Re: Emacs learning curve

[René Kyllingstad]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 7:59 AM, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:
> We've seen no real demonstration in this thread that there is a dwindling
> interest in Emacs by users (which was the claim that started the thread), but 
> I
> would be willing to guess that there is insufficient new blood in the Emacs
> development community.

At least in the extension packages there is new blood out there:

Tomohiro Matsuyamas auto-complete mode is really nice, super smooth
inline completion support, fast and beautiful with a complete manual
(though not in info format, but I'd easily volunteer to convert it if
it was up for inclusion in Emacs, I have a hacky version in info
format I'm using already):

    http://cx4a.org/software/auto-complete/

He has also written other coding support tools:

    http://cx4a.org/#Softwares

The collection of authors of Magit, a really nice support for git,
with a good info manual to boot:

http://philjackson.github.com/magit/

Python support is also really nice in Emacs, most of it by new blood
and not integrated into Emacs:

ropemacs, compiler supported support for showing docs, goto
definition, refactoring:

    http://rope.sourceforge.net/ropemacs.html

It is built on top of Pymacs by François Pinard, not really new blood I guess:

    http://pymacs.progiciels-bpi.ca/pymacs.html

According to that page Pymacs was once suggested for inclusion, but he
never heard back. I'm guessing it needs some person to guide it
through the process. François intented it to be used to extend Emacs
using Python, which is of course a controversial goal, but in the
meantime it's really useful just to provide Python development support
in Emacs.

Taesoo Kim wrote pylookup, for looking up docs for the standard python
library in a browser, with completion in Emacs:

    http://taesoo.org/Opensource/Pylookup

Stephen Bach wrote Lusty Explorer which provides replacements for
find-file and switch-buffer with:

   - a fuzzy matching implementation
   - showing completion candidates in columns in a buffer instead of
in a jumble in the minibuffer (I find this much nicer when there are
many completion candidates)

    http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LustyExplorer

Martin Svenson wrote darkroom mode, which is the start of distraction
free mode for creative writing:

     http://www.martyn.se/code/emacs/darkroom-mode/

Julien Danjou wrote rainbow mode to fontify a color specification by
giving it that background color and changing foreground to white or
black, really nice, would be nice to have in Emacs:

    http://julien.danjou.info/rainbow-mode.html

Some of these are experimenting with UI and different ways of
operating, so they're not necessarily ready for inclusion into a
coherent Emacs, but having them in the Emacs Package manager would at
least make the installation instructions shorter and easier.


-- René