Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

rahuljuliato.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 294 posts

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#51

Post by asimovDev »

hoppp wrote: post #5
jerf wrote: post #4

"Is anyone still using emacs?" 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 v…

The two complaints I hear is: 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.

being scared of emacs pinkie was a major contributor for me back as a student to learning vim. I remap ctrl to CAPS LOCK on all my computers as one of the first things but I still end up using my pinkie. I've been playing with the idea of switching ctrl to the spacebar at least in non insert mode though because I still end up using my pinkie a lot when scrolling with Ctrl+E for example

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#52

Post by b5n »

coldtea wrote: post #44
b5n wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all trivial to implement? `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.

Being many things, even if "easy to install" individually, can add up to a hassle to pick, research, install, and configure them.

Why even use `emacs` if you're not willing to learn the basics? There are plenty of alternatives that cater to that preference.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#53

Post by yoyohello13 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #15

Systems like Emacs that are hyper-configurable via a text file seem tailor made for modern LLM's. If you've got a little bit of Emacs experience but bounced off of it because the learning curve was too steep I highly recommend diving back in with your agent. Agents are really good at setting up and maintaining your .emacs/init.el.

A programmable editor really is so amazing now. You can have a LLMs whip up anything you can think of in minutes. Ive used neovim for a long time but never really customized it much. Now I’ve got tons of plugins and can add new features on a whim.

I’ve been thinking of trying out emacs because I think the native gui can probably be even more powerful

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#54

Post by intrasight »

gentooflux wrote: post #46

This stuff all looks great, I can't wait to upgrade to 31 and then forget about all of it and just keep using Emacs the same way I have been for the past 20 years, /again/

LOL. So true!

Except for tree-sitter. That's something I'll be investing time in.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#55

Post by kccqzy »

baokaola wrote: post #17
jerf wrote: post #4

"Is anyone still using emacs?" 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 v…

> 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. 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 :)

I quickly skimmed and did not really see any compelling reason why I should switch from vterm. Then I went into the docs and found compelling performance numbers (10MB cat test: 220ms vs 550ms; throughput: 75MB/s vs 18 MB/s). You could market your project better by showing these numbers :)

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#56

Post by DonHopkins »

xedrac wrote: post #8
hoppp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two complaints I hear is: 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.

I've only ever used emacs in vim mode (evil-mode). Its vim emulation is the best I've seen anywhere.

It's terribly inefficient for emacs vi emulation mode to actually quit emacs when you type ":q", because it takes much longer for emacs to start up than vi, and people use a long-running emacs a lot differently than they use disposable vi's.

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

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#57

Post by pdyc »

I have been using Emacs for more than a decade, and I was always excited about the features. But with AI, something has changed. I no longer type/edit that much. Recently, LSP stopped working, and I was completely oblivious to it for about a week. Earlier, something like this would have been a major annoyance.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#58

Post by whacked_new »

I recently sifted through a bunch of tagged entries in a text file, where each entry had a json array of image names, but the images resided on a remote server. I basically wanted a program that could detect if the cursor was on an image name, and display it on the right.

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

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#59

Post by cyberpunk »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #38
xedrac wrote: post #7

I'm happy to see these improvements. One thing that has always been annoying with Emacs is how much configuration is required to get a modern editor going. Things like Doom Emacs, and Spacemacs try to solve that problem, but both feel far removed from vanilla emacs. I wish Emacs came with several presets so with a single line, you could transform the editor to different base points. For example, most devs want treesi…

I think it is cultural. It's kinda like building your own lightsaber as a Jedi. The part of Emacs/Vim initiation is building your own configuration that works for you. Setting up plugins, keybindings, colorschemes etc. It's part of the fun of it (at least for me).

And then slowly over 20 or so years deleting all of it.

I think I'm down to about 110 lines of ~/.vimrc now :}

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#60

Post by joshuastuden »

jerf wrote: post #4

"Is anyone still using emacs?" 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 v…

Why not use agent-shell? It makes the whole experience great.

Also claude-code-ide.el. try these

Post reply on HN