Two Years of Emacs Solo • Hacker News Board

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#91

Post by drob518 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:19 PM UTC

kidsil wrote: post #89

Funny, this mirrors almost exactly a decision I made after about a year of struggling with ELPA packages breaking on me repeatedly. I ended up cutting Emacs off from ELPA entirely, settled on a ~700-line init.el, and now use Emacs as a glorified Org-mode agenda keeper. It's been heavenly (especially with a dedicated monitor). The one thing I'm still working out is syncing with calendars and email.

Interesting. I use ELPA/MELPA all the time and find things pretty stable for my own uses. Surprisingly so, in fact. I honestly expected more hiccups. I wonder whether it’s differences between the packages that we use or the complexity of the configuration or what. Mostly I spend my time in Clojure mode with CIDER and Magit. I’m not trying to run email and calendar in Emacs.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#92

Post by drob518 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:24 PM UTC

rkomorn wrote: post #57

dhosek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because any mention of Emacs must bring out the vi people, just as any mention of vi must bring out the Emacs people. Because you people are cracking your eggs from the wrong end!

> Because you people are cracking your eggs from the wrong end! That's because both ends are wrong. Eggs should be cracked from the side. Can't believe this still needs to be said on this forum in 2026.

Cue RMS giving the Church of Emacs skit…

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#93

Post by drob518 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC

LiamPowell wrote: post #33

NetOpWibby wrote: post #27

I’m always impressed by people who are hardcore EMacs or Vim devs, their setups are impressive af. I’m a GUI guy though. As soon as I try delving in, I abort when I see things like “just type c-C dingle bob to do x thing.” I’m happy these people found something that works with their brains. I just want a GUI that works like what they use. I recently saw a Zed fork stripped of AI stuff but there’s no binaries yet (you…

> I’m a GUI guy though. As soon as I try delving in, I abort when I see things like “just type c-C dingle bob to do x thing.” I’m happy these people found something that works with their brains. I just want a GUI that works like what they use. You do have that somewhat with packages like which-key that will show you a menu of options every time you press a key. You then learn the keybinds that you use the most. You c…

Which-key is invaluable as a way to navigate a large key chord hierarchy. Great for learning mode-specific commands that live under C-c.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#94

Post by drob518 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:38 PM UTC

CodeCompost wrote: post #54

Emacs is awesome but customizing it costs me way too much of my precious time.

Yep, me too. That’s the eternal trade-off. I’m always pretty sure that there’s a specific Emacs function or mode that does exactly what I want, but I mostly can’t be bothered to find it beyond a quick guessing search via apropos (C-h a). I brute-force my way through a lot of tasks using keyboard macros that might otherwise be solved more elegantly if I had the time.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#95

Post by timonoko » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

I tried (setq backup-directory-alist '(("." . ".local/share/Trash/files/"))). It would have been fun if backup files were also Thunar Trash.

But too many problems. Even Grok, Gemini and Chatgpt were stunned.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#96

Post by alfiedotwtf » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

amake wrote: post #26

Ferret7446 wrote: post #10

The "why" is kinda sketchy. The difference between what is shipped in Emacs and in ELPA is somewhat arbitrary. In fact, there are many built in packages that have their updates shipped in ELPA, meaning if you aren't using ELPA then your builtin packages might have unpatched bugs. There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to…

> The "why" is kinda sketchy It seems pretty clear that the "why" is "because it's there"

> because it’s fun

Sounds good enough for me

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#97

Post by drob518 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:50 PM UTC

bananamogul wrote: post #19

If I was going to reimplement Emacs it wouldn't be with Lisp. Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing? I'm skeptical because to my knowledge, Emacs is the only major text editor written in Lisp.

Not specifically superior for text editing, but it has some specific capabilities that make it ideal for making an editing environment. Specifically, it’s great at incremental, dynamic loading of small code snippets. This allows development of Emacs code without having to recompile and restart all the time. In fact, the low-level core of Emacs (buffer manipulation code, regex execution, redisplay, etc.) is all in C. But then those C routines are strung together with Lisp to make up all the high level functionality. Having a dynamic, incremental language is really handy for that. Does it have to be Lisp? No, not necessarily. But Lisp is a great choice.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#98

Post by obezyian » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

> Disabling C-z (suspend) because accidentally suspending Emacs in a terminal is never fun

This reminds me of a story from a past job. I have to get it out of my system.

There was this bearded sysadmin guy who was very proud of his "15 years of experience", and was quick to scold us new employees for every little thing he could.

He used vim, and every now and then would say that it's a good editor, but kinda "unstable". Crashed a lot, he said.

You probably know where this is going.

One day, one of us sat next to him and discovered many suspended vim jobs in his shell (this was the kind of guy that doesn't power off his computer).

He was fat-fingering C-z all the time, and has never heard of job control - bg, fg, etc.

15 years of experience.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#99

Post by bergheim » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 1:15 PM UTC

Great stuff. Funny how that whole Ai thing is Ai generated:

No gptel, no ellama, just url-retrieve and some JSON parsing.

The no x no y just z is the new em dashes. And that will probably be true for about a week.

Re: Two Years of Emacs Solo

#100

Post by rgoulter » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

uncletaco wrote: post #71

jimbokun wrote: post #24

This article shows how Emacs remains a beautiful, relevant project several decades after it was first created. The core design and implementation’s ability to evolve into something still useful today and competitive with modern tools is an amazing achievement. Also, with LLMs driving so much of current development it potentially makes Emacs even more competitive relative to modern IDEs. Development can be driven prim…

It’s interesting how your comment did not talk about anything that’s unique to emacs.

The core of it is described by the post you're replying to as "I imagine an LLM would be very good at writing Elisp to leverage EMacs’ strong core functionality to make Emacs work exactly how you want."

Emacs is highly customisable. There's not really a hard difference between "configuration" and "extension". Whereas with e.g. VSCode, very few people would write their own extensions. -- So it's a good point that with LLMs, the barrier to customise Emacs to exactly how you want it is even lower.

I'd also argue that since practically everything in Emacs is text (as opposed to a rich GUI interface), Emacs itself ought to make for a nice interface to LLM functionality.