20 Jul
2025
20 Jul
'25
12:36 a.m.
[Somewhat off-topic for TUHS; please follow up at COFF]
On Saturday, 19 July 2025 at 17:37:34 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
Also, there are no GUI emacs versions I like..
You have me curious. How many do you know? And what don't you like
about them, when you clearly use Emacs?
Greg
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20 Jul
20 Jul
1:27 a.m.
On Sat, Jul 19, 2025 at 6:36 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
[Somewhat off-topic for TUHS; please follow up at COFF]
On Saturday, 19 July 2025 at 17:37:34 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
Most of the emacs GUI adaptations assume that it's THE instance of the
editor. With multiple terminals, I can have multiple editors with
different contexts. With the GUI, it all gets dumped together.
It may just be an odd quirk of when I grew up and always having job
control and just always using that all the way back to the 4.2BSD Vax
11/750 days.
Warner
Also, there are no GUI emacs versions I like..
You have me curious. How many do you know? And what don't you like
about them, when you clearly use Emacs? Greg
--
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21 Jul
21 Jul
4:03 a.m.
New subject: [TUHS] Re: Not really Emacs wars (was: foreground/background vs. Windowing)
On Saturday, 19 July 2025 at 19:27:40 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
On Sat, Jul 19, 2025 at 6:36 PM Greg
'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
You don't say which. I only know GNU Emacs. Looking at the FreeBSD
Ports Collection, not even xemacs seems to have survived.
[Somewhat off-topic for TUHS; please follow up at COFF]
On Saturday, 19 July 2025 at 17:37:34 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
Most of the emacs GUI adaptations assume that it's THE instance of the
editor.
Also, there are no GUI emacs versions I like..
You have me curious. How many do you know? And what don't you like
about them, when you clearly use Emacs? With multiple terminals, I can have multiple editors
with different
contexts. With the GUI, it all gets dumped together.
Not in my experience (GNU Emacs 29.4 (build 1,
amd64-portbld-freebsd13.3, GTK+ Version 3.24.43, cairo version
1.17.4). I have four displays on my server 0, and also 4 instances of
Emacs: one on :0.1 and three on :0.2. You need to start them
individually, of course, but that's what shells are for. Each Emacs
can open windows on other displays, and that's useful if they're on
other machines, but it's not the only way. Can it be that your
negative experience was with another version that has since died?
What you describe sounds like my pain with web browsers.
Greg
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11:52 a.m.
New subject: [TUHS] Re: Not really Emacs wars (was: foreground/background vs. Windowing)
On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 02:03:38PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
Yeah, it doesn't work that way for me using GNU emacs on Debian
either.
Many decades ago I did force the behaviour that you describe; it
involved setting EDITOR to emacsclient, and then running
(server-start) in my ~/.emacs.el. This was a feature back when I was
running emacs on BSD 4.3 with a Vaxstation II/RC with 2 MiB of memory
(Digital had put epoxy into the backplane so you couldn't add more
memory to their memory-starved inexpensive model), but now that I buy
my own desktops with 64 GiB of memory, I really don't care that emacs
is "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" (well, not swapping; I
don't configure swap any more :-) and emacsclient is more annoying
than it's worth.
- Ted
With multiple
terminals, I can have multiple editors with different
contexts. With the GUI, it all gets dumped together.
Not in my experience (GNU Emacs 29.4 (build 1,
amd64-portbld-freebsd13.3, GTK+ Version 3.24.43, cairo version
1.17.4). I have four displays on my server 0, and also 4 instances of
Emacs: one on :0.1 and three on :0.2.
22 Jul
22 Jul
2:23 a.m.
New subject: GUIs: There can only be one (was: Not really Emacs wars ...)
[Removing TUHS again]
On Monday, 21 July 2025 at 7:52:32 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 02:03:38PM +1000, Greg
'groggy' Lehey wrote:
Yeah, it doesn't work that way for me using GNU emacs on Debian
either.
The way I describe, or the way Warner describes?
With
multiple terminals, I can have multiple editors with different
contexts. With the GUI, it all gets dumped together.
Not in my experience (GNU Emacs 29.4 (build 1,
amd64-portbld-freebsd13.3, GTK+ Version 3.24.43, cairo version
1.17.4). I have four displays on my server 0, and also 4 instances of
Emacs: one on :0.1 and three on :0.2. Many decades ago I did force the behaviour that you
describe; it
involved setting EDITOR to emacsclient, and then running
(server-start) in my ~/.emacs.el.
That's a painful way to work around the issue. Nothing against
emacslient; I'm using it to write this message. But it's not
necessary. I didn't have any problems with Emacs in my Linux days.
This was a feature back when I was running emacs on
BSD 4.3 with a
Vaxstation II/RC with 2 MiB of memory (Digital had put epoxy into
the backplane so you couldn't add more memory to their
memory-starved inexpensive model), but now that I buy my own
desktops with 64 GiB of memory, I really don't care that emacs is
"eight megabytes and constantly swapping" (well, not swapping; I
don't configure swap any more :-)
Eight megabytes? Nowadays that fits into L2 cache :-)
But why do we have this disconnect? My guess is our different
interpretation and use of "GUI". I assume that most of us are using
X, though presumably some (you?) might be using Wayland. There's
nothing in X (nor, I think, in Wayland) that precludes running
multiple instances of the same program. But programs like firefox
refuse to do so, connecting to instances already running, even if
they're on different displays, or even on different machines. Emacs,
like most programs, doesn't do that.
So could your window manager (GNOME?) be to blame? How do you start
Emacs? I do it via a window manager (fvwm3) that just runs the
program. Could it be that your window manager tries to be cleverer?
Greg
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2
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4 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
-
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
Theodore Ts'o -
Warner Losh