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What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

masteringemacs.org

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Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#181

Post by jonpalmisc »

bko wrote: post #150
jonpalmisc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What parts did you find difficult? When I first started, I found the keybindings odd, but now I love them since the core set of shortcuts—C-a, C-e, C-f, etc.—work "everywhere" from the terminal, to GNU readline-based programs, to even native macOS text boxes. If you don't like the default keybindings, you can change them or use the Evil package [0] for Vim bindings. If you want to get up and running quickly, I'd chec…

Do you use it as an IDE? That's the part I had trouble with (react/typescript and python). I could get it almost there, but essentially what I would need is a VS Code mode. A side panel with the collapsible directories, double click into them, global search, linting, syntax, etc.

I use it at my current job in which I work in a large C++ codebase. I formerly used CLion.

Whether Emacs is an IDE or not depends how you define IDE. I use Eglot [0] for LSP integration; this gives me IDE-like features like "jump-to-definition", syntax error highlights, warnings, etc. and integrates with company-mode [1] for code completion. This handles most of my needs for writing code.

As for other things like a file tree, I've found that the built in `project-find-file` command combined with `vertico` [2] and `orderless` [3] makes finding files and navigating around projects easier; that pair behaves similarly to CMD+P in Sublime Text or VS Code. There are file tree packages out there, but I've found that I don't really need a file tree in practice and that I prefer navigating around projects with fuzzy file search and grep.

[0] https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot [1] https://github.com/company-mode/company-mode [2] https://github.com/minad/vertico [3] https://github.com/oantolin/orderless

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#182

Post by trey-jones »

antiframe wrote: post #176
novocantico wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Emacs almost exclusively for half a decade and got pretty good at it. But I feel like VS Code is the natural evolution of all the great ideas of Emacs. So I use VS Code almost exclusively now.

I feel that VSCode is missing the number one critical feature of Emacs: the ability to inspect and change the program as it's running.

And don't forget the number two critical feature: the ability to call yourself an Emacs user!

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#183

Post by didibus »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #93

I almost wish I never tried Emacs. Ignorance is bliss, and Emacs ruined all other text editors for me. There are absolutely areas that others do better, but the self-documenting “living program” nature is too much to give up; everything you ever need to know or do is a few keystrokes away.

Agree, but for me, there also are simply some features no other editors have, especially when it comes to navigation.

Some examples are all the ivy autocompletion, command autocompletion, dired, adjust-parens, windmove, smart parents, expand and contract region, agressive-indent, avy, swiper, hydra, and so on.

And it seems whatever I think about exists. Every time I go: How do I? There's a solution, and if not, I can just quickly add a function for it myself.

That's what keeps me in Emacs. Some other editors are more polished, and have better UX, might be more responsive, but there's always something they don't have and I miss from Emacs, or something that I don't like how they do it and I can't customize to my liking.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#184

Post by ghosty141 »

novocantico wrote: post #126
gaze wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using emacs on and off for about 20 years and I don’t really get the fanaticism. Org mode and magit and all these things are cool. I like that you can hack it. But — to me it never stops feeling like an ongoing project when you try to live your entire life in it. I like it obviously otherwise I wouldn’t still be using it, but it will never exactly feel elegant to me. More like a good text editor and a hundr…

I used Emacs almost exclusively for half a decade and got pretty good at it. But I feel like VS Code is the natural evolution of all the great ideas of Emacs. So I use VS Code almost exclusively now.

For me it doesnt even come close to it. Maybe if you wtite your own plugins but even then there are many limitations. The one-window problem for example.

In emacs I can overwrite ANY function wherever it is from my config and change for example how shr (an html renderer) handles/styles headings. Its crazy!

One MAJOR thing that emacs does better is making things work together. I have orderless installed for matching strings in ANY completion. It works everywhere while in VSCode you cant even get close to that.

VSCode is great if you like the default and dont want to „build your text editor“ cause thats what emacs basically is. Its a toolbox with which you can build the editor to fit your exact needs with almost no limitations

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#185

Post by mplanchard »

viksit wrote: post #133

Given all the emacs ninjas here - what’s the best way to do JSX/TSX formatting while playing nice with js2-mode, tide and web-mode? I’ve been stuck for months on finding a good config and almost wanted to move to VS Code to try it out. Then, while using it I just couldn’t do without emacs buffers and panels flexibility — so moved back :))

prettier-emacs[0] works well, and IIRC I think the JS/TS language servers can handle formatting, if you’re using LSP or eglot!

[0]: https://github.com/prettier/prettier-emacs

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#186

Post by Hedepig »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #157
novocantico wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Emacs almost exclusively for half a decade and got pretty good at it. But I feel like VS Code is the natural evolution of all the great ideas of Emacs. So I use VS Code almost exclusively now.

Yeah the LSP ecosystem is so much nicer than the machinations hacked into text editors over the last 20 years. When you get down to it a modern editor is just a process manager for language servers, a global event bus/RPC layer across them all, and a UI layer. Instead of reinventing bespoke versions of those things, just solidify it using standard protocols like JSON RPC, HTML for UI, etc.

I thought LSP was available for emacs?

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#187

Post by mplanchard »

da39a3ee wrote: post #155

I used Emacs for 20 years, contributed to popular open source emacs projects, and am the maintainer of a couple of emacs packages with small numbers of users. It's wonderful and extremely powerful having everything in lisp; don't bother with emacs if you're not interested in writing lisp. One silly thing that I could never get to grips with is the way the minibuffer always seems to get stuck asking me a question, but…

FWIW lsp-mode does a great job of integrating with language servers in emacs. I and two of my coworkers use emacs with rust-analyzer, and it’s generally been a very positive experience.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#188

Post by Hedepig »

bko wrote: post #150
jonpalmisc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What parts did you find difficult? When I first started, I found the keybindings odd, but now I love them since the core set of shortcuts—C-a, C-e, C-f, etc.—work "everywhere" from the terminal, to GNU readline-based programs, to even native macOS text boxes. If you don't like the default keybindings, you can change them or use the Evil package [0] for Vim bindings. If you want to get up and running quickly, I'd chec…

Do you use it as an IDE? That's the part I had trouble with (react/typescript and python). I could get it almost there, but essentially what I would need is a VS Code mode. A side panel with the collapsible directories, double click into them, global search, linting, syntax, etc.

Have you tried Doom Emacs?

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#189

Post by trey-jones »

BeetleB wrote: post #161
bko wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use it as an IDE? That's the part I had trouble with (react/typescript and python). I could get it almost there, but essentially what I would need is a VS Code mode. A side panel with the collapsible directories, double click into them, global search, linting, syntax, etc.

As a heavy Emacs user for over a decade: I still use IDEs instead of Emacs for programming. Emacs has plenty of uses outside of SW development. Only recently did I manage to set up my Emacs to have IDE-like capabilities for my Python work. But if I switched to a C++ job, I'll use an IDE. And maybe , over the course of a year or two, I'll bother setting up LSP for Emacs. It's totally fine to use IDEs if they make your…

You may have investigated this already (or discovered it setting Emacs up for python), but lsp-mode just about works out of the box (for most languages). Extremely minimal setup required. Maybe a few configs for lsp-ui to suit your own taste.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#190

Post by ghosty141 »

karencarits wrote: post #107
jonpalmisc wrote: post #93

I almost wish I never tried Emacs. Ignorance is bliss, and Emacs ruined all other text editors for me. There are absolutely areas that others do better, but the self-documenting “living program” nature is too much to give up; everything you ever need to know or do is a few keystrokes away.

How did you approach Emacs to make it such a valuable tool? I have tried to get started with Emacs a few times but the initial resistance has been too large

At my new job a colleague mentioned he used emacs and I basically took it as inspiration and started trying emacs myself, I'm very accustomed to vim after 4-5 years of heavy usage so I started with the evil package (evil-mode) and went from there.

It boils down to using the already known vim keys for basic actions like splitting the window, save a file etc. and creating keybinds for anything else I needed. So I customized any keybind to my liking, I didn't really adopt the emacs binds since I find many of them to be quite unintuitive.

It took me like 2-3 weeks of constant configuration to get to a productive config that covers all my needs (from autocompletion, to colorscheme) and I still edit my config every 1-2 days since I discover new small "itches" and then fix those.

For example: I always want my compilation output to be on one monitor -> always open the compilation buffer ("output") in its own window. Perfect!

To me emacs is like a platform that I can use to build my "own" perfect text editor that does exactly what I want it to do without really any compromises. This is where emacs shines, the endless possibilities and nothing that holds you back and says "no the editor is not meant to do X".

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