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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

#221

Post by TacticalCoder »

mesrik wrote: post #75

"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch. Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves. Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CL…

> "Is anyone still using emacs?"

Answering to preemptively asked question that doesn't appear in TFA: yup I sure still do.

If anything compared to the 486 days, back when Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping was a joke that made sense, my computer now instead of 8 MB or RAM has 32 GB or RAM (so 4096x more RAM, or 2 exp 12 more RAM: something something about transistors doubling every 18 months and all that)...

Who's laughing now? ; )

Seriously though: Emacs with native-compilation, tree-sitter and LSP support (and stuff like Magit and ripgrep integration too) makes it really amazing.

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

#222

Post by wtetzner »

cyberpunk wrote: post #59
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).

And then slowly over 20 or so years deleting all of it. I think I'm down to about 110 lines of ~/.vimrc now :}

But without building it all up and then slowly deleting it, you wouldn't have known which 110 lines were the ones to keep ;)

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

#223

Post by prinny_ »

bbkane wrote: post #138
francoisdevlin wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use vi because I'm not a savage

NeoVim because it's fun!! So many plugins and colorschemes! So customizable- these days Claude will just change it for you, no need to learn the APIs if you're just interested in the result. Yes you're AI-slopping your config, but the drawbacks to that are super low (it's a personal editor, not something I'm inflicting on others)

AI slopping my config is what allowed me to learn vim without going through the pain of setting it up. I can ask AI to teach me about some motions or set up some configs for m in lua without ever know lua. This is the biggest impact of AI in my professional life.

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

#224

Post by wpm »

ralphc wrote: post #211
rdtsc wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch. It's 26 years for me. Emacs is I believe the oldest software I still use. I started on an SGI Irix in 2000. I used it also on HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, and of course all varieties of Linux > Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves. And many keystrokes work on MacOS, too. That…

One advantage of vi is that even though emacs is available on all those systems, vi is actually installed on all of those, setting aside windows. If you know rudimentary vi you can walk up to any of those machines and edit a configuration file well enough to work.

mg is installed on macOS by default and is basically diet vanilla emacs. Works fine for quick edits.

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

#225

Post by sl_convertible »

dismalaf wrote: post #170
aag wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is anyone using anything else?

I use Lem. It's an "emacs" but not a clone of GNU Emacs. It's written in Common Lisp, extensible in Common Lisp and it's way more performant than GNU Emacs. Obviously less features and plugins but for my needs (writing Lisp code mostly) it's great.

How is it now compared to 6 months ago? I tried it back then, and just... I don't know, couldn't get into it.

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

#226

Post by anamax »

drob518 wrote: post #185
jordigh wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 keyst…

Similar usage pattern (no init.el), but I started with TECO Emacs in the late 70s.

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

#227

Post by joshuastuden »

ngai_aku wrote: post #107
joshuastuden wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use agent-shell? It makes the whole experience great. Also claude-code-ide.el. try these

agent-shell is awesome, but Anthropic banning subscription usage via ACP is a killer. I've liked claude-code-ide.el when I've used it, but its lack of concurrent sessions per project has prevented me from fully adopting it. I know, I should be using worktrees, but I still haven't figured out a nice way to get that to work with my docker-compose-based project (though I'm open to suggestions!)

Anthropic scrapped their sdk billing thing

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

#228

Post by parl_match »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #209
rdtsc wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch. It's 26 years for me. Emacs is I believe the oldest software I still use. I started on an SGI Irix in 2000. I used it also on HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, and of course all varieties of Linux > Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves. And many keystrokes work on MacOS, too. That…

It's quite difficult to find software older than Emacs in widespread use. Emacs is one of the "original" software, the first GNU software for which the GPL was created. It competes with vi, whose direct lineage has been broken (nvi and vim are reimplementations).

vi recently received an update. C23 compliance and some unicode fixes. it's a feature complete editor!

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

#229

Post by joshuastuden »

jerf wrote: post #141
joshuastuden wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use agent-shell? It makes the whole experience great. Also claude-code-ide.el. try these

I use claude-code. I've been trying to use agent-shell with OpenCode but the abstraction that agent-shell puts on top of it is too much. I can't figure out how to change the model. The command to do it doesn't do anything; I see the correct model list and seem to be able to select it, but then it doesn't change. If I just run "opencode" in the same directory it comes up configured the way I want. The Claude integrati…

When on the agent shell buffer, do C-c C-v with the latest agent-shell to change the model

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

#230

Post by jcgrillo »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #221
mesrik wrote: post #75

"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch. Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves. Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CL…

> "Is anyone still using emacs?" Answering to preemptively asked question that doesn't appear in TFA: yup I sure still do. If anything compared to the 486 days, back when Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping was a joke that made sense, my computer now instead of 8 MB or RAM has 32 GB or RAM (so 4096x more RAM, or 2 exp 12 more RAM: something something about transistors doubling every 18 months and all that)... Who…

Yeah, emacs is very competitive with "modern" IDEs. Even in JVM languages, which for a long time wasn't true. And I don't know of anything, anywhere that can rival magit.

I've been using it for far less time than you have, began ca. 2011 or 2012 here[0], but over that time it has been my constant benchmark for what an editor should feel like, and every other IDE I've used has fallen short. With LSP especially, in the past 6-7yr I have actually been predominantly using emacs. Part of that was being fortunate enough to no longer have to work on much JVM stuff since ca. 2019, but it's also due largely to large advancements in emacs' capabilities.

[0] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/mechanics-sy...

EDIT: In particular, this is exactly where I fell down the rabbit hole:

> If you are not familiar with Emacs you SHOULD run the tutorial, which can be accessed in edwin by holding down the control key and typing h, then, releasing the control key, type t. (C-h t)

I don't know if there's anything else on the entire internet I can specifically point to that has had a greater impact on my professional life... strange.

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