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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

#81

Post by blks »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #15

Systems like Emacs that are hyper-configurable via a text file seem tailor made for modern LLM's. If you've got a little bit of Emacs experience but bounced off of it because the learning curve was too steep I highly recommend diving back in with your agent. Agents are really good at setting up and maintaining your .emacs/init.el.

Modern LLMs are ok with that, but they do make silly mistakes; and a major problem here is that your init.el stops being your own, if it’s written and maintained by an LLM, you will have no idea what’s going on there. And if you would be reviewing every single line of your init file, then what’s the point

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

#82

Post by sporedro »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #15

Systems like Emacs that are hyper-configurable via a text file seem tailor made for modern LLM's. If you've got a little bit of Emacs experience but bounced off of it because the learning curve was too steep I highly recommend diving back in with your agent. Agents are really good at setting up and maintaining your .emacs/init.el.

I’ve always used vim/neovim but fell in love with some of the features of emacs (org, magit, lisp). My problem was spending the time to configure it though.

Even with spaceman’s/doom and the amazing documentation it was always still so much work to configure emacs as a newer user. LLMS have made this nearly instant.

This is a bit of a ramble but it’s so amazing having emacs and an LLM now, I don’t even touch vscode anymore and only find myself touching things like IntelliJ when I really need to dig into something with a debugger.

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

#83

Post by tpmoney »

skulk wrote: post #29
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…

This comment shows up on every single emacs thread and for the life of me I can't understand why. It takes one line in a shell to pull down a premade config and if that were to be built on, who would decide what gets put in? I don't think it's worth anyone's time to decide what everyone needs in a premade config.

The problem isn’t so much the difficulty in finding a pre-made config, it’s a combination of:

A) which premade config to choose

B) what half of those settings even do (and do you need them)

C) a lack of “sane” defaults that use the built in abilities

Realistically walking through the article authors “emacs from scratch” config and seeing what can be done with the built in packages and how is hugely instructive but even then you only get that from walking through the config one line at a time and reading “help” documentation for most of it.

At this point emacs is so old that fixing the problem of “sane defaults” is probably near impossible if only for how much it would break existing configs. But it might be a good addition to the tutorial to provide a set of questions and answers (possibly with demonstrations) that allow a new user to generate their own config with some nice defaults. We can assume these days that most new emacs users are coming from some other editors, so asking questions like “do you want auto complete suggestions in an inline drop down like VSCode” could be a perfectly reasonable question and then it could add the correct configuration settings to config for you using just the built in functionality

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

#85

Post by ot »

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…

> GNU deadline

I think you mean readline?

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

#86

Post by chipotle_coyote »

b5n wrote: post #41
quibono wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

treesitter (with easily installable grammars - a big pain point) / LSP integration OOTB / themability Plus now agent integration (aka GPTEL)

These are all trivial to implement? `treesitter` grammars _are_ easy to install. `eglot` is available OOTB, `lsp-mode` is easy to install and configure if you prefer. `gptel` is easy to install and configure.

I'm getting pretty good with Emacs, but I find its Treesitter handling a bit obtuse, and the auto-installation package I found slowed the editor down a lot for reasons I can't determine. (I mean, everything slowed down, and it all sped up again when I uninstalled the package.) I'm looking forward to revisiting this when Emacs 31 comes out, though.

I also don't think I'd ever call configuring Emacs "trivial" compared to more modern editors. Matching the out-of-box experience of something like VS Code or Panic Nova requires some work. This isn't really a knock against Emacs, but I think Emacs fans -- myself included -- need to be honest about that. It's quite possible I would have picked up Emacs years earlier if I hadn't been given the impression that it was just super duper easy, especially once you picked a starter pack. It is not, it probably never will be, and I've come to believe that starter packs are actually a bad idea for most new users. If you don't understand just what it is you're putting in your init.el file and why, then if you run into problems, it's going to be way harder to figure out how to fix them.

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

#87

Post by bryanlarsen »

blks wrote: post #76
dieggsy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.

I used emacs for about 16 years, but never properly gotten into client-daemon setup. What’s your setup? Does the daemon preserve open buffers and stuff, so when you connect you have all your openned stuff? Or each emacs sessions have separate set of buffers and windows?

> Does the daemon preserve open buffers and stuff, so when you connect you have all your openned stuff?

Yes. I use it instead of tmux for that.

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

#88

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kccqzy wrote: post #40
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…

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?

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

#89

Post by cmrdporcupine »

emil-lp wrote: post #28
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…

What are these things you have that makes Emacs a modern editor? I have cua-mode and don't show startup message. What else do I need to modernize Emacs?

Vertico feels like a must-have to me these days. I also like to have treemacs installed.

Apart from that, I don't have a lot I insist on, and my used emacs package space keeps shrinking.

That said lately I use lem more than I do GNU emacs.

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