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Emacs Is My New Window Manager

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Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#151

Xmonad, Emacs, a terminal and Chrome pretty much do the same thing for me on Ubuntu desktop, possibly with a little less pain. Mostly mouse free operation, and easy resizing, swapping etc. If you want to learn Emacs, just jump in head first. Try and use it like a native. Just for kicks I'm trying to do the same with vi by forcing myself to use it for anything vaguely sysadmin related.

I really like fluxbox, is very lighweight, so my setup is fluxbox, tilda and chrome. If by some reason I want a full desktop, I just need to type Alt-f2, nautilus, and boile, gnome takes the desktop.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#152
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the files for this public, can I see your config?

Looking at his user info, it looks like this might be it: https://github.com/julienchastang/dotemacs/blob/master/setti... It looks like it's meant to be included directly as a config file, which seems like deep magic to me. :-)

@math0ne @gknoy

Sorry for answering late:

https://github.com/julienchastang/dotemacs

You'll need tangle/babel

  ➜  .emacs.d  cat init.el 
  (package-initialize)
  (require 'cl)
  (require 'ob-tangle)
  (org-babel-load-file "~/git/dotemacs/settings.org")
https://github.com/julienchastang/vagrant (still a work in progress)

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

TRAMP to me seems to be the worst offender here. If your connection is slow or you mistyped the domain you pretty much just have to wait for it to time out

C-g

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#154

Xmonad, Emacs, a terminal and Chrome pretty much do the same thing for me on Ubuntu desktop, possibly with a little less pain. Mostly mouse free operation, and easy resizing, swapping etc. If you want to learn Emacs, just jump in head first. Try and use it like a native. Just for kicks I'm trying to do the same with vi by forcing myself to use it for anything vaguely sysadmin related.

Do you find yourself needing other little helpers (panel applets) or just run xmonad as is?

I run Xmonad with no status bars or anything and it works great. No clutter, just the windows I want to have there. I tried it out as an experiment on my laptop to get more screen real estate and then I carried it over to my next desktop install. I used to think that it was obvious that there were things I wanted to have visible all the time, but in reality there was really only one thing that could even qualify for that and that was a clock. When I realized I could do without that, even, I decided to skip status bars entirely.

The effect is what the article is seeking, without the pain of "Oh, but if I want to do this thing I can't". Free with workspaces that can be used for anything, meaning you don't have to deal with this "It opens up on top of everything else, making multitasking useless".

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#155

Xmonad, Emacs, a terminal and Chrome pretty much do the same thing for me on Ubuntu desktop, possibly with a little less pain. Mostly mouse free operation, and easy resizing, swapping etc. If you want to learn Emacs, just jump in head first. Try and use it like a native. Just for kicks I'm trying to do the same with vi by forcing myself to use it for anything vaguely sysadmin related.

I generally like that setup better as well, but imo one of the advantages of the emacs approach is that there is more of a culture of providing extensive API hooks for scripting. If you run an RSS reader inside emacs, it's expected that it'll expose many/most of its operations via elisp function entry points, so what's going on in the reader is "transparent" in a sense: scripts can query the list of feeds, the items…

He could still run Xmonad and have a workspace for a browser, only switching to it when he wants to check something. Running a proper window manager will not interfere with how many things he wants to run in Emacs.

I've run Xmonad bare on a dual core 1 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM and it ran great. The processes he runs are going to vastly outweigh Xmonad in terms of resource usage. This is one of the worst non-solutions I've seen to this, when he could've had the same setup without any of the hassle.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#157

Xmonad, Emacs, a terminal and Chrome pretty much do the same thing for me on Ubuntu desktop, possibly with a little less pain. Mostly mouse free operation, and easy resizing, swapping etc. If you want to learn Emacs, just jump in head first. Try and use it like a native. Just for kicks I'm trying to do the same with vi by forcing myself to use it for anything vaguely sysadmin related.

For me, it would be Ratpoison, Vim, Xterm, and Firefox.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find yourself needing other little helpers (panel applets) or just run xmonad as is?

I run Xmonad with no status bars or anything and it works great. No clutter, just the windows I want to have there. I tried it out as an experiment on my laptop to get more screen real estate and then I carried it over to my next desktop install. I used to think that it was obvious that there were things I wanted to have visible all the time, but in reality there was really only one thing that could even qualify for…

Specifically for the laptop use case, where do you find out how much battery life is left without a top panel?

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#160
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run Xmonad with no status bars or anything and it works great. No clutter, just the windows I want to have there. I tried it out as an experiment on my laptop to get more screen real estate and then I carried it over to my next desktop install. I used to think that it was obvious that there were things I wanted to have visible all the time, but in reality there was really only one thing that could even qualify for…

Specifically for the laptop use case, where do you find out how much battery life is left without a top panel?

There were a few 'solutions' that I was content with. You can have a workspace where you have these things (htop, other monitoring tools) and you can also have it in your vim/emacs status-line if you want to keep track of it while working.

I've never actually found that I need something _everywhere_ as much as I need to have it _somewhere_. Monitoring of things like these included.

Edit: I hesitate to call them real solutions, because obviously they are not for everyone. Some people need to see their CPU/RAM usage, network usage, clock and battery level at all times.

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