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How I am deeply integrating Emacs

joshblais.com

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Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#41

Post by Antibabelic »

shevy-java wrote: post #15

This may sound strange, but I actually think we need just ... one editor. Now, this is not a "we need to favour vim over emacs". I think this is a stupid war, the vim versus emacs war. What I mean is ... basically most editors do almost the same exact thing. They look at some buffer for a file and help the user modify this. There is a finite number of operations possible. Why do people keep on re-implementing basic t…

Step 1. The most perfect editor with all the features is created. We've done it. Everyone can tailor it perfectly to their workflow.

Step 2. People complain that it's bloated, that they don't want 99% of the optional features in the editor, and that the codebase is a nightmare to maintain.

Step 3. A thousand more editors are created.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#42

Post by k_bx »

sim04ful wrote: post #4

The more I learn about emacs the more I feel we took the wrong fork on road in terms of the desktop metaphor decades ago.

I actually discovered that emacs is great as it is out of the box (except for creating annoying backup files with ~ at the end). I use it instead of nano and vim.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#43

Post by Ferret7446 »

adlpz wrote: post #37

A question for the heavy Emacs users: What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs? I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there. However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe…

Don't use them. A personal config is highly personal, and a distro force someone else's preferences onto you. Even things like how exactly your config is organized.

But ultimately it's all about tradeoffs and what works for you. You don't necessarily need to go beyond your distro, but if you want to or need to, then that's a good sign to try it

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#45

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

omnicognate wrote: post #7

Re EXWM and: > Emacs is single threaded, therefore if anything in the system hangs, the whole system hangs For development work I haven't found this to be an issue. Generally when coding I use very few X apps - pretty much just a web browser and maybe occasionally a PDF preview or docs browser. I don't think I've ever had a problem with the single-threaded behaviour blocking window management there. (And as an aside,…

I don’t imagine I’d want to use my general emacs as my window manager, I imagine the sanest way would be to run two instances of emacs.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#46

Post by tmtvl »

adlpz wrote: post #37

A question for the heavy Emacs users: What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs? I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there. However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe…

My petty opinion is that distributions which disable the menu bar are bad, distributions which use an edgelord dark theme are bad, and distributions which do both are terrible. Where Doom in particular is concerned I dislike the fact that it starts with Vi keybindings by default (I quite disfavour modal editing, there's a reason I switched away from Vim after 5 years) and that it changes the 's' binding so I can't even rely on my muscle memory.

I've tried both Spacemacs and Doom (and others like Witchmacs and Bedrock) and now I'm just using my own 800 line init.el (which does include comments and whitespace so the actual LOC will be lower) and 110 line custom.el (if you set the custom file to a different file than your init then using customize to change settings won't mess things up if you manually edit your init).

If you really like Doom you can try reading its code base, if it's just too much then maybe it would be better to try setting up your own configuration from scratch.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#47

Post by douglee650 »

internet_points wrote: post #33
douglee650 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t emacs slow down on really long files? I mean like 8,000 lines

My "main" org file is 21k lines, it's no problem at all. My laptop is from 2017 or something. I do sometimes work on files that are 300k lines (don't ask), and while it's mostly fine, once in a while I'll try to use some less common operation that's not very optimized and have to abort it (e.g. don't try to magit-blame that file). But stuff like searching, scrolling, editing, syntax highlighting are all fast. If I ha…

I finally made the switch to vim when I was working on a really large frontend template that consisted of the same massive repeated block where a small portion of each was different based on a condition.

There was a lot of search and replace, and emacs started dogging it really hard on like the 10th condition block.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#48

Post by jbstack »

adlpz wrote: post #37

A question for the heavy Emacs users: What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs? I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there. However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe…

They have their place. I started out with Doom and it definitely helped to streamline the beginner phase where vanilla would have felt overwhelming. But, as with you, I soon became frustrated when I wanted to move beyond its default configuration.

I've since switched to Vanilla and I've been using ChatGPT to gradually explain and help me integrate the Doom features that I like, so that I end up with a similar base that I actually understand and which I can deviate from where I want to.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#49

Post by fhd2 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #38
fhd2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the power of Emacs is mainly that I can do everything with the keyboard, which is not only much faster, but also - to me - much more enjoyable than going through visual menus with the mouse. For someone not good with the keyboard, it's probably a nightmare. I suppose it's good for power users and terrible for casual users, and I don't know if there's any way to really build one user interface that works equal…

When I got into emacs 20+ years ago the "use only the keyboard" thing was a huge point of pride and to this day I don't understand why. Who cares? I use emacs because I can code the entire environment. Fundamentally the mouse is just a form of modal editing. Emacs supports this in spades of course, and god-mode is my modal input minor mode of choice, but clicking to jump to a position on screen can often be a lot fas…

> Regardless, the keyboard vs mouse thing always struck me as one of the many dumb flamewars that tech people engage in.

Certainly. I wouldn't argue that text editing speed is a relevant bottleneck in software development, actually. To me it's enjoyable and that's a big factor in my productivity, but that's just me.

My point was mainly that the keyboard (efficient use is difficult to learn) vs mouse (arguably easier to learn) is just one example of why the current desktop metaphor won over something I'd say is designed for heavy keyboard use (even if usable without it). The "code the entire environment" thing you mention is another example. Not sure I expressed that point all that well, rereading my comment it almost looks as if I'm trying to start a flame war :D

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