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tarsius

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The post I hoped to avoid. The end of C&H Subreddit

old.reddit.com

13 pointsby tarsius12 ay önce2 comments

Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)

emacsair.me

3 pointsby tarsius6 yıl önce0 comments

Evolution of Emacs Lisp [pdf]

iro.umontreal.ca

194 pointsby tarsius8 yıl önce55 comments

Show HN: Magit, the magical Git interface

emacsair.me

24 pointsby tarsius9 yıl önce5 comments

comments

8 ay öncediscuss

Thanks!

Yesterday evening I saw that I had a few new sponsors and was wondering where they had come from.

So in the end something good came of it. The one time donations covered the bill, and I also got a few new monthly sponsors. (Well, unless you also take the hours into account that it took me to move to new hosting, then its way way below minimal wage, but as a maintainer of free software, I am used to that by now.)

Sooo... I guess I should take the opportunity and do a bit of marketing. I am still making a living maintaining Magit et al., so please consider sponsoring my day to day work too. Thanks!

8 ay öncediscuss

That's exactly what I did! Though I would call it morbid curiosity. :P

After initial setup it was smooth sailing. Other more reasonable setups would also have been smooth sailing, but... they weren't setup yet. I was uneasy about the possibility of a surprise bill happening, as it eventually did, but until the brain dead LLM leeches came along, that just never happened. After a decade of it not happening, I wasn't that concerned anymore, but I guess when it comes to the AI bots, I had my head in the sand a bit. I still though something like a 500% bill might happen, not 5000%.

Once it did happen, I immediately shut my sides down, and within the hour the account was no more. On the way out I saw that you can now actually set a "spending limit", it still had a [new] next to it. I tried setting it up, but could only quickly figure out how to setup a notification. It might be possible to set an actual spending limit, but not in a few minutes -- probably got to read some documentation for that.

But even if this were a one click setting, it wouldn't have made a difference at this point. You do this once and I am gone. Also, I wanted to move away from Amazon anyway, so really, this was the kick in the pants that I needed.

For now I am using Github Pages for the very static parts, and the free hosting provided by my email provider, for the slightly less static manuals generated with Github Actions. I would have made sense to use Github for both (not least so that Microsoft could cover the cost of the bots they have unleashed), but I wanted to avoid the complexity of committing to the same pages repository from the CI pipelines of multiple package repositories.

9 ay öncediscuss

Thanks for the bug report. Fixed. The next release will come out in about two weeks.

9 ay öncediscuss

> Transient UIs [...] could usually be replaced by just using a regular special-mode keymap in a custom buffer.

For people who can look at a list of key bindings once and have them memorized, maybe. Turns out most people are not like that, and appreciate an interface that accounts for that.

You also completely ignore that the menus are used to set arguments to be used by the command subsequently invoked, and that the enabled/disabled arguments and their values can be remembered for future invocations.

> The fact that Transient hooks into the MVC and breaks elementary navigation such as using isearch

Not true. (Try it.) This was true for very early versions; it hasn't been true for years.

> or switching around buffers

Since you earlier said that transient menus could be replaced with regular prefix keys, it seems appropriate to point out that transient menus share this "defect" with regular prefix keys, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/17#issuecomment-46.... (Except that in the case of transient you actually can enable such buffer switching, it's just strongly discouraged because you are going to shoot yourself in the foot if you do that, but if you really want to you can, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/114#issuecomment-8....

> has irritated me ever since Magit adopted the new interface.

I usually do not respond to posts like this (anymore), but sometimes the urge is just too strong.

I have grown increasingly irritated by your behavior over the last few weeks. Your suggestion to add my cond-let* to Emacs had a list of things "you are doing wrong" attached. You followed that up on Mastodon with (paraphrasing) "I'm gonna stop using Magit because it's got a sick new dependency". Not satisfied with throwing out my unconventional syntax suggestion, you are now actively working on making cond-let* as bad as possible. And now you are recycling some old misconceptions about Transient, which can at best be described as half-truths.

9 ay öncediscuss

> The Magit experience is due to the use of the transient package for its UI.

(I'm the author of Magit and Transient. (Though not the original author of Magit.))

The transient menus certainly play an important role but I think other characteristics are equally important.

A few years ago I tried to provide an abstract overview of Magit's "interface concepts": https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/the-magical-git-interface/. (If it sounds a bit like a sales pitch, that's because it is; I wrote it for the Kickstarter campain.)

geçen yıldiscuss

I've collected a list of projects that are inspired by Magit at https://github.com/magit/magit/wiki/Inspired-by-Magit.

(And a list of other Git related tools at https://github.com/magit/magit/wiki/Other-Tools.)

geçen yıldiscuss

For dramatic effect, my monitor turned off right after "By this point, distant galaxies and starts are receding so fast that their light has become undetectable."

3 yıl öncediscuss

When a breaking change is made on Emacs' development branch, whether intentionally or not, and some users voice concerns about that change, then the change isn't reverted the minute those concerns are raised. The pros and cons are discussed, different solutions are implemented and improved, and finally a compromise is found.

Users raising their concern started three days ago. That's not enough for this process to have concluded already.

Here's a recent message by Eli (and the message he is responding to).

    > I'm hoping the old behavior stays the default and the new behaviour
    > is what users can opt in with a variable.
    > 
    > If that is what normally happens for much less disruptive changes,
    > why isn't it happening for this deep impacting one?
    
    Because the original discussion of these changes, between two people
    who were interested and involved, indicated that the new behavior
    makes much more sense than the old one.  Now, that others chimed in
    with the opposite views, we are still discussing what should be the
    behavior, and once that is concluded, we can talk about the defaults.

So I think this has been blown way out of proportion. IMO there are some serious issues in how Emacs is developed. I don't have a solution but I think that us users/package-maintainers thinking to ourselves "gee there sure are a lot of stubborn people on emacs-devel, what's wrong with them?" and then the second a change is made that we strongly disagree with, we start behaving like the world is ending, that might be a problem. This is how maintainers get defensive (you might have noticed that in the projects that you maintain).

3 yıl öncediscuss

Magit stopped using the git-wip script ten years ago.

3 yıl öncediscuss

That's an issue with Transient, a dependency of Magit and also authored by me. It's complicated, but essentially the problem is that post-command-hook is not guaranteed to be run after the command. And the second problem is that I tried working around that for too long (and instead resorted to increasingly sophisticated and desperate heuristics), instead of getting it changed in Emacs. I've done that now, so maybe in Emacs 30.

But I have also switched to handling part of it using an around advice, which does work reliably. I've done that about two weeks ago, so changes are that if you update Transient now, you won't ever see that again.

3 yıl öncediscuss

Thanks to all the new, current and former supporters!

I am a bit overwhelmed right now, but will try to provide some background information and answer some questions over the course of this day.

For now, since many of you probably are not Emacs users and might be wondering how this is relevant to you, consider that Magit has inspired some (incomplete) clones, that you might find useful.

See https://github.com/magit/magit/wiki/Inspired-by-Magit for a list of tools inspired by Magit and https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/magit-for-non-emacs-users/ for some older musings of mine on the matter.

4 yıl öncediscuss

SimSkiResort

4 yıl öncediscuss

It probably doesn't make much of a difference because Magit's stashing commands offer more flexibility that even after this addition is still missing from `git stash`. Stash creation is actually one of the very few areas where Magit doesn't use the respective Git procelain commands at all (as opposed to using them and then doing additional things using other pluming and/or porcelain commands as is the case in many other areas).

Also I have to continue supporting older Git releases anyway; people like to use the latest Magit version without considering doing the same for Git, for some reason.

Change the license to GPLv2 OR later.

4 yıl öncediscuss

My point is that I find it difficult to understand how someone can invest so much time/money improving their typing experience without realizing that such a keyboard is the way to go.

I am guessing that it is because we are all so used to "normal" keyboards that it is not enough to be explicitly told what isn't so great about them and being shown a picture of the alternative to overcome the "wow, that surely is a keyboard for freaks designed by freaks" reaction.

And I though that having those two insights about anatomy on your own might just be enough for some to be more open to those freakish keyboards. After all that's what I did; it might work for others too. Back when I bought my first Kinesis Advantage nobody talked about such keyboards. One day I looked at my hands and then at my keyboard and realized that that can't possibly be the best there is. Then I went on the still young internet and searched for something reasonable().

() Of course such keyboards have disadvantages too. Mainly they tend to be on the bulky side, which isn't so great for traveling.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I am somewhat confused by all the love for mechanical keyboards. Don't get me wrong I absolutely agree that a good keyboard is a great investment and think that about 99.99% of all keyboards are complete garbage.

What I don't understand is how someone can spend so much time and/or money getting just the right key switch and researching the right amount of lube to be applied on the inside of those switches, but at the same time not get/build a keyboard that fixes the two major defects shared by 99.99% (probably understating it) of all keyboards.

Instead of telling you what those defects are I invite you to notice them on your own by moving away the keyboard and mouse and what else is on your desk and instead place you hands on the plate and looking at them for a few minutes.

Once you notice those two characteristics of your hands you should also see how your current keyboard (be that an apple/dell/logitech or fancy keyboard for $1000) completely fails to take those into account.

Sure, lube you key switches, I am sure that improves your typing experience too, but compared to fixing the two defects of most keyboards those improvements are only marginal.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I usually try to leave the Magit praising to others in these threads but in this case I would have found it hard to resist. Glad others have already taken care of it. ;P

5 yıl öncediscuss

Let me rephrase that: Give those that already love your project more of the same instead of wasting time on making those who think your approach is fundamentally misguided slightly less dissatisfied.

5 yıl öncediscuss

> So I wonder what marketing techniques they use to make people feel this way; the emotions are strong, and widely shared.

It's easy. 1) Listen to the fans when they suggest a feature even if it doesn't click when first hearing about it, but then approve upon the initial suggestion, turning it into something I myself would want to use too.

2) Ignore the haters except for telling them how to disable that one feature that is so abhorrent it makes the whole tool unusable:

  (with-eval-after-load 'git-rebase
    (setq auto-mode-alist
          (delete (cons git-rebase-filename-regexp 'git-rebase-mode)
                  auto-mode-alist)))

5 yıl öncediscuss

For those you understand Swiss German: Mani Matter – I han es Zündhölzli azündt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkGatIgXERI

6 yıl öncediscuss

Internally they are actually quite different. Hydra is much simpler, which has its benefits. Transient is much more flexible, which it has to pay for with complexity. There's value in having both options.