Emacs is my new window manager

https://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.html

by Paul-Craft • 3 years ago

284 189 3 years ago

howardism.org

lvncelot2• 3 years ago

See also EXWM[1]

[1] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

zvmaz3• 3 years ago

The developer has been missing on GitHub since 2020 [1]

[1] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm/issues/845

dustfinger3• 3 years ago

There have been some releases since then though [1] and recent commits [2]

[1] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm/releases

[2] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm/commits/master

tetris11• 3 years ago

Dont. Emacs is there to be tinkered with, and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard.

I love Emacs. I develop for it, financially support it, live it everyday. The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets.

If you love Lisp, give StumpWM a try. Simplicity, DWM. Simplicity with modularity? AwesomeWM just works.

Keep your Emacs config away from your system packages. The latter should prop up the former, not vice versa

kehrin3• 3 years ago

and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard.

Being off by one column of keys on your keyboard can really be a death sentence to your buffer (and maybe even codebase).

aldanor• 3 years ago

... and maybe even your hard drive

noman-land2• 3 years ago

This sounds like running heavy machinery with no safety equipment. Is it really desirable to have a system that would behave this way?

ParetoOptimal4• 3 years ago

That would be your fault for not writing prompts for dangerous actions in your elisp automation though.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

AwesomeWM just works

I use AwesomeWM since forever, with about 12 virtual desktops/workspaces. Nice thing is: it's a tiling WM but I can still put some of the workspace in "floating" mode and they then behave not unlike windows on a regular desktop (which makes some programs happy).

FWIW I'm also a big Emacs user.

markstos• 3 years ago

Sway allows toggling floating and tiled as well.

BaculumMeumEst• 3 years ago

you can do this in stumpWM as well

natrys2• 3 years ago

The feature that keeps me is that same client can be tagged in multiple workspaces, and it just exists in different layouts. It's a little buggy in the 4.3 tree, but fixing focus issue in my config was easy enough, that's the cool thing about hackable software.

This feature is the one of the biggest reasons I haven't tried something like EXWM or StumpWM yet. I really like AwesomeWM but can't say the same about Lua.

xedrac• 3 years ago

Even though I still use X11, my concern with AwesomeWM is there seems to be no path forward to Wayland, which will eventually eclipse X to the point that distros stop supporting it.

peterhil• 3 years ago

I came here to recommend AwesomeWM also.

Here is my setup, written in Fennel Lisp: peterhil/awesome-ultraviolet: Awesome WM theme with dark violet colours https://github.com/peterhil/awesome-ultraviolet

Peter Pan on Twitter: "@app4soft @probonopd @MX_Linux Screenshot of my #AwesomeWM setup. https://t.co/2XMnDEdJfN" / X https://twitter.com/peterhil/status/1463914949491761164/phot...

cutler2• 3 years ago

The ultimate Awesome setup has to be that used by Daniel Berg and Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate. Plenty of Lua and Python scrolling frantically but I don't remember seeing any Emacs.

No-Firefighter• 3 years ago

This looks super sleek than the one recommended in the post

zvmaz3• 3 years ago

AwesomeWM just works.

I used tiling window managers for years (I started with wmii, and I even used ESXM), but now I'm settled on Gnome: Everything works out of the box, and it's mostly keyboard driven. I don't know if there's a good argument for me now to return to tiling window managers.

adiM• 3 years ago

A bit attraction of _tiling_ WMs is ... automatic tiling of windows. Does Gnome do that (haven't used it seriously in about 2 decades)?

Phelinofist• 3 years ago

You can have both with the Forge extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4481/forge/

Add Space Bar and you are close to e.g. i3.

pxc3• 3 years ago

Read the article! This instance of Emacs runs in a VM he uses for accessing and editing his personal tech notes at work, to provide better separation from his work system. He's not risking much. :)

tomcam3• 3 years ago

Actually your wife might be happy to know that I have developed some nearly stable Emacs packages that interface with the Sabre system for airline reservations. The only drawback other than stability is that they require a SPARC workstation running a special variant of FreeBSD.

UniverseHacker• 3 years ago

That’s why I have a SparcStation LX. Fits in the carryon for travel much better than a pizza box. Even easier to travel with now that I can use an LCD and don’t need to lug around the ‘ol Trinitron.

With an inverter and a car battery in my backpack I can even show a digital/ on screen boarding pass with a full 8 bits of color.

ParetoOptimal4• 3 years ago

Dont. Emacs is there to be tinkered with, and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard.

Then you simply roll back to the working git commit of your emacs configuration or NixOS generation!

blackpill0w2• 3 years ago

or NixOS generation

Yes! NixOS is perfect for the author's situation. But maybe his setup is so simple that a little bash script could work just fine.

hollerith2• 3 years ago

I'm good enough at remembering to test my changes that I only need to resort to my backup of my emacs customizations 4 or 5 times a year.

(I test by starting a second emacs, so I can used the still-running first instance of emacs to fix the regressions.)

lvncelot2• 3 years ago

When I got cachix set up in Github CI with my custom emacs package that pre-builds and compiles my configuration including packges, I was as giddy as when I started programming. It's over-the-top, unnecessary, overkill, and an absolute blast. Stuff like this is the reason why I've gotten into this whole thing.

(Also, I think overengineering stuff like this is almost an outlet, which helps me stay pragmatic and goal-oriented at work)

scrame• 3 years ago

I'm sure his wife has the tickets on her phone.

also, this is specifically for a personal vm on a work machine, right?

ssivark2• 3 years ago

Is there a Wayland compatible WM analogue of Awesome?

Elv134• 3 years ago

(AwesomeWM co-maintainer here)

From the point of view of tiling, Sway is an i3 clone for wayland.

For AwesomeWM as a programming sandbox WM, it is much tougher to get something identical. A lot of AwesomeWM work goes into APIs, CI and documentation. Making a scriptable WM using wlroot isn't the end of the world. Making one with mature APIs, backward compatibility, high test coverage, an active userbase large enough to sustain a plugin ecosystem and extensive documentation is much harder.

Making AwesomeWM 100% wayland compatible has been attempted a bunch of time, getting 80% working has been done a few time too, but the last 20% is like 95% of the effort or something and those projects keep stalling. From my side, I put the little free time I have for this into actually realistic features and maintenance work, at least until there's an actual reason to move away from X11. Most users at this point have been using it for years or even over a decade. They want their setup to keep working the next morning over #newshiny.

taeric3• 3 years ago

I'm curious why you would be fumbling in your computer trying to find tickets.

I do find the plethora of window managers interesting. Is that same level of exploration going to exist in wayland? My understanding was that the job of a window manager is very different in that world.

shadowgovt2• 3 years ago

I'm curious why you would be fumbling in your computer trying to find tickets.

I mean, it's certainly a joke, but because jokes are always better explained (/s) it's because most airlines offer the option of paperless ticket emails these days, and if you don't have a smartphone, you'll have to bring up the image on a desktop so they can scan it at the gate.

donio3• 3 years ago

I've been using EXWM since 2016 and this hasn't been a problem for me. Emacs doesn't just magically break on its own. And even if I managed to break my config without noticing it the fix is just a git revert away.

I used StumpWM for many years before EXWM and I don't see how the config situation is any different.

dustfinger3• 3 years ago

I have been using it since 2017 and I have no problems to report that were specific to EXWM. I also use EXWM on my work dev machhine and have set EXWM as the windows manager for my kids computers.I absolutely love it. If you want the best experience, I recommend compiling emacs >=29 and configure it for native lisp + tree-itter so that you can get the most from eglot.

I have run into issues with the odd package, but nothing that has ruined my day.

actionfromafar3• 3 years ago

The solution is obviously to run the Emacs window manager in Docker.

bachmeier• 3 years ago

The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets.

They should be on your phone or you should use your credit card to print them at the airport. I'm sure there are other examples that make your point though. Yours reminded me of the furniture salesman selling a warranty on a couch by saying it'd cover the cost of getting the blood out, or even give you a replacement, should you sit on a scissors and cut your legs up.

femiagbabiaka• 3 years ago

The problem here isn't Emacs, it's the imperative style of package management. Use Nix and then it is very hard to irredeemably bork your stuff

cbsmith3• 3 years ago

Everyone remember ol' GWM?

https://tronche.com/gui/x/gwm/html-manual/overview.html

throwaway16389• 3 years ago

See also Sawfish

https://sawfish.tuxfamily.org/

Worth mentioning, it supports tiles [1] and tabs [2], but those were added after becoming independent from a famous desktop project.

1. https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfis...

2. https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfis...

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets.

Does Richard M Stallman look someone who cares about your wife getting upset for missing the plane while you fiddle with Emacs? That use case of Emacs enabling you to browse the web (accessing the airline’s website which runs non-free software) and check-in so you can ride on an airplane(which also uses non-free software) is not something that in his goals for Emacs.

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets.

Just log out and switch to your backup WM/DE.

paulddraper2• 3 years ago

I have to appreciate the half dozen suggestions for airline ticket management.

HN is nothing if not helpful and well-adjusted.

billfruit• 3 years ago

While Emacs does a lot of things, what feature I miss most from it, is a builtin intellisense like code completion for common language s.

john-radio• 3 years ago

Hah! As an emacs novice, I am happy to learn that my config isn't the only one that breaks so easily.

FrostKiwi• 3 years ago

Do. Emacs is there to be tinkered with and stuff breaking in novel ways is half the fun.

dngray2• 3 years ago

I love Emacs. I develop for it, financially support it, live it everyday. The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets.

100%, what possible benefit is there in tightly integrating a bunch of things so if one of them fails the whole house of cards falls down :-), also good luck with having a system so custom you'll have to do all the debugging, patch writing yourself.

It's a "cool idea" but not one you should be doing in practice. I've never really gotten the emacs is "everything". I thought UNIX philosophy was to do one thing an do it well.

Yes you may be really clever and be able to do that, but there are only so many hours in a day.

xmcqdpt2• 3 years ago

It's a "cool idea" but not one you should be doing in practice. I've never really gotten the emacs is "everything". I thought UNIX philosophy was to do one thing an do it well.

Emacs isn't a UNIX program at all, philosophically speaking.

deathanatos• 3 years ago

morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets.

Hah oh the flashbacks. I've literally done this. Except — ironically — I was keeping the tickets in the airline's app.

The airlines app, idiotically, needed the network to fetch the tickets. The airport's network was misconfigured, as many are: it had one of those idiotic "proxy all traffic to the captive portal"¹ things, so the airline app was confused about why its AJAXs weren't returning the right stuff. But in the moment (i.e., TSA) I wasn't grokking that the error from the app was a lie because the network was malicious.

Perhaps Emacs could have saved me…?

(What I do now is open the ticket beforehand and then screenshot it so that it's local. And we also bring paper fallbacks. Paper cannot have it's packets captured.)

¹There's a proper way to do captive portals. This ain't it.

ptramo• 3 years ago

What's the proper way to do captive portals?

ElectricalUnion• 3 years ago

How did "proxy all traffic to the captive portal" MITM the app? Does the app ignore HTTPS errors? Does the app send your PII in plaintext? Does the app not know what are the expected protocols and status code from it's own backend servers?

yencabulator• 3 years ago

I once had a ticket on my phone. My phone overheated and crashed just before I reached the ticket checking station at the gate. It refused to start for several minutes, because it was still too hot.

Ever since then, I've been printing out plane tickets...

ycombinete• 3 years ago

I have always enjoyed Howard’s posts about eMacs and orgmode. Great to see the two at the limits.

bitwize• 3 years ago

Lisp is life, Emacs is hometown.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Nah, that belongs to Genera, TI and Xerox PARC.

ttyprintk• 3 years ago

Feels like an X-Windows emulator for your corporate OS with extra overhead.

gumby2• 3 years ago

On the original gnu machine (a Vax 750 that had been lying around unused) I made emacs my shell in /etc/passwd. The machine had BSD Unix on it and that was so unpleasant I preferred to go straight into emacs.

Nowadays of course, SVr4 Unix/Linux is the best you can get. How the mighty have fallen.

The /etc/passwd entry was actually a one-page trampoline that exec'ed emacs (as -emacs of course) or, if invoked under anything other than init, /bin/sh for the subprocess of emacs case -- bash hadn't been written yet.

eichin2• 3 years ago

Around the same decade I did a similar thing with an athena vaxstation under X; I noticed recently I still had the same hacks in my emacs startup to keep M-x shell from starting another emacs (I didn't use the trampoline trick, just literally chsh /bin/athena/emacs.)

testfoobar• 3 years ago

SIPB?

Y_Y2• 3 years ago

"Hey dude, how come you're using emacs as your login shell, are you stupid?"

"Nah, it's cool, bash doesn't exist yet."

"Cool."

kykeonaut• 3 years ago

If this isn't the most, "Emacs is a great operating system..." moment, I don't know what is.

yellowapple• 3 years ago

Maybe SystemE? https://github.com/a-schaefers/systemE

actionfromafar3• 3 years ago

Makes more sense than systemd, honestly.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

An idea tried multiple times, that always fails short of using a proper Lisp Machine.

ranger207• 3 years ago

Now you just need a good text editor...

ParetoOptimal4• 3 years ago

https://github.com/meow-edit/meow

Modal editing with seamless emacs integration avoiding the need for evil-collection type packages.

whalesalad2• 3 years ago

I wish I had the enthusiasm, grit and dare I say "sisu" that lisp developers possess. I worked with a guy - very skilled Clojure developer - who was an absolute wizard in Emacs. If a car company sold a vehicle that was powered by emacs, he would have bought it. He will probably construct his own casket out of elisp to be buried in.

gumby2• 3 years ago

Emacs was not originally written in Lisp and is a great programmer's (and general) editor even if you never touch or think of Lisp. You can even write (and save and edit) keyboard macros knowing no programming at all.

sdfghswe• 3 years ago

Didn't emacs give Stallman RSI? No thank you, I'll still with vim.

dmvdoug2• 3 years ago

“And death i think is no parenthesis”

(e.e. cummings)

krylon3• 3 years ago

zile is an attempt to create an equivalent to GNU Emacs using Lua instead of Lisp. There was an attempt to merge the GNU Guile engine into emacs to replace the elisp bytecode VM; Guile would have supported, in addition to elisp, Scheme and Javascript. But last I heard the project had stagnated or fizzled out entirely.

One might argue that VS Code is using Javascript in a similar manner to Emacs using elisp, but ... it just doesn't feel the same to me. I have very little experience with VS Code, though, so I might be mistaken.

whalesalad2• 3 years ago

my problem with emacs is not lisp, lol. lisp is great.

sph• 3 years ago

Removing Lisp from Emacs means completely missing the point and not understanding that's the thing that makes Emacs work.

zile is not Emacs in Lua, it's just a programmable text editor. It's not the same thing.

nathants4• 3 years ago

emacs is a good manager for terminals. i use it instead of tmux.

noman-land2• 3 years ago

I love tmux and have been wanting to dip my toes into emacs. Is there a tutorial or migration guide you could recommend?

ParetoOptimal4• 3 years ago

https://www.masteringemacs.org/book

There are good free ones too, but this one is still best IMO.

nathants4• 3 years ago

plenty of emacs resources around. i would suggest multi-term for terminals. text file and terminal management is very similar.

matrix122• 3 years ago

I tell coworkers who ask "It's Emux... tmux but graphical!"

nathants4• 3 years ago

i run emacs in a terminal. graphics emacs is too fancy for me.

i’ve got firefox and webkit2gtk if i’m feeling fancy.

pxc3• 3 years ago

I decided to finally give tmux a break and experiment with other terminal emulators lately, after enjoying living in tmux for a long time. I started playing with kitty first, which I'm still using. But more recently I've decided to try making more use of vterm, and so far I like it a lot!

wwfn2• 3 years ago

emacs as a terminal has surprisingly good latency [0] but I'm pretty careless with my pipes and frequently overwhelm the buffer with verbose output. Waiting seconds for a ctrl-c to take so I can fix my mistake is painful. Any magical incantations (long line tweaks?) that help with this?

apropos of emacs as WM: with the config kludge I've made and frequent REPL spamming, I've found `killall -SIGUSR2 emacs` essential to get back the editor.

[0] https://danluu.com/term-latency/

harrygeez6• 3 years ago

which term do you use? eshell?

harrygeez6• 3 years ago

I tried to use Emacs for that for a while, but whether it's ansi-term or eshell it always felt a little kludgy. There's always this mental exercise of having to switch between char and line mode. I hate that I could accidentally delete characters in stdout sometimes and then something just breaks in my head for me.

nathants4• 3 years ago

it doesn’t have to work like that, mine doesn’t.

maybe chatgpt can help setup your init.el.

it’s quite a good experience when tuned.

mpenet4• 3 years ago

There’s vterm nowadays

filereaper• 3 years ago

Emacs Enthusiasts unite https://youtu.be/urcL86UpqZc

quux• 3 years ago

"But it's all lisp based... and astonishingly slow"

dmvdoug2• 3 years ago

Honestly, my comment was going to be that this is the most emacs thing I’ve seen today, especially with other users, chiming in with 17 different options he could try.

“I spend more time customizing my computer than using it."

WhereIsTheTruth• 3 years ago

That's, to me, the best form of an OS, linux gives me the ability to shrink my desktop resource usage to a _strict_ minimum, removing all the distractions, so I can focus on the task

krylon3• 3 years ago

As much as I love emacs, that is too spartan for me. I would at least run OpenBox, it is lightweight and unobtrusive. That way I could still run emacs in full screen mode, and escape to a web browser gracefully if needed. I am not that much of a minimalist.

But I won't criticize other people's desktop environments, if it works for them, I wish them hours and hours of joy.

matrix122• 3 years ago

Until GNUs is hit with the g command.

pxc3• 3 years ago

This is the blog of Howard Abrams, who also has a great YouTube channel full of Emacs demos and tutorials.

His video on literate programming for DevOps via Emacs' Org-mode was very impressive and inspiring to me. It's my favorite. :)

https://youtu.be/dljNabciEGg

blackpill0w2• 3 years ago

and since Emacs is in its graphical mode, I can use my favorite fonts, decorate the fringe, etc.

Except when you want to use stylistic sets, is Emacs planning to support them in future releases or are they out of the discussion?

Y_Y2• 3 years ago

The only thing missing from emacs taking over my life like this is a simple to connect to remote emacs server. I want to have my perfect config live on some server somewhere and then connect to the with my local emacs client, and then maybe tramp back if I need to deal with something local. Seems like it should be simple enough but I still haven't managed it.

cutler2• 3 years ago

What's wrong with Github?

mpenet4• 3 years ago

It’s quite easy to have non trivial, reproducible configs on a single file nowadays (ex using straight/use-package). The rare times I needed to use emacs on a remote server with my config my full blow setup is a copy/paste, or curl call away.

shadowgovt2• 3 years ago

Whenever a page doesn’t render well (can you say JavaScript)

I mean, yeah, emacs doesn't have a modern browser engine in it. I wouldn't recommend it for that use case and of course you'll have to "shell out" to a modern browser engine to handle that. Now, if emacs could somehow provide an X render target and let the browser process bind to it as the window, that would be kind of awesome and I could totally see kicking my window manager overboard and just switching to emacs. But the web just "looks wrong" text-only these days.

Apart from that, great experiment and fun idea.

jaccarmac• 3 years ago

I'm not familiar with X internals and am not sure if it's the same thing, but EXWM basically allows that (browsers run in buffers).

svlasov• 3 years ago

Yes, that's possible. You can set any X11 window as a child of another X11 window, the parent window will be responsible to manage (taking care of window geometry and what not) child windows.

bandyaboot• 3 years ago

Don’t stop there. emacs as pid 1, or bust.

dustfinger3• 3 years ago

This was posted by someone else in the thread, but SystemE is close to that dream [1]. There is also this HN thread [2] with more interesting links:

Using the tooling in this repo, I am able to boot from linux to sinit as PID1, and from there to Emacs acting as PID2 using --script mode, performing all typical rc.boot system initialization using Emacs lisp until we hit the getty.

[1] https://github.com/a-schaefers/systemE

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849963

jll29• 3 years ago

RMS uses Emacs as its window manager, too, but without X11 (his ThinkPad runs in text mode).

emersion• 3 years ago

(2015)

thewanderer1983• 3 years ago

While reading this article i was hearing this guys voice. https://youtu.be/urcL86UpqZc

neilv4• 3 years ago

Emacs nuts (I used to be one) can also combine Emacs with a no-decorations tiling window manager (e.g., Xmonad, which I currently use, or i3wm).

That lets them do all their "Emacs is my operating system" stuff, but still gracefully degrade to non-Emacs windows when necessary.

BTW, one time I was doing that, I used a minibuffer frame, shared among multiple frames, and wrote a tweak to help: https://www.neilvandyke.org/perkymbf/

suslik• 3 years ago

That's a great approach. I used xmonad for a while and switched to i3wm recently. At work, where I have to use mac, I replicated my i3 setup using yabai + skxd - that plus Emacs makes using osX almost bearable.

jpeeler• 3 years ago

I thought this was going to be some development news with Wayland compositing going further: https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/wayland/. Maybe it's because 29.1 was on my mind with the full Wayland client support being released.

If you want to just run one application in a modern way (yes, I'm assuming you agree that Wayland is desirable), then check out https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/.

bunga-bunga• 3 years ago

It’s crazy to me, after I stopped being a teenager, to spend almost any time customizing my computer to this point. I used to tweak every screw but when I started working I did the bare minimum to get by and be productive.

Shoehorning things into what they don’t want to be is something I only do behind compensation.

yoyohello13• 3 years ago

People who do this kind of thing primarily do it for fun.

myaccountonhn• 3 years ago

I used tweak my computer like crazy as a teenager as well for fun and then when I entered the workforce.

Now I've started to work part time and so I have a lot more free time and energy which made me pick this up again. It's been a lot of fun and I learn so many things that I then bring into my work. I've switched back to linux from os x and stopped using vscode to instead use emacs.

incompatible• 3 years ago

Nice, up to the point where he can only open a transient (JavaScript enabled) web browser. These days, I need a persistent web browser as well as an Emacs.

efitz• 3 years ago

Reminds me of this video “Interview with an Emacs enthusiast”: https://youtu.be/urcL86UpqZc

firecall• 3 years ago

I've always thought, as a Developer, that somehow I'm missing out by not learning Emacs or VIM.

Some of the Devs I've worked with move so fast in these tools it's mind boggling!

I'm an old school Mac person... I mouse and click things :-)

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

As grey beard that also has earned his UNIX scars, you can move just as fast with an IDE.

Master the shortcuts and keyboard + mouse chords.

harrygeez6• 3 years ago

I'm fairly quick with Emacs... But these days VS Code is so good I don't really miss it. Command palette kind of feels like M-x

Sometimes I feel like I'm too quick that Emacs is trying to catch up, that's the problem. Emacs native compilation made things a lot faster, but I reckon VS Code out of the box plus some extensions makes it a much better value proposition. It's difficult to go back to grepping when VSCode let's you see your regex results _on the fly_

I still use Emacs for Magit. I would pay for a Magit for VSCode implementation

mpenet4• 3 years ago

consult-grep (and it’s variants using git or rg etc) let you do that, with results as you type in mini buffer, with full live previews in a separate buffer (if you want). With an extra keystroke you can export all the results in a buffer and edit/save them in place too.

m_dgrs• 3 years ago

You might be interested in https://github.com/kahole/edamagit

thomastjeffery• 3 years ago

Speed is one thing, but satisfaction is the real value.

This is also why I type with a non-standard layout (Workman) on a non-standard ergonomic keyboard (Keyboardio Model 01). It's comfortable and functional, but above all, is satisfying.

Unfortunately, the change in keyboard broke Vim for me: at its core, vi's functionality is made out of its keybinds. You can remap them, but you can't reconceptualize them. Emacs has about half of this problem.

3np• 3 years ago

For an emacs-inspired actual WM, I highly recommend looking into stumpwm. It became my preferred daily driver even as someone who spent maybe an accumulated hour or two in emacs over my lifetime (that is to say, I'm very much not an emacs person). It's been developed for ~10y, hit 1.0 in 2017, and is still actively developed.

https://stumpwm.github.io/

The OP mentions ratpoison already. ratpoison (or cage for Wayland) is great for those situations where I just want a quick-and-dirty OoB minimal WM without needing to tweak or install anything else. stump gives you groups(workspaces) and a powerful language and environment so you can customize and optimize everything as you like.

They especially shine when you have nested environments (say opening a virt-manager window where you're remote-Xing in to another host where...). It becomes like tmux for X. No more resolving conflicting keybindings - you just have your prefix key to think about. Just like when a tmux-inside-tmux-over-ssh, navigating between different layers becomes second nature.

(BTW OP is (2015) and their referred 2wm seems to be dead and gone now)

mark_l_watson• 3 years ago

Cool setup, but I would run something like this Emacs setup in a full screen term window.

I ‘live’ frequently in mosh+tmux+Emacs but to be honest with as simple of a setup as possible.

hprotagonist• 3 years ago

why not exwm?

stebalien• 3 years ago

I've been using EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) for over 6 years now and can't go back.

- I have _one_ window manager for my files, browser, and terminals. - Everything is keyboard driven with a centrally managed set of hotkeys. - Everything integrates with everything else. It's the convenience of an IDE without ever having to leave it. - Because it's lisp based, every aspect of my environment can be inspected, debugged, and modified at runtime.

Of course, some recent advancements in Emacs really help here:

- LSP support means it's no longer a "second class" IDE/editor. - Native compilation of Elisp means it's much snappier.

catskull• 3 years ago

The best GUI's I've used by far were text based curses (midnight commander, htop, nano, etc). They even support pointer input!

datadeft• 3 years ago

EMACS is my new operating system. Soon...

deafpolygon• 3 years ago

As I get on in my years, I start to believe that emacs proponents are just masoschists in disguise.

DonHopkins• 3 years ago

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

As a result, one of the most amazing pieces of literature to come out of the X Consortium is the “Inter Client Communication Conventions Manual,” more fondly known as the “ICCCM”, “Ice Cubed,” or “I39L” (short for “I, 39 letters, L”). It describes protocols that X clients must use to communicate with each other via the X server, including diverse topics like window management, selections, keyboard and colormap focus, and session management. In short, it tries to cover everything the X designers forgot and tries to fix everything they got wrong. But it was too late — by the time ICCCM was published, people were already writing window managers and toolkits, so each new version of the ICCCM was forced to bend over backwards to be backward compatible with the mistakes of the past.
The ICCCM is unbelievably dense, it must be followed to the last letter, and it still doesn’t work. ICCCM compliance is one of the most complex ordeals of implementing X toolkits, window managers, and even simple applications. It’s so difficult, that many of the benefits just aren’t worth the hassle of compliance. And when one program doesn’t comply, it screws up other programs. This is the reason cut-and-paste never works properly with X (unless you are cutting and pasting straight ASCII text), drag-and-drop locks up the system, colormaps flash wildly and are never installed at the right time, keyboard focus lags behind the cursor, keys go to the wrong window, and deleting a popup window can quit the whole application. If you want to write an interoperable ICCCM compliant application, you have to crossbar test it with every other application, and with all possible window managers, and then plead with the vendors to fix their problems in the next release.
In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry’s standard naked emperor.

linmob• 3 years ago

Please add (2015) to the title, the post date can be found at the bottom of the page.

gigatexal2• 3 years ago

yikes. People really think i3 or sway or other tiling wm's are "heavy"?

That being said I love the idea of living in my editor. That's all i do on i3 anyway with neovim.

How is the stability? If you open a huge file in emacs or something since emacs is your graphical session and it blows up the whole ui and everything goes down too?

this + emacs + evil mode might be fun for me a vim diehard to try.

lavp2• 3 years ago

I loved every minute of my neovim + i3 setup on Arch. Was sad to let that go when I moved into Apple’s ecosystem (their laptop hardware is too good).

I’ve begun switching my to Emacs + evil mode and I thoroughly enjoy it, it fulfills this ‘customization’ gap I’ve wanted for years.

If you want to just jump in and try out Emacs, use Doom Emacs. If you want to go on the journey of making your own config, take a look at “Emacs from Scratch” [1]. It’s been great for me so far.

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bBJ4...

gigatexal2• 3 years ago

Your journey to Apple's ecosystem makes sense. Their build quality is amazing. It's the software (MacOS) I can't stand granted I am all-in on everything Apple on other things (phone, watch, tv, ipad, airtags, etc).

I3 is what brought me to Linux. A true, proper, no-compromises tiling window manager is the killer feature. I didn't go to FreeBSD (given how much I love ZFS) because of containers/docker/podman (and how native fast container stuff is on Linux given it's just abstractions over things in the kernel ... yes yes BSDs have jails but we don't use BSD at work so...) and gaming on Linux (thank you Valve! and wine and proton folks).

Re Emacs every few months I try to dabble but the vi/vim muscle memory is just so so so hard to break. That being said for neovim I use AstroNvim. It's been dope.

uwagar• 3 years ago

a sad life of 80x25 text.

anthk• 3 years ago

Emacs has a graphical interface since... 30 years ago? X11, Motif, GTK2/3... even Cocoa/Gnustep (OSX).

expertentipp• 3 years ago

The learning and configuration curves are too steep for the time I have available. Too lazy to give a try to other CLI window managers. As a tmux user, am I missing something?

herewulf• 3 years ago

There are multiple indications that this was written in 2015, yet the advice seems new. The timelessness of elisp/lisp and the emacs ecosystem.

I actually did the same thing a couple years back on a system where an Arch Linux upgrade resulted in my Xmonad packages being broken beyond repair. "emacs only" wasn't what I was used to but I was impressed with how much utility I got out of just emacs and no window manager. With some of the author's tips, I could probably do the same. Though a lot of my work forces me into using a "real" web browser (with JS and the kitchen sink).

Emacs is my new window manager

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