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Julia Snail – An Emacs Development Environment for Julia Like Clojure's Cider

138 points by TheWiggles 4 days ago | 23 comments

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_...

miroljub 9 hours ago

> 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.

throwaway27448 17 hours ago

[flagged]

tadfisher 16 hours ago

What's not usable about it?

HexDecOctBin 15 hours ago

You can't scroll without moving the cursor.

skydhash 10 hours ago

Split the windows and scroll the other windows. Or mark your current position and pop back to it after scrolling.

throwaway27448 16 hours ago

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.

rudhdb773b 15 hours ago

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.

throwaway27448 15 hours ago

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.

skydhash 10 hours ago

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.

throwaway27448 6 hours ago

Sure, but why would you intentionally make such a slow and buggy editor? I don't buy the idea that this is on purpose.

skydhash 4 hours ago

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).

throwaway27448 3 hours ago

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.

karthink 3 hours ago

> 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.

https://github.com/progfolio/elpaca

Antibabelic 11 hours ago

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.

throwaway27448 3 hours ago

I'll submit more bug requests, I guess. But the emacs community is very hostile to criticism.

bitwize 11 hours ago

Actual multithreading, and a UI that was state-of-the-art sometime later than 1978, might be a good beginning.

jbstack 10 hours ago

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.

bitwize 50 minutes ago

Emacs isn't popular. It might've been in the 90s, but its star has faded now. It has niche appeal at best. Virtually everyone I interact with professionally views it as a dim memory best left in the past, or as something just inscrutably weird. Part of the reason why is "it's the UI, stupid". It needs a far better UX out of the box and by "better" I mean "more aligned with what literally every other program you are likely to use does for UX". (Just enabling cua-mode by default, and making the user toggle on "vanilla Emacs", would go far.) Most developers these days were brought up with Windows or Mac; they don't want to pretend to be using a PDP-11 or Lisp machine. One of the truths preached in the Gospel of Mac is that ALL programs need to be consistent with one another, and use the same visual look, menu hierarchy, and keybindings for corresponding commands.

karthink 33 minutes ago

> It needs a far better UX out of the box and by "better" I mean "more aligned with what literally every other program you are likely to use does for UX". (Just enabling cua-mode by default, and making the user toggle on "vanilla Emacs", would go far.)

> ...

> One of the truths preached in the Gospel of Mac is that ALL programs need to be consistent with one another, and use the same visual look, menu hierarchy, and keybindings for corresponding commands.

I started using Emacs on a Mac recently and was pleased to discover that it is, in fact, consistent with other programs.

- Cmd-C/X/V work as expected (copy/cut/paste from system clipboard)

- Cmd-Z undoes,

- Cmd-O brings up the open-file dialog, Cmd-T opens a new tab,

- Cmd-F invokes search and Cmd-L goes to line, and so on.

It uses the same global menu bar as other programs, and setting the font from the menu works. The only thing that didn't work is using Cmd-Shift-? to search through menu bar options. This is GNU's official MacOS build, not the custom-built emacs-mac or emacs-plus packages.

Last year I helped a non-programmer get started with Emacs (for the first time) on a Mac. After a couple of weeks their only remarks were that the customize interface looks a little dated and the config/custom file has a weird format. They never brought up the keybindings or other UI as an issue. Now I understand why -- Emacs is a reasonably good citizen on MacOS.

teddyh 10 hours ago

Does this look like 1978 to you? <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/>

PhilipRoman 10 hours ago

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

jbstack 10 hours ago

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.

teddyh 6 hours ago

20 years ago was in 2006, not 1978.