51–60 of 125 posts
Emacs w/org mode was the only program that helped me make sense of the mess and finish the darn thing. I have never seen a program so elegant and yet so powerful, and I am forever grateful it exists if only as a counterweight to the modern tech paradigm.
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What? Emacs has eglot built in. It has had native grep and find stuff for decades . https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Gr... You can change the exec-path to point to your cross compiled grep tool --- or you can change the command string to your tool of choice.
parent is talking about the external dependencies, grep.exe and java and jdtls etc., and in particular how they need to be installed separately from Emacs
They say there’s no Emacs — only your Emacs. This hit home for me. I spent about 6 months working exclusively with emacs to get past the "this is weird/hard because it is unfamiliar to me" stage. At the end of the experiment, I went back to using vim and IDEs. My take personal takeaways from the experience: 1) capslock/ctrl switching is helpful in so many other areas - so I kept that 2) emacs is something you want to…
Or vterm if you don't want to be proficient with eshell.
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employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to Your words, not mine. But gene propagation is up there, and steady wages is a sufficient if not necessary condition for that to happen.
Never in my 20 years of programming, data engineering, engineering management of games, search engines, dating apps and machine learning systems I had a problem of people not wanting to hire me because I prefered Emacs (and linux). In fact, in was the opposite. So what are you even talking about?
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>If you install emacs for windows... ...you are a second class citizen in the emacs republic. I mean, I don't endorse this position, but it's the way things are.
>If you install emacs for mac... ...you are a third class citizen in the emacs republic. In spite of the fact that you can't spell emacs without mac. Also: >If you install emacs for linux... ...you get flamed for not calling it gnu/linux.
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Emacs for Mac is fine though?: https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds That build has native compilation, and if you go for a Doom install you may need to build ripgrep yourself, but... that's also not difficult.
they mean you live within the walled garden, that you are playing make-believe.
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Why not instead blame Windows for not having the standard tools “grep” and “find”?
UNIX standard tools, and not every operating system is supposed to be a UNIX clone. There are ways to search and grep files on Windows.
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I was shocked by the reference to Navidson's house from the House of Leaves. The ending to your first paragraph is also interesting in that HoL starts with "This is not for you."
House of Leaves is something I've been wanting to read since I first saw it, but I've never had the chance. Unlike most books, I feel that I'd be missing out on a lot if I didn't read it in physical form. Emacs, too, is bigger on the inside.
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UNIX standard tools, and not every operating system is supposed to be a UNIX clone. There are ways to search and grep files on Windows.
Feel free to add the code to use something else by default on Windows: https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/p... >
https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/dont-use-emacs-says-jav...
Given that was in 2008, I would update his remark from Netbeans, to any of JetBrains products, Eclipse or whatever.
In any case, you can get those features using Windows Resource Toolkit on the old days, a mix of findstr and other similar improvements on Windows NT linage, nowadays Powershell will be enough.
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>If you install emacs for mac... ...you are a third class citizen in the emacs republic. In spite of the fact that you can't spell emacs without mac. Also: >If you install emacs for linux... ...you get flamed for not calling it gnu/linux.
Emacs for Mac is fine though?: https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds That build has native compilation, and if you go for a Doom install you may need to build ripgrep yourself, but... that's also not difficult.
http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/emacs_macos_emoji.html
Color emoji was deliberately disabled on macOS (2016): policy first, parity later. Emacs 25 turned off multicolor fonts on the Cocoa port even though they worked, with a NEWS note saying they’d be re-enabled "once it is also implemented in Emacs on free operating systems." This was widely read as a political parity requirement that penalized macOS users for years.
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html
"Prefer GNU/GNU-Linux" development time: an explicit guideline. GNU’s own standards advise spending time on features "useful on GNU and GNU/Linux, rather than on supporting other incompatible systems." That guideline has often been cited in Emacs discussions to argue against platform-specific work that would land only on macOS.
https://irreal.org/blog/?p=13137
https://xenodium.com/emacs-send-to-aka-macos-sharing-merged-...
macOS-only features face extra process friction, or must be generalized. The "send-to" (macOS Sharing) patch was finally merged in 2025 -- but only after a lengthy debate and a rework into a cross-platform framework to satisfy GNU policy concerns about adding features that target a non-free OS first. (The end result is good! -- but the path illustrates the extra hurdles for macOS-first work.)
https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac
Long-running reliance on mac-specific forks to get a polished UX. For years, many mac users have depended on Mitsuharu Yamamoto's Emacs Mac port (emacs-mac) or distributions like Aquamacs to get native scrolling, gestures, font/rendering tweaks, and other integrations that either lagged upstream or weren’t accepted. The continued popularity and active maintenance of these forks reflects a gap in first-party mac attention.
https://xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-macos-bug/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44737676
Recent high-profile macOS performance pathology highlighted as "non-primary platform" pain. In 2025, a widely-read analysis ("Emacs: The macOS Bug") traced severe jank/memory growth to how Emacs drives Cocoa’s runloop (e.g., NSApp run usage inside the select/IO path), arguing that historical architecture -- plus macOS not being a primary target -- left deep issues unaddressed for years. Follow-on bug threads on emacs-devel discuss memory fragmentation and event handling. This is more engineering history than politics, but it shows practical consequences of platform de-prioritization.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/applying-free-sw-criteria
FSF position on non-free systems frames the culture. FSF materials repeatedly emphasize using and prioritizing free systems. Even where they explicitly say they didn’t drop support for non-free OSes, the values signal still affects triage, reviews, and what maintainers feel comfortable merging first. This shapes outcomes like color emoji support and the review friction in the "send-to" patch.
https://lists.gnu.org/r/emacs-devel/2012-07/msg00287.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual///html_node/efaq/N...
https://aquamacs.org/features/
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-03/ms...
2008–2010, the long, bumpy road to a native Mac port: During Emacs 23’s cycle the old Carbon port was "completely broken ... for almost a year," and was ultimately removed when the new Cocoa/Nextstep port was merged. For years many Mac users relied on forks (Aquamacs, Mitsuharu's "Emacs Mac Port") for a smoother experience, reinforcing the "not a first-class target" vibe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/bek5b2/til_emacs_was...
https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-April/031758.html
https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/config.h#L...
RMS isn't only against Emacs on Macs and Windows. He also has some strong opinions about UniPress Software, who sold a version of Gosling's Emacs for Gosling's own NeWS window system, Apple Lisa, Mac, MS-DOS, Amiga, Xenix, SGI IRIX, Intergraph, xePIX, Northern Telecom, Cadmus, DEC Rainbow, VMS, VAX BSD, DECWRL Titan, TI Professional, Masscomp, Apollo, HP, Stride, AT&T 3B, System V, Gould, NBI U! ("Nifty Box"), Pyramid, Perkin-Elmer, Cray UniCos, and many other proprietary Unix systems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139
>I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
>Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
>RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
>Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!