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Emacs Is My New Window Manager

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Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#101

Post by vijaykiran »

pyre wrote: post #55
vijaykiran wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 persona…

I think I had sluggish behaviour sometime ago - but the updates to the config are happening at a very fast pace. I'm a pretty happy user. Also, the chat on https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs is very active too, may be someone there could answer your specific questions (if you haven't asked already).

EDIT: you can also disable the packages you don't need, perhaps that's an option.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#102

Post by scrumper »

I do something similar when I'm taking notes in meetings. It's a nice clean interface.

I love your modeline, which is actually clear - any pointers to how to do it myself? I'm using Prelude (I know) which does its own weirdness.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#103

Post by preavy »

db48x wrote: post #63
deevus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle package management? I just couldn't get things to go my way. Either it worked on Windows or Mac, not both. What flavour of Emacs are you using on Windows?

The biggest cross-platform difficulties are the emacs version and OSX. Make sure all your computers have the same major version (all 23 or all 24; I recommend 24 as it actually has a package manager). OSX was for several years a problem for emacs as there were two or three incompatible ports that did things differently; it's probably gotten better over time. As preavy said, the rest can be handled by checking the OS…

I agree that you should use the same Emacs version. On the Mac I recommend http://emacsformacosx.com/.

I have my .emacs.d symlinked to a folder in Dropbox. So to set up on a new machine I just have to install Dropbox and make a new symlink.

This also worked for me in Ubuntu.

I was concerned when package management came in as a lot more stuff seems to get downloaded, but it just seems to look after itself.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#104

Post by pyre »

vijaykiran wrote: post #101
pyre wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 persona…

I think I had sluggish behaviour sometime ago - but the updates to the config are happening at a very fast pace. I'm a pretty happy user. Also, the chat on https://gitter.im/syl20bnr/spacemacs is very active too, may be someone there could answer your specific questions (if you haven't asked already). EDIT: you can also disable the packages you don't need, perhaps that's an option.

> EDIT: you can also disable the packages you don't need, perhaps that's an option.

I realize that, but it also means tracking down which thing is misbehaving because it's not immediately obvious.

I haven't given up on Spacemacs, but for the time being, I'll need to swap back and forth with my personal config so that I can get work done. At the very least, there are things that I like about it that I'll want to figure out and pull into my personal config.

There are also some things that could use a bit more documentation. For example, porting parts of my config over, I didn't realize that :nohlsearch was already bound to evil-search-persist-remove-all in the Spacemacs initialization.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#105

Post by gcv »

hollerith wrote: post #92
gcv wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this handle multiple displays?

I cannot do a definitive test because I only ever use one monitor at a time, but since (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'maximized) does not make use of the fullscreen mode introduced by Apple with Lion, it will almost certainly not suffer from the most-complained-about problem with multiple monitors on OS X. In contrast, (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'fullboth) does make use of Lion's fullscreen mode -- a…

Looks like both these invocations use the screen the Emacs frame is on.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#106

Post by brudgers »

chriswarbo wrote: post #69
brudgers wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Well, I was mostly piling my own complaints on top of what you said. I also agree that Emacs is wonderful, and I agree that it's great how much power it gives us to reconfigure everything. However, that doesn't make it perfect. It's completely legitimate to point out flaws, whether they're actual bugs, subjective annoyances or hand-wavey project-wide things. For example, I think that the Emacs community should embrac…

The Emacs community embraces starter kits to the extent it makes sense to embrace starter kits. That extent is the extent to which people are willing to expend the energy to develop and maintain those configurations. My impression is that few people have the energy and will to make such projects a successful ongoing enterprise because in the end, pretending that Emacs is notepad.exe comes crashing down to the reality that Emacs is a power tool and even newbies are drawn to it for that reason. The bill for its learning curve comes through.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#107

Post by s_kilk »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
omaranto wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any other example of an Emacs application assuming it is the only thing running? I ask because I use Emacs a fair bit and don't think I've ever come across something like that.

Emacs is unfortunately still single-threaded at its core, so it indeed happens that some subpar code can hang the whole editor while waiting for some network requests to finish, or take down everything in a crash (but this happens extremely rarely; I think I had only a few random crashes on Windows in years of using Emacs).

I use emacs all day every day, and the only crashing problems I've had has been helm-projectile lagging and crashing if you start typing too fast after invoking it.

Otherwise it's rock solid.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#108

Post by VLM »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67
VLM wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most interesting cultural observation thats not often talked about is bare emacs and bare vi are equivalent-ish, but all the "cool" stuff in emacs is in the addons. If you just use bare emacs you'll think its pretty boring and not see any productivity gains. If you use a pre-packaged set for emacs, you'll be utterly overwhelmed trying to learn a million things at once. There are no pre-pack sets with just systemi…

I very much second this comment. Learning Emacs is a very interactive process (much as Emacs itself). It's best to introduce new extensions one by one as you need them, and spending some time using them. I consider myself a noob Emacs user (having been using it exclusively for the last 4+ years), and here's a trick I use if I feel overwhelmed/annoyed by some extension: I decide to spend 30-60 minutes (to the clock; p…

@melpa_emacs twitter feed automatically lets you know packages that are under development. That doesn't mean they're any good LOL, but it does mean they're definitely not abandoned.

meta x package-list-packages or something like that and scroll thru 3000 or so packages. I used to do that with Debian in the 90s or so when there were only a couple thousand packages, to see whats new.

HELM input method addon for emacs is interesting. So you hit alt-x and type pac (spacebar) lis and it searches the command list for the regex pac (logical AND) lis and returns the set of scrollable results. Its why I don't remember if the command is packages-list-packages or elpa-list-package-list or whatever, no cognitive need anymore, you want a list of packages you type some of the word package, spacebar and some of the word list, and its right there, ready for up and down arrow and hit enter. And HELM is applied to pretty much everything in emacs, running commands, switching buffers, opening files, projectile addon stuff... pretty awesome. I think it took me about a month to completely break my decades old tab completion habit when opening files LOL.

Just scrollin about the emacswiki finds some interesting addons.

Finally if you install a pre-pack of 50 addons and init file, you'll be blown away, but they can be a nice map or todo list. I think that was how I discovered perspective addon, I'd seen it and shrugged shoulders, but everyone likes it in the lists of pre-packs so I gave it a try, and I really liked it after trying.

AFAIK there is no "emacs addon of the week" twitter feed or podcast or screencast. This would be an interesting microstartup for some bored new emacs user. "Lets play" screencast video series on youtube featuring exactly one emacs extension per episode sounds fun.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#109

Post by tyrust »

scrumper wrote: post #102

I do something similar when I'm taking notes in meetings. It's a nice clean interface. I love your modeline, which is actually clear - any pointers to how to do it myself? I'm using Prelude (I know) which does its own weirdness.

It looks like he has his emacs config on github [0]. emacs-modeline-mode-line{,2}.org [1] are probably what you're looking for.

[0] - https://github.com/howardabrams/dot-files/blob/master/emacs....

[1] - Yes, he writes his configs in org-mode. This is the first time I've actually seen literate programming used and it's beautiful.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#110

Post by jacobsenscott »

kyllo wrote: post #91
TeMPOraL wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out emacs-server then ;).

Ok, now I have no need for tmux anymore. Thanks!

I use emacs every day. You'll soon find emacs is a terrible xterm/gnome-term/iterm/whatever-term.

* The emacs terminal is very slow. Run a command that produces a few hundred lines of output and you need to wait 30 seconds for it to catch up. A dedicated terminal program displays the output several orders of magnitude faster.

* Emacs crashes or freezes from time to time forcing you to kill all your emacs terminals anyway. It isn't nearly as stable as tmux.

That said you can connect to a tmux session with an emacs terminal. That fixes the stability issue - even if emacs crashes your tmux session lives on. It doesn't handle resizing well, and it is still slow as molasses.

I do use emacs server. That plus emacsclient allows you to open files instantly, and your term mode and gui mode emacs can share buffers.

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