What’s new in Emacs 28.1? • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#281

Post by asoneth » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 2:21 AM UTC

pzone wrote: post #229

asoneth wrote: post #147

I aspired to learn Emacs but gave up a number of times. It's in that category of things that I believe would be Good For Me but that have such high activation energy that it never becomes a high enough priority. It's like the documentary I keep skipping over in my streaming queue, the free weights gathering dust in the basement, or the guitar I finally gave away after having only learned a few chords. There's got to…

The best reason to use Emacs is that it’s fun. Would you learn the guitar because it’s “good for you” to learn it or because you enjoy playing music? I think the only sustainable motivation is the latter. If learning Emacs is simply a chore with an abstract promise of “productivity” as a reward you’re not missing out on anything.

By "Good For Me" I don't just mean productivity-wise, I mean a positive and rewarding experience. And frankly I do not know whether I would enjoy using Emacs. (I similarly don't know whether I would enjoy playing music.)

But I know that learning Emacs is a chore. I did not enjoy having to relearn common interaction concepts like windows, frames, yank, kill. I did not enjoy retraining muscle-memory (or modifying bindings) because editing and navigation shortcuts don't match the standards that have been codified in every other desktop text area. I did not enjoy the endless search for the right distribution/mode/extension to solve a particular problem. I did not enjoy that none of these are generalizable skills that transfer beyond the esoteric priesthood of Emacs use.

I liked the core concepts in principle and I enjoyed the new perspective it provided, like peeking into an alternate universe with a parallel evolutionary path.

Eventually life intervened and I had to retreat back to editors that take minutes to learn rather than hours or days. I suspect I'll give it another go someday when I can afford to devote the better part of a weekend to it, perhaps when the kids are older.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#282

Post by BeetleB » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:19 AM UTC

newtwilly wrote: post #276

BeetleB wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it's the canonical solution, that would be a degradation for me. It's more ergonomic to use two hands to enter any modifier sequence. Mapping Capslock to Control doesn't provide extra benefits to my solution. The other problem people have with the pinky is that they're twisting their wrist while typing, which is also against more ergonomic guidelines. The recommendation is to move the whole arm. Once you get…

No it's not a degradation. It puts Ctrl in a sane place much easier to reach with your pinky. And if you really were going to use your thumb on the left control, then it's about the same distance to the Caps Lock key. I'm replying to the original asker with my advice, if you want to read more about what I think :)

> It puts Ctrl in a sane place much easier to reach with your pinky.

That it does, but there's no good reason I should use my pinky to hit Ctrl to begin with.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#283

Post by Bancakes » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 8:03 AM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #271

Bancakes wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP literally said emacs has extensions IDE's will never have.

I've never seen an IDE with an equivalent to smart-dash-mode: http://malsyned.net/smart-dash.html

That's nice, dear. Can you work with .vcxproj files?

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#284

Post by da39a3ee » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

NoGravitas wrote: post #264

nanna wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the cursor isn't in the minibuffer. Or it's in some sort of recursive minibuffer mode. So many times I've just mashed C-g repeatedly in irritation! This happens to me all the time too! Anyone have a fix?

The thing you're looking for is `M-x top-level`. It exits all recursive editing levels and active minibuffers.

Thanks, that's perfect. I still have a running emacs instance for magit, and editing elisp at least, so I can still make use of your suggestion. (I made it so that C-g with prefix arg calls top-level; not sure if you'll think that UI makes sense).

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#285

Post by gjvc » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #282

newtwilly wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not a degradation. It puts Ctrl in a sane place much easier to reach with your pinky. And if you really were going to use your thumb on the left control, then it's about the same distance to the Caps Lock key. I'm replying to the original asker with my advice, if you want to read more about what I think :)

> It puts Ctrl in a sane place much easier to reach with your pinky. That it does, but there's no good reason I should use my pinky to hit Ctrl to begin with.

Your reasoning is most bizarre.

By that rationale, there's no good reason I should use my (left) forefinger to press "g" to begin with.

(qwerty layout assumed...)

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#286

Post by NateEag » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

Bancakes wrote: post #283

NateEag wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen an IDE with an equivalent to smart-dash-mode: http://malsyned.net/smart-dash.html

That's nice, dear. Can you work with .vcxproj files?

Deflect much?

If you know of an IDE that has anything like smart-dash-mode, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#287

Post by oedo » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 6:48 PM UTC

dv35z wrote: post #122

I’m interested in emacs / org-mode / org-roam. My goal is to have a local notes solution (replacing Obsidian, Apple Notes), and have the notes automatically published on the web as a crosslinked personal knowledge base. I have somewhat achieved this with Obsidian/markdown files + git + Hugo + Render. I write stuff. Check it into git. Push, and it deploys as a website. Feel pretty good about cobbling that together. Bu…

> local notes solution ... published on the web ... crosslinked

Definitely a lot of ways to go about this.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest checking out what the creator of org-roam does for publishing his own notes: https://github.com/jethrokuan/braindump

It works quite well, and might be exactly what you want as far as publishing goes.

> end up in weird jams where Emacs has opened up 3+ panes (buffers), and I can’t figure how to even close/quit them

Typically 'q' will close Doom's popup windows (+popup/quit-window), otherwise you should be able use plain ol' Emacs 'C-x k' or Doom's ' b k' (also 'b d') to kill a buffer.

If you actually want to keep the buffers, and you just want the windows out of the way, you can use winner-undo / winner-redo to cycle through past window configurations.

> bottom-up guide for personal information systems

AFAIK, this does not exist. But there is, I'm sure you've seen, a variety of independent users continually working out interesting new ways to process and link information using Emacs. For example, outside of bloggers in the Roam/Zettelkasten camp, you can always glean insights from John Kitchen's work [0][1], although it leans more towards research/academic use than PIM/PKM.

> my brother is writing a book - he’s not super technical but can get around

If it's technical/academic writing, you can honestly get astonishingly far just using org-mode's LaTeX export.

[0] https://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/

[1] https://github.com/jkitchin

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#288

Post by a_e_k » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #280

a_e_k wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M-x xterm-mouse-mode gives an experience in the console that's pretty darn faithful to the full GUI when it comes to mouse interaction. Clicking, selection, and scroll wheel all work pretty much as expected. Even menus and pop-menus work; the new TTY menu in 28.1 is pretty slick!

Is there a setting in Customize to control whether to use init.el or .emacs for configuration? Trying to set symlinks from $HOME to another directory and it's fighting me...

I believe the code that controls that is all in startup.el (or startup.el.gz) in the Emacs distribution. You can find the documentation here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Fi...

I do know that ~/.emacs takes precedence over ~/.emacs.d/init.el. I've taken advantage of that in the past to keep all the public configuration that I share between machines in ~/.emacs.d/init.el, and then on my work machine I had a ~/.emacs that wraps a (load "~/.emacs.d/init") with some company-specific configuration.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#289

Post by chrisfinazzo » Thu, Apr 14, 2022, 3:01 AM UTC

a_e_k wrote: post #288

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a setting in Customize to control whether to use init.el or .emacs for configuration? Trying to set symlinks from $HOME to another directory and it's fighting me...

I believe the code that controls that is all in startup.el (or startup.el.gz) in the Emacs distribution. You can find the documentation here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Fi... I do know that ~/.emacs takes precedence over ~/.emacs.d/init.el. I've taken advantage of that in the past to keep all the public configuration that I share between machines in ~/.emacs.d/init.el, and then on my wo…

The stink of it is, I had this working: mouse-mode, correct symlinks, all of it...for like 10 mins. before I realized, 'oh crud, I forgot to disable something' and in my haste of mucking w/ settings, tossed the good init I had trying to ID what was missing.

Self: You're dumb

I think I can recreate it, but I've got other stuff to do too, so this may get paused for a while - Monterey beckons as I have yet to take that plunge, although I really should soon.

Re: What’s new in Emacs 28.1?

#290

Post by pritambaral » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

almost wrote: post #59

ilovecaching wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me there are Emacs users that don’t understand the importance of free software. You’re using the editor devised by the free software foundation, but you only want to talk about convenience. Convenience is not an excuse to switch to corporate made closed source spyware.

I just can't think why you might have trouble convincing people to try it :p But you yourself bought up convenience in your original comment. If your argument is a purely moral one then no need to specify how little fiddling is required to get LSP working. But I do think if your only argument is yelling at people about it being immoral to use VSCode you ain't going to get far. Why not talk about the cool things Emacs…

> VSCode is open source by the way ...

The extensions marketplace requires you to use the closed source version. Quite a few of VS Code's best extensions are also completely closed source. VS Code is already on the same path that Google took with "Open Source" Android.