7 ms·

Dont. Emacs is there to be tinkered with, and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard. I love Emacs. I develop for it, financially support it

Dont. Emacs is there to be tinkered with, and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard. I love Emacs. I develop for it, financially support it, live it everyday. The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. If you love Lisp, give StumpWM a try. Simplicity, DWM. Simplicity with modularity? AwesomeWM just works. Keep your Emacs config away from your system packages. The latter should prop up the former, not vice versa

kehrin 3y ago
> and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard. Being off by one column of keys on your keyboard can really be a death sentence to your buffer (and maybe even codebase).
- aldanor 3y ago
  ... and maybe even your hard drive
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  That would be your fault for not writing prompts for dangerous actions in your elisp automation though.
  - kehrin 3y ago
    Most of the danger (for me) comes from evil-mode. Adding prompts wouldn't make sense there ;P
- noman-land 3y ago
  This sounds like running heavy machinery with no safety equipment. Is it really desirable to have a system that would behave this way?
  - kehrin 3y ago
    Eh, there is plenty of safety equipment. Mainly undo-tree and magit.
  - donio 3y ago
    The parent is just being ridiculous, Emacs of course has undo, auto-save and version control. And unlike in certain modal editors it's pretty hard to do any real damage without touching Control or Meta.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> AwesomeWM just works I use AwesomeWM since forever, with about 12 virtual desktops/workspaces. Nice thing is: it's a tiling WM but I can still put some of the workspace in "floating" mode and they then behave not unlike windows on a regular desktop (which makes some programs happy). FWIW I'm also a big Emacs user.
- markstos 3y ago
  Sway allows toggling floating and tiled as well.
  - sweettea 3y ago
    But Sway makes you use Wayland instead of the eminently stable and usable X11.
    - dngray 3y ago
      > eminently stable and usable X11 FUD. Wayland works fine. I have been using Sway for years now without issue. It is also more secure[1], maintained[2] and even works with NVIDIA's proprietary driver. [3][4]. It also isn't the antiquated piece of crap that X11[5] is, which has trouble with things like mixed DPI, and other modern features that Windows and macOS do completely fine without "tweaking" [6]. If Wayland did not exist I would not be using Linux on a desktop. The "screen tearing" with X11 when using a compositor was painful. [1] https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-c... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly [3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway [4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.7-rc2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.7-rc2 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c [6] https://blog.summercat.com/configuring-mixed-dpi-monitors-with-xrandr.html https://blog.summercat.com/configuring-mixed-dpi-monitors-wi...
      - 3y ago
peterhil 3y ago
I came here to recommend AwesomeWM also. Here is my setup, written in Fennel Lisp: peterhil/awesome-ultraviolet: Awesome WM theme with dark violet colours https://github.com/peterhil/awesome-ultraviolet https://github.com/peterhil/awesome-ultraviolet Peter Pan on Twitter: "@app4soft @probonopd @MX_Linux Screenshot of my #AwesomeWM setup. https://t.co/2XMnDEdJfN https://t.co/2XMnDEdJfN" / X https://twitter.com/peterhil/status/1463914949491761164/photo/1 https://twitter.com/peterhil/status/1463914949491761164/phot...
- cutler 3y ago
  The ultimate Awesome setup has to be that used by Daniel Berg and Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate. Plenty of Lua and Python scrolling frantically but I don't remember seeing any Emacs.
- No-Firefighter 3y ago
  This looks super sleek than the one recommended in the post
zvmaz 3y ago
> AwesomeWM just works. I used tiling window managers for years (I started with wmii, and I even used ESXM), but now I'm settled on Gnome: Everything works out of the box, and it's mostly keyboard driven. I don't know if there's a good argument for me now to return to tiling window managers.
- adiM 3y ago
  A bit attraction of _tiling_ WMs is ... automatic tiling of windows. Does Gnome do that (haven't used it seriously in about 2 decades)?
  - zvmaz 3y ago
    No, it does not natively, but there's discussion to do that [1]. There was a discussion here about it a few days ago [2]. [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-window-management/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-windo... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    popOs's distribution of gnome includes a tiling plugin that will work nicely out of the box if that's what you like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fltwBKsMY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fltwBKsMY0
- Phelinofist 3y ago
  You can have both with the Forge extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4481/forge/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4481/forge/ Add Space Bar and you are close to e.g. i3.
pxc 3y ago
Read the article! This instance of Emacs runs in a VM he uses for accessing and editing his personal tech notes at work, to provide better separation from his work system. He's not risking much. :)
tomcam 3y ago
Actually your wife might be happy to know that I have developed some nearly stable Emacs packages that interface with the Sabre system for airline reservations. The only drawback other than stability is that they require a SPARC workstation running a special variant of FreeBSD. /s
- _yb2s 3y ago
  That’s why I have a SparcStation LX. Fits in the carryon for travel much better than a pizza box. Even easier to travel with now that I can use an LCD and don’t need to lug around the ‘ol Trinitron. With an inverter and a car battery in my backpack I can even show a digital/ on screen boarding pass with a full 8 bits of color.
  - datalus 3y ago
    The username definitely checks out.
  - tomcam 3y ago
    No matter how good I think I am, I always know there’s someone better on this board!
  - neilv 3y ago
    The Sun god, Scott McNealy, has heard our prayers, and answered us with the V'ger: https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/sparcstation-voyager/20134 https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/sparcstation-...
    - tomcam 3y ago
      ngl that's a pretty sweet look
      - neilv 3y ago
        It was even more impressive if you were accustomed to a one-ton SPARCstation pizzabox with a hulking two-ton 21" CRT on top of it. (There were soon third-party SPARCstations in normal laptop form factors, but then how would bystanders know you were using a SPARCstation. You might as well put a Ferrari in a Prius shell.)
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
> Dont. Emacs is there to be tinkered with, and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard. Then you simply roll back to the working git commit of your emacs configuration or NixOS generation!
- blackpill0w 3y ago
  >or NixOS generation Yes! NixOS is perfect for the author's situation. But maybe his setup is so simple that a little bash script could work just fine.
- hollerith 3y ago
  I'm good enough at remembering to test my changes that I only need to resort to my backup of my emacs customizations 4 or 5 times a year. (I test by starting a second emacs, so I can used the still-running first instance of emacs to fix the regressions.)
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Same(-ish) here. Between git and emacs auto-save, I don't recall the last time my init file failed to load without being able to revert to a previous working version almost immediately.
  - tazjin 3y ago
    Your Emacs configuration, embedded in your Nix configuration, is obviously tested by CI before being committed. (mine certainly is, and I've also been using EXWM for 6-7 years or so, with few problems)
    - hollerith 3y ago
      Cool. Can you show how you start an Emacs (i.e., what flags you use) to test whether init.el would load successfully next time an Emacs is started the normal way?
- lvncelot 3y ago
  When I got cachix set up in Github CI with my custom emacs package that pre-builds and compiles my configuration including packges, I was as giddy as when I started programming. It's over-the-top, unnecessary, overkill, and an absolute blast. Stuff like this is the reason why I've gotten into this whole thing. (Also, I think overengineering stuff like this is almost an outlet, which helps me stay pragmatic and goal-oriented at work)
scrame 3y ago
I'm sure his wife has the tickets on her phone. also, this is specifically for a personal vm on a work machine, right?
ssivark 3y ago
Is there a Wayland compatible WM analogue of Awesome?
- Elv13 3y ago
  (AwesomeWM co-maintainer here) From the point of view of tiling, Sway is an i3 clone for wayland. For AwesomeWM as a programming sandbox WM, it is much tougher to get something identical. A lot of AwesomeWM work goes into APIs, CI and documentation. Making a scriptable WM using wlroot isn't the end of the world. Making one with mature APIs, backward compatibility, high test coverage, an active userbase large enough to sustain a plugin ecosystem and extensive documentation is much harder. Making AwesomeWM 100% wayland compatible has been attempted a bunch of time, getting 80% working has been done a few time too, but the last 20% is like 95% of the effort or something and those projects keep stalling. From my side, I put the little free time I have for this into actually realistic features and maintenance work, at least until there's an actual reason to move away from X11. Most users at this point have been using it for years or even over a decade. They want their setup to keep working the next morning over #newshiny.
  - ssivark 3y ago
    Thanks for the response, and thanks for all the effort towards an awesome WM :-) I can totally appreciate your priorities. My use of Wayland (and for a lot of users , I suspect) is mostly just flowing with all the upstream distribution defaults. Do you expect the number of awesome-on-X users to dwindle or continue for the foreseeable future? My main concern with regards to switching to AwesomeWM would be whether I’ll be left stranded if the rest of the Linux ecosystem moves on. Also, any pointers to the 80% attempts?
    - Elv13 3y ago
      > I’ll be left stranded if the rest of the Linux ecosystem moves on. There is no such things. Unless they remove xorg from the repository, then it's just an entry in the session login screen as it always was. > Also, any pointers to the 80% attempts? Waycooler rewrite 2 and rewrite 3 are close enough. There's some private implementations that are more recent and more complete, but not released and probably wont ever be. Being a FLOSS maintainer these days isn't very enjoyable (disclaimer: opinions are my own), I can relate to their reticence to open the floodgates. There's one based on wlroot FFI floating around on Discord. Then there's a bunch of doomed attempts by people who just made the same mistakes as the ones before them, but had too much ego/enthusiasm to acknowledge how it was going to end. The problem with Wayland is that it's hype-y. People who fall into the hype tend to fall into all the hyped techs at the same time. Which means shiny Rust frameworks and edgy code generators. Then all those things are dead a couple months later and whatever depends on them also die. The only way a working AwesomeWM Wayland port can be made is using boring old glib event loops and boring old service-client architecture of xorg. Anything else will not be compatible, so the plugins and existing configs wont work, thus nobody will use it even if it was somehow internally usable. People with a lot of time and grand ideas don't tend to like boring/mature/old techs and backward compatibility. I can't blame them either, why would they.
taeric 3y ago
I'm curious why you would be fumbling in your computer trying to find tickets. I do find the plethora of window managers interesting. Is that same level of exploration going to exist in wayland? My understanding was that the job of a window manager is very different in that world.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  > I'm curious why you would be fumbling in your computer trying to find tickets. I mean, it's certainly a joke, but because jokes are always better explained (/s) it's because most airlines offer the option of paperless ticket emails these days, and if you don't have a smartphone, you'll have to bring up the image on a desktop so they can scan it at the gate.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Right, I mostly get that. I have literally never seen anyone use a computer at airport security. As such, the joke falls rather flat. Would be better on a story about using emacs on your phone?
    - Name_Chawps 3y ago
      Some people print their tickets at home. That's what I assumed they meant.
      - taeric 3y ago
        I should have also said I meant my quip mostly in jest, as well. I don't actually question why they would be doing something I know they aren't actually ever doing. :D
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      Well what if I want the option
donio 3y ago
I've been using EXWM since 2016 and this hasn't been a problem for me. Emacs doesn't just magically break on its own. And even if I managed to break my config without noticing it the fix is just a git revert away. I used StumpWM for many years before EXWM and I don't see how the config situation is any different.
- dustfinger 3y ago
  I have been using it since 2017 and I have no problems to report that were specific to EXWM. I also use EXWM on my work dev machhine and have set EXWM as the windows manager for my kids computers.I absolutely love it. If you want the best experience, I recommend compiling emacs >=29 and configure it for native lisp + tree-itter so that you can get the most from eglot. I have run into issues with the odd package, but nothing that has ruined my day.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  The solution is obviously to run the Emacs window manager in Docker.
  - bexsella 3y ago
    Without Kubernetes? I'd like to read about the details of how you manage that load.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      All keypresses are inspected by Serverless llamas in Azure. Quite trivial.
  - beebmam 3y ago
    Why not? A container is mostly just a process (or more) with an embedded filesystem you can inject into, more or less
sharts 3y ago
[flagged]
- glouwbug 3y ago
  We should keep reddit on reddit
bachmeier 3y ago
> The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. They should be on your phone or you should use your credit card to print them at the airport. I'm sure there are other examples that make your point though. Yours reminded me of the furniture salesman selling a warranty on a couch by saying it'd cover the cost of getting the blood out, or even give you a replacement, should you sit on a scissors and cut your legs up.
femiagbabiaka 3y ago
The problem here isn't Emacs, it's the imperative style of package management. Use Nix and then it is very hard to irredeemably bork your stuff
cbsmith 3y ago
Everyone remember ol' GWM? https://tronche.com/gui/x/gwm/html-manual/overview.html https://tronche.com/gui/x/gwm/html-manual/overview.html
- throwaway16389 3y ago
  See also Sawfish https://sawfish.tuxfamily.org/ https://sawfish.tuxfamily.org/ Worth mentioning, it supports tiles [1] and tabs [2], but those were added after becoming independent from a famous desktop project. 1. https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfish/wm/tile https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfis... 2. https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfish/wm/tabs https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfis...
  - cbsmith 3y ago
    I remember Sawfish!
  - donio 3y ago
    I used both of these. My WM journey so far: - olwm/olvwm: virtual desktops and the 19" SPARCStation 2 monitor was absolutely amazing at the time - fvwm, fvwm2 - sawmill/sawfish was my intro to programmable WMs. It was great until Gnome gobbled it up as its default WM eventually ruining it - GWM I believe is actually older than then all of the above but I haven't discovered it until I was looking for an alternative for sawfish - StumpWM was my introduction to tiling WMs and having a proper REPL to allow modifying it live. I don't think that GWM had a REPL but I might be wrong - EXWM is where I've been for quite a while now. Folding X window management into Emacs buffer management was just as amazing as olvwm was back in the day. Regarding Sawfish I know that development continued after the Gnome adventure and I could have stuck with it but "Gnome ruined it" is how I perceived it at the time. I can't remember what the specific issues were that made me look for alternatives.
    - cbsmith 3y ago
      I've never heard of EXWM. That looks great.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. Does Richard M Stallman look someone who cares about your wife getting upset for missing the plane while you fiddle with Emacs? That use case of Emacs enabling you to browse the web (accessing the airline’s website which runs non-free software) and check-in so you can ride on an airplane(which also uses non-free software) is not something that in his goals for Emacs.
mcpackieh 3y ago
> The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. Just log out and switch to your backup WM/DE.
paulddraper 3y ago
I have to appreciate the half dozen suggestions for airline ticket management. HN is nothing if not helpful and well-adjusted.
billfruit 3y ago
While Emacs does a lot of things, what feature I miss most from it, is a builtin intellisense like code completion for common language s.
john-radio 3y ago
Hah! As an emacs novice, I am happy to learn that my config isn't the only one that breaks so easily.
FrostKiwi 3y ago
Do. Emacs is there to be tinkered with and stuff breaking in novel ways is half the fun.
dngray 3y ago
> I love Emacs. I develop for it, financially support it, live it everyday. The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. 100%, what possible benefit is there in tightly integrating a bunch of things so if one of them fails the whole house of cards falls down :-), also good luck with having a system so custom you'll have to do all the debugging, patch writing yourself. It's a "cool idea" but not one you should be doing in practice. I've never really gotten the emacs is "everything". I thought UNIX philosophy was to do one thing an do it well. Yes you may be really clever and be able to do that, but there are only so many hours in a day.
- xmcqdpt2 3y ago
  > It's a "cool idea" but not one you should be doing in practice. I've never really gotten the emacs is "everything". I thought UNIX philosophy was to do one thing an do it well. Emacs isn't a UNIX program at all, philosophically speaking.
deathanatos 3y ago
> morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. Hah oh the flashbacks. I've literally done this. Except — ironically — I was keeping the tickets in the airline's app. The airlines app, idiotically, needed the network to fetch the tickets. The airport's network was misconfigured, as many are: it had one of those idiotic "proxy all traffic to the captive portal"¹ things, so the airline app was confused about why its AJAXs weren't returning the right stuff. But in the moment (i.e., TSA) I wasn't grokking that the error from the app was a lie because the network was malicious. Perhaps Emacs could have saved me…? (What I do now is open the ticket beforehand and then screenshot it so that it's local. And we also bring paper fallbacks. Paper cannot have it's packets captured.) ¹There's a proper way to do captive portals. This ain't it.
- ptramo 3y ago
  What's the proper way to do captive portals?
- ElectricalUnion 3y ago
  How did "proxy all traffic to the captive portal" MITM the app? Does the app ignore HTTPS errors? Does the app send your PII in plaintext? Does the app not know what are the expected protocols and status code from it's own backend servers?
- yencabulator 3y ago
  I once had a ticket on my phone. My phone overheated and crashed just before I reached the ticket checking station at the gate. It refused to start for several minutes, because it was still too hot. Ever since then, I've been printing out plane tickets...
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kehrin 3y ago

> and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard. Being off by one column of keys on your keyboard can really be a death sentence to your buffer (and maybe even codebase).

aldanor 3y ago
... and maybe even your hard drive
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
That would be your fault for not writing prompts for dangerous actions in your elisp automation though.
- kehrin 3y ago
  Most of the danger (for me) comes from evil-mode. Adding prompts wouldn't make sense there ;P
noman-land 3y ago
This sounds like running heavy machinery with no safety equipment. Is it really desirable to have a system that would behave this way?
- kehrin 3y ago
  Eh, there is plenty of safety equipment. Mainly undo-tree and magit.
- donio 3y ago
  The parent is just being ridiculous, Emacs of course has undo, auto-save and version control. And unlike in certain modal editors it's pretty hard to do any real damage without touching Control or Meta.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> AwesomeWM just works I use AwesomeWM since forever, with about 12 virtual desktops/workspaces. Nice thing is: it's a tiling WM but I can still put some of the workspace in "floating" mode and they then behave not unlike windows on a regular desktop (which makes some programs happy). FWIW I'm also a big Emacs user.

markstos 3y ago
Sway allows toggling floating and tiled as well.
- sweettea 3y ago
  But Sway makes you use Wayland instead of the eminently stable and usable X11.
  - dngray 3y ago
    > eminently stable and usable X11 FUD. Wayland works fine. I have been using Sway for years now without issue. It is also more secure[1], maintained[2] and even works with NVIDIA's proprietary driver. [3][4]. It also isn't the antiquated piece of crap that X11[5] is, which has trouble with things like mixed DPI, and other modern features that Windows and macOS do completely fine without "tweaking" [6]. If Wayland did not exist I would not be using Linux on a desktop. The "screen tearing" with X11 when using a compositor was painful. [1] https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-c... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly [3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway [4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.7-rc2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.7-rc2 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c [6] https://blog.summercat.com/configuring-mixed-dpi-monitors-with-xrandr.html https://blog.summercat.com/configuring-mixed-dpi-monitors-wi...
    - 3y ago

peterhil 3y ago

I came here to recommend AwesomeWM also. Here is my setup, written in Fennel Lisp: peterhil/awesome-ultraviolet: Awesome WM theme with dark violet colours https://github.com/peterhil/awesome-ultraviolet https://github.com/peterhil/awesome-ultraviolet Peter Pan on Twitter: "@app4soft @probonopd @MX_Linux Screenshot of my #AwesomeWM setup. https://t.co/2XMnDEdJfN https://t.co/2XMnDEdJfN" / X https://twitter.com/peterhil/status/1463914949491761164/photo/1 https://twitter.com/peterhil/status/1463914949491761164/phot...

cutler 3y ago
The ultimate Awesome setup has to be that used by Daniel Berg and Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate. Plenty of Lua and Python scrolling frantically but I don't remember seeing any Emacs.
No-Firefighter 3y ago
This looks super sleek than the one recommended in the post

zvmaz 3y ago

> AwesomeWM just works. I used tiling window managers for years (I started with wmii, and I even used ESXM), but now I'm settled on Gnome: Everything works out of the box, and it's mostly keyboard driven. I don't know if there's a good argument for me now to return to tiling window managers.

adiM 3y ago
A bit attraction of _tiling_ WMs is ... automatic tiling of windows. Does Gnome do that (haven't used it seriously in about 2 decades)?
- zvmaz 3y ago
  No, it does not natively, but there's discussion to do that [1]. There was a discussion here about it a few days ago [2]. [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-window-management/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-windo... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  popOs's distribution of gnome includes a tiling plugin that will work nicely out of the box if that's what you like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fltwBKsMY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fltwBKsMY0
Phelinofist 3y ago
You can have both with the Forge extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4481/forge/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4481/forge/ Add Space Bar and you are close to e.g. i3.

pxc 3y ago

Read the article! This instance of Emacs runs in a VM he uses for accessing and editing his personal tech notes at work, to provide better separation from his work system. He's not risking much. :)

tomcam 3y ago

Actually your wife might be happy to know that I have developed some nearly stable Emacs packages that interface with the Sabre system for airline reservations. The only drawback other than stability is that they require a SPARC workstation running a special variant of FreeBSD. /s

_yb2s 3y ago
That’s why I have a SparcStation LX. Fits in the carryon for travel much better than a pizza box. Even easier to travel with now that I can use an LCD and don’t need to lug around the ‘ol Trinitron. With an inverter and a car battery in my backpack I can even show a digital/ on screen boarding pass with a full 8 bits of color.
- datalus 3y ago
  The username definitely checks out.
- tomcam 3y ago
  No matter how good I think I am, I always know there’s someone better on this board!
- neilv 3y ago
  The Sun god, Scott McNealy, has heard our prayers, and answered us with the V'ger: https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/sparcstation-voyager/20134 https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/sparcstation-...
  - tomcam 3y ago
    ngl that's a pretty sweet look
    - neilv 3y ago
      It was even more impressive if you were accustomed to a one-ton SPARCstation pizzabox with a hulking two-ton 21" CRT on top of it. (There were soon third-party SPARCstations in normal laptop form factors, but then how would bystanders know you were using a SPARCstation. You might as well put a Ferrari in a Prius shell.)

ParetoOptimal 3y ago

> Dont. Emacs is there to be tinkered with, and your cat will break it by simply looking at your keyboard. Then you simply roll back to the working git commit of your emacs configuration or NixOS generation!

blackpill0w 3y ago
>or NixOS generation Yes! NixOS is perfect for the author's situation. But maybe his setup is so simple that a little bash script could work just fine.
hollerith 3y ago
I'm good enough at remembering to test my changes that I only need to resort to my backup of my emacs customizations 4 or 5 times a year. (I test by starting a second emacs, so I can used the still-running first instance of emacs to fix the regressions.)
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Same(-ish) here. Between git and emacs auto-save, I don't recall the last time my init file failed to load without being able to revert to a previous working version almost immediately.
- tazjin 3y ago
  Your Emacs configuration, embedded in your Nix configuration, is obviously tested by CI before being committed. (mine certainly is, and I've also been using EXWM for 6-7 years or so, with few problems)
  - hollerith 3y ago
    Cool. Can you show how you start an Emacs (i.e., what flags you use) to test whether init.el would load successfully next time an Emacs is started the normal way?
lvncelot 3y ago
When I got cachix set up in Github CI with my custom emacs package that pre-builds and compiles my configuration including packges, I was as giddy as when I started programming. It's over-the-top, unnecessary, overkill, and an absolute blast. Stuff like this is the reason why I've gotten into this whole thing. (Also, I think overengineering stuff like this is almost an outlet, which helps me stay pragmatic and goal-oriented at work)

scrame 3y ago

I'm sure his wife has the tickets on her phone. also, this is specifically for a personal vm on a work machine, right?

ssivark 3y ago

Is there a Wayland compatible WM analogue of Awesome?

Elv13 3y ago
(AwesomeWM co-maintainer here) From the point of view of tiling, Sway is an i3 clone for wayland. For AwesomeWM as a programming sandbox WM, it is much tougher to get something identical. A lot of AwesomeWM work goes into APIs, CI and documentation. Making a scriptable WM using wlroot isn't the end of the world. Making one with mature APIs, backward compatibility, high test coverage, an active userbase large enough to sustain a plugin ecosystem and extensive documentation is much harder. Making AwesomeWM 100% wayland compatible has been attempted a bunch of time, getting 80% working has been done a few time too, but the last 20% is like 95% of the effort or something and those projects keep stalling. From my side, I put the little free time I have for this into actually realistic features and maintenance work, at least until there's an actual reason to move away from X11. Most users at this point have been using it for years or even over a decade. They want their setup to keep working the next morning over #newshiny.
- ssivark 3y ago
  Thanks for the response, and thanks for all the effort towards an awesome WM :-) I can totally appreciate your priorities. My use of Wayland (and for a lot of users , I suspect) is mostly just flowing with all the upstream distribution defaults. Do you expect the number of awesome-on-X users to dwindle or continue for the foreseeable future? My main concern with regards to switching to AwesomeWM would be whether I’ll be left stranded if the rest of the Linux ecosystem moves on. Also, any pointers to the 80% attempts?
  - Elv13 3y ago
    > I’ll be left stranded if the rest of the Linux ecosystem moves on. There is no such things. Unless they remove xorg from the repository, then it's just an entry in the session login screen as it always was. > Also, any pointers to the 80% attempts? Waycooler rewrite 2 and rewrite 3 are close enough. There's some private implementations that are more recent and more complete, but not released and probably wont ever be. Being a FLOSS maintainer these days isn't very enjoyable (disclaimer: opinions are my own), I can relate to their reticence to open the floodgates. There's one based on wlroot FFI floating around on Discord. Then there's a bunch of doomed attempts by people who just made the same mistakes as the ones before them, but had too much ego/enthusiasm to acknowledge how it was going to end. The problem with Wayland is that it's hype-y. People who fall into the hype tend to fall into all the hyped techs at the same time. Which means shiny Rust frameworks and edgy code generators. Then all those things are dead a couple months later and whatever depends on them also die. The only way a working AwesomeWM Wayland port can be made is using boring old glib event loops and boring old service-client architecture of xorg. Anything else will not be compatible, so the plugins and existing configs wont work, thus nobody will use it even if it was somehow internally usable. People with a lot of time and grand ideas don't tend to like boring/mature/old techs and backward compatibility. I can't blame them either, why would they.

taeric 3y ago

I'm curious why you would be fumbling in your computer trying to find tickets. I do find the plethora of window managers interesting. Is that same level of exploration going to exist in wayland? My understanding was that the job of a window manager is very different in that world.

shadowgovt 3y ago
> I'm curious why you would be fumbling in your computer trying to find tickets. I mean, it's certainly a joke, but because jokes are always better explained (/s) it's because most airlines offer the option of paperless ticket emails these days, and if you don't have a smartphone, you'll have to bring up the image on a desktop so they can scan it at the gate.
- taeric 3y ago
  Right, I mostly get that. I have literally never seen anyone use a computer at airport security. As such, the joke falls rather flat. Would be better on a story about using emacs on your phone?
  - Name_Chawps 3y ago
    Some people print their tickets at home. That's what I assumed they meant.
    - taeric 3y ago
      I should have also said I meant my quip mostly in jest, as well. I don't actually question why they would be doing something I know they aren't actually ever doing. :D
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Well what if I want the option

donio 3y ago

I've been using EXWM since 2016 and this hasn't been a problem for me. Emacs doesn't just magically break on its own. And even if I managed to break my config without noticing it the fix is just a git revert away. I used StumpWM for many years before EXWM and I don't see how the config situation is any different.

dustfinger 3y ago
I have been using it since 2017 and I have no problems to report that were specific to EXWM. I also use EXWM on my work dev machhine and have set EXWM as the windows manager for my kids computers.I absolutely love it. If you want the best experience, I recommend compiling emacs >=29 and configure it for native lisp + tree-itter so that you can get the most from eglot. I have run into issues with the odd package, but nothing that has ruined my day.
actionfromafar 3y ago
The solution is obviously to run the Emacs window manager in Docker.
- bexsella 3y ago
  Without Kubernetes? I'd like to read about the details of how you manage that load.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    All keypresses are inspected by Serverless llamas in Azure. Quite trivial.
- beebmam 3y ago
  Why not? A container is mostly just a process (or more) with an embedded filesystem you can inject into, more or less

sharts 3y ago

[flagged]

glouwbug 3y ago
We should keep reddit on reddit

bachmeier 3y ago

> The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. They should be on your phone or you should use your credit card to print them at the airport. I'm sure there are other examples that make your point though. Yours reminded me of the furniture salesman selling a warranty on a couch by saying it'd cover the cost of getting the blood out, or even give you a replacement, should you sit on a scissors and cut your legs up.

femiagbabiaka 3y ago

The problem here isn't Emacs, it's the imperative style of package management. Use Nix and then it is very hard to irredeemably bork your stuff

cbsmith 3y ago

Everyone remember ol' GWM? https://tronche.com/gui/x/gwm/html-manual/overview.html https://tronche.com/gui/x/gwm/html-manual/overview.html

throwaway16389 3y ago
See also Sawfish https://sawfish.tuxfamily.org/ https://sawfish.tuxfamily.org/ Worth mentioning, it supports tiles [1] and tabs [2], but those were added after becoming independent from a famous desktop project. 1. https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfish/wm/tile https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfis... 2. https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfish/wm/tabs https://github.com/SawfishWM/sawfish/tree/master/lisp/sawfis...
- cbsmith 3y ago
  I remember Sawfish!
- donio 3y ago
  I used both of these. My WM journey so far: - olwm/olvwm: virtual desktops and the 19" SPARCStation 2 monitor was absolutely amazing at the time - fvwm, fvwm2 - sawmill/sawfish was my intro to programmable WMs. It was great until Gnome gobbled it up as its default WM eventually ruining it - GWM I believe is actually older than then all of the above but I haven't discovered it until I was looking for an alternative for sawfish - StumpWM was my introduction to tiling WMs and having a proper REPL to allow modifying it live. I don't think that GWM had a REPL but I might be wrong - EXWM is where I've been for quite a while now. Folding X window management into Emacs buffer management was just as amazing as olvwm was back in the day. Regarding Sawfish I know that development continued after the Gnome adventure and I could have stuck with it but "Gnome ruined it" is how I perceived it at the time. I can't remember what the specific issues were that made me look for alternatives.
  - cbsmith 3y ago
    I've never heard of EXWM. That looks great.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. Does Richard M Stallman look someone who cares about your wife getting upset for missing the plane while you fiddle with Emacs? That use case of Emacs enabling you to browse the web (accessing the airline’s website which runs non-free software) and check-in so you can ride on an airplane(which also uses non-free software) is not something that in his goals for Emacs.

mcpackieh 3y ago

> The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. Just log out and switch to your backup WM/DE.

paulddraper 3y ago

I have to appreciate the half dozen suggestions for airline ticket management. HN is nothing if not helpful and well-adjusted.

billfruit 3y ago

While Emacs does a lot of things, what feature I miss most from it, is a builtin intellisense like code completion for common language s.

john-radio 3y ago

Hah! As an emacs novice, I am happy to learn that my config isn't the only one that breaks so easily.

FrostKiwi 3y ago

Do. Emacs is there to be tinkered with and stuff breaking in novel ways is half the fun.

dngray 3y ago

> I love Emacs. I develop for it, financially support it, live it everyday. The last thing you want is to be stuck debugging your failed desktop session on Tuesday morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. 100%, what possible benefit is there in tightly integrating a bunch of things so if one of them fails the whole house of cards falls down :-), also good luck with having a system so custom you'll have to do all the debugging, patch writing yourself. It's a "cool idea" but not one you should be doing in practice. I've never really gotten the emacs is "everything". I thought UNIX philosophy was to do one thing an do it well. Yes you may be really clever and be able to do that, but there are only so many hours in a day.

xmcqdpt2 3y ago
> It's a "cool idea" but not one you should be doing in practice. I've never really gotten the emacs is "everything". I thought UNIX philosophy was to do one thing an do it well. Emacs isn't a UNIX program at all, philosophically speaking.

deathanatos 3y ago

> morning at the airport as your wife waits for you to find the tickets. Hah oh the flashbacks. I've literally done this. Except — ironically — I was keeping the tickets in the airline's app. The airlines app, idiotically, needed the network to fetch the tickets. The airport's network was misconfigured, as many are: it had one of those idiotic "proxy all traffic to the captive portal"¹ things, so the airline app was confused about why its AJAXs weren't returning the right stuff. But in the moment (i.e., TSA) I wasn't grokking that the error from the app was a lie because the network was malicious. Perhaps Emacs could have saved me…? (What I do now is open the ticket beforehand and then screenshot it so that it's local. And we also bring paper fallbacks. Paper cannot have it's packets captured.) ¹There's a proper way to do captive portals. This ain't it.

ptramo 3y ago
What's the proper way to do captive portals?
ElectricalUnion 3y ago
How did "proxy all traffic to the captive portal" MITM the app? Does the app ignore HTTPS errors? Does the app send your PII in plaintext? Does the app not know what are the expected protocols and status code from it's own backend servers?
yencabulator 3y ago
I once had a ticket on my phone. My phone overheated and crashed just before I reached the ticket checking station at the gate. It refused to start for several minutes, because it was still too hot. Ever since then, I've been printing out plane tickets...

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