow the goings on with other editors; the most correct statement I could make is "this is true in this case, perhaps it is generally true." I didn't want to tout a feature as being exceptional but did want to call out that functions I wrote three decades ago still evaluate without requiring modifications. I hope users of other editors are as fortunate.

          But yes, I think programmers routinely use tools they can't rely on (in a backward compatible way). Witness Python. Emacs could have had a flag

        • Do you have any reason to think it's not true for literally every editor?

          Unlike you, he and I have used many other editors. You simply (and obviously) do not understand the power of Emacs, if you are claiming every other editor has these same features and abilities.... every other editor is in fact like going back to a bicycle for transport when you have been driving a sports car.

          Take any other editor you chose. How do I customize it to indent code by totally different rules if a C function within the fi

    • Org-mode. I started by putting in notes, then I started using it as a jupyter notebook (pretty much all programming languages are supported), then I started tangling some of my code blocks so that they exported into relevant code files, then I started writing my configuration files this way, then I started writing my documentation in it too.

      Basically, I just set up to export out of emacs as needed: HTML templated emails, static sites, slide shows, PDFs, code, and configuration files. It all comes out of my

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      I have been writing code for over 20 years and have never used Emacs. I have used everything from Kedit (Mansfield), vim, geany, atom, notepad++, code studio but never ever Emacs... and here is a bloody conference for Emacs. Is my fomo justified?

      Vi and many of those other editors you mentioned are good solid editors for simple stuff. I still use vi if it's something quick. However if I need to get some work done there's nothing like Emacs. You can set up macros, split windows, hell you can even fire up an interactive shell inside of emacs. It's a power tool. Like any tool it requires you to learn how to use it. It's often the case where I'm dealing with lots of data and I need to make wholesale changes and I can do it in a few seconds in Emacs. Wit

    • I've been writing code for about 20 years, and I've MOSTLY used emacs (on Windows!)

      I write my own extensions in emacs; I even built a system that syncs my machine to the right data/code revisions, and a little display that shows build progress, a build queue, etc., etc.

      Basically, emacs is very flexible. If you're missing a feature, you can check and see if someone else has already done it (probably) through some installable package, or you can write it yourself (in lisp). It's the most powerful editor I've

  • Non-EditorDavid (Score:4, Informative)

    by fred911 ( 83970 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @04:59PM (#60800894) Journal

    ''RMS: Trisquel.''

    What are you attempting to link to?
    https://trisquel.info/en [trisquel.info] -this works
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - that works

    but https://trisquel.info/https://... [trisquel.info] is just a custom 404.

  • Main question, of course: (Score:3)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday December 06, 2020 @06:59PM (#60801170)

    When will Emacs get an editor?

  • Can he answer what was that thing between his toes that he ate in a Q&A session a while ago?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • You'd think the better editor would also have a conference...
  • This is an important lingering question.

  • Unfortunately, over the past decade or so, emacs has become bloated with way too many features, all implemented in a twisty maze, full of dark passages and next to no code documentation.

  • Was he really there, or was it just a dot matrix print out of RMS standing in for him?
  • People actually attend an EMACS conference? Someone created a conference?

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