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> don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion I sort of came here to say the same thing. The intersection between (the set of people who care about good UX) and

by IceDane 10mo ago

> don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion I sort of came here to say the same thing. The intersection between (the set of people who care about good UX) and (the set of people who would try to use emacs on android) is the empty set. Emacs users' self-flagellation is pretty legendary, and I say this as an emacs user (though I've mostly given up on how janky and slow it is compared to modern editors and only use it for magit these days)

rrix2 10mo ago
i didn't mean it in such a disdainful or self-flagellating way, though. emacs is a bag of tricks, and each of us pull a different set of them out.
xenodium 10mo ago
I’m an Emacs enthusiast and also build iOS apps powered by org markup. The more I used my apps, the more I wanted their UX optimised for mobile. This often means completely rethinking the Emacs experience when bringing to mobile. This is most obvious in my latest app [1]. Org markup fully fades as implementation details. Of all my apps, this is the one I personally use the most. Proudly, I also started getting non-Emacs users interested in org [2]. Anyway, that’s all to say that as an Emacs fan, I want the full Emacs experience on desktop, but when on iPhone, I want fully optimised mobile UX. No meta anything there ;) [1] https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-eyes-only https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-ey... [2] https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for-those-who-dont-do-org https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...
- skydhash 10mo ago
  Emacs is ultimately an REPL environment, but ones where you can bind commands to bindings. And there’s a lot of bindings possible in a keyboard. A mobile experience can be fine if you want a restricted subset of commands. You can then map them to buttons. But the core emacs experience is the ability to create your own commands and have different bindings. The closest implementation, IMO, would be a streamdeck like UI, but with a transient or hydra like UX.
- rrix2 10mo ago
  I love your apps and wish I had android equivalents. cheers
  - xenodium 10mo ago
    Thank you! That’s wonderful to hear.
Karrot_Kream 10mo ago
I agree with you on UX but disagree with everything else. If you use native elisp compilation, I find its speed to rival an average editor. Completions can be slow in lsp-mode but still faster than VSCode (and emacs itself ships with eglot, a less full featured alternative to lsp-mode, but may be faster. I haven't used it enough to judge.) This is due to shelling out to LSPs and the fact that not all LSPs are particularly well built. If you find your emacs to feel jank I highly recommend declaring "emacs bankruptcy" and starting anew with a fresh config. Defaults emacs ships with today are really good. That said I haven't used emacs on Android yet so I don't know how well, if it all, it works. I also think the UX of emacs tends to bend toward the user's own preferences rather than good UX, and the default UX of emacs is a bit bad.
- IceDane 10mo ago
  I've been using emacs for 15 years as my daily editor. One thing that never fails is that when I share the fact that I've switched away, emacs users fall over themselves to tell me I'm wrong. I assure you that my emacs setup is as optimized as it can be. Native compilation, all that jazz. I've compiled my own. But emacs is ultimately a lost cause unless something drastic changes. The single threaded nature of it means that you need to just live with your editor regularly freezing for a whole second while working in bigger projects using modern tooling. The only way to remedy this is to turn off as many features as possible and accept a worse tooling experience. Shifting the blame for emacs poor internal architecture over on the poor LSPs is silly. Every other editor handles this better than emacs. For now, I'm using zed and it was really an eye-opener to how fast an editor can be and feel. I replicated a large part of my workflow, basically all the keybindings, and while there are things I miss (projectile and some other things), I can live without them in exchange for not having my editor choke constantly when working on big projects while emacs chugs through json from lsp or something like that.
  - skydhash 10mo ago
    You may have a very justified reason to switch, including nnot liking one aspect of emacs. But you are presenting it as a general flaw. Which people cannot obviously accept as it’s fine for them and they are not experiencing your issue (and as you know, everyone’s setup and workflow are different) As for the single threaded nature of it, it doesn’t bother me. Because what should be async already is. The only thing left that is synchronous follows closely the repl model of the terminal. I issue a command and I wait for the result. If the result doesn’t matter or I want part of it as soon as possible, then it can be async and there’s plenty of way you can make it so.
jhbadger 10mo ago
Are Emacs users really known for "self-flagellation"? I would have thought that was more vi users. Even if modern vis like vim try to make it slightly less painful, the fact is modal editing is really nonintutive. Certainly the reason why I became an Emacs user nearly 40 years ago when I was using UNIX for the first time, was that the only two real options were vi and Emacs and after playing with vi for a bit I was pretty much "nope, not doing that". Emacs may have a reputation as being arcane, but ultimately it is a modeless editor (yes, you can make it emulate vi and its modes if you really want it to) which means it basically works like any other editor or word processor you'd find on mainstream OSes.
- jwrallie 10mo ago
  Plain Emacs certainly felt more intuitive at first contact, but Vim felt more intuitive to me once I approached it as a language. What can I say, I’m the target audience of evil mode.
  - rrix2 10mo ago
    whenever i ssh in to some box and fire up vi[m] to edit some text i realize how reliant i am on both input methods & how cool emacs&evil are for letting my do that to myself... vim text object motions for edits, my emacs keybindings and libs for movement&buffer management... my normal-mod binding for avy-goto-char and my other evil-leader stuff is muscle memory now...
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  Modal editing is unintuitive for the same reason why new language you're learning unintuitive. Once you understand the rules, it is much more intuitive than any other editor. This is the reason why I use IdeaVim/VSCodeVim instead of learning "native" shortcuts. Obligatory: https://i.imgur.com/WLzeQMj.png https://i.imgur.com/WLzeQMj.png
zipy124 10mo ago
I mean this kind of makes sense right, they chose it because they can customise it to fit them, it's basically a bespoke editor.
Jeff_Brown 10mo ago
Very occasionally I run into a speed glitch in Emacs but not nearly enough to drive me away, given that nothing else can do all the stuff it does.
neutronicus 10mo ago
What do you mean by "modern editors"? For me it is noticeably snappier than VSCode (which I am hassled by management to use for Copilot).

by IceDane 10mo ago

rrix2 10mo ago

i didn't mean it in such a disdainful or self-flagellating way, though. emacs is a bag of tricks, and each of us pull a different set of them out.

xenodium 10mo ago

I’m an Emacs enthusiast and also build iOS apps powered by org markup. The more I used my apps, the more I wanted their UX optimised for mobile. This often means completely rethinking the Emacs experience when bringing to mobile. This is most obvious in my latest app [1]. Org markup fully fades as implementation details. Of all my apps, this is the one I personally use the most. Proudly, I also started getting non-Emacs users interested in org [2]. Anyway, that’s all to say that as an Emacs fan, I want the full Emacs experience on desktop, but when on iPhone, I want fully optimised mobile UX. No meta anything there ;) [1] https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-eyes-only https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-ey... [2] https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for-those-who-dont-do-org https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...

skydhash 10mo ago
Emacs is ultimately an REPL environment, but ones where you can bind commands to bindings. And there’s a lot of bindings possible in a keyboard. A mobile experience can be fine if you want a restricted subset of commands. You can then map them to buttons. But the core emacs experience is the ability to create your own commands and have different bindings. The closest implementation, IMO, would be a streamdeck like UI, but with a transient or hydra like UX.
rrix2 10mo ago
I love your apps and wish I had android equivalents. cheers
- xenodium 10mo ago
  Thank you! That’s wonderful to hear.

Karrot_Kream 10mo ago

I agree with you on UX but disagree with everything else. If you use native elisp compilation, I find its speed to rival an average editor. Completions can be slow in lsp-mode but still faster than VSCode (and emacs itself ships with eglot, a less full featured alternative to lsp-mode, but may be faster. I haven't used it enough to judge.) This is due to shelling out to LSPs and the fact that not all LSPs are particularly well built. If you find your emacs to feel jank I highly recommend declaring "emacs bankruptcy" and starting anew with a fresh config. Defaults emacs ships with today are really good. That said I haven't used emacs on Android yet so I don't know how well, if it all, it works. I also think the UX of emacs tends to bend toward the user's own preferences rather than good UX, and the default UX of emacs is a bit bad.

IceDane 10mo ago
I've been using emacs for 15 years as my daily editor. One thing that never fails is that when I share the fact that I've switched away, emacs users fall over themselves to tell me I'm wrong. I assure you that my emacs setup is as optimized as it can be. Native compilation, all that jazz. I've compiled my own. But emacs is ultimately a lost cause unless something drastic changes. The single threaded nature of it means that you need to just live with your editor regularly freezing for a whole second while working in bigger projects using modern tooling. The only way to remedy this is to turn off as many features as possible and accept a worse tooling experience. Shifting the blame for emacs poor internal architecture over on the poor LSPs is silly. Every other editor handles this better than emacs. For now, I'm using zed and it was really an eye-opener to how fast an editor can be and feel. I replicated a large part of my workflow, basically all the keybindings, and while there are things I miss (projectile and some other things), I can live without them in exchange for not having my editor choke constantly when working on big projects while emacs chugs through json from lsp or something like that.
- skydhash 10mo ago
  You may have a very justified reason to switch, including nnot liking one aspect of emacs. But you are presenting it as a general flaw. Which people cannot obviously accept as it’s fine for them and they are not experiencing your issue (and as you know, everyone’s setup and workflow are different) As for the single threaded nature of it, it doesn’t bother me. Because what should be async already is. The only thing left that is synchronous follows closely the repl model of the terminal. I issue a command and I wait for the result. If the result doesn’t matter or I want part of it as soon as possible, then it can be async and there’s plenty of way you can make it so.

jhbadger 10mo ago

Are Emacs users really known for "self-flagellation"? I would have thought that was more vi users. Even if modern vis like vim try to make it slightly less painful, the fact is modal editing is really nonintutive. Certainly the reason why I became an Emacs user nearly 40 years ago when I was using UNIX for the first time, was that the only two real options were vi and Emacs and after playing with vi for a bit I was pretty much "nope, not doing that". Emacs may have a reputation as being arcane, but ultimately it is a modeless editor (yes, you can make it emulate vi and its modes if you really want it to) which means it basically works like any other editor or word processor you'd find on mainstream OSes.

jwrallie 10mo ago
Plain Emacs certainly felt more intuitive at first contact, but Vim felt more intuitive to me once I approached it as a language. What can I say, I’m the target audience of evil mode.
- rrix2 10mo ago
  whenever i ssh in to some box and fire up vi[m] to edit some text i realize how reliant i am on both input methods & how cool emacs&evil are for letting my do that to myself... vim text object motions for edits, my emacs keybindings and libs for movement&buffer management... my normal-mod binding for avy-goto-char and my other evil-leader stuff is muscle memory now...
wiseowise 10mo ago
Modal editing is unintuitive for the same reason why new language you're learning unintuitive. Once you understand the rules, it is much more intuitive than any other editor. This is the reason why I use IdeaVim/VSCodeVim instead of learning "native" shortcuts. Obligatory: https://i.imgur.com/WLzeQMj.png https://i.imgur.com/WLzeQMj.png

zipy124 10mo ago

I mean this kind of makes sense right, they chose it because they can customise it to fit them, it's basically a bespoke editor.

Jeff_Brown 10mo ago

Very occasionally I run into a speed glitch in Emacs but not nearly enough to drive me away, given that nothing else can do all the stuff it does.

neutronicus 10mo ago

What do you mean by "modern editors"? For me it is noticeably snappier than VSCode (which I am hassled by management to use for Copilot).