6 ms·

I have yet to encounter anything that can match the sheer flexibility of Emacs. For example I am currently using Org mode to write some documentation complete

I have yet to encounter anything that can match the sheer flexibility of Emacs. For example I am currently using Org mode to write some documentation complete with hyper-links, tables, foot notes and the option to export the results as LaTeX, HTML, Open-Office, and so on with just a few keypresses. It's not just an editor, or an IDE, or even a windowing system - it is a cross-platform computing environment that can be fashioned to exactly suit whatever purpose you require.

dmitriid 8y ago
Emacs is an OS that lacks a decent text editor (the joke is as old as Emacs).
- purerandomness 8y ago
  Not funny. Evil mode was released in 2013.
  - someguy101010 8y ago
    That's much more recent than I expected
    - black-tea 8y ago
      It's about the time hipsters started to take an interest in vim so not too surprising.
    - noelwelsh 8y ago
      There were other vi emulation modes before that. Vile was one. I believe evil is much better, though (I never used vi emulation before evil so I have no firsthand experience here).
  - alpaca128 8y ago
    I tried Evil mode a few months ago and went back to Vim very quickly. It's one of the best Vim plugins out there, but it still misses a few features and it also behaves differently in a couple of situations. It never really feels like Vim, more like a minefield of unknown shortcuts with a layer of Vim bindings on top. But I get why some people like it, if you can't stand modal editing then Emacs is a great choice.
    - zzzzzzzza 8y ago
      spacemacs.
    - setr 8y ago
      One of the selling points of neovim was to make it more easily embedded into other programs.. doesn’t seem like anyones trying to do so from a quick googling though; maybe one day there can be true unification of the holy editors
      - dan-robertson 8y ago
        I suspect this is quite unlikely. A main reason for emacs being good is that it has a good programming language for extensions and good primitives to support it. This is in comparison to eg vimscript (hopelessly bad) and javascript (extremely mediocre). Emacs Lisp has several advantages: 1. Language is more extensible because of macros so dealing with editor state can be hidden. 2. Language is more dynamic with advice and eval-after-load and such is extensions can play well together 3. For all it’s difficulties, having buffer-local variables and dynamic scope seems to make writing extensions easier As far as I can tell, making Emacs cooperate with neovim would require shoehorning the editor model of one editor into that of the other, likely causing many extensions and expected behaviours to break. There is, I think, a difference between making a new application that can use neovim for editing some bits and making an old (or, indeed, very old) application switch to using neovim for editing.
        alpaca128 8y ago
        NeoVim supports Lua as well.
    - snazz 8y ago
      Could you elaborate on some of the specific features that Evil was missing? Aside from a couple of exceptions, any differences from Vim are considered bugs.
      - alpaca128 8y ago
- gglitch 8y ago
  I realize this is a joke, but there seem to be a lot of people who are really attached to the interpretation of Emacs as a little Lisp Machine.
  - nickpeterson 8y ago
    Emacs should just embrace it and make a distro.
    - jammygit 8y ago
      Call it "Emix"
  - dan-robertson 8y ago
    Emacs is an ok lisp machine. It is much better than many common lisp distributions which are typically not very good lisp machines (I believe the proprietary systems are better in this regard). Clinging on to Emacs as a lisp machine can mean clinging onto the more dynamic customisable extensible computation environment epitomised by the lisp machine, and in this sense I think it is more understandable
    - lispm 8y ago
      > Emacs is an ok lisp machine GNU Emacs is an extensible text editor, but not a Lisp Machine. A Lisp machine is a computer with a Lisp OS on the metal. This means the OS itself is written in Lisp and not just some specialized application, interfacing to a foreign underlying OS. A Lisp OS has also an open GUI and not just an editor-buffer-based UI. With GNU Emacs the extensibility ends when one calls an OS tool or an OS library - for a Lisp Machine there is no such distinction. GNU Emacs is a mostly single-threaded editor, with a horrible user interface and heroic efforts from users to deal with thousands of modes and keystroke combinations. None of the extensible Lisp applications are 'Lisp Machines': not Autocad, not Audacity, not iCAD, not Creo Elements, not GNU Emacs, not OpusModus, not Macsyma, ... They are Lisp applications which expose a development interface and a development environment (yes, Autocad has Lisp development tools) and users are writing complex applications on top of those. On a real Lisp Machine, an Emacs-like text editor is just one application and one interface style.
- xte 8y ago
  Well... For me it also have a decent text editor... The bad point is that it lack a bootloader+kernel+userland that let me ditch basic Linux kernel... GuixSD is nicely integrated but Emacs Guile port is not "official" and "mature" enough to have it really as a sole OS, also GuixSD use bash by default, not Emacs at login... For now I'm happy enough with NixOS+EXWM despite few annoyance not directly caused by Emacs :-)
  - idle_zealot 8y ago
    Would you mind sharing your nix config?
    - xte 8y ago
      Since I plan to re-write it in org and cleanup I do not publish it however here http://ix.io/1vf0 http://ix.io/1vf0 there is a quick redacted NixOS config of my desktop :-) When I have time I will port both NixOS, homeManager and Emacs config in org, with proper docs. But I do not know when I will do that...
- krylon 8y ago
  As a long-term emacs user, I obviously disagree, but it is a good joke. ;-)
tiborsaas 8y ago
How much time have you invested?
- Wildgoose 8y ago
  Relatively little really. Probably the biggest individual customisation I have made is using Poet Theme (and its recommendations) to provide a good-looking GUI setup: https://github.com/kunalb/poet https://github.com/kunalb/poet I also have a basic (text only) init.el for when solely working in a Terminal environment. My advice would be to perhaps start with just what is recommended to use Poet theme and then add what you need when you need it.
- black-tea 8y ago
  I've invested lots of time, but it's enjoyable. It's not work.
- jimhefferon 8y ago
  Not OP. But if you are asking whether it is not possible for a person to just sit down and start typing, surely time spent to get such great results is an investment.
- xte 8y ago
  I second to have choose Emacs as a main computing environment and since I often here the question "how much time ..." well... I'd like to add a note: time can't be only measured in hours, days, etc. To learn Emacs enough to decide that's the way I'd like to interact and use my desktop it take a very little time, in around three month I start using Emacs as WM (EXWM), MUA (notmuch-emacs) in around two months with a "false start" on Mu4e, main docs solution, tramp, personal finance (ledger) etc But the real point is: I do it when I like to do, as much as I like, in my free time. In other words I can start easily and grow as I wont and need, and this knowledge will survive for decades to came. With commercial software you need to invest time (and money) before start, and after having reached a certain amount of knowledge you can't go further, you have to keep yourself up to date following upstream changes and you new knowledge have a very little value in the long run. That distinction is important because too many people say "hey it took too much time to proficiently use FOSS" completely ignoring the big picture. Good time to learn FOSS is at school, when you have plenty of time and (in theory) you are willing to learn, after you get the benefit for the lifetime. Another good time is when you feel the need, in free time. You do not have to pay something in advance, you do not have "training", "diplomas" etc, you grow at your speed and desire, limitless. That's the real matter, not how many hours.
leemailll 8y ago
Org mode is really awesome. A chemist basically does his work with org (http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu) and recently another guy showing his colleague’s poster done with org and Beamer ( http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7651 http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7651). I find org and mu4e really make mundane stuff easily done. On a mac and iOS system to get email, calendar, to do list, and notes done, it is usually 4 different programs, with emacs it is just org and mu4e and beorg on mobile.
- asdff 8y ago
  I'd love to find more examples of org mode used in the sciences! Any for molecular/cell biology type work?
  - nouseforaname 8y ago
    There are a few examples here: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-papers.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-papers.html
  - leemailll 8y ago
    I'm not in that field, but I think you can take a look at org-ref for bibliography, org-babel for R and Matlab. For me org and emacs serve more as a note keeper. I think if you are in a wet lab, many things have to be done with specific programs, but if you don't own a bench, many things on commandline can use org to do.
kashyapc 8y ago
My sole use of Emacs is for Org-Mode (for extensive note-taking, task breakdown, writing reports, etc). I'm glad I invested the time three years ago. During the upcoming holidays, I should try to explore and "stumble upon" advanced features and neat tricks that I haven't come across yet.
- Torwald 8y ago
  Remember mode could be cool for your use case. It may be integrated into Org by now (?)
  - kashyapc 8y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion; never heard of it before. Not sure if it's integrated into Org itself; it looks like so. but the Remember Mode seems to have Org as one of its "backends"[1]. Reading the documentation ... section 7.5 (Saving to an Org Mode file) says: "For instructions on how to integrate Remember with Org Mode, consult Capture" Okay, let's go and read the documentation of Capture[2]; it says: "Capture lets you quickly store notes with little interruption of your work flow. Org's method for capturing new items is heavily inspired by John Wiegley excellent remember.el package. Up to version 6.36, Org used a special setup for remember.el, then replaced it with org-remember.el. As of version 8.0, org-remember.el has been completely replaced by org-capture.el." [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/remember.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/remember... [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/org.html#Capture https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/org.html...
yters 8y ago
I used org-mode for a bit, but it got really cluttered. Now I have a KISS setup with 3 quick keyboard macros and standard Emacs. Benefit is I can instantiate this system in any Emacs in about 5 minutes.

dmitriid 8y ago

Emacs is an OS that lacks a decent text editor (the joke is as old as Emacs).

purerandomness 8y ago
Not funny. Evil mode was released in 2013.
- someguy101010 8y ago
  That's much more recent than I expected
  - black-tea 8y ago
    It's about the time hipsters started to take an interest in vim so not too surprising.
  - noelwelsh 8y ago
    There were other vi emulation modes before that. Vile was one. I believe evil is much better, though (I never used vi emulation before evil so I have no firsthand experience here).
- alpaca128 8y ago
  I tried Evil mode a few months ago and went back to Vim very quickly. It's one of the best Vim plugins out there, but it still misses a few features and it also behaves differently in a couple of situations. It never really feels like Vim, more like a minefield of unknown shortcuts with a layer of Vim bindings on top. But I get why some people like it, if you can't stand modal editing then Emacs is a great choice.
  - zzzzzzzza 8y ago
    spacemacs.
  - setr 8y ago
    One of the selling points of neovim was to make it more easily embedded into other programs.. doesn’t seem like anyones trying to do so from a quick googling though; maybe one day there can be true unification of the holy editors
    - dan-robertson 8y ago
      I suspect this is quite unlikely. A main reason for emacs being good is that it has a good programming language for extensions and good primitives to support it. This is in comparison to eg vimscript (hopelessly bad) and javascript (extremely mediocre). Emacs Lisp has several advantages: 1. Language is more extensible because of macros so dealing with editor state can be hidden. 2. Language is more dynamic with advice and eval-after-load and such is extensions can play well together 3. For all it’s difficulties, having buffer-local variables and dynamic scope seems to make writing extensions easier As far as I can tell, making Emacs cooperate with neovim would require shoehorning the editor model of one editor into that of the other, likely causing many extensions and expected behaviours to break. There is, I think, a difference between making a new application that can use neovim for editing some bits and making an old (or, indeed, very old) application switch to using neovim for editing.
      - alpaca128 8y ago
        NeoVim supports Lua as well.
  - snazz 8y ago
    Could you elaborate on some of the specific features that Evil was missing? Aside from a couple of exceptions, any differences from Vim are considered bugs.
    - alpaca128 8y ago
gglitch 8y ago
I realize this is a joke, but there seem to be a lot of people who are really attached to the interpretation of Emacs as a little Lisp Machine.
- nickpeterson 8y ago
  Emacs should just embrace it and make a distro.
  - jammygit 8y ago
    Call it "Emix"
- dan-robertson 8y ago
  Emacs is an ok lisp machine. It is much better than many common lisp distributions which are typically not very good lisp machines (I believe the proprietary systems are better in this regard). Clinging on to Emacs as a lisp machine can mean clinging onto the more dynamic customisable extensible computation environment epitomised by the lisp machine, and in this sense I think it is more understandable
  - lispm 8y ago
    > Emacs is an ok lisp machine GNU Emacs is an extensible text editor, but not a Lisp Machine. A Lisp machine is a computer with a Lisp OS on the metal. This means the OS itself is written in Lisp and not just some specialized application, interfacing to a foreign underlying OS. A Lisp OS has also an open GUI and not just an editor-buffer-based UI. With GNU Emacs the extensibility ends when one calls an OS tool or an OS library - for a Lisp Machine there is no such distinction. GNU Emacs is a mostly single-threaded editor, with a horrible user interface and heroic efforts from users to deal with thousands of modes and keystroke combinations. None of the extensible Lisp applications are 'Lisp Machines': not Autocad, not Audacity, not iCAD, not Creo Elements, not GNU Emacs, not OpusModus, not Macsyma, ... They are Lisp applications which expose a development interface and a development environment (yes, Autocad has Lisp development tools) and users are writing complex applications on top of those. On a real Lisp Machine, an Emacs-like text editor is just one application and one interface style.
xte 8y ago
Well... For me it also have a decent text editor... The bad point is that it lack a bootloader+kernel+userland that let me ditch basic Linux kernel... GuixSD is nicely integrated but Emacs Guile port is not "official" and "mature" enough to have it really as a sole OS, also GuixSD use bash by default, not Emacs at login... For now I'm happy enough with NixOS+EXWM despite few annoyance not directly caused by Emacs :-)
- idle_zealot 8y ago
  Would you mind sharing your nix config?
  - xte 8y ago
    Since I plan to re-write it in org and cleanup I do not publish it however here http://ix.io/1vf0 http://ix.io/1vf0 there is a quick redacted NixOS config of my desktop :-) When I have time I will port both NixOS, homeManager and Emacs config in org, with proper docs. But I do not know when I will do that...
krylon 8y ago
As a long-term emacs user, I obviously disagree, but it is a good joke. ;-)

tiborsaas 8y ago

How much time have you invested?

Wildgoose 8y ago
Relatively little really. Probably the biggest individual customisation I have made is using Poet Theme (and its recommendations) to provide a good-looking GUI setup: https://github.com/kunalb/poet https://github.com/kunalb/poet I also have a basic (text only) init.el for when solely working in a Terminal environment. My advice would be to perhaps start with just what is recommended to use Poet theme and then add what you need when you need it.
black-tea 8y ago
I've invested lots of time, but it's enjoyable. It's not work.
jimhefferon 8y ago
Not OP. But if you are asking whether it is not possible for a person to just sit down and start typing, surely time spent to get such great results is an investment.
xte 8y ago
I second to have choose Emacs as a main computing environment and since I often here the question "how much time ..." well... I'd like to add a note: time can't be only measured in hours, days, etc. To learn Emacs enough to decide that's the way I'd like to interact and use my desktop it take a very little time, in around three month I start using Emacs as WM (EXWM), MUA (notmuch-emacs) in around two months with a "false start" on Mu4e, main docs solution, tramp, personal finance (ledger) etc But the real point is: I do it when I like to do, as much as I like, in my free time. In other words I can start easily and grow as I wont and need, and this knowledge will survive for decades to came. With commercial software you need to invest time (and money) before start, and after having reached a certain amount of knowledge you can't go further, you have to keep yourself up to date following upstream changes and you new knowledge have a very little value in the long run. That distinction is important because too many people say "hey it took too much time to proficiently use FOSS" completely ignoring the big picture. Good time to learn FOSS is at school, when you have plenty of time and (in theory) you are willing to learn, after you get the benefit for the lifetime. Another good time is when you feel the need, in free time. You do not have to pay something in advance, you do not have "training", "diplomas" etc, you grow at your speed and desire, limitless. That's the real matter, not how many hours.

leemailll 8y ago

Org mode is really awesome. A chemist basically does his work with org (http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu) and recently another guy showing his colleague’s poster done with org and Beamer ( http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7651 http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7651). I find org and mu4e really make mundane stuff easily done. On a mac and iOS system to get email, calendar, to do list, and notes done, it is usually 4 different programs, with emacs it is just org and mu4e and beorg on mobile.

asdff 8y ago
I'd love to find more examples of org mode used in the sciences! Any for molecular/cell biology type work?
- nouseforaname 8y ago
  There are a few examples here: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-papers.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-papers.html
- leemailll 8y ago
  I'm not in that field, but I think you can take a look at org-ref for bibliography, org-babel for R and Matlab. For me org and emacs serve more as a note keeper. I think if you are in a wet lab, many things have to be done with specific programs, but if you don't own a bench, many things on commandline can use org to do.

kashyapc 8y ago

My sole use of Emacs is for Org-Mode (for extensive note-taking, task breakdown, writing reports, etc). I'm glad I invested the time three years ago. During the upcoming holidays, I should try to explore and "stumble upon" advanced features and neat tricks that I haven't come across yet.

Torwald 8y ago
Remember mode could be cool for your use case. It may be integrated into Org by now (?)
- kashyapc 8y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion; never heard of it before. Not sure if it's integrated into Org itself; it looks like so. but the Remember Mode seems to have Org as one of its "backends"[1]. Reading the documentation ... section 7.5 (Saving to an Org Mode file) says: "For instructions on how to integrate Remember with Org Mode, consult Capture" Okay, let's go and read the documentation of Capture[2]; it says: "Capture lets you quickly store notes with little interruption of your work flow. Org's method for capturing new items is heavily inspired by John Wiegley excellent remember.el package. Up to version 6.36, Org used a special setup for remember.el, then replaced it with org-remember.el. As of version 8.0, org-remember.el has been completely replaced by org-capture.el." [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/remember.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/remember... [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/org.html#Capture https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/org.html...

yters 8y ago

I used org-mode for a bit, but it got really cluttered. Now I have a KISS setup with 3 quick keyboard macros and standard Emacs. Benefit is I can instantiate this system in any Emacs in about 5 minutes.