- I want this but for Haskell :-) Maybe some of the amazing work on dataframe[0] and related libraries could be used for a better Haskell REPL in Emacs. I never much liked the notebook way of working, I prefer having a file of functions alongside a REPL, but time-to-graph is bad, and I don't know if there's a good solution to how the REPL forgets previously defined variables on reloading a file.
[0] https://dataframe.readthedocs.io/en/latest/exploratory_data_...
- > Like Clojure Cider
You mean like Common Lisp Slime? When Cider started, it was based on slime, later they created a fork and even later created the nrepl protocol.
- [flagged]
- What's not usable about it?
- You can't scroll without moving the cursor.
- Split the windows and scroll the other windows. Or mark your current position and pop back to it after scrolling.
- It's slow and buggy and difficult to wrangle to the needs of modern text editing yea?
Look I live in emacs. I cannot explain to you why this is such a shitty experience. I assume there are random assholes around the world who are holding emacs back so they can view their email from a repl or some bullshit.
- I don't think your complaints are a common experience.
I've used neovim for the last 10 years, but before that I used emacs with R for many years at work and it was great, certainly not slow.
- Emacs is certainly capable of speedy editing; i don't mean to imply otherwise. But there isn't much explanation as to why emacs does things the way it does even if it makes the experience shittier.
- There is just one explanation. The people who develop it like it this way and unless you want to pitch in, your very vague complaints does not really matter.
- Sure, but why would you intentionally make such a slow and buggy editor? I don't buy the idea that this is on purpose.
- You’re maybe trolling. But what exactly is slow? Or are you a superhuman typing 400 words a minute? Emacs have never crashed on me (I use it daily) and there are things you just can’t speed up. Multithreading just sidesteps the problem while introducing its own can of worms. The current async facilities are fine by me (I don’t use any auto* things, so YMMV).
- I'm not trolling.
How long does it take to start emacs for you?
> Multithreading just sidesteps the problem while introducing its own can of worms.
In the meantime we're all stuck waiting for package downloads. I don't know the specifics about why emacs can't move to a concurrent model but it's embarrassing at this point
> The current async facilities are fine by me (I don’t use any auto* things, so YMMV).
Yes, it is clear the people who maintain emacs are fine with it. This is why using emacs in 2026 is so shitty.
- > In the meantime we're all stuck waiting for package downloads.
I use Elpaca instead of the built-in package manager, which is better designed (declarative package specification) and fully asynchronous. The UI is also more thoughtful, with more granular search-as-you-type capability and easy git commit reviews of pending package updates.
package.el is catching up to Elpaca in features, but async installs/updates is not one of them.
- Can you be more specific about your complaints? It's open source software. If there are bugs we can fix them and submit a pull request.
- I'll submit more bug requests, I guess. But the emacs community is very hostile to criticism.
- Actual multithreading, and a UI that was state-of-the-art sometime later than 1978, might be a good beginning.
- I agree with you on multithreading. But for most Emacs users, the rich and highly customisable keyboard-driven UI (including packages like embark, which-key, transient, hydra, ivy/helm/vertico, etc.) is one of its strengths over traditional GUI IDEs. It doesn't need to be "state of the art" to be good, and there's a reason that Emacs has remained popular despite its age. Sure, it's not going to appeal to most VS Code users, but that isn't the point of Emacs.
- Does this look like 1978 to you? <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/>
- Don't get me wrong, I don't mind old aesthetics, but... yes? Well I wasn't exactly alive in 1978 but all the screenshots look like they are at least 20 years old
- Firstly, the original comment was about UI rather than aesthetics. Secondly, as with everything else in Emacs, you can customise the appearance however you want. Those screenshots are from vanilla Emacs which is admittedly rather ugly. Most people heavily customise, or use an Emacs distro like Spacemacs (https://www.spacemacs.org/) or Doom (https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs?tab=readme-ov-file) which have more sensible default appearance configs.
- 20 years ago was in 2006, not 1978.
136 points by TheWiggles 3 days ago | 21 comments