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Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

rahuljuliato.com

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Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#181

Post by jb1991 »

mesrik wrote: post #131
jb1991 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox emacs bindings still work on Mac since everywhere on macOS supports emacs bindings, nearly.

I just tried, and my macOS up todateFirefox (still Sonoma few weeks), doesn't work. Nor does Waterfox (Firefox derivativ) that I've been using more lately. Could it be some setting I need to set before it works?

Unless I misunderstood your question, are you simply trying to use emacs bindings in all text areas of the browser like the URL bar, any text fields on webpages, being able to move to the beginning or the end of a line, backspace, etc., go to the next or previous line, all with emacs bindings? That has worked for decades on Mac and it works for me now in all browsers.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#182

Post by tmtvl »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #97
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those are modal editor configs. Which... No thanks?

Both Doom and Spacemacs work fine without the vi bindings.

Doom doesn't, it defaults to vi bindings and you can't turn that off easily. Spacemacs does offer a choice, though.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#183

Post by iLemming »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #88
kccqzy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just worrying for no good reason. Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are both very good; being far removed from vanilla emacs is not a problem to be worried about.

Both of those are modal editor configs. Which... No thanks?

Huh? Emacs is inherently a modal editor - transients, isearch, keychords, M-x - these are all forms of modality. Vim-motions simply organizing that all into nice set of patterns - memorable and very practical. Besides, both Doom and Spacemacs absolutely can be used without Evil layer.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#184

Post by bryanlarsen »

tmtvl wrote: post #182
bryanlarsen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Doom and Spacemacs work fine without the vi bindings.

Doom doesn't, it defaults to vi bindings and you can't turn that off easily. Spacemacs does offer a choice, though.

Last time I looked it appeared to be as simple as disabling evil mode and configuring a new leader key. But you're right, it's not a straight configurable.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#185

Post by drob518 »

jordigh wrote: post #144
drob518 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly 40 years for me. Wow! I’d note that MacOS input fields also have basic Emacs bindings for cursor movement, not just shells and browsers. Works in MacOS Mail, Evernote, etc.

Wow, so you used the earliest public versions. Ever written a retrospective of what 40 years of Emacs has been like?

Nope. And I’m probably not a great person to write it. I’m hardly an Emacs power user. I had friends who would do everything in Emacs to the point where I would joke with them that Linux was just their Emacs boot loader. I keep lots of other apps and term windows open. My init.el file is pretty simple. I’m often aware of a vague capability that Emacs has, but I’ll brute-force my way through an editing task with keystrokes and some keyboard macros rather than add a new fancy library, at least until I’ve been forced to do the same thing a couple times per month. That said, I do remember trying to use Emacs on a 300 baud dial-up link. That was painful, though truthfully everything beyond ed would be painful at that speed.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#186

Post by tmtvl »

xedrac wrote: post #7

I'm happy to see these improvements. One thing that has always been annoying with Emacs is how much configuration is required to get a modern editor going. Things like Doom Emacs, and Spacemacs try to solve that problem, but both feel far removed from vanilla emacs. I wish Emacs came with several presets so with a single line, you could transform the editor to different base points. For example, most devs want treesi…

There's Bedrock, Centaur Emacs, Witchmacs, and more; even if you don't like Doom and Spacemacs there's plenty of fish in the sea. Though there is the issue where preconfigs tend to have edgelord 'Dark As My Soul' themes which make text absolutely unreadable, which is a bit of a pain to deal with.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#187

Post by dotancohen »

iLemming wrote: post #180
francoisdevlin wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use vi because I'm not a savage

I'm a die-hard vimmer. I use vim-motions everywhere - they permeate my editors/IDEs, browsers, terminal, I use them system wide (e.g. to change volume or control media or my WM). One day I woke up with the realization of the fundamental truth - Emacs simply vims better. Much better than even Neovim. I just had to master Vim and grok some Lisp to arrive to that conclusion. People fighting Vim vs. Emacs are materially…

Almost all my vimming is in Emacs now. I started with Org mode - now I can't find any feature of any TODO application that Org mode doesn't do better.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#188

Post by tmtvl »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #77
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is cultural. It's kinda like building your own lightsaber as a Jedi. The part of Emacs/Vim initiation is building your own configuration that works for you. Setting up plugins, keybindings, colorschemes etc. It's part of the fun of it (at least for me).

Oh yes. What other software allows you so much to make it your own? Yes, I know the yak shaving argument etc. But what's the fun in opening up some computer/OS/software that looks and feels exactly like everyone elses? An Emacs (and vim) setup is something you can actually have a discussion about with someone else.

KDE, various window managers (i3, awesome, xmonad,...), the Linux kernel (there's so much stuff you can configure through sysctl alone, and that's just 1 single customization facility), SystemD, your shell (whether it be bash, zsh, csh, ksh, or something else), and the list goes on.

Re: Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

#190

Post by cmrdporcupine »

iLemming wrote: post #183
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those are modal editor configs. Which... No thanks?

Huh? Emacs is inherently a modal editor - transients, isearch, keychords, M-x - these are all forms of modality. Vim-motions simply organizing that all into nice set of patterns - memorable and very practical. Besides, both Doom and Spacemacs absolutely can be used without Evil layer.

This is a ridiculous collapsing of the sense of what people by "modal editing" into a homogeneous conceptual soup.

The core editing components of non-Evil emacs are direct manipulation, not modal. That there are modal aspects on top of that for doing things which practically/genuinely need a modal switch (command entry, search entry, etc) doesn't make the default emacs configuration a "modal editor" in any sense of which people actually apply those terms.

By your definition of modal, almost every application can be described this way. The point is not whether a system has modes, it's whether it makes its core emphasis and interaction modal.

You can see vi's motions as elegant and purposeful. I see them as an accident of history stemming from the poverty of the number of keys and capabilities of the dumb terminal it was designed on.

I encountered both editors in the late 80s and chose emacs precisely because it didn't have the "barely a step up from a teletype" interaction model that vi had.

As for Doom and Spacemacs without Evil.. yes... but why? Their original and state purpose was a packaging with a modal default. It's trivial to toss together your own init.el that brings in the same set of packages these days and with very little effort.

If the goal is an easy packaging of emacs with sensible defaults.. and then you have to go modify the defaults to make it what most people (yes, most) would consider sensible... No, that's not meeting the state use case.

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