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Emacs 29 is nigh

blog.phundrak.com

161–170 of 267 posts

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#163

I am loving all this emacs love lately (I am an emacsophile), but I do find all this attention it is getting suddenly a bit surprising. Is it just that "long lines, LSP, fast syntax hightlighting" is making new people interested, or is it just us neckbeards coming out of the woods? I mean, many of these things are just a package-install away right now. I seldom see vim put in the same lime-light, for instance. Or may…

Seems like Emacs has always had a presence in the cultural background of online programming—most people might not use it, but they're aware of it and maybe vaguely curious—so it takes a relatively small push to generate discussion. The substantial new features in the last couple of releases is enough of a push, especially after a prolonged (perceived?) slowdown in changes.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#164

Its great to see both eglot and tree-sitter being merged. However, I am unhappy about the state of 'emacs configurations/distributions' right now. I have been using Doom Emacs, but the development is pretty much stalled there [0], and I don't think there is any distribution that is keeping up with these cutting-edge features (compared to the NeoVim ecosystem, let's say). Somehow it feels like I was seeing a lot more…

I've been using Emacs overlay to compile packages ahead of time for a while. Unless I've misunderstood how it works, that's what the variations on emacsWithPackages do.

I use the version of emacsWithPackages that parses use-package declarations from my .emacs file and uses Nix to compile and install the corresponding Emacs packages. The upside is that this also pulls in native dependencies (pdf-tools/etc) but the downside is that adding a new package requires rebuilding at the Nix level and restarting Emacs. It has not been a major problem for me—I don't install new Emacs packages very often at this point—but I can definitely see how it could get annoying for anyone who does!

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#166
post #50

Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…

Emacs was a great editor just like Nirvana was a great band. It’s influenced every other editor after it. People are always going to love it. But I think all the best ideas from that era have been taken. I like Vim but EMacs won the editor wars

The key with Emacs is that it's an editor that grows: the close mapping between the editor and its code makes it more fluid and natural to extend than any other popular tool I've tried. It's a fuzzy distinction—not something you can put on a feature checklist—but it's made working with Emacs qualitatively different from working with other tools. While Emacs has certainly influenced other editors, none of the ones I'm familiar with have carried over this core philosophy.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#167

I am loving all this emacs love lately (I am an emacsophile), but I do find all this attention it is getting suddenly a bit surprising. Is it just that "long lines, LSP, fast syntax hightlighting" is making new people interested, or is it just us neckbeards coming out of the woods? I mean, many of these things are just a package-install away right now. I seldom see vim put in the same lime-light, for instance. Or may…

I switched from Vim to Spacemacs years ago and I was generally willing to roll up my sleeves to configure it in exchange for the additional power and freedom. But now, with the maturity of these pre-configured distributions and the nice things like LSP, you don't even need to fiddle much with elisp to have a solid environment working for you. I can now imagine introducing Emacs as a first text-editor / IDE to a novice (OK, maybe not with the Vim layer enabled).

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself.

> I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself. Because it's a lot scarier to struggle alone. Plus as his videos progress and his knowledge progresses he frequently teaches you things that come up and practice a lot as a matter of course. It's kind of like when you start programming you have to build up you…

> A decade or two later you realize you've become accustomed the darkness...

Nice one.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#169
post #82
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it was org-mode. Emacs is basically my org mode interface.

I've used emacs for ~15 years now and never really get into org-mode, I have a directory of org files that I use for writing and keeping some kind of personal wiki but it's just a bunch of org files. I never successfully build a workflow around it. I see that I'm missing something but I don't know where to start. Org-roam seems interesting. Do you have any recommendation for how to use org-mode productively?

Here is one way explained. It's written with EasyOrg as Agenda/Calendar in mind, but should work equally well with Emacs.

https://easyorgmode.com/blog/how-i-use-org-mode-to-keep-trac...

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#170
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but what about remote support? That’s the single most thing I miss from VSCode. I want to run my editor on the local machine so that it can benefit from graphics support and integrate properly with the local windowing system, but I want all heavy lifting (LSP and the like) done on a remote machine. Yes, I can use Emacs over SSH (which I do now), but it has limitations. Yes, I could forward X11, but it’s pretty t…

I use tramp on a devcontainer daily FWIW.

What languages? I've struggled to get it working with Ruby (specifically with robe) and it's the one thing that keeps me in VSCode for work.
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