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

rahuljuliato.com

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

#71
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.

Yup. I've aliased it to e and and it works just fine. Sort of "send file into Emacs". I've also added some elisp to say things like e something.c:43 so that it opens it up at line 43.

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.

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

#72
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.

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

On my MacBook I map the right hand command key to “ctrl” and the right hand option key to “meta”. Since the command keys are right next to the space bar that puts the ctrl key on a thumb position most of the time, and for the times when that isn’t a good key for a given combo I still have caps lock bound to “ctrl” as well. Seems to work reasonably well and lets me keep the usual command and option keys on the left side for “super” modifiers and for typing accented and other characters.

For my desktops, I use an Ergodox EZ keyboard and mapped ctrl and meta into the thumb clusters there.

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

#73
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Vim user (just admitting to my ignorance here), is it not feasible to make something like this yourself? Emacs is said to be flexible and extensible enough, or at least I’m under the impression that it has that reputation. I imagine it would take a lot of time, maybe. Any greybeards that do this?

Yeah, it'd be easy, but the hard part is getting people to agree what the standard will be. 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.

Richer in vscode, i'm not so sure.

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

#74

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.

Agree, I put off using org-roam a few times in the past because I couldn’t be bothered to keep my notes in such order. But now I have an agent that set it up and it’s also recording, organizing, and referencing everything.

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

#75
"Is anyone still using emacs?"

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

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

#76
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.

I used emacs for about 16 years, but never properly gotten into client-daemon setup. What’s your setup? Does the daemon preserve open buffers and stuff, so when you connect you have all your openned stuff? Or each emacs sessions have separate set of buffers and windows?

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

#77
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).

Oh yes. What other software allows you so much to make it your own? Yes, I know the yak shaving argument etc. But what's the fun in opening up some computer/OS/software that looks and feels exactly like everyone elses? An Emacs (and vim) setup is something you can actually have a discussion about with someone else.

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

#78
post #36
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Vim user (just admitting to my ignorance here), is it not feasible to make something like this yourself? Emacs is said to be flexible and extensible enough, or at least I’m under the impression that it has that reputation. I imagine it would take a lot of time, maybe. Any greybeards that do this?

I spent a lot of time making my own elisp config for a custom emacs experience and ended up getting something similar to Doom Emacs. So, I just switched to use Doom :)

This is how I justify not switching back to vanilla, despite not really being an evil user. Doom's module system is really great for organizing a config.

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

#79

back in 2nd year of university I remember thinking that vim is complicated so i went with Emacs. Now after using vim for couple years , I can't imagine going to Emacs and learning it. The availability of vim emulation in majority of text editors and IDEs has been a lifesaver 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…

Emacs evil-mode gives you vim bindings.

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

#80
post #43
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment shows up on every single emacs thread and for the life of me I can't understand why. It takes one line in a shell to pull down a premade config and if that were to be built on, who would decide what gets put in? I don't think it's worth anyone's time to decide what everyone needs in a premade config.

> if that were to be built on, who would decide what gets put in? A small number of people with taste and experience. Like one hopes to be the case for every opinionated preset profile set.

Yes. That's why you should use Doom Emacs.
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