Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch.
Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves.
Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CLI much much convenient and faster than moving hand to reach cursor keys.
My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more. Long time ago it did work. And I have no idea why feature was dropped some rewrite.
e: s/deadline/readline/g
Nothing else is capable of handling the variety of text-related things I want from my text editor.
- I consume HN and Reddit in Emacs. Allows me for example to quickly search through all the links shared in a thread.
- I read Jira and Slack in Emacs - in org-mode. It is far better for finding relevant things, extract them for my notes, etc.
- All my writing done in Emacs. Because I have: spellchecking, thesaurus, etymology and definition lookup, translations, LLM integration, etc. All my notes are in Org (Zettelkasten style).
- All my spaced repetition cards are in Org-mode (they are parts of my notes, I don't need a separate system to manage them). I can generate number of cards to study a topic, from selected notes.
- All my AI sessions are in Emacs. It's amazing that I can send just about any text to an LLM, anytime, anywhere. I can do it in the middle of typing a message, like this very comment.
- I watch YT vids controlling the playback directly. I can pause, rewind, speed-up, mute, extract transcript, etc. - this is indispensable while watching and taking notes.
- my email client is in Emacs (of course, why not)
- my Telegram client is in Emacs. I can easily retrieve a video from any web page and send it directly (without linking the page).
- I can extract any part of my screen and OCR the text out - it pops up in an Emacs buffer.
- I perform all searches from Emacs - I can google, duckduckgo, brave, HN (algolia), wikipedia, etc. I search through my browser history in Emacs.
- I can control my browser tabs, switch between them, find matching lines on the page, jump to links, etc.
- I read and annotate PDFs in Emacs.
- And I haven't even touched anything programming-related (tons of things)
Why, oh why would I ever feel unsatisfied, hoping that there's anything else that can help me do things better? Honestly, there just doesn't exist a piece of software that could help me do even a subset of things I can easily achieve with Emacs. You'd ask me that question in 20 years, if I'm alive and still using a computer - the answer would be - "Yes, what else would I use?"
It sounds inconceivable for non-TUI users such as myself.
What are you using for Reddit now that they have closed access to their API?
The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. I wrote a small python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch to the appropriate layer.
[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata
[1]: https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/dotfiles/-/blob/master/kanata/.co...
So it's not wrong to call these "Emacs" shortcuts.
It's 26 years for me. Emacs is I believe the oldest software I still use. I started on an SGI Irix in 2000. I used it also on HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, and of course all varieties of Linux
> Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves.
And many keystrokes work on MacOS, too. That was a pleasant surprise when I got a Mac laptop for work.
Agredd! Aside from the basic Unix commands (ls, cat, etc), the only substantial program that I use today that I also used in 1991, is emacs.
Well, and perl. I don't write much perl these days, but I have tons of perl scripts accumulated over the decades that I use daily so that counts as using it.
Third oldest for me would be mutt, which is still my primary email client. But I only switched from elm to mutt in.. not sure maybe 1996?
That is a separate discussion from whether you should use ed or vi normally. You learn the "fallback" with the hope of never being forced to used them.
I also used Emacs way back in the day but have been Vim/Neovim for the last 5 years or so. But I recently started a new Lisp project so revisited Lem, actually set it up the way I want (with LazyVim-like bindings), and found with my changes and comfort hacking on it (it's all Common Lisp top to bottom so it's easy to change) that it can replace LazyVim for me now. Just using the ncurses front end BTW.
Add onto that pretty nasty performance issues, internals that aren't exactly well thought-out, and the experience in general having a high background noise of jank, where it's not uncommon for simple things like rainbow parens to randomly break.
I understand why other people like it, but it's really just not for me. I'll stick with Lite-XL.
Interesting? Unless you're using voice dictation, isn't text editing 100% keyboard based input?
People fighting Vim vs. Emacs are materially wrong - they focus on superficial (albeit substantial) angle, instead of considering the core ideas behind them. Vim's augmentation of modality is an incredible, beautiful, practical concept. Lisp - yet another grandest idea in all history of computer science. And these ideas are not overlapping. Lisp-powered vimming grants you genuinely joyful experience - surprisingly empowering and enormously liberating.
Emacs' Lisp interpreter is so capable - accurately simulating vim in it is not impossible, while pretty much every other editor/IDE has failed - not a single VSCode plugin, not Sublime, not IntelliJ with IdeaVim have ever fully implemented vim motions to the degree where it doesn't feel foreign, while Evil-mode in Emacs feels like a built-in feature. Until recently, bolting Lisp into Vim seemed impossible, today you can get a pseudo-Lisp engine with Fennel. Even though it unlikely ever feel like Emacs.
If you're sticking to one thing only due to some muscle memory, sure you're not a savage, you're just a bit ignorant.
You might be able to sync with Dropbox.
Org timestamps infamously do not support them.
I can't imagine using a todo application which lies to me half a year and every time I travel.
So? Emacs has built-in solar and lunar calendars, has world-clock command, format-time-string accepts ZONE argument. Why don't you build a minor mode that calculates the offsets and shows you stuff in different timezones? This can be done in less than 15 minutes. With AI maybe in 20.
You're not dealing with an app you paid for, and your complaint not even an accurate one: Org's timestamp format doesn't encode timezone by default. Emacs absolutely supports the feature you want, you just didn't know about it.
Last time I checked, proper timezone support wasn't there. One could specify single timezone for entire org engine, but not per timestamp. I found some nearly official mailing list thread where participants couldn't settle on a single solution, and so the conclusion was that proper TZ is not coming to org.
> Org's timestamp format doesn't encode timezone by default
> format-time-string accepts ZONE argument
Isn't format-time-string just a visual decoration? Last time I checked, agenda and all other plumbing always treated every timestamp as local (to the TZ configured globally). And so if I recorded that I have a meeting at 1PM London time, my org-agend would show it to me 1PM even if my TZ is set to New York.
> Why don't you build a minor mode that calculates the offsets and shows you stuff in different timezones?
Can you elaborate? My understanding was that I'd need to rewrite entire org in order to support time stamps with mixed time zones embedded in them.
> You're not dealing with an app you paid for
Actually, I'd be willing to pay above the competitor _subscritpion_ price for an org-based organizer with
- proper TZ support
- conflict-free sync between devices
- (cherry on top) touch UI friendly Android client. But honestly, orgzly would do, as long as it supports the above
a) you need to see the timestamp in different timezone(s)
A minor mode with home-zone/visiting-zone vars showing dual times via overlays answers: e.g. "It's 1PM here, what's that in London?" That's the world-clock problem. Useful, easy to solve in ~15 min.
b) anchor an event to a foreign zone permanently - you want to record a fact about an event that is intrinsically tied to a zone
For that, yes, you'd have to either change a bunch of things about Org-mode - every consumer of timestamps (agenda, clock, deadlines, repeaters) would need to become zone-aware.
Pragmatically, you can store the zone without rewriting Org, by piggybacking on a property/tag and a conversion step.
1. Author in foreign zone, but store normalized to one canonical zone (e.g. UTC) in the timestamp, and keep the original zone in a property:
* Meeting
:PROPERTIES:
:TZ: Europe/London
:END:
<2025-06-01 12:00> ; UTC
The limitation is that all the timestamps within a single heading can only be of a single timezone.
---
There's yet another alternative - you can codify the TZ on each timestamp as a propertized text. The problem? Text properties don't get persisted, so you'd have to add custom logic that mangles the timestamps in the file on save (essentially breaking them for all dowstream consumers), and then restores them to normal shape with propertized timezone info. I guess this begets another problem - many Org operations reconstruct the timestamp string from a parsed org-element struct.
I guess, I do stand corrected - if the problem you want to solve is "b" - there isn't a straightforward solution to it.
Another possible solution. Often - but not always - a datetime and timezone pair can alternatively be represented as a UNIX timestamp. Depending on the use case there are tons of ways to manipulate UNIX timestamps, and Org mode might support that naively (I'm not sure, try it).
Bill Joy (creator of vi) once said that if he sits down on a foreign system, he reaches for ed [1].
To be fair, both emacs and vi have "magic exit incantations", though if you have emacs perhaps you have a menu in GUI mode. If not, C-x C-c is really not any more memorable than :wq! The vi one at least has an obvious mnemonic ("write quit") but either way, you need to know an arbitrary sequence of keystrokes.
So customizable- these days Claude will just change it for you, no need to learn the APIs if you're just interested in the result. Yes you're AI-slopping your config, but the drawbacks to that are super low (it's a personal editor, not something I'm inflicting on others)
*) https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard...
For speaking the truth.
Vi-lets, engage!
Answering to preemptively asked question that doesn't appear in TFA: yup I sure still do.
If anything compared to the 486 days, back when Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping was a joke that made sense, my computer now instead of 8 MB or RAM has 32 GB or RAM (so 4096x more RAM, or 2 exp 12 more RAM: something something about transistors doubling every 18 months and all that)...
Who's laughing now? ; )
Seriously though: Emacs with native-compilation, tree-sitter and LSP support (and stuff like Magit and ripgrep integration too) makes it really amazing.
I've been using it for far less time than you have, began ca. 2011 or 2012 here[0], but over that time it has been my constant benchmark for what an editor should feel like, and every other IDE I've used has fallen short. With LSP especially, in the past 6-7yr I have actually been predominantly using emacs. Part of that was being fortunate enough to no longer have to work on much JVM stuff since ca. 2019, but it's also due largely to large advancements in emacs' capabilities.
[0] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/mechanics-sy...
EDIT: In particular, this is exactly where I fell down the rabbit hole:
> If you are not familiar with Emacs you SHOULD run the tutorial, which can be accessed in edwin by holding down the control key and typing h, then, releasing the control key, type t. (C-h t)
I don't know if there's anything else on the entire internet I can specifically point to that has had a greater impact on my professional life... strange.
Yes, even in Codex and Claude Code.
> Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari... My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more
Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite: I had to finally bite the bullet and migrate to Firefox because Chrome/ium switched to GTK4 which removed key themes support.
(That's OK though, I should've moved off Chrome a long time ago.)
I think you mean readline?
Specifically none of these do anything like what they do in Emacs: C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-f and C-b.
This is on Linux, but ISTR finding the same state of affairs on MacOS many years ago during some previous iteration of this conversation.
They also don't work in VSCode.
There is a way to enable Emacs keybindings in all GTK apps on Linux, but it’s quite buggy in practice (many apps define keybindings that override or conflict with these), and I believe the feature is officially deprecated.
In vscode on MacOS?
Chrome Version 149.0.7827.155 (Official Build) (arm64)
Very similar in Visual Studio Code.
(I started using macOS in 2010, I think, and the Emacs-style shortcuts have felt pretty well supported the whole time. I can't promise that applies to Chrome as well though, as I'm not a regular user.)
I don’t daily drive VSCode but I use it for teaching, and then basic Emacs keybindings like C-n and C-a and C-k work pretty much everywhere, from the command palette to the code editor, without any plugins.
I also don’t use Chrome as my daily driver, but keybindings like C-a/C-e certainly work in both text areas and address field, or I would have remembered it as one of the annoying exceptions. I do regularly use a few Electron apps, which are based on Chrome, and it does work fine there.
*: There are a few apps that deliberately break the Emacs keybindings. Microsoft Office is one of them, since they insist that Ctrl keybindings on Mac should do the same as it does on Windows, which is extremely jarring if you rely on the Emacs keybindings everywhere else.
And then there are more ambitious projects like the static analyzer and language server https://github.com/emacs-elsa/Elsa I haven't tried Elsa yet since it seems to require setting up a package manager like Eask (I don't really understand why I have to install a package manager to run a language server, especially when they support four emacs-specific package managers?) and the docs were very light on whether eglot is supported or just lsp-mode.
But for example ^T (letter transpose) do not work on macOS Firefox, which I'm quite accustomed to use also. But ^T works fine same macOS Safari and Chromium.
Firefox apparently has its own input method which do not implement all what macOS supports.
I have never used emacs seriously as an editor, however, I couldn't work without magit. I even manually build emacs 28 so I can re-use the same set of magit configure files.
Yes. I had to briefly visit the world of VSCode during a period of time when it had better AI integration than emacs did, but since I got Claude working well inside of emacs I've returned to 100% emacs. There just isn't anything like the old editors, built in the 80x24 terminal era, for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once. I run a standard widescreen monitor with three vertical windows for emacs, each of which I often will break into two frames, so I can have up to six contexts active at once. I rarely do, but I frequently have 2 and 3. That's my entire 4K screen, full of code, usefully full of code. I'm not an IDE hater but they do put an awful lot of stuff on the screen that on a proportional basis I'm just not using as much as I use the code editor.
I had been getting somewhat nervous about emacs' long term prospects about 10 years ago. I would read the release notes for major versions and generally not be particularly excited about anything. Somewhere around treesitter something seems to have revitalized the project. It may well have been treesitter that revitalized it overall. You end up with a lot more wood behind fewer arrows when the project is able to put more work into generally-useful tools rather than every single language community maintaining their own separate mode for each language.
Now I am more excited about the major releases; for instance term issues are an issue for me with the aforementioned Claude integration. Not enough to stop me, but annoying. At the risk of saying something inflammatory to emacs fans, I feel like emacs is catching up to everything else better now... but it is catching up. It's getting easier to recommend it again as something you may want to seriously consider as a power-tool editor and not just something I used because I had 15 years of finger-experience with it and no significant reason to change. AI has eaten a lot of the IDE tools for me and you can type into a text box in emacs as well as you can anything else.
I still occasionally bring up VSCode now to use the debugger, I still don't feel like I have as nice an experience with that as I do with emacs, but my debugging habits have always been able to deal with doing something a little extra to do a debugging session. By its very nature, you're committing some time to the process just to do the debugging itself, no matter how slick the UI for it may be, so a bit of overhead isn't so bad.
Being a co-maintainer, I'm a bit biased, but I think you should try Ghostel (https://github.com/dakra/ghostel) if you aren't already. And if you are, you should report bugs so we can fix them :)
Otherwise, I think the main advantage over Vterm and other Emacs terminal emulators is that it handles modern fancy TUIs a lot better than Vterm. It's backed by libghostty-vt so supports all the new fangled escape codes. It has a bunch of tricks to force fallback glyphs to the terminal monospace grid to remove the flickering effect when the glyph cells change size during TUI animations, most notably in Claude Code. Btop and Yazi runs great too, if you're into that sort of thing.
Plus a bunch of other things!
Besides the performance and what baokaola already mentioned some things that make Ghostel better than vterm especially when working with those cli agents are:
- proper handling of resizing windows
- progress reports (you get a spinner in the modeline when claude thinks)
- notifications (get an alert when your agent is done)
- drag and drop works
- hyperlinks. urls and files are clickable
https://lawsofux.com/postels-law/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
>In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software that states: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". It is often reworded as: "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Jon Postel, who used the wording in an early specification of TCP.[1]
>In other words, programs that send messages to other machines (or to other programs on the same machine) should conform completely to the specifications, but programs that receive messages should accept non-conformant input as long as the meaning is clear.
I thought it was named Ghostel because of Ghostty and EL (emacs lisp).
It was. But I like the Postels law relation as well :)
cf agent-shell which uses the agent-connection-protocol and provides its own interface.
Of course. Emacs has been my stable editor over many years, handling many languages that came along, surviving many other IDEs that came and gone (the latest being the Cursor sold out).
There're always new enhancements in Emacs, from multiple-cursor editing years ago, to LSP and tree sitter in recent years. Currently I just got into the vertico/marginalia/consult/embark combo packages. Embark with its context based actions seriously is an amazing underrated package.
1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve.
2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time.
Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.
UniPress[1] Emacs's vi emulation mode would actually flip you over to an emacs shell buffer when you typed :q, and the shell would recognize when you typed "vi foo.c" and flip back over to a vi emulator buffer instead of actually running vi, but INSTANTLY, since changing buffers in a running emacs was much faster than actually starting up a new vi process.
So die-hard vi users didn't have to re-learn their muscle memory, and could just stay in the same emacs all the time, while the same old emacs alternately flipped between pretending to be a shell, and pretending to be vi.
[1] "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.
Yes. I use it instead of tmux for that.
For my desktops, I use an Ergodox EZ keyboard and mapped ctrl and meta into the thumb clusters there.
Also claude-code-ide.el. try these
I've been trying to use agent-shell with OpenCode but the abstraction that agent-shell puts on top of it is too much. I can't figure out how to change the model. The command to do it doesn't do anything; I see the correct model list and seem to be able to select it, but then it doesn't change. If I just run "opencode" in the same directory it comes up configured the way I want. The Claude integration works with that workflow too. Opencode comes up with some baby CPU-only model that I've never heard of, and basically, it outputs syntactically correct English sentences but doesn't seem to do much more than that.
Since I mostly use Claude I haven't fussed with agent-shell much yet.
https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell#why-doesnt-agent-she...
This is my major gripe at most IDEs. Every window, or view, or sub-view insists on shaving off a little bit of vertical and horizontal space for... I don't know, tabs or things? Or to tell me what program I'm running?
I just want a dark screen with text (I run Vim, so I'll concede I allow a tiny bit of vertical space for line numbers and a little bit of horizontal space for the command space)
It is crazy nice how invisible the native compilation became.
I switched from vertico to fido-vertical myself, but still use company for in-buffer completions. I tried corfu and completion-preview several times but didn’t get something I’m happy with from it.
;; TODO: Remove? Maybe. For now, trying the following.
(icomplete-vertical-mode 1)
(setq icomplete-delay-completions-threshold 0)
(setq icomplete-compute-delay 0)
(setq icomplete-show-matches-on-no-input t)
(setq icomplete-scroll t)
2. Remove MELPA packages that are now part of Emacs
3. Go to step 1 when new version comes out
Except for tree-sitter. That's something I'll be investing time in.
I can just ask Claude, “make leader / toggle a terminal at the bottom of the screen , and leader t swaps it to the right side” and it’ll just do that. I liked a theme but I wanted it to also change the status line of the focused window, and it just did that for me. I had an issue where the neo tree would freeze for a few seconds, and Claude figured out it was a bad interaction with the git in our toolchain, etc etc.
I have my very own text editor that I customized in plain English! I could’ve learnt spent hours learning Neovim’s style of Lua, researching packages, debugging, etc, but this gets the same stuff done way faster and lets me get to work. This was the biggest thing that kept me going back to either a preconfigured Vim setup like LazyVim or vscode. Definitely recommend.
Claude did my neovim in about 45 seconds, with the instruction “make it work like my vimrc but better and using the cool new stuff” and it’s great! Not my daily driver, but serviceable as EDITOR and prettiest of the bunch.
Using an LLM on init.el is a lot easier than using it in your day job. A 2 line change that you told the LLM to make is easy to internalize.
Even with spaceman’s/doom and the amazing documentation it was always still so much work to configure emacs as a newer user. LLMS have made this nearly instant.
This is a bit of a ramble but it’s so amazing having emacs and an LLM now, I don’t even touch vscode anymore and only find myself touching things like IntelliJ when I really need to dig into something with a debugger.
I’ve been thinking of trying out emacs because I think the native gui can probably be even more powerful
Maybe there will be a resurgance of terribly obscure totally unique quirky configuration files for all these vibe coded apps, unique enough that they don't appear in the training data, so you have to hire real humans to sit at your elbow and help you!
super slow on windows
There is Only One. En garde!
I never asked for native compilation implemented via the trampoline technique, which increases attack surface (because it causes Emacs to routinely execute files in a known-by-attackers location in my home directory) and makes debugging harder, but I'm stuck with it if I want my Emacs to speak the Wayland protocol (and I do).
Ditto the clumsy bolting-on of lexical scope.
It also has nothing to do with Wayland.
And what's wrong with adding lexical scope!?
I do have some concerns about certain features but the ones listed do work, and work great.
Hallelujah and thank you, sweet little baby Jesus. Now I can get rid of this bullshit from my dotfiles:
rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
set _plat = windows
if ( `uname` == Linux ) set _plat = linux
if ( `uname` == Darwin ) set _plat = apple
set _arch = x86
if ( `arch` == arm64) set _arch = aarch64
gh release -R emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs download -p "*${_arch}*${_plat}*"
tar -C ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter --transform 's/^\(.*\.\(so\|dylib\|dll\)\)/libtree-sitter-\1/' -xzf tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz
rm tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz
A) which premade config to choose
B) what half of those settings even do (and do you need them)
C) a lack of “sane” defaults that use the built in abilities
Realistically walking through the article authors “emacs from scratch” config and seeing what can be done with the built in packages and how is hugely instructive but even then you only get that from walking through the config one line at a time and reading “help” documentation for most of it.
At this point emacs is so old that fixing the problem of “sane defaults” is probably near impossible if only for how much it would break existing configs. But it might be a good addition to the tutorial to provide a set of questions and answers (possibly with demonstrations) that allow a new user to generate their own config with some nice defaults. We can assume these days that most new emacs users are coming from some other editors, so asking questions like “do you want auto complete suggestions in an inline drop down like VSCode” could be a perfectly reasonable question and then it could add the correct configuration settings to config for you using just the built in functionality
A small number of people with taste and experience.
Like one hopes to be the case for every opinionated preset profile set.
The core editing components of non-Evil emacs are direct manipulation, not modal. That there are modal aspects on top of that for doing things which practically/genuinely need a modal switch (command entry, search entry, etc) doesn't make the default emacs configuration a "modal editor" in any sense of which people actually apply those terms.
By your definition of modal, almost every application can be described this way. The point is not whether a system has modes, it's whether it makes its core emphasis and interaction modal.
You can see vi's motions as elegant and purposeful. I see them as an accident of history stemming from the poverty of the number of keys and capabilities of the dumb terminal it was designed on.
I encountered both editors in the late 80s and chose emacs precisely because it didn't have the "barely a step up from a teletype" interaction model that vi had.
As for Doom and Spacemacs without Evil.. yes... but why? Their original and state purpose was a packaging with a modal default. It's trivial to toss together your own init.el that brings in the same set of packages these days and with very little effort.
If the goal is an easy packaging of emacs with sensible defaults.. and then you have to go modify the defaults to make it what most people (yes, most) would consider sensible... No, that's not meeting the state use case.
Sure I do, and there's so much tacit knowledge that I can't ever explain verbally or in writing that goes into it, to the point that arguments like yours, challenging my "choices" would ever feel less disingenuous. It's like forcing a left-handed kid to hold the pen "correctly", due to religious dogmas. It just works far more naturally for me and thousands of other people, and just because you don't get it, it doesn't make the model useless. Try to see the other side, sometimes "dumb" ideas do work, and shit that works maybe ain't that stupid.
> Doom and Spacemacs without Evil.. yes... but why
Great question. Now maybe you're trying to learn something despite of "years of the opposite experience" feeding to your hubris. Doom offers a set of Lisp macros that come very handy - map!, add-hook!, defadvice!, undefadvice!, add-transient-hook!, etc. - they genuinely can slash the inevitable boilerplate in the config. It's much easier to experiment with advising and instead then writing ad-remove-advice with different syntax, repeating the symbol names, etc., you'd simply prepend `un` to the form and eval it. add-hook! allows binding multiple fns to multiple hooks. And these are just some examples.
Also Doom does some tricks to make the startup blazing fast. Many times I have compared my config (that pulls over 350 packages) with someone else's vanilla. Doom demonstrably starts much faster.
I think I'm down to about 110 lines of ~/.vimrc now :}
First you need to define what is that much better starting point? Something VSCode like? I find VS Code a bad example of software development tooling (anemic file management, integration with external tooling is cunbersome, VCS integration is flimsy, Code viewing is poor,…).
VSCode is a swiss knife. It has a few tools that are handy for occasional needs. But Vim and Emacs provide a complete toolbox. Learn it once and be set for life.
The only reason we still have IDE is kafkaesque ecosystems that requires expansive and custom tooling just to make sense of it. People can use vim to write code for the Linux kernel but needs XCode for a 5 screens app.
Grooming a personal .emacs or .vimrc is fine if you're working alone, but when you're on a team of professionals working on an application built on a commercial platform, a standard workflow for development is essential and an IDE supplies all the tools, integrations, and conventions to cover the basics of such a standard. Do not underestimate their value.
But they often use subpar components (code editors, file managements, VCS,..). They are tailored to a specific standard and any deviation to that standard result in a lot of pain. So I much prefer documented tooling subset that can be integrated however you want than an IDE.
Also you usually spend more time using a system than learning it. Aiming thing to beginners increase longterm discomfort.
It won't be a perfect transition, but it will make it a lot smoother.
The bigger thing. "Ask the agent to build it" is fine here because init.el is read-only damage. Worst case it writes a file you `git diff` before trusting. That's the safe end of the spectrum. The instinct breaks the moment the same agent is touching things you can't cheaply inspect: package installs, shell-outs in a hook, anything with a side effect off your disk.
The lesson I keep relearning building this stuff: an audit log after the fact tells you what broke, it doesn't stop it. What you actually want is a capability check before the agent acts. This run is allowed to write `~/.config`, not to curl-pipe-sh. Plus a trail you can't quietly rewrite later, a hash chain, not a log file anyone with write access can edit. For an init.el that's overkill. For an agent you'd let near `apt` or your dotfiles repo, it's the whole game.
Selfishly I wasn't willing to spend the time to master Emacs proper back then, but with the LLM craze now I find it much easier to hack on my configs.
> I don't fully understand the editor
Going vanilla will not help you there - well, not completely anyway. Moreover, it may even obscure some features that were easily accesible before.
> I don't fully appreciate the difference between what comes in as part of vanilla Emacs and as a Doom feature
That is not very difficult - learn how to use built-in features - profiler, edebug, describe-, apropos-, hooks and advising, etc.; Start writing Elisp code (with understanding it). In the end, it won't really matter - whatever runs in your Emacs, there's always a way to get to the source. And if you ever need to disable any feature of Doom - there are multiple ways to do that.
I have cua-mode and don't show startup message. What else do I need to modernize Emacs?
Apart from that, I don't have a lot I insist on, and my used emacs package space keeps shrinking.
That said lately I use lem more than I do GNU emacs.
Plus now agent integration (aka GPTEL)
`treesitter` grammars _are_ easy to install.
`eglot` is available OOTB, `lsp-mode` is easy to install and configure if you prefer.
`gptel` is easy to install and configure.
I also don't think I'd ever call configuring Emacs "trivial" compared to more modern editors. Matching the out-of-box experience of something like VS Code or Panic Nova requires some work. This isn't really a knock against Emacs, but I think Emacs fans -- myself included -- need to be honest about that. It's quite possible I would have picked up Emacs years earlier if I hadn't been given the impression that it was just super duper easy, especially once you picked a starter pack. It is not, it probably never will be, and I've come to believe that starter packs are actually a bad idea for most new users. If you don't understand just what it is you're putting in your init.el file and why, then if you run into problems, it's going to be way harder to figure out how to fix them.
I imagine it would take a lot of time, maybe. Any greybeards that do this?
Plus, frankly, a lot of people (myself included) who want a richer experience are pretty much just happy turning on emacs keybindings in VSCode or IntelliJ or whatever.
I don't care what tools other developers use but in January I made my two dev Macs 'VSCode free' and use Emacs for everything. Feels better!
For decades I would spend tons of time experimenting with my Emacs setups but in the last few years I have been shifting to more out of the box experiences. I did write my own agentic coding platform in Emacs Lisp but I keep that separate from .emacs and .emacs.d
Someone should write an Emacs guide for people who haven't meaningfully touched their .emacs since the early 2000s
Should I consider adding tree-sitter into the mix?
The main exception is if you want to program in a language that only has a treesitter-mode, or I suppose if the regular mode has quite buggy syntax highlighting / the ts-mode has much better features.
(There are also fancy minor mode packages like combobulate that make special use of treesitter, but that's tinkering territory.)
Thank you! No more:
(defun cutregion-or-killword (beginning end) "Kills region if marked else backward kills word." (interactive "r") (if (use-region-p) (kill-region beginning end) (backward-kill-word 1)))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-w") 'cutregion-or-killword)
although the brief time I used Magit I was enamored I gotta say. I tried lazygit recently and it evoked the same feeling I had when trying Magit for the first time
Please, if you have something to do with Emacs, can you review this for NetBSD and OpenBSD when using gtk3:
https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1621-emacs-30-wxaw
The issue was traced to library xinput2, when compiled with '--without-xinput2' the issue does not occur. But I do not know if that is something that Emacs can address.
I built a tmux like buffer manager. So I can just pick a window, press Alt-F#, and switch that pane over to whatever buffer I want. It's super easy to even display the same buffer twice but in different panes.
If you're using one without the other you're going to have a bad time.
If I want to change layouts I just close panes down to one and then open it up in the configuration I like. Then I just switch to each pane and Alt-F# the correct content into it.
There's a bajillion ways to do this, some might even involve writing an html file and launching a remote server and tunneling and using a browser and what not. But no! ChatGPT wrote 20 lines of elisp code. I add a tramp basepath, open the text file, and got exactly what I needed. Need any behavior changes, callbacks, transformations? Modify, eval expression, new behavior!
I asked ChatGPT what other system I can use to achieve the same effect. The best answer it gave was neovim. No, neovim can't do that with the same degree of ease.
Disappointing and amazing at the same time.
The drawback of the emacs approach in my case is the tramp latency. To speed things up we'd want to add prefetch and that's gonna be much more than 20 lines and C-x e
Should be normalized now.
https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell
xenodium is doing some amazing work (and not just on agent-shell, either!)
There's also claude-code-ide.el that gives you more of a cursor like experience with autocomplete, simple chat, etc.
Agent-shell is like the Claude code CLI. Claude-code-ide is like cursor with ghost completions/auto complete, chat, etc.
Sweet. GLP1 for my .emacs!
I have to use the pgtk channel, because Wayland.
pgtk/stable is 30.2, pgtk/edge is 32.0.50. Version 31 is not even offered on snap, in none of the channels. I am running on edge (32.0.50) with no problems.
I use emacs --daemon instead of tmux inside my agent sandbox for session permanence and portability. A full editor rather than a layer between me and my editor. I can even waypipe the client windows if I want mouse support.
I'd like to, but there is currently a RAM shortage
[j_jonah_jameson_laughing.mp4]
Emacs is a fine weapon. And one that grows with you over the years of honing it to perfection. Nothing else compares.
Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without it:
https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/open-source-with-profanity-in...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699
DonHopkins on July 6, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Open source code with profanity in comments is sta...
The original terminal emulator terminal.el in gnu emacs, written by mly (Richard Mlynarik), was particularly salty. I finally tracked down a copy, but it looks like somebody complained and in 1990 it was begrudgingly cleaned up a bit, so some of the worst stuff was moved out into a separate file called term-nasty.el for posterity (you, here, now), so as not to give "in to the pressure to censor obscenity that currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US" (oh, Richard <3 ):
https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emac...
1990-08-26 Richard Stallman (rms@mole.ai.mit.edu)
* terminal.el: Move possibly offensive comments to term-nasty.el.
https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li...
[...]
;; disgusting unix-required shit
;; Are we living twenty years in the past yet?
(defun te-losing-unix ()
nil) ;; (A version of the following comment which might be distractingly offensive
;; to some readers has been moved to term-nasty.el.)
;; unix lacks ITS-style tty control...
(defun te-process-output (preemptable)
;;>> There seems no good reason to ever disallow preemption
(setq preemptable t)
;; I suppose if I split the guts of this out into a separate
;; function we could trivially emulate different terminals
;; Who cares in any case? (Apart from stupid losers using rlogin)
(?\C-b . te-backward-char)
;; should be C-d, but un*x
;; pty's won't send \004 through!
;; Can you believe this?
;; Did I ask to be sent these characters?
;; I don't remember doing so, either.
;; (Perhaps some operating system or
;; other is completely incompetent...)
;;-- Not-widely-known (ie nonstandard) flags, which mean
;; o writing in the last column of the last line
;; doesn't cause idiotic scrolling, and
;; o don't use idiotische c-s/c-q sogenannte
;; ``flow control'' auf keinen Fall.
"LP:NF:"
;;-- For stupid or obsolete programs
"ic=^p_!:dc=^pd!:al=^p^o!:dl=^p^k!:ho=^p= :"
;;-- For disgusting programs.
;; (VI? What losers need these, I wonder?)
"im=:ei=:dm=:ed=:mi:do=^p^j:nl=^p^j:bs:")))
(setq te-process
(start-process "terminal-emulator" (current-buffer)
"/bin/sh" "-c"
;; Yuck!!! Start a shell to set some terminal
;; control characteristics. Then start the
;; "env" program to setup the terminal type
;; Then finally start the program we wanted.
(format "%s; exec %s"
te-stty-string
(mapconcat 'te-quote-arg-for-sh
(cons program args) " ")))))
;;;; what a complete loss
https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li...
;;; term-nasty.el --- Damned Things from terminfo.el
;;; This file is in the public domain, and was written by Stallman and Mlynarik
;;; Commentary:
;; Some people used to be bothered by the following comments that were
;; found in terminal.el. We decided they were distracting, and that it
;; was better not to have them there. On the other hand, we didn't want
;; to appear to be giving in to the pressure to censor obscenity that
;; currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US.
;; So we decided to put the comments here.
;;; Code:
These comments were removed from te-losing-unix.
;(what lossage)
;(message "fucking-unix: %d" char)
This was before te-process-output.
;; fucking unix has -such- braindamaged lack of tty control...
And about the need to handle output characters such as C-m, C-g, C-h
and C-i even though the termcap doesn't say they may be used:
;fuck me harder
;again and again!
;wa12id!!
;(spiked)
;;; term-nasty.el ends here
Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty:
https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m...
Noah Friedman, Aug 3, 1992, 4:54:20 AM
In article <15i2n9...@hal.com> wood...@hal.com (Nathan Hess) writes:
>In article <FRIEDMAN.9...@nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, friedman@gnu (Noah Friedman) writes:
>>It's by no means necessary, but it's funny.
>Along the same lines, look at lisp/terminal.el
Of course, terminal.el is actually useful, albeit not terribly powerful.
(and terminal.el is pretty mild compared to some of the other things I've seen written by mly. :-))
Incidentally, a lot of terminal.el has been rewritten in version 19.
Too bad... I liked all the variable names and comments in the original.
Jamie Zawinski, Aug 5, 1992, 12:40:38 AM
In the FSF-distributed Emacs 19, the obscenities (will) have been stripped from terminal.el, though they are preserved in a file called term-nasty.el, to avoid appearing to bow to the censors.
In Lucid GNU Emacs, terminal.el will remain as nasty as it ever was.
-- Jamie "Truth, Justice, and the Fucking First Amendment" Zawinski
Even if you didn't have emacs, I don't think you are forced to use VSCode. You could just use sshfs and use any local editor, but I guess other editors also have remote editing plugins