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Emacs 29 is nigh

blog.phundrak.com

71–80 of 267 posts

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#71
post #50

Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…

I do think that keyboard optimized workflows are not for everyone; you should use what works best for you!

However, Emacs distributions like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs are definitely more approachable and featured OOTB than vanilla Emacs.

For me, the benefit of Emacs is that it's a single environment I can do everything in. I also am the type to enjoy messing with my workflow.

IMO most of that can be replicated with VS Code in a much more user friendly manner (VS Code remote editing blows TRAMP out of the water), with the caveat that multiple projects means multiple windows, it's difficult to have an entirely mouseless workflow, and in general it's less customizable than Emacs.

I personally never bothered to learn Emacs keybindings and instead use Vim keybindings in every editor I touch; VS Code and Emacs both have excellent Vim plugins.

Honorable mention: Neovim. It is lighter weight than either Emacs or VS Code but can still have pretty much all the bells and whistles. Definitely cool if you prefer to live in a terminal.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#72

Wow, Eglot/Treesitter/better package support in 29 make me want to try Emacs again. > Install packages from source with package.el Emacs users updating to 29: do you plan to use this instead of Straight now? If not, can you help me to understand what more Straight provides? Emacs on macOS users: do you generally compile new versions of Emacs from source, or wait for ports like Mitsuharu Yamamoto's one[1] to update? […

I’ve been using Mitsuharu’s port for years, always compiling it myself from his bitbucket repo. I am no longer sure how different it is from the vanilla GNU distribution. When I first started using emacs, long before the Mac port, the current version was 18.57, I think. It was a long wait for version 19 to appear, being the first version with proper X11 support. It amazes me to think of how much has happened since, and that emacs is as useful and relevant now as then.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#73
post #63

I really want to use Emacs but I can't get Company + any LSP to come close to vs code or coc.nvim. When I configure company to trigger instantly on a single keystroke, Emacs completely locks up pretty much every time I hit a key.

you can try https://github.com/manateelazycat/lsp-bridge

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#74
post #10

I highly recommend modern Emacs over VSCode. If you don't want to tinker, Emacs has multiple levels of preconfigured distributions like Prelude, Nano, and Doom Emacs that give the same out of the box working experience. Modern Emacs includes all of the great features of VSCode, plus much more. You get things like: - LSP support for completion, refactoring, listing. - Tree sitter support for super fast highlighting. -…

Yes, but what about remote support? That’s the single most thing I miss from VSCode. I want to run my editor on the local machine so that it can benefit from graphics support and integrate properly with the local windowing system, but I want all heavy lifting (LSP and the like) done on a remote machine. Yes, I can use Emacs over SSH (which I do now), but it has limitations. Yes, I could forward X11, but it’s pretty t…

> Yes, I can use Emacs over SSH (which I do now), but it has limitations. Yes, I could forward X11, but it’s pretty terrible to do so from Windows or macOS.

Which limitations (that matter)? Maybe I was just too used to vim - everybody is saying use the graphical edition of emacs, but I don't really care. mosh + emacs works great for me.

One thing that helped a lot is making the tmux clipboard transfer to your local computer.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#76
post #50

Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…

I find the consistency and configurability great, but for me the killer features were being able to write elisp and kbd-macros to accomplish tasks that (most?) other editors can’t.

Modern conveniences include magit (the best git [porcelain] I’ve ever used) and cider, but I’ve been using emacs for 30+ years now and feel like for all but the first 6 months, it’s been an increasing time-saver and powerful lever for me to use.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#77
post #50

Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…

For me it was org-mode. Emacs is basically my org mode interface.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#78
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is a lifestyle and it takes time to get into it. The jokes are pretty spot on - it's a wonderful operating system; it only needs a decent text editor. You'd probably have to "dedicate" yourself to it for a month or more (and having a "mentor" or support group that can answer questions and telling you there's an easier way to do it would help). It was MUCH more powerful (relative) when we didn't have much beyond…

I don't know why you are being downvoted - I agree. I do just that. Last paragraph though I do not agree with at all.

Before tools like VScode existed Emacs was infinitely beyond other options, now it’s just really really really far ahead.

Re: Emacs 29 is nigh

#79
post #71
post #50

Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…

I do think that keyboard optimized workflows are not for everyone; you should use what works best for you! However, Emacs distributions like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs are definitely more approachable and featured OOTB than vanilla Emacs. For me, the benefit of Emacs is that it's a single environment I can do everything in. I also am the type to enjoy messing with my workflow. IMO most of that can be replicated with VS…

> VS Code remote editing blows TRAMP out of the water

I’ll have to try VSCode in this area, but Tramp seems pretty awesome to me so I’m trying to think how it could be blown out of the water.

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