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

Post by mesrik » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

jb1991 wrote: post #121

mesrik wrote: post #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 CL…

Firefox emacs bindings still work on Mac since everywhere on macOS supports emacs bindings, nearly.

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

blks wrote: post #81

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.

Modern LLMs are ok with that, but they do make silly mistakes; and a major problem here is that your init.el stops being your own, if it’s written and maintained by an LLM, you will have no idea what’s going on there. And if you would be reviewing every single line of your init file, then what’s the point

Post by enbugger » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

jlouis wrote: post #100

If you do any kind of serious work, you need a text editor. Emacs is still one of the best around. It's fast. It's configurable. And it's under your control. You won't suddenly find your text editor "upgraded" with tons of new features you never asked for. It's all opt-in.

Post by mesrik » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

francoisdevlin wrote: post #126

aag wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is anyone using anything else?

I use vi because I'm not a savage

Post by richard_todd » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

varun_ch wrote: post #45

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.

Doing this for Neovim at work and it’s so much fun. I justify the slopped config to myself because I want to get work done rather than learn the config of some random Neovim package and how it interacts with the rest of the system. I can just ask Claude, “make leader / toggle a terminal at the bottom of the screen , and leader t swaps it to the right side” and it’ll just do that. I liked a theme but I wanted it to al…