Re: is there summary of template systems for emacs?

[Xah Lee]

2008-12-14

On Dec 7, 11:14 am, "Peter Milliken" <peter.milli...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Xah,
>
> I'd be interested in your opinion of ELSE. I haven't tried some of the
> others that you mention - ELSE suits me fine. I have tried tempo and
> skeleton etc but were turned off by the "intrusive" and horribly awkward
> interfaces that they presented to the user. I had been exposed to DEC's LSE
> in the past (circa 1985), and found that it didn't "get in my face" or cause
> awkward usage problems, so I decided to "port" their language sensitive
> editor functionality to Emacs (hence E(macs)LSE :-)).
>
> But facilities such as ELSE, tempo, skeleton etc are obviously not very
> popular (which I have never been able to understand!) i.e. I have shown many
> fellow programmers ELSE over the years and not a single one of them has ever
> taken up it's use. In fact, through all the time ELSE has been available on
> the Internet, I have only ever received less than 10 queries/expressions of
> interest in it - which may argue that it just doesn't hit the mark! :-) But
> given the alternatives that were available (especially in the "early days")
> I don't think that was the case. Of course, these days, it is even less
> likely because Emacs just isn't that popular as an editor i.e. there are
> probably 30 - 40 programmers at my current place of employ and there is only
> one other programmer here that uses Emacs - so the opportunities for
> creating "converts" are not good at all!
>
> ELSE does not use (e)lisp like syntax. It has it's own template file for
> generating new templates. It has (what I believe is) extensive documentation
> - something that has always annoyed me about many Emacs packages (such as
> tempo and skeleton) - when they were first available it was very much "read
> the code and examples" - I believe that has changed for skeleton but I had
> long since lost interest by the time somebody rectified that!
>
> So I would echo Drew's call - by all means do a comparison and share the
> results if you can with us all.
>
> Peter
>
> On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Drew Adams <drew.ad...@oracle.com> wrote:
> > > there seems to be a lot elisp packages for defining templates. Has
> > > anyone studied them and can give a comparison? Basically, i just need
> > > a brief explanation of their syntax and feature.
>
> > > the emacswiki page
> > >http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryTemplates
> > > is very helpful in listing them but a clear summary and comparison is
> > > lacking. here's what i found so far....
>
> > Good idea. Please update the wiki with a summary of the info you found and
> > whatever else comes out of this thread that might be helpful. The next
> > person
> > who looks where you did will then find that missing help. ;-)

Hi Peter,

Sorry i missed your post. (i use google groups and sometimes i miss
posts. (regular newsgroup client won't help much in this regard))

Anyway, i've followed Drew's advice and cleaned up the emacswiki a bit
based on what i've studied.

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

though, i haven't looked into ELSE. Right now i pretty much settled on
yasnippet.

I really feel sorry emacs's user base is dying. The most important
thing i think is to get emacs to use modern terminologies and be
compatible with the minimum of standard modern UI. On the Mac, emacs
modernization is a huge success with Aquamacs Emacs, which is emacs
with pretty much complete Mac OS X UI. On Windows, there's EmacsW32 by
Lennart Borgman, but i think it primarily just changes emacs the Alt
key to conform to Window's Alt=Menu behavior and the core philosophy
of EmacsW32 is a emacs add-on improvement, as opposed to a whole,
complete, “download and use it” software. If Lennart would change his
philosophy and marketing a bit, i think it'd complete revolutionize
emacs overnight, together with Aquamacs, solves the emacs
modernization problem like XEmacs did 18 years ago.

In this year since June, i've filed 40 bug reports to bug-gnu-emacs.
( http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.bug/search?q=xah&start=0&scoring=d&;
)
About maybe 20 has been fixed. About maybe only 5 of my all reports
are suggestions. (these are really conservative ones, most of these
suggestions are suggested by other developers's encouragement for
sending it to bug-gnu-emacs, as opposed to my owe ideas of critical
modernization issues) Roughly, anything that's not bugs are either
receives no reply, or marked as not bug with a explanation (e.g. emacs
does it THIS way), or piled to “wish list”.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄