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Even more batteries included with Emacs

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Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#101

Post by iLemming »

rgoulter wrote: post #97
glimshe wrote: post #63

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

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 par…

> 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.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#102

Post by beepbooptheory »

jr_isidore wrote: post #58
kqr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

The emacs devel mailing list is way more active than that.. although you do see some regulars there for sure.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#103

Post by db48x »

internet_points wrote: post #79
internet_points wrote: post #56

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?

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

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 " " #'ruler-mode-mouse-grab-any-column)

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#104

Post by amusingimpala75 »

rk06 wrote: post #83
noelwelsh wrote: post #31

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 den…

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

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

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#105

Post by kqr »

sachac wrote: post #67
kqr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sad. Is there a way I can fund them without going through FSF? I tried looking into it before but it seemed like FSF was the only alternative, so I assumed it was well-managed.

https://github.com/tarsius/elisp-maintainers and https://github.com/freetonik/support-emacs-community-devs list quite a few people, so you can support them directly.

Ah, thanks. At least one of them is apparently already receiving recurring donations from me!

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#106

Post by iLemming »

buzzwords wrote: post #4

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.

> 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.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#107

Post by saltcured »

simiones wrote: post #94
Matumio wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Ctrl-C in Emacs is not "terminate program", it is "start of user command", in most modes. Similarly, even in vi/vim, Ctrl-C does something completely different. So this has nothing to do with the terminal whatsoever.

It's an even more basic Unix affordance, that terminals had a key-binding that generated the interrupt signal, and programs could define useful behaviors that commenced upon receipt of interrupt.

It made sense that interrupt in Emacs could get into a controlled state of receiving the next command. It's a little bit like the SAK (secure attention key) concept, as seen with Windows use of ctrl-alt-del.

Edit: Ironically, as a long-term emacs user, I don't really remember any commands that start with ctrl-c! For me, the most common sequences start with ctrl-X or meta-X. Or the prefix search commands ctrl-S and ctrl-R.

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#109

Post by neutronicus »

noelwelsh wrote: post #31

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 den…

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

Re: Even more batteries included with Emacs

#110

Post by skydhash »

saltcured wrote: post #107
simiones wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ctrl-C in Emacs is not "terminate program", it is "start of user command", in most modes. Similarly, even in vi/vim, Ctrl-C does something completely different. So this has nothing to do with the terminal whatsoever.

It's an even more basic Unix affordance, that terminals had a key-binding that generated the interrupt signal, and programs could define useful behaviors that commenced upon receipt of interrupt. It made sense that interrupt in Emacs could get into a controlled state of receiving the next command. It's a little bit like the SAK (secure attention key) concept, as seen with Windows use of ctrl-alt-del. Edit: Ironically…

Ctrl-c is mostly for modes, not core emacs. Org-mode and gnus have a lot of bindings. But there’s a convention that ctrl-c then are not to be bound. There needs to be a modifier for
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