7 ms·

Emacs in odd places

164 points by catacombs 6y ago

teddyh 6y ago
Emacs clone “AMIS” for TOPS-10 (swedish): https://hack.org/mc/texts/amis.txt https://hack.org/mc/texts/amis.txt
fxj 6y ago
emacs in termux on any android device
- julienchastang 6y ago
  With an external bluetooth keyboard, this solution is surprisingly good. This is what I use for light remote work when I go on leisure travel and don't want to bring my laptop.
  - fxj 6y ago
    even text scrolling by touch works for me. hackers keyboard on android is a godsent. also you can install it without the play store by downloading the apk directly from f-droid. works on a fire hd like a charm. combine that with floatingapps.net and you even can use it in an x-windows style.
mlang23 6y ago
I once wrote a patch to Emacs to make it possible to build it as part of buildroot. The problem here is that buildroot does cross-compiling, and Emacs has no native support for cross-building. However, qemu was able to help by emulating the target arch at user-space level (I didnt even know this worked, very nice). I am not sure if that hack still works today, since the Emacs dumper was recently rewritten AFAIK. Regarding Emacs being an universal UI platform, I wrote a metapost to emacs-devel to celebrate that fact very recently. Indeed, Emacs is the only platform I know which can be used to write programs which work on the terminal and with a GUI toolkit alike. I call that modality-independant. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00286.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00...
- p3r7 6y ago
  Wow, impressed by that buildroot port. Did you had any particular target hardware when doing this? I see we share a similar view of what Emacs really is (https://www.eigenbahn.com/2020/01/12/emacs-is-no-editor https://www.eigenbahn.com/2020/01/12/emacs-is-no-editor) and enjoyed your piece. Thanks for posting it. Having the possibility to have a system that "glues" together different functionalities in a coherent way is really something. And you being a blind person, I can only conceive how even more critical that is.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
olivierestsage 6y ago
When I started using Emacs, I didn't think I'd use it much except for org-mode, which was the reason I started learning it. Then, as my usage expanded, I didn't think I'd want to use it for anything beyond org-mode, programming, and core text editing functions. Certainly not email or any of that other foolishness. Flash forward a couple of years and here I am, looking into making Emacs into my actual X window manager [1] so that I finally use it for everything, period. I recognize that the practical arguments in favor of doing this are limited at best. Sometimes people "Emacs evangelize" by talking about how living entirely within the program allows them to have one text editing paradigm for everything in their lives; even though that is indeed nice, non-users aren't wrong to be skeptical about the practical benefits, given the amount of effort that will probably be involved. The secret is that for many Emacs users, it's just plain fun -- hence the things shown in this article, and also EXWM. [1] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
- AlanYx 6y ago
  IMHO using Emacs as your X window manager isn't particularly strange -- conceptually at least, it seems more natural than the Chromebook model, where people are essentially using a web browser as a window manager.
- basicneo 6y ago
  +1. For many years I heard strange things from Emacs users about how they wanted to do everything in Emacs. It's just a text editor! Now I'm one of those strange users. It's not just a text editor.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - taeric 6y ago
    I view it more as it being evidence that relying on text interactions is more powerful than folks acknowledge. It can be slower, for dinner things, but usually is more resilient than binary integrations. If only because it is easy to see what it was trying to do.
Grumbledour 6y ago
What I mostly get from this is, that there really is no good modern alternative to those great UMPCs.
- throwanem 6y ago
  I have a Gemini PDA, and it's not bad. I could wish for an X server to run Emacs against, but it works fine in terminal mode; I could wish for a more comfortable Linux-on-metal experience, but Termux and Firefox on Android are easily good enough. The keyboard is excellent. Too bad it came along a decade after I ceased to really need the kind of road-warrior sysadmin capability that such a device excels at providing. I'm still glad to have it.
- nicolapcweek94 6y ago
  Of course there is! The GPD family of Windows devices (Win/Win2/Win Max and Pocket/Pocket 2/Pocket2 Max) have pretty good hardware and somewhat decent linux support (they all have official Ubuntu Mate images), and the GPD MicroPC even has quite a few ports more than a modern ultrabook (ethernet, full size usb, 3.5' jack, even a RS232!). They have price points ranging from 400$ to 1000$, so there's something for everyone as well. Disclaimer: While I don't work for GPD I'm a very happy owner of a Win 2 that I use for light gaming and game streaming with Stadia and Geforce Now, and I've started using it for "computery tasks" more and more as I just keep that and my iPad Pro in my backpack - not that I leave the house often these days, though...
tahirkhan17 6y ago
Just to give an alternative perspective, I use emacs almost exclusively in the terminal through SSH. It is very convenient to be able to SSH into a host running emacs daemon and immediately have access to my existing session doing everything from irc and email, to editing scripts and tex files. X11 forwarding would be too sluggish and things like tramp don't keep you connected to irc. I do accept though that emacs in the GUI is probably how the majority of users are using it, so not moaning, just giving perhaps an alt use case.
elwell 6y ago
> It’s common sense that almost every device with a bare minimum of computing power can run Doom. Oh how far we've come since '93.
npsimons 6y ago
Oh yeah, I used to run Emacs+org-mode on an N900. Nowadays I run it in Termux. Fits my needs.
- tetris11 6y ago
  N900 had such a beautiful keyboard. I learned C and Python with ease from it, and wrote several fanfics - all enabled by the sheer ease of being able to slide open that keyboard (with the satisfying click) and precision typing a paragraph with what to the outside world must have looked like a series of well-timed squeeze-rubbing motions. I could type blind too - talking and interacting with someone whilst finishing a sentence with my other hand brain. I miss it so much.
cle 6y ago
This reminds me of the story Steve Yegge told about Emacs powering Amazon's customer service for years: > Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it. > People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-Lisp https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I've read this story countless time, and after having worked in a few places, I realize that software being missed is quite rare.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
akhilcacharya 6y ago
I recently saw a TikTok from a (I believe) non technical Mac user describing how to use the Doctor/Eliza bot to save on therapy. I was pretty impressed!
- GloriousKoji 6y ago
  Yow! Legally-imposed CULTURE-reduction is CABBAGE-BRAINED!
mrbonner 6y ago
I have been a Vim user for as far as I can remember. Now I am transitioning to Emacs. I keep hearing that you can "live" in emacs but I can't seem to have that revelation, yet. For example, I often find myself quit Emacs to jump to a different directory just to open a file. I think I am doing this wrong. I have tried Dire/Neotree but those are not providing enough convenience imo. Do you you a workflow or setup to "live" in emacs? Note: I use pure Emacs and not spacemac or Doom.
- jsrjenkins 6y ago
  There is a special mode for looking for files called "Dired". It is very powerful, especially with the extensions. This link is a good introduction to it: http://pragmaticemacs.com/emacs/dired-marking-copying-moving-and-deleting-files/ http://pragmaticemacs.com/emacs/dired-marking-copying-moving...
- kfoley 6y ago
  You can navigate to files in Emacs using `find-file` (C-x C-f with standard key bindings). That should prompt you to enter a path, which, without any customization, should perform very similar to a shell prompt in terms of using tab for file completions. A huge improvement to this in my opinion is the use of a completion framework package. I use ivy[0] but helm is also popular and there are others. The main draw in this case is instead of having to tab through completion candidates, they appear as a vertical list which is updated as you type. It also allows more advanced filtering, for example by regex which I find a lot easier to use than shell completion which only supports prefix. For example say I want to navigate to a directory called `the-project` but I always forget whether it's named `the-project` or `a-project`, it doesn't matter because I just type `project` and would see `the-project` as an option so I'd navigate to that and select it (using `C-n` and `C-p` to navigate the list). If that isn't what you're looking for then another option is `emacsclient` [1] which let's you open files in an already existing Emacs process. [0] https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient
- caenn 6y ago
  If you used Ranger in your vim days it's also available in emacs. Projectile when inside a git repo also has a lot of good stuff for navigation, see projective-find-file and other fn from the package. I will leave this here for the small set of people that use both emacs and windows. The 'everything' extension for emacs is really great, instant HD(s) wide file/folder search. If you don't have Everything.exe installed on your windows machine i'd urge you to go try it. (with or without emacs) As far as emacs integration this is what I use for it. The 2nd function requires the projectile and perspective extensions, it opens a new virtual-desktop-thing inside emacs. (if (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (use-package everything :config (setq everything-cmd "C:\\Program Files\\Everything\\es.exe") (setq everything-ffap-integration nil))) (defun open-file-from-anywhere () (interactive) (everything)) (defun open-file-from-anywhere-in-new-persp-if-in-project () (interactive) (let* ((fpath (everything-find-prompt)) (f-projectile-root (projectile-project-root fpath)) (project-name (projectile-project-name f-projectile-root))) (if f-projectile-root (progn (persp-switch project-name) (find-file fpath)) (progn (message "File is not in a valid project directory") (find-file fpath)))))
p3r7 6y ago
Hi, I'm the original author of the article. I'm quite surprised to see this got posted and made it to the front page. I'm a bit late to the party. Don't hesitate to ask questions, though.

Emacs in odd places

164 points by catacombs 6y ago

teddyh 6y ago

Emacs clone “AMIS” for TOPS-10 (swedish): https://hack.org/mc/texts/amis.txt https://hack.org/mc/texts/amis.txt

fxj 6y ago

emacs in termux on any android device

julienchastang 6y ago
With an external bluetooth keyboard, this solution is surprisingly good. This is what I use for light remote work when I go on leisure travel and don't want to bring my laptop.
- fxj 6y ago
  even text scrolling by touch works for me. hackers keyboard on android is a godsent. also you can install it without the play store by downloading the apk directly from f-droid. works on a fire hd like a charm. combine that with floatingapps.net and you even can use it in an x-windows style.

mlang23 6y ago

I once wrote a patch to Emacs to make it possible to build it as part of buildroot. The problem here is that buildroot does cross-compiling, and Emacs has no native support for cross-building. However, qemu was able to help by emulating the target arch at user-space level (I didnt even know this worked, very nice). I am not sure if that hack still works today, since the Emacs dumper was recently rewritten AFAIK. Regarding Emacs being an universal UI platform, I wrote a metapost to emacs-devel to celebrate that fact very recently. Indeed, Emacs is the only platform I know which can be used to write programs which work on the terminal and with a GUI toolkit alike. I call that modality-independant. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00286.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00...

p3r7 6y ago
Wow, impressed by that buildroot port. Did you had any particular target hardware when doing this? I see we share a similar view of what Emacs really is (https://www.eigenbahn.com/2020/01/12/emacs-is-no-editor https://www.eigenbahn.com/2020/01/12/emacs-is-no-editor) and enjoyed your piece. Thanks for posting it. Having the possibility to have a system that "glues" together different functionalities in a coherent way is really something. And you being a blind person, I can only conceive how even more critical that is.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

olivierestsage 6y ago

When I started using Emacs, I didn't think I'd use it much except for org-mode, which was the reason I started learning it. Then, as my usage expanded, I didn't think I'd want to use it for anything beyond org-mode, programming, and core text editing functions. Certainly not email or any of that other foolishness. Flash forward a couple of years and here I am, looking into making Emacs into my actual X window manager [1] so that I finally use it for everything, period. I recognize that the practical arguments in favor of doing this are limited at best. Sometimes people "Emacs evangelize" by talking about how living entirely within the program allows them to have one text editing paradigm for everything in their lives; even though that is indeed nice, non-users aren't wrong to be skeptical about the practical benefits, given the amount of effort that will probably be involved. The secret is that for many Emacs users, it's just plain fun -- hence the things shown in this article, and also EXWM. [1] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

AlanYx 6y ago
IMHO using Emacs as your X window manager isn't particularly strange -- conceptually at least, it seems more natural than the Chromebook model, where people are essentially using a web browser as a window manager.
basicneo 6y ago
+1. For many years I heard strange things from Emacs users about how they wanted to do everything in Emacs. It's just a text editor! Now I'm one of those strange users. It's not just a text editor.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- taeric 6y ago
  I view it more as it being evidence that relying on text interactions is more powerful than folks acknowledge. It can be slower, for dinner things, but usually is more resilient than binary integrations. If only because it is easy to see what it was trying to do.

Grumbledour 6y ago

What I mostly get from this is, that there really is no good modern alternative to those great UMPCs.

throwanem 6y ago
I have a Gemini PDA, and it's not bad. I could wish for an X server to run Emacs against, but it works fine in terminal mode; I could wish for a more comfortable Linux-on-metal experience, but Termux and Firefox on Android are easily good enough. The keyboard is excellent. Too bad it came along a decade after I ceased to really need the kind of road-warrior sysadmin capability that such a device excels at providing. I'm still glad to have it.
nicolapcweek94 6y ago
Of course there is! The GPD family of Windows devices (Win/Win2/Win Max and Pocket/Pocket 2/Pocket2 Max) have pretty good hardware and somewhat decent linux support (they all have official Ubuntu Mate images), and the GPD MicroPC even has quite a few ports more than a modern ultrabook (ethernet, full size usb, 3.5' jack, even a RS232!). They have price points ranging from 400$ to 1000$, so there's something for everyone as well. Disclaimer: While I don't work for GPD I'm a very happy owner of a Win 2 that I use for light gaming and game streaming with Stadia and Geforce Now, and I've started using it for "computery tasks" more and more as I just keep that and my iPad Pro in my backpack - not that I leave the house often these days, though...

tahirkhan17 6y ago

Just to give an alternative perspective, I use emacs almost exclusively in the terminal through SSH. It is very convenient to be able to SSH into a host running emacs daemon and immediately have access to my existing session doing everything from irc and email, to editing scripts and tex files. X11 forwarding would be too sluggish and things like tramp don't keep you connected to irc. I do accept though that emacs in the GUI is probably how the majority of users are using it, so not moaning, just giving perhaps an alt use case.

elwell 6y ago

> It’s common sense that almost every device with a bare minimum of computing power can run Doom. Oh how far we've come since '93.

npsimons 6y ago

Oh yeah, I used to run Emacs+org-mode on an N900. Nowadays I run it in Termux. Fits my needs.

tetris11 6y ago
N900 had such a beautiful keyboard. I learned C and Python with ease from it, and wrote several fanfics - all enabled by the sheer ease of being able to slide open that keyboard (with the satisfying click) and precision typing a paragraph with what to the outside world must have looked like a series of well-timed squeeze-rubbing motions. I could type blind too - talking and interacting with someone whilst finishing a sentence with my other hand brain. I miss it so much.

cle 6y ago

This reminds me of the story Steve Yegge told about Emacs powering Amazon's customer service for years: > Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it. > People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-Lisp https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...

agumonkey 6y ago
I've read this story countless time, and after having worked in a few places, I realize that software being missed is quite rare.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

akhilcacharya 6y ago

I recently saw a TikTok from a (I believe) non technical Mac user describing how to use the Doctor/Eliza bot to save on therapy. I was pretty impressed!

GloriousKoji 6y ago
Yow! Legally-imposed CULTURE-reduction is CABBAGE-BRAINED!

mrbonner 6y ago

I have been a Vim user for as far as I can remember. Now I am transitioning to Emacs. I keep hearing that you can "live" in emacs but I can't seem to have that revelation, yet. For example, I often find myself quit Emacs to jump to a different directory just to open a file. I think I am doing this wrong. I have tried Dire/Neotree but those are not providing enough convenience imo. Do you you a workflow or setup to "live" in emacs? Note: I use pure Emacs and not spacemac or Doom.

jsrjenkins 6y ago
There is a special mode for looking for files called "Dired". It is very powerful, especially with the extensions. This link is a good introduction to it: http://pragmaticemacs.com/emacs/dired-marking-copying-moving-and-deleting-files/ http://pragmaticemacs.com/emacs/dired-marking-copying-moving...
kfoley 6y ago
You can navigate to files in Emacs using `find-file` (C-x C-f with standard key bindings). That should prompt you to enter a path, which, without any customization, should perform very similar to a shell prompt in terms of using tab for file completions. A huge improvement to this in my opinion is the use of a completion framework package. I use ivy[0] but helm is also popular and there are others. The main draw in this case is instead of having to tab through completion candidates, they appear as a vertical list which is updated as you type. It also allows more advanced filtering, for example by regex which I find a lot easier to use than shell completion which only supports prefix. For example say I want to navigate to a directory called `the-project` but I always forget whether it's named `the-project` or `a-project`, it doesn't matter because I just type `project` and would see `the-project` as an option so I'd navigate to that and select it (using `C-n` and `C-p` to navigate the list). If that isn't what you're looking for then another option is `emacsclient` [1] which let's you open files in an already existing Emacs process. [0] https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient
caenn 6y ago
If you used Ranger in your vim days it's also available in emacs. Projectile when inside a git repo also has a lot of good stuff for navigation, see projective-find-file and other fn from the package. I will leave this here for the small set of people that use both emacs and windows. The 'everything' extension for emacs is really great, instant HD(s) wide file/folder search. If you don't have Everything.exe installed on your windows machine i'd urge you to go try it. (with or without emacs) As far as emacs integration this is what I use for it. The 2nd function requires the projectile and perspective extensions, it opens a new virtual-desktop-thing inside emacs. (if (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (use-package everything :config (setq everything-cmd "C:\\Program Files\\Everything\\es.exe") (setq everything-ffap-integration nil))) (defun open-file-from-anywhere () (interactive) (everything)) (defun open-file-from-anywhere-in-new-persp-if-in-project () (interactive) (let* ((fpath (everything-find-prompt)) (f-projectile-root (projectile-project-root fpath)) (project-name (projectile-project-name f-projectile-root))) (if f-projectile-root (progn (persp-switch project-name) (find-file fpath)) (progn (message "File is not in a valid project directory") (find-file fpath)))))

p3r7 6y ago

Hi, I'm the original author of the article. I'm quite surprised to see this got posted and made it to the front page. I'm a bit late to the party. Don't hesitate to ask questions, though.