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Emacs Is My New Window Manager

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Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#51

Post by brudgers »

chriswarbo wrote: post #46
brudgers wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs has many frustrating behaviors out of the box. Typo-> C-z->Crap->Grab Mouse->Expand Emacs Window->Scold self for not calling it a frame. "Frames v. Windows" thing aside, every behavior in Emacs is configurable. It's just that the default assumes that the user fired up Dired to seriously use Dired. The default assumes that the user is using Emacs as Dired and so it becomes Dired with lots of dedicated resources.…

BTW, you can run "killall -CONT emacs" instead of having to use a mouse and expand the window (which is hack anyway). You could also use cua-mode, which makes Ctrl-Z work like in other applications. Or you could use an "Emacs starter kit" which includes it (I started with "Emacs Prelude", although that doesn't include cua-mode if that's what you're after). Other answers are given here, including a one-liner to disabl…

To be clear, I'm not blaming Emacs. I find it mind boggling incredible. It's computer science not an ad-supported app built about culled Creative Commons content. I've written the one liner - which just maps C-z to 'undo. Got the tee-shirt the first time. I just find myself thinking about it as a manifestation of the nature of Emacs because I seem to install some version of Linux over another a few times a year and wind up redoing the defaults because I'm too lazy in the wrong way to set up a central init.el somewheres.

Emacs takes a long time to learn and I think that's a good thing. The fact I grab the mouse after hitting C-z shows that I don't know the OS's underlying hotkeys for managing windows. It shows that I've been trained to use the mouse rather than actually control my computer. I love that Emacs points this out to me regularly.

Speaking of SuperUser, did you know that there's an Emacs site in beta on StackExchange?

http://emacs.stackexchange.com/

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#52

Post by pyre »

coldnebo wrote: post #45

> Of course, I do not install personal software... > My remedy is to install a virtualization system... which is personal software.

He says that his work is virtualization systems, so the install of (e.g.) VirtualBox itself is not "personal software." It really comes down to whether or not you consider the guest OS image running in the virtualization system to be "installing personal software."

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#54

Post by brudgers »

chriswarbo wrote: post #40
brudgers wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs has many frustrating behaviors out of the box. Typo-> C-z->Crap->Grab Mouse->Expand Emacs Window->Scold self for not calling it a frame. "Frames v. Windows" thing aside, every behavior in Emacs is configurable. It's just that the default assumes that the user fired up Dired to seriously use Dired. The default assumes that the user is using Emacs as Dired and so it becomes Dired with lots of dedicated resources.…

Yeah, I do find it annoying how many Emacs-based applications assume they're the only thing running. I'm developing an application built on ProofGeneral, which itself is built inside Emacs. I ran the test suite one day and one function turned out to quit Emacs if it encoutered an error! It took out all of my open shells, files, etc. (everything was saved, but I had to open them all again). Now I'm running the tests i…

I know it's the internet and the standard assumpution is that what I wrote is a complaint.

But just to be clear, I don't find Emac's behavior annoying. I find it empowering. The idea that I might know what I am doing and be doing it seriously is refreshing. Even if I don't.

I get annoyed with the fact that I don't know Emacs better. But I love the fact that I can change that fact. I love that there's something else to learn about Emacs and that it's likely to be worth learning because it involves diving into an incredible piece of software as an object of design.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#55

Post by pyre »

vijaykiran wrote: post #20
tribaal wrote: post #2

I'm a vim guy, but I've been wanting to try emacs for a long time. Any tip for a convert like me? Is the "trick" just to make the jump and persist until it clicks? How do I still get my job done in the mean time?

You might want to try https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

I've been looking into spacemacs, but I've found it to be a bit bloated vs. my personal config. It takes longer to start up, and sometimes just typing text in Insert Mode was sluggish (I imagine due to one of the autocomplete/typeahead libraries). That said, it has a lot of nice things and nice ideas. I'm undecided if I want to port my personal config to spacemacs, or just pull things out of spacemacs into my personal config.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#56

Post by bojo »

tribaal wrote: post #2

I'm a vim guy, but I've been wanting to try emacs for a long time. Any tip for a convert like me? Is the "trick" just to make the jump and persist until it clicks? How do I still get my job done in the mean time?

After years of using vim I made the switch last Friday when I stumbled across this fellow's blog post while randomly trying to figure out more about evil mode: http://juanjoalvarez.net/es/detail/2014/sep/19/vim-emacsevil...

It took all day Saturday to configure things so they mostly behaved the same as my vim environment, mixed with learning emacs specific stuff along the way. There's a few quirks I still need to work out, but the power to configure absolutely anything is worth the switch in my book. I have to admit, I wish I had made the switch sooner.

The biggest thing I desire right now, and maybe I just don't know what to look for, is a way to swap between full sets of buffers. i.e. Group A: handful of IRC windows, Group B: project 1's code buffers, Group C: project 2's code buffers, etc. Maybe someone has a tip?

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#57

Post by chriswarbo »

gexla wrote: post #13

Interesting idea. I would just use something like DWM, a lightweight tiling window manager. You still get the simplicity but with a bit more flexibility. Most people will probably quickly hit a deal breaker with just using Emacs as a WM.

I agree. He's not really using Emacs as a WM, so much as using no WM, and doing as much as possible within Emacs. Note that Emacs can be used as a WM, with a little effort: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsXWidgets

Likewise, it wouldn't be "using Firefox as a WM" by just running Web apps in a fullscreen FF. You'd need something like PyroDesktop http://web.archive.org/web/20080905102046/http://www.pyrodes...

I much prefer my current Xmonad setup to this "Emacs WM":

1) My windows are all fullscreen, whilst his are stuck at their app-specific defaults.

2) I can use multiple desktops (in practice, each one holds a different app, including 2 instances of Emacs)

3) I can show one desktop on my laptop screen and another on an external monitor (or occasionally a projector). I have no idea how his setup would cope with multiple screens.

4) I can have long-running external windows. He must close his before returning to Emacs. Whilst I could live without this, it would be a pain. Even if I only used each app temporarily, I'd have to wait for them to start up every time.

5) I can run slow Emacs applications in a separate instance. I read my mail with Gnus, which gives me four options:

5a) Run Gnus in my main Emacs instance, which will freeze every time updates are fetched.

5b) Start a separate Emacs instance for Gnus, which I must wait for as it fetches updates, since it is overlayed above my main Emacs instance.

5c) Start a separate Emacs instance for Gnus in a terminal, which of course limits me to a character-based interface, and causes key conflicts between the outer and inner Emacs instances.

5d) Have a long-running GUI Emacs instance, fetching mail on another desktop, which doesn't interfere with my main Emacs and I can switch to instantly whenever I like.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#58

Post by pyre »

tribaal wrote: post #4
samsaga2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use emacs with evil mode.

Does that help at all for muscle memory and things like that?

There are things that are missing, but you can modify them. Examples:

I use Ctrl-6 a lot in Vim, but Evil mode only implements it as Ctrl-Shift-6. But it's easy to create the binding (especially since the function that implements the functionality is already there).

The :sort command doesn't exist, but there is :sort-lines, etc.

The other thing that is a bit lacking is folding. Emacs doesn't have folding baked in, and there are several folding implementations (outline-mode, hide-show-mode, etc). I haven't found a good setup of all of the z* commands for folding. spacemacs does a good job of setting them up for org-mode (which leans on outline-mode for folding), but also doesn't implement zj / zk folding movement bindings.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#59

Post by eyko »

a3n wrote: post #14
coding4all wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try Evil Mode. => http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Alternative: go full-on emacs, without evil. I think you need to do that, at least at first, to really learn emacs. How to still get your work done: continue to use vim for your "work," and at first just use emacs to learn emacs. As soon as practical, start using emacs to do just one thing from your work. Somewhere soon after this you'll be comfortable enough to do everything from emacs (although still not an expert)…

I started off with emacs, moved to vim, and now i'm back on emacs with evil mode.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#60

Post by cmiles74 »

technomancy wrote: post #47
wtbob wrote: post #35

One can get the same effect (full-screen emacs, no window decorations, Lisp) with stumpwm, a window manager written in Common Lisp. It's under active development, but it has not so far succumbed to creeping featuritis. And one can then run Firefox instead of Chrome…

Yeah, the main problem with this approach is all the mouseless extensions I found for webkit (vimperator, surf, uzbl, etc) were built around Vim bindings instead of Emacs bindings. For some reason all the Emacs-centric ones (Conkeror, Keysnail) are based on Gecko. Maybe this is because Gecko's extension mechanism is worlds better than the one that ships with Chromium, (which requires you to recompile the C++ just to…

I've been really happy with Conkeror and, IMHO, it's been more reliable than the keyboard driven, webkit browsers (Luakit, DWB, etc.) I've had issues where they'll crash on certain websites (my bank, Jira, etc.) and Conkeror will soldier on.
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