81–90 of 132 posts
I have two comments, that I think also apply to any other HN post on emacs: 1. We are on version 30. By this time emacs should have come with some better defaults. It's 2023, not 1960 people. 2. Why are 90% of emacs frameworks trying to make it into vi?? I choose emacs, if I wanted vi-ish I would have used vi from the beginning
A lot of people want the power of emacs without the RSI that so often goes with it :)
Good, clear comments on sensible defaults. I've already copied some into my init.el. Plus I've started using early-init.el too.
Thank you!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's the biggest thing to happen to Emacs in 30 years. That is presumably why all the beardies ignore it. Clearly bearing the costs of a wrong decision - learn vim keybindings 30 years ago, and use it in every popular editor and ide, including emacs, ever since. Only half-joking.
:-) That's sort of the point. I learned all those editors (VMS EDT and RPED and LocoScript and Edlin and WordStar and WordPerfect and DisplayWrite and MultiMate and loads of BASIC editors, including the very strange RISC OS one, with two independent cursors) before I ever saw Vi for the first time, which was on SCO Xenix in about 1989 or so. Vi was just another weird editor to me, a supercharged Edlin and you'd have…
I would also agree, that vim keybindings shine for programming, less for prose where one would be all the time in insert mode anyway. Emacs, oh, readline keybindings are less supported in general, but can be found in the most unexpected places - text fields and editors in macOS, console terminals. Now, CUA - I would not even know which editor I should use it with - some amount is supported everywhere, but there is not a lot overlap between let's say windows and macOS, so I would put this idea into a box with a label "Had some clear influence on things we use, but is mostly dead".
Totally curious: is anyone using Emacs seriously on Windows, especially with stuff like LSP? My personal experience is that most of the new dev tooling is Linux/MacOS only, and maaaaybe sometimes it's ported badly to Windows. Are people using Emacs with LSPs for Java, Python, for example? Are they solid? Would you be able to use them day to day for software engineering work?
The one thing in Emacs that does not really work for me are these fancier new completion frameworks (Vertico, Orderless etc) as the performance is abysmal. So I switched back to Helm.
This is the first time I'm hearing of digital tooling used as legacy in the actual meaning of the word. I can't really be surprised that Emacs is the one that pops up, but I'm wondering if anybody has had (or heard) similar experiences
If you’re running emacs 29+ I posit you get less value out of a starter kit or framework than beforehand. Treesitter is baked in for syntax, eglot is baked in for language servers (intellisense), project and tab-bar give you scoped workspaces. use-package is baked in for downloading and configuring dependencies. Modus-themes are also built in now, so you can use modus-operandi and modus-vivendi out of the box. Two in…
Sadly the two of them don't seem to mix well together (eg rust-mode works well with eglot but rust-ts-mode makes eglot ask for LSP server binary and then still does not connect).
Looks like it's early toothing problems but it's not that straightforward (at least yet).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All late-era DOS stuff, and Windows >= 3.x, Mac OS X and ~all Linux GUIs are compliant. CUA was "influenced" by the old Mac OS Human Interface Guide mid/end 80s. The influence on macOS (as it is called now) is tiny. macOS is mostly not compliant.
Oh, yes, absolutely. CUA was 100% clearly IBM's response to the Apple HIG. But it was a good one and mostly it's won. It did adopt Apple's Ctrl-X/C/V for cut/copy/paste, but that's about all. Mac OS X isn't very compliant, no, but it's quite a bit closer than Classic MacOS was, and I find that very welcome. The menus, the hotkeys, the editing keys and so on mostly just work. All you do is use Cmd instead of Ctrl and…
> Cmd instead of Ctrl
For half of the keys this won't work. For example the Function keys. Search something is Command-F. On Windows next search is F3. On the Mac it is Command-G. F3 for search does not work on the Mac. Worse, to type F3 on a Macbook keyboard I need to press World-F3.
My personal favorite would be to have a modern clone of the Symbolics keyboard... the "keymacs" keyboard, in the version with the original Symbolics keyboard layout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl8CGGOrxXE
Available from https://keymacs.com .
If you’re running emacs 29+ I posit you get less value out of a starter kit or framework than beforehand. Treesitter is baked in for syntax, eglot is baked in for language servers (intellisense), project and tab-bar give you scoped workspaces. use-package is baked in for downloading and configuring dependencies. Modus-themes are also built in now, so you can use modus-operandi and modus-vivendi out of the box. Two in…
Why can't something that is built into IDEs like Intellij be built into Emacs even after 30+ years of development?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very much worth taking it as true. I was in the same position as you initially and it took a week or two to get the muscle memory but it's so smooth to navigate using keys near the home row compared to arrow keys.
Plus those keys work in bash shells (anything that uses readline) and a lot of other places too. Not only that but, the basic forward/back char, up/down line are caveman style navigation. Obviously they come in useful, but emacs has a much richer set of navigation options: M-f, M-b move forward/back by words, M-}, M-{ by paragraphs etc.
Actually back then I used tcsh first because it was the one that commonly had niceties like.. arrow keys.
In shell, I use the emacs bindings for kill-buffer, incremental search, and end of line jump, etc. but arrow keys for cursor movement. I suspect most people who aren't using vi bindings are much the same.
To me the ctrl-n/ctrl-p thing is a piece of ideology, not practicality; as sibling comment pointed out, they are not really ergonomic, and really just date to the fact that various terminals did not have consistent arrow navigations at various point.
Actually I did get used to ctrl-p/ctrl-n in the context of an old MUD client I used to use (TinyFugue, actually I still use it sometimes). It used those bindings for history cycling. And the MOO client I used in emacs also used ESC-p for similar purposes, I recall.
How does Emacs (and most addons) run on Windows? I'm tempted to try it out, but knowing the community is (righteously) Unix-fist I'm not so sure it's worth the trouble.
I've been using it for years on windows. Magit is much slower but still great. Some people run emacs inside wsl, and I've done that once or twice to try out unix-only modes, but they were never good enough to convince me to use them. My life improved a lot when I switched to Doom emacs, which takes care of a lot of emacs stuff I don't know that well.
Part of Git appeal is speed, because it works locally, magit on windows take that away
I hope on Linux it is actually fast, otherwise I would not know how to explain its fame and reputation