Even more batteries included with Emacs

https://karthinks.com/software/even-more-batteries-included-with-emacs/

by signa11 • 1 month ago

366 134 1 month ago

karthinks.com

tptacek• 1 month ago

I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired.

rirze• 1 month ago

Try it out! It has its own learning curve, but it's convenient to use in quick and dirty situations.

wafflemaker• 1 month ago

Love that the "don't mess something up accidently" aka input lock is working in dired too(C-c C-q) Here it turns off input lock, so you can freely edit filenames in a dir like if it was a regular text buffer.

unlogic• 1 month ago

Check out sunrise-commander, it is Dired reskinned as a dual-paner. Love how convenient it is to have a powerful integrated file manager.

kqr7• 1 month ago

Is sunrise commander stable these days?

I tried using it maybe a decade ago and back then it had a tendency to mess up window layouts and leave weird buffers around. I notice there's now a GitHub repository which has two spurts of work in its history that probably didn't exist when I last used it – have they improved its usability?

amszmidt• 1 month ago

Fun fact. DIRED pre-dates EMACS.

DIRED on ITS is also similar enough to today’s DIRED.

kickingvegas• 1 month ago

NGL, I find the Dired UX out of the box to be frustrating given its reliance on remembering key bindings, so much so that I ended up writing both a Transient menu and a context menu for it, both available in the Casual and Anju packages on MELPA, respectively. If interested, you can read more about them in the following links: https://kickingvegas.github.io/casual/Dired-Usage.html https://kickingvegas.github.io/anju/Dired-Mode-Context-Menu....

yxhuvud• 1 month ago

It has a million features I don't use. But some features are really, really nice, like C-q for editing file names (C-x-s to persist changes once done). Rectangle editing is so, so nice to have when renaming multiple files.

SoftTalker3• 1 month ago

C-q just tells me the buffer is read-only. How does that work?

fridder• 1 month ago

dirvish is nice

m463• 1 month ago

I think 's' is sort.

More seriously, what I would like to do is ediff files (only the differences) in two directories (have the changed files together one line after the other)

or, ediff two arbitrary lists of files and have them show up in ediff.

rpdillon2• 1 month ago

wdired is still magic to me. Use it almost every day.

dired_fan• 1 month ago

Like you, I've been using emacs (gnu) for decades, and dired is my directory/file manipulation tool, for both linux and windows. I never see a desktop with files/folders or anything like that, it's dired for everything.

For example: Just a few minutes ago, in a directory with lots of PDFs, I did:

- wdired to rename pdfs to a consistent convention. Did this with the awesome multiple-cursors package, then interactively spell-checked and corrected my renamed pdfs. All within writeable dired :-)

- delete several non-pdf files

- mark several possible duplicate files and dired-do-shell-command with sha512sum

- move several pdfs to another directory (split window and open target dir, mark files to move, one-button move using dired-dwim-target.

- mark several pdfs and open with reader app

Obviously that's all do-able with a shell or traditional file manager GUI, but dired was a total win here.

Multiply that win by a hundred times per week, and that's a quality of life enhancement.

kqr7• 1 month ago

dired-dwim-target

Aha! That's what's been missing in my life! Thank you.

agumonkey• 1 month ago

it's bare but i'm surprised people would get confused by it, it kinda follows the usual shortcuts over bare unix util output: mark/select, delete, rename, compress, encrypt

then maybe you dislike the low-discoverability of shortcuts, i think someone added a transient layer (aka a visible shortcut summary with some state management for options)

iLemming5• 1 month ago

I have an opposite argument - no other file manager ever worked for me and I tried and keep trying so many. And not because Dired "is so much better" or "far more capable", or "has better default keybindings", or due to my muscle memory or Stockholm syndrome, no. It's because I can always introspect every single feature of it, override any command, integrate things with any other packages.

I honestly think that we (programmers) collectively went backwards when we tried to abandon Lisp. Why aren't there [popular] apps with a built-in true Lisp REPL for file management, email, version control?

Misunderstanding (or complete incomprehension) of Lisp lead us to the mess we're in today. Some may say: "people made their choice", etc. Well, like so many times in history, majority is not always right, but quite the opposite. We spent almost 2000 years building with inferior Portland cement, which degrades in seawater within decades, instead of using techniques perfected by Romans. We keep piling the crap, making CO2 emissions even worse. And only because we lost the recipe. The Pantheon built with Roman harbor concrete that strengthens in seawater still stands. Emacs is the Pantheon of software - the monumental example of what we've lost, the shining display of continuous progress in a world of regression.

It is heartbreakingly sad because there's now an entire generation that has no clue, because they have not witnessed the decades of callback hell. They don't know anything (or wouldn't even want to know) about "Beating the Averages", Greenspun's Tenth Rule, Gabriel's "Worse Is Better" and how he was so conflicted about his own essay that he spent a decade writing rebuttals under a pseudonym.

Lisp won't ever die, but it will never regain its former supremacy. Because for humans, economic/social reasons matter more than technical merits.

buzzwords• 1 month ago

I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.

binary132• 1 month ago

I’ve come to believe that this is less an emacs problem and more an “emacs plugins that try to do way too much stuff / take too much control” problem. I’m on vanilla emacs (I don’t even use use-package) and my config never breaks any more, even when upgrading major emacs versions. I think it’s about doing things in harmony with the emacs way instead of trying to take over the UI/UX. Emacs Live was always broken when I was using that.

zelphirkalt8• 1 month ago

use-package is now in standard Emacs, so I would count that towards the Emacs way.

But I agree that it is very stable and for me also doesn't break, even though I use use-package a lot and install many key packages. Maybe it is important to note, that I don't need everything there is out there and that I remove not well working packages quickly after trying them. From time to time I also look at my init file and get rid of no longer used stuff.

globular-toast• 1 month ago

What "updates" are you referring to? In more than 15 years of using Emacs I've not once been blocked from doing work due to any kind of breakage.

jjav• 1 month ago

Right, I can't understand what this breaking refers to?

I've been using emacs every day all day every time I'm front of a computer, since 1991. I need only one finger to count the pieces of software I've been using that long that have never crashed or broken on me in any way.

kqr7• 1 month ago

I think it depends on which parts of the ecosystem you use. The org publication/export logic has changed a few times in the past 10 years. If you relied on quirks in that in your configuration you would have had to fix your code to repair it after some upgrades.[1]

I have also run into compatibility issues when using older versions of Emacs with newer packages, and newer Emacs versions with older packages.

[1]: I totally did not build my blog on top of a bunch of these quirks. Every time one of them is fixed I'm reminded of the workflow xkcd. https://m.xkcd.com/1172/

jr_isidore6• 1 month ago

He means time passing, aka bitrot. Emacs is designed for quick hacks which often rely on filesystem and shell behaviors outside itself to remain constant.

neutronicus4• 1 month ago

I'm a Spacemacs user, and I just tried to update all my packages and my emacs is now somehow broken. Luckily I only did that one one of my two work machines so I will just do without the mac until I have the time to unfuck it.

0xpgm• 1 month ago

I use vanilla emacs and compile from source straight from master at whatever commit it happens to be in when I decide to do it.

Only once was there a noticeable breakage when a command like `git log` in the terminal would spit out all its output instead of displaying one screenful at a time. I'd expect someone following stable releases wouldn't experience any breakages.

zelphirkalt8• 1 month ago

I tried Doom or Spacemacs for a while, not sure which one right now. The one that does evil-mode by default. After it crashed a few times inexplicably, I gave up on them and returned to my heavily configured vanilla Emacs, which never crashes. Not sure how the other Emacsen managed to break things and maybe those failures are long fixed by now, but it was quite unfortunate. I imagine other people experiencing such a thing thinking Emacs is unstable.

iLemming5• 1 month ago

does everything break on updates and need fixing

Emacs is a kitchen and emacs-packages are recipes - they come with the exact instructions (source code). If you try to cook fifty different meals all at once, your kitchen inevitably would be a mess. You need to know what you're trying to cook and how to work the recipes, and that comes with experience. No starter kit gives you a structure to un-mess your kitchen magically. Every sufficiently complex Emacs config is a system - a composite interweaving network of thousands of expressions, millions of code lines - it is the Space Shuttle equivalent; Neovim is like a simple twin-engine and VSCode is like a Cessna in comparison. Updates break your Emacs, I update things multiple times a week and rarely anything breaks (I consume over 350 packages); when things stop working - it doesn't usually take even a minute to figure out what's up. Yes, it does happen, but not as often as you painted it. On the other hand - when I need to get something done, there's no other tool in existence that can help me better.

mplanchard3• 1 month ago

TBF to the parent, I also started in spacemacs, then doom, before rolling my own config some years ago, and my early experiences also felt like upgrades were really hard to deal with and often breaking.

I think most of that was because I didn’t understand emacs itself very well, and doom or whatever is an entire extra layer of code and idioms on top of that. Start adding in any custom packages you’ve installed and things get well outside of the realm where a beginner can comprehend them.

Like you, I also now have a pretty large number of packages, and rarely run into issues on update, with any issues that do occur being easy enough to fix. However, I think a lot of that comes from at this point having built my own emacs from the ground up, so I understand what all the components are doing, mostly…

gnulinux• 1 month ago

My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024.

This is largely a discoverability problem

In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinations of packages. I know how to use dired, I know how to install elisp packages, I know how to write emacs lisp myself. The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large packages with "batteries" because any additional package added can bork some random, seemingly unrelated package. E.g. back in the day (maybe around ~2020s or a bit before?) I've been using Spacemacs without vim keybinding, and although batteries were included and I was happy, this issue I mentioned above was even bigger. Because I constantly had to deal with installing a package and discovering that it broke some unrelated LSP, programming, or autocomplete package. It gets quite a bit frustrating at some point. Since this LLM madness started, I never really installed anything LLM related to Emacs, and have been using other text editor for LLM related stuff, Emacs for everything else (especially if there is a strong Emacs package, e.g. agda2-mode is incredibly good, almost flawless!)

Again, just my humble two cents. Obvious Emacs is amazing, and in many ways it's still my go-to, I just think that the biggest issue for me has always been randomly broken packages. Maybe I'm a terrible elisp programmer, that's possible! But I've been using emacs everyday for decades, so idk...

skydhash2• 1 month ago

Both you and the sibling common by buzzwords have the same contexte: You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way. Most package assumes something standard and you can expect something to break if your configuration isn’t.

shevy-java3• 1 month ago

You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way

I heard a similar argument about vim's billion configuration options.

At some point I simply got tired of having to tweak it and switched to a better editor (not emacs though; both vim and emacs are losing in any debate, but it's a fun debate nonetheless since both camps think software can only be written with these two editors; everyone else must be clueless and skillless).

noelwelsh2• 1 month ago

I've used Doom Emacs for years and it rarely breaks. Sometimes things get out of sync, and I delete the git repo and clone it again. That happens once every few years.

People holding your attitude is one thing that keeps people away from Emacs. Very few people want to get into the weeds of customizing their editor. They want to do whatever it is they are interested in and the editor is tool to get it done. Doom Emacs, and other approachable "distributions" are the way to make the power of Emacs accessible.

garn810• 1 month ago

Spacemacs is kind of bloated and easy to break with custom packages which are not part of original build

Paradigma11• 1 month ago

LLMs are a godsend in fixing emacs problems.

tapete1• 1 month ago

I have asked LLMs several Emacs-related questions and _never_ got a reply that works. And at generating elisp code they are especially awful.

zelphirkalt8• 1 month ago

Question: Why VSCode spyware? Why not at least VSCodium? Or is this just a case like people saying Chrome, when they have Chromium or Ungoogled-Chromium?

zelphirkalt8• 1 month ago

My guess is, that writing Emacs packages requires a lot of discipline, to only use the minimal surface one needs from Emacs. And that is, because of the huge amount of mutable global state in Emacs. An actual design flaw, that is sometimes super useful, but at other times super annoying.

gpderetta2• 1 month ago

I'm often amazed how things do not break more often than they do[1] given how deep a package can alter emacs intenrals.

[1] and they do break!

QwenGlazer90005• 1 month ago

All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix.

I used to be on neovim, and that ecosystem compared to emacs feels like this image: https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg

Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes, but I also think the ecosystem is more slow moving than other editors which helps. The editor is older than most devs after all.

shevy-java3• 1 month ago

The irony is that the vim camp can use just the same "argument" here about emacs. So that is a weird comparison to want to make here.

The editor is older than most devs after all.

Well, being old does not automatically mean better. Peak human physical performance typically happens, with some exceptions (Justin Gatlin, if we ignore the use of enhancement drugs) in younger years; see Usain Bolt's fastest time achieved when he was young (23 years, in 2009). For mental tasks it is not so limited, but for physical peaks it is often in the younger years. For some software projects it also is the case that older age means more code, which in turn automatically mean smore bugs, all other things being equal. I am not necessarily questioning as to whether emacs has more bugs; my point is that the comparison/analogy does not work as means of quality assessment.

weinzierl• 1 month ago

If you look at the output of mathematicians and their biggest discoveries it suggests that it is similarly limited for mental tasks.

DonHopkins2• 1 month ago

It's as wrong to anthroporphize Emacs as it is Larry Ellison.

sph3• 1 month ago

The evidence of younger code being better than old one doesn’t pass the smell test, and it’s hard to prove in a nascent field of technology where the oldest piece of software in continuous use has barely reached middle age.

You just cannot compare software robustness to human lifespan. Does software need 3 years at the bare minimum to be self-sufficient? Does it become argumentative and crashes a lot after 13-14 years?

arikrahman• 1 month ago

I find that Emacs is actually the first mover on prime technologies. Just look at gptel and org-mode. Nothing else really even comes close. The reason some odd names exist like yank and kill or kill chain is because Emacs was the first and didn't have anything else to use as reference.

imglorp• 1 month ago

That's right teco/emacs pre-dates xerox gypsy, which coined cut/copy/paste.

rpdillon2• 1 month ago

Kill chain is a military term relating to the sequence of events that lead up to the actual attack.

You're probably thinking of kill ring, which I always thought was a neat term.

db48x2• 1 month ago

Technically Kill and Yank came from TECO, which is an entirely different visual editor that predates Emacs.

royal__2• 1 month ago

Can you explain more what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem? I just switched from Doom Emacs to Neovim and my impression of Neovim has been much better. (I get that Emacs has a much more powerful backbone, I just realized that I didn't really need that power; I just want a good text editor)

rjzzleep• 1 month ago

LSPs keep getting reimplemented, package managers keep getting reimplemented. It's a bit like the react version of text editors.

I used it more than I use emacs, but I agree with the assessment of doom emacs vs neovim.

sph3• 1 month ago

Neovim suffers from the Javascript kids mode of development. Constant change, constant churn, the mirage of stability always behind the corner, you always require third-party packages for functionality that should be core, completely erasing the Lindy effect of vim proper.

It’s a bit sad Neovim has stolen the thunder from the original work of Moolenaar & co. My guess is that neovim will splinter itself down the line further again once lua stops being attractive, while vim & Emacs will keep chugging along for another half century.

lycopodiopsida2• 1 month ago

I think a big difference is that in the end emacs often makes a call and adopts one of the very popular packages to the core - eglot, modus-themes, use-package - there are certainly more, and more will come. It may not make everyone happy, but is sets the baseline - e.g., I am using eglot as package manager, but I wrap it into use-package commands for compatibility reasons.

No such thing exist in neovim (or at least in times when I was using it), so that churn never ends. Also I find, that neovim ecosystem is concentrated on one (very productive) developer in an unhealthy manner - folke often takes time off and half the packages one uses stands still.

But in the end, while I like neovim, I also find that emacs ecosystem has better ideas - which-key, embark do not stop to amuse me (I will not comment on whether it is a good thing for a text editor). I also do not like lua and actively dislike the experience of debugging and configuring neovim with it (maybe less of an issue with LLM these days).

In my experience, running in a terminal absolutely adds a bunch of rendering/performance issues and all kind of surprising failures with hotkeys.

aktau• 1 month ago

I think Neovim itself has been stabilizing quite a bit in terms of upgrade breakage.

A common reason for breakage is/was:

  - Neovim changes some API (deprecating, ...).
  - User upgrades Neovim and theres some incompability, OR user upgrade plugin and that plugin assumes a much newer version of Neovim. (I've often seen Neovim plugins "mandate" either the latest stable Neovim or even HEAD).

But:

  1. Neovim has been including some popular plugins (or at least their functionality domain) in the past few years. This obviates the need for plugin-for-$THING, and reduces breakage.
  2. ISTM that the pace of (new) plugin development in the Neovim-sphere has slowed down.

The latest example of #1 is vim.pack, which is a plugin manager similar to vim-plug, mini.deps (vim.pack is based on mini.deps), lazy et cetera.

I can remember removing vim-commentary (from tpope) a while ago because Neovim included something like it in the main distribution. Granted, that specific plugin never broke because it uses the stable viml API.

iLemming5• 1 month ago

what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem

Nothing's wrong with it. It's just incomparable categorically. Just like you can't really equate a photo-editor and the web-browser. Sure, there's a way to do photo editing in the browser, still will be weird to compare them.

Neovim has been much better

In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it, the opposite is hardly possible - you can bolt Lisp interpreter on top of Neovim, but it won't be the same.

I just want a good text editor

Is that implying Emacs doesn't have "a good one"? You probably just have not discovered some mind-blowing features of the editor. It is hands down the best-known machine ever designed to deal with plain text, nothing even comes close. Indirect buffers alone are such a brilliant idea, I have zero clue how people ever exposed to that power would willingly abandon it. I get it though, building a text-manipulating theater orchestrated by Lisp is not for everyone. Unfortunately, most newcomers get attracted to Emacs hearing "how powerful an editor it is", without ever learning what exactly makes it as such.

Barrin92• 1 month ago

wrong with the Neovim ecosystem?

It's like a willful exercise in ignoring systems thinking. With Emacs every package tends to be designed with Emacs itself in mind, packages like consult, vertico, marginalia etc all built on Emacs' facilities improving not just the package itself but the overall experience of using Emacs, intentionally so.

The Neovim ecosystem is a bit like a dozen architects each designing a room in a house with total disregard for the layout of the house. A very common experience I had, and I never even used many plugins, was that when something was updated often something else would break. An update in the completion engine would cause some weird quirk with the lsp backend, etc.

Alien1Being• 1 month ago

I use both Emacs ( have used it for decades ) and began using Neovim recently.

Neovim seems fairly reasonable. Using the LazyVim distribution of Neovim and it works quite well for my purposes.

QwenGlazer90005• 1 month ago

Distros help a lot shielding you from the churn, but lazyvim is maintained by folke who I hear loves breaking changes. Back when I used lazyvim I remember people complaining that he swapped out some major component randomly, I think it was auto complete.

Respect where it's due to folke, he's been pushing the neovim ecosystem forward incredibly fast. The bleeding edge just ain't everyone's style though.

quertyrecord742• 1 month ago

Use borg package. You'll get rock solid emacs. Worth the effort.

sph3• 1 month ago

Link: https://github.com/emacscollective/borg

Seems worth a look, simply because it’s from the magit author.

cvdub• 1 month ago

Don’t think stuff like borg is necessary now that Emacs has built in support for installing packages from git repos (use-package :vc)

bogomog• 1 month ago

20 or 25 years ago it almost never crashed. Now I might see a crash or freeze once a week or so. And slowdowns several times a day. Of course I'm running more modes now in a more customized environment. Hopefully this new version with more in it will improve the situation.

shevy-java3• 1 month ago

Emacs is a great OS. If you complement it with vim then you may have a working editor as well, provided you know how to exit from vim.

__patchbit__• 1 month ago

Emacs is the AI acupuncture livecode needle probe into AI robotics. Pair it with Helix editor for the old and true, refresh new experience.

neutronicus4• 1 month ago

Just use the emacs-native implementation (evil-mode).

mintflow• 1 month ago

Nice write up about Emacs, ruler-mode is a thing I never used before.

Recently I finally start to C-X M-x to do text scaling, the typing is hard even as near 2 decades user of Emacs.

DonHopkins2• 1 month ago

I LOVE Emacs, but I HATE it when I have the irresistible urge to edit text, but Emacs has dead batteries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo

noelwelsh2• 1 month ago

The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a dent: when people boot it up it has to have the good stuff right in their face. This also means ditching the "vanilla Emacs only" snobbery.

That said, I'm the kind of person to invest time in my editor and I appreciate this post.

lycopodiopsida2• 1 month ago

There is no "problem" in emacs (there are big technical problems, but not this one) and no need to get "most people" on emacs - the ecosystem is healthy by all means and only increasing.

The "out of the box" experience could be better - but for emacs users. Those, who expect VS Code, should just install it and live happy.

pfortuny• 1 month ago

On your first paragraph: exactly. This is not a competition, Emacs is just shared software, not part of a market.

kqr7• 1 month ago

That would be a problem if the Emacs project needed to attract new users that aren't "the kind of person to invest time in" their editor.

I'm not sure it does. Emacs has a healthy user base of people like you and I and appears to receive stable funding from the FSF. I don't see that changing any time soon. Emacs can be Emacs and be just fine the way it is.

I will keep suggesting new users should aim to get as close to vanilla as they have patience for, because that will teach them more about the powerful virtual machine running their text editor, and the ways it can be bent to do their bidding.

jr_isidore6• 1 month ago

appears to receive stable funding from the FSF

No, about ten underemployed or semi-retired graybeards on the emacs.devel mailing list burn most of their waking hours futzing with emacs. That's not an exaggeration. They receive no remuneration.

michaelanckaert2• 1 month ago

I understand your point of view, but as far as the Emacs community is concerned there is no problem.

Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is not an IDE. Emacs is a platform to develop your own tooling. Text is the main interface Emacs offers.

I don't speak for the Emacs community, there isn't even such a thing except maybe semi related groups that share viewpoints, usage and interests. But on the whole, I don't think the "Emacs community" is looking for users or is looking to attract users. At least not users who are looking for "text editor experiences" that mimic or take inspiration from VS Code and the likes.

noufalibrahim• 1 month ago

I generally agree. I look at Emacs like a lisp interpreter with text editing primitives on which someone has built a decent editor.

There was a "community" about a decade or two ago. On Freenode IRC, there were regulars who hung around in #emacs and it was quite nice. There were no corporate sponsors or random startups trying to hire from there so it was genuinely just a bunch of people who enjoyed using Emacs and were chatting about it. It's a part of the reason I got really hooked into it. I still use Org heavily for meeting minutes etc.

zelphirkalt8• 1 month ago

I think whoever really wants to know what Emacs is about will give it a try and spend some time with it. Or some other distro like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs or stuff like that, if they are after a better out of the box experience.

What truly is a problem and extremely difficult to solve, is getting multi core and concurrency into Emacs properly. A truly concurrent lightweight thing would be so amazing to have and make package development probably much easier. No more worrying about accidentally blocking the UI and all that.

To get there would probably break many existing packages and would probably occupy all maintainers for 3 years or so, because Emacs comes from a time, where software was not designed to support that.

steve-atx-7600• 1 month ago

aquaemacs was helpful for me when I was new to emacs backin ‘07. When I forgot some commands, having a gui with menus was handy.

rk06• 1 month ago

rest of the world is ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctrl-v. but emacs is in completely different world.

for emacs to gain mindshare, it needs to meet people where they are, not where emacs was 30 yrs ago.

of course, emacs does not work reliably in windows, so that is another issue

Matumio• 1 month ago

of course, emacs does not work reliably in windows, so that is another issue

No, it's the same issue. In a Linux shell (say, bash or fish) ctrl-c is not "copy" but "terminate program". Most emacs editing keys (copy-paste, motion) work in the shell as they do in emacs, at least in fish and bash (and probably other places in Linux).

kristjansson2• 1 month ago

Learning that those shortcuts are arbitrary, application-defined conventions is the first step toward enlightenment.

amusingimpala75• 1 month ago

M-x cua-mode enables a variety of “traditional” keybinds such as C-x / C-c / C-v for cut / copy / paste

kristjansson2• 1 month ago

Why does emacs have to be for everyone? Its attraction, to this user at least, is the lifelong process of adaptation and discovery that molds it to the user, and the user to it.

It’s like a pet. I love my dog, I’m happy to tell you about my dog, share pictures, etc. But in sharing, I’m not asking you to take _my_ dog. If you’re inspired to go find your own dog, train it, care for it, you can have a dog too!

But neither taking my dog nor the first-day experience of your own dog will replicate, and asking for a dog with a good OOTB experience IMO misses the point.

neutronicus4• 1 month ago

FWIW Spacemacs has been breaking on update for me with depressing regularity the past couple years. I'm afraid to do it

mplanchard3• 1 month ago

I have rolled my own config now, but I started in spacemacs, and then moved to doom a while later. FWIW I found doom much easier to grok and generally stabler.

quertyrecord742• 1 month ago

Also karthik is the author of gptel mode.

internet_points2• 1 month ago

TIL about ruler-mode; now I can delete my own half-assed implementation of the same.

And compare-windows looks really handy. I was about to write a note in my init file to my future self telling me to start using that, but then I saw there is already a note there from my past self, telling me about compare-windows.

scroll-all-mode seems useful, but it seems to only handle keyboard scrolling, not mouse-wheel?

internet_points2• 1 month ago

...except ruler-mode uses dragging of middle mouse button to move the fill column, which on my system scrolls.

db48x2• 1 month ago

Then simply change the keybindings.

Use `C-h k` and then middle click on the ruler-mode’s header to find out what command is bound to the middle mouse button, then bind that same command to a different mouse button:

    (keymap-set ruler-mode-map "<header-line> <down-mouse-3>" #'ruler-mode-mouse-grab-any-column)

zelphirkalt8• 1 month ago

Cool blog post. Though I think the blog post would benefit from having a table of contents. Some things one might know about or not be interested in, but one has to scroll through them anyway.

glimshe• 1 month ago

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

gpderetta2• 1 month ago

No, I think that ̶w̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶m̶u̶t̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶e̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶e̶u̶r̶o̶m̶a̶n̶c̶e̶r̶ emacs will merge with claude instead.

volemo• 1 month ago

Already did: https://github.com/stevemolitor/claude-code.el /j

rgoulter• 1 month ago

I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies.

LLMs are powerful at dealing with text. And Emacs is highly extensible and typically text-oriented. Already I see people say that LLMs much Emacs much easier to use (since you can ask an LLM to come up with the elisp for you), but I reckon what Emacs provides ought to be useful the other way.

With Emacs, it's common to see people favour bringing various parts of the system all within Emacs. I'm reminded of that when I've seen how useful it can be to provide API access to logging/code/documentation when asking an LLM to troubleshoot.

With LLMs, there are several uses cases I see which are a natural fit for org-mode, and just imitated in markdown. -- e.g. org mode have TODO items, checklists, tables (including spreadsheet functionality), code blocks, tagging/properties.

iLemming5• 1 month ago

I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies.

Let's reword this a bit: "I wish Lisp use was more popular with LLMs...", because using Lisp REPL with AI is such a "life hack", I don't get why more people don't do that. When you give AI a "true Lisp REPL" it works wondrously - it stops randomly guessing and starts empirically understanding the problem and the code - saving time, tokens, your mental energy. And with Emacs' text manipulating machinery on top of that, things can get seriously interesting.

mrhottakes2• 1 month ago

I thought this as well, so I spent a few days working with Claude in emacs. Claude managed to totally break my install by suggesting a bunch of "fixes" that were actually not fixes at all. Very poor performance, just hallucinating things left and right.

I don't need Anthropic to break my emacs, I can do that all by myself.

sinker• 1 month ago

I've started experimenting with claude to run end-to-end tests for an emacs package I'm developing. It's incredible.

The way it works:

1. You start emacs in daemon (server) mode.

2. You prompt claude to instantiate an emacs client and write/run tests.

That's it.

Claude will then "pilot" an emacs instance where you can visibly see it running tests. Since almost everything is a first-class function in emacs, and emacs enables almost complete introspection, claude can debug the code in the execution environment. You can also just look at the piloted emacs instance and prompt the agent on what's wrong in the running application state.

This is much more thorough then just having claude write unit tests because many of the issues you might encounter are visual/gui things - which, again, because emacs allows so much introspection, can be examined by looking at the current application state.

This is a good example of "completing the loop."

mplanchard3• 1 month ago

agent-shell is a great package. I’m not an AI booster by a long shot, but it makes integrating LLMs into your standard emacs flows ezpz

justinhj• 1 month ago

Both Emacs and Neovim reward rtfm and working up from a vanilla configuration to your own custom one.

The distribution style packages for these editors make the user skip all that initial learning and discovery. It leads to people writing plugins and packages that simply replicate what was already possible. I have written plenty of elisp myself only to find out I was rewriting builtin functionality.

I'd also say that both editors are fully discoverable but you have to first learn how to use the various help available. Emacs is a bit ahead here with its help options, letting you search for functions, variables, info and man pages, apropos (fuzzy search) and more.

In short start vanilla and explore; this kind of blog really helps with that.

jr_isidore6• 1 month ago

Half of the obscure features mentioned required the author's massaging to make useful to himself. The history of these "solutions looking for a problem" is common, some guy reveling in a rabbit hole of his own creation, the only difference being that guy was old enough to have a gnu.org email address whereas the rest of us publish our dabblings on github as third-party packages.

This reminds me of the fading but ever present power of institutionalism. For probably good reasons we accord higher respect to the Tonight Show than some rando podcaster. But at least in emacs's case, there really is no quality difference between a "batteries included" mode and one off the rack.

ascii0eks84• 1 month ago

nah, vi/vim forever.

Steeeve• 1 month ago

Back when I was on usenet, it was a common joke that all real programmers used emacs - and at the time I was a vi guy. It took me so long to get the muscle memory to do what I needed in vi that I thought I'd never change. But sure enough, I'm a nerd, and just like when I tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I decided to spend two weeks learning emacs. Absolutely frustrating for a few days. But I've been on emacs ever since. Some years I didn't update my emacs config or install any updates at all. Some years, that's MOST of what I did.

No shade at all to VIM or any other community of evangelists who have taken the time to get all the power they can out of their toolset. What works for you works.

But between org-mode and the 70 other features that I've come to know and love (like projectile, flycheck, ivy, m-x butterfly, yasnippet, etc.), I'm never looking back. I will occasionally use another tool for a specific purpose, and sometimes those tools have features and niceness that is hard to beat, but most of what I do professionally is just plain typing and I'm way more productive in emacs than any other typing tool.

Pretty cool that after all these years I can see an article like this and learn a thing or two as well. Thanks OP!

kqr7• 1 month ago

But you can get the best of both worlds by using Evil. That gets you Emacs-the-platform with Vim-the-editor.

Even more batteries included with Emacs

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