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Emacs Is My New Window Manager

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Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#81
Rather than using Emacs standalone, I like using ratpoison as the window manager. That way I can have a full screen Emacs and easily use other applications, too. Bonus points for not having to use the mouse for any of it.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about Emacs is how much it's open to modification. There are compatibility modes to make it work like other editors (eg. "evil mode" to make it work more like Vi, "cua mode" to use "normal" key combos instead of having to learn Emacs's, etc.). There are often a bunch of alternative ways to do things, which have their own pros and cons, so if something seems frustrating, it pays to Google around a littl…

M-x shell is so useful for searching for text strings in outputs. (when grep alone will not do) like all things emacs/ terminal its a little awkward when trying to use the control keys (up arrow, ^r) and they get captured by emacs and not the shell.

Amen, and throw in hi-lock and you can create arbitrary keyword highlighting (like any time the word "error" appears it's colored red). Great for tailing log files.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#83
post #77
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…

I thought stumpwm was dead until just now! Thanks for that. Did they ever fix the system tray situation? When I last used it (several years ago) there was refusal by the devs to implement any sort of systray support and the third-party tools did not fill the gap, so I switched to i3.

I use the stumptray module in stumpwm-contrib https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm-contrib

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#84
post #8

I'm always a little jealous when I see what people do with emacs. But I've never liked using emacs, so I've resigned myself to a permanent, mild case of emacs envy. I think you could get approximately his same functionality with a terminal (e.g urxvt) and tmux for the splitting. In fact I do essentially that at work on Windows, from a cygwin terminal and tmux. When it fits whatever workflow I'm doing from within cygw…

The nice thing about Emacs is how much it's open to modification. There are compatibility modes to make it work like other editors (eg. "evil mode" to make it work more like Vi, "cua mode" to use "normal" key combos instead of having to learn Emacs's, etc.). There are often a bunch of alternative ways to do things, which have their own pros and cons, so if something seems frustrating, it pays to Google around a littl…

Another shortcoming of eshell is the still-incomplete manual.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.h...

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#87
The OP uses (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'fullboth).

In contrast, I use (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'maximized) leaving OS X's menu bar and Dock on the screen.

I do not know if Homebrew package `emacs` has been fixed because these years, I only ever install Homebrew package `emacs-mac` (a.k.a., Mitsuharu Emacs) but it used to be that one had to install Emacs.app via `brew install emacs-mac` instead of the conventional `brew install emacs` for (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'maximized) to automatically and cleanly occupy every screen pixel except for the pixels needed for the menu bar and the Dock.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#89

The OP uses (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'fullboth). In contrast, I use (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'maximized) leaving OS X's menu bar and Dock on the screen. I do not know if Homebrew package `emacs` has been fixed because these years, I only ever install Homebrew package `emacs-mac` (a.k.a., Mitsuharu Emacs) but it used to be that one had to install Emacs.app via `brew install emacs-mac` instead o…

How does this handle multiple displays?

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#90
post #38
post #8

I'm always a little jealous when I see what people do with emacs. But I've never liked using emacs, so I've resigned myself to a permanent, mild case of emacs envy. I think you could get approximately his same functionality with a terminal (e.g urxvt) and tmux for the splitting. In fact I do essentially that at work on Windows, from a cygwin terminal and tmux. When it fits whatever workflow I'm doing from within cygw…

What do you use i3wm with? I like Debian and wonder if there's a best practise setup for desktop environment plus i3wm. Everyone seems to do something different and the setups I've seen have all had minor quirks (wifi tray icon, sound control, locking, etc). Currently my main machine is Ubuntu 14.04 with Xcfe and i3wm and I have a few quirks (something about the keyboard charset picker never aligning with the Xcfe tr…

For what it's worth, I also use i3 under Arch. I don't think there is a canonical right distro or anything, but then again I've only ever used it under Arch so what do I know? Also like the sister comment, I also use dmenu & i3bar to handle the rest of my needs. I generally stay away from things like conky.

Good luck, although I generally found i3 a breeze to set up. Part of that is due to the fact it was already 95% of what I wanted in a WM. I didn't have to spend hours and hours customizing it like dwm or Awesome. Your mileage will, of course, vary.

I will say that the Arch wiki page on i3 is a treasure trove of info, most of which is distro-agnostic or at least easily translated into debian flavors.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/i3

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