7 ms·

Even more batteries included with Emacs

366 points by signa11 4mo ago

tptacek 4mo ago
I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired.
- rirze 4mo ago
  Try it out! It has its own learning curve, but it's convenient to use in quick and dirty situations.
  - wafflemaker 4mo ago
    Love that the "don't mess something up accidently" aka input lock is working in dired too(C-c C-q) Here it turns off input lock, so you can freely edit filenames in a dir like if it was a regular text buffer.
- unlogic 4mo ago
  Check out sunrise-commander, it is Dired reskinned as a dual-paner. Love how convenient it is to have a powerful integrated file manager.
  - kqr 4mo ago
    Is sunrise commander stable these days? I tried using it maybe a decade ago and back then it had a tendency to mess up window layouts and leave weird buffers around. I notice there's now a GitHub repository which has two spurts of work in its history that probably didn't exist when I last used it – have they improved its usability?
- amszmidt 4mo ago
  Fun fact. DIRED pre-dates EMACS. DIRED on ITS is also similar enough to today’s DIRED.
- kickingvegas 4mo ago
  NGL, I find the Dired UX out of the box to be frustrating given its reliance on remembering key bindings, so much so that I ended up writing both a Transient menu and a context menu for it, both available in the Casual and Anju packages on MELPA, respectively. If interested, you can read more about them in the following links: https://kickingvegas.github.io/casual/Dired-Usage.html https://kickingvegas.github.io/casual/Dired-Usage.html https://kickingvegas.github.io/anju/Dired-Mode-Context-Menu.html https://kickingvegas.github.io/anju/Dired-Mode-Context-Menu....
- yxhuvud 4mo ago
  It has a million features I don't use. But some features are really, really nice, like C-q for editing file names (C-x-s to persist changes once done). Rectangle editing is so, so nice to have when renaming multiple files.
  - SoftTalker 4mo ago
    C-q just tells me the buffer is read-only. How does that work?
    - scoops_ 4mo ago
      They probably mean ‘C-x C-Q’, which toggles a buffer with its read-only state. In this case it lets you edit the contents of the dired buffer (i.e directory or file names) to changing the buffer to wdired-mode, and then ‘C-x C-s’ to save the contents of the buffer, which changes the names and places the buffer back into read-only (dired-mode)
      - SoftTalker 4mo ago
        Yes, that worked! Thanks. Though it was C-c C-c to save and exit the r/w mode.
- fridder 4mo ago
  dirvish is nice
- m463 4mo ago
  I think 's' is sort. More seriously, what I would like to do is ediff files (only the differences) in two directories (have the changed files together one line after the other) or, ediff two arbitrary lists of files and have them show up in ediff.
- rpdillon 4mo ago
  wdired is still magic to me. Use it almost every day.
- dired_fan 4mo ago
  Like you, I've been using emacs (gnu) for decades, and dired is my directory/file manipulation tool, for both linux and windows. I never see a desktop with files/folders or anything like that, it's dired for everything. For example: Just a few minutes ago, in a directory with lots of PDFs, I did: - wdired to rename pdfs to a consistent convention. Did this with the awesome multiple-cursors package, then interactively spell-checked and corrected my renamed pdfs. All within writeable dired :-) - delete several non-pdf files - mark several possible duplicate files and dired-do-shell-command with sha512sum - move several pdfs to another directory (split window and open target dir, mark files to move, one-button move using dired-dwim-target. - mark several pdfs and open with reader app Obviously that's all do-able with a shell or traditional file manager GUI, but dired was a total win here. Multiply that win by a hundred times per week, and that's a quality of life enhancement.
  - kqr 4mo ago
    > dired-dwim-target Aha! That's what's been missing in my life! Thank you.
- agumonkey 4mo ago
  it's bare but i'm surprised people would get confused by it, it kinda follows the usual shortcuts over bare unix util output: mark/select, delete, rename, compress, encrypt then maybe you dislike the low-discoverability of shortcuts, i think someone added a transient layer (aka a visible shortcut summary with some state management for options)
- iLemming 4mo ago
  I have an opposite argument - no other file manager ever worked for me and I tried and keep trying so many. And not because Dired "is so much better" or "far more capable", or "has better default keybindings", or due to my muscle memory or Stockholm syndrome, no. It's because I can always introspect every single feature of it, override any command, integrate things with any other packages. I honestly think that we (programmers) collectively went backwards when we tried to abandon Lisp. Why aren't there [popular] apps with a built-in true Lisp REPL for file management, email, version control? Misunderstanding (or complete incomprehension) of Lisp lead us to the mess we're in today. Some may say: "people made their choice", etc. Well, like so many times in history, majority is not always right, but quite the opposite. We spent almost 2000 years building with inferior Portland cement, which degrades in seawater within decades, instead of using techniques perfected by Romans. We keep piling the crap, making CO2 emissions even worse. And only because we lost the recipe. The Pantheon built with Roman harbor concrete that strengthens in seawater still stands. Emacs is the Pantheon of software - the monumental example of what we've lost, the shining display of continuous progress in a world of regression. It is heartbreakingly sad because there's now an entire generation that has no clue, because they have not witnessed the decades of callback hell. They don't know anything (or wouldn't even want to know) about "Beating the Averages", Greenspun's Tenth Rule, Gabriel's "Worse Is Better" and how he was so conflicted about his own essay that he spent a decade writing rebuttals under a pseudonym. Lisp won't ever die, but it will never regain its former supremacy. Because for humans, economic/social reasons matter more than technical merits.
buzzwords 4mo ago
I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.
- binary132 4mo ago
  I’ve come to believe that this is less an emacs problem and more an “emacs plugins that try to do way too much stuff / take too much control” problem. I’m on vanilla emacs (I don’t even use use-package) and my config never breaks any more, even when upgrading major emacs versions. I think it’s about doing things in harmony with the emacs way instead of trying to take over the UI/UX. Emacs Live was always broken when I was using that.
  - zelphirkalt 4mo ago
    use-package is now in standard Emacs, so I would count that towards the Emacs way. But I agree that it is very stable and for me also doesn't break, even though I use use-package a lot and install many key packages. Maybe it is important to note, that I don't need everything there is out there and that I remove not well working packages quickly after trying them. From time to time I also look at my init file and get rid of no longer used stuff.
- globular-toast 4mo ago
  What "updates" are you referring to? In more than 15 years of using Emacs I've not once been blocked from doing work due to any kind of breakage.
  - jjav 4mo ago
    Right, I can't understand what this breaking refers to? I've been using emacs every day all day every time I'm front of a computer, since 1991. I need only one finger to count the pieces of software I've been using that long that have never crashed or broken on me in any way.
  - 4mo ago
gnulinux 4mo ago
My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024. > This is largely a discoverability problem In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinations of packages. I know how to use dired, I know how to install elisp packages, I know how to write emacs lisp myself. The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large packages with "batteries" because any additional package added can bork some random, seemingly unrelated package. E.g. back in the day (maybe around ~2020s or a bit before?) I've been using Spacemacs without vim keybinding, and although batteries were included and I was happy, this issue I mentioned above was even bigger. Because I constantly had to deal with installing a package and discovering that it broke some unrelated LSP, programming, or autocomplete package. It gets quite a bit frustrating at some point. Since this LLM madness started, I never really installed anything LLM related to Emacs, and have been using other text editor for LLM related stuff, Emacs for everything else (especially if there is a strong Emacs package, e.g. agda2-mode is incredibly good, almost flawless!) Again, just my humble two cents. Obvious Emacs is amazing, and in many ways it's still my go-to, I just think that the biggest issue for me has always been randomly broken packages. Maybe I'm a terrible elisp programmer, that's possible! But I've been using emacs everyday for decades, so idk...
- skydhash 4mo ago
  Both you and the sibling common by buzzwords have the same contexte: You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way. Most package assumes something standard and you can expect something to break if your configuration isn’t.
  - shevy-java 4mo ago
    > You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way I heard a similar argument about vim's billion configuration options. At some point I simply got tired of having to tweak it and switched to a better editor (not emacs though; both vim and emacs are losing in any debate, but it's a fun debate nonetheless since both camps think software can only be written with these two editors; everyone else must be clueless and skillless).
QwenGlazer9000 4mo ago
All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix. I used to be on neovim, and that ecosystem compared to emacs feels like this image: https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes, but I also think the ecosystem is more slow moving than other editors which helps. The editor is older than most devs after all.
- shevy-java 4mo ago
  The irony is that the vim camp can use just the same "argument" here about emacs. So that is a weird comparison to want to make here. > The editor is older than most devs after all. Well, being old does not automatically mean better. Peak human physical performance typically happens, with some exceptions (Justin Gatlin, if we ignore the use of enhancement drugs) in younger years; see Usain Bolt's fastest time achieved when he was young (23 years, in 2009). For mental tasks it is not so limited, but for physical peaks it is often in the younger years. For some software projects it also is the case that older age means more code, which in turn automatically mean smore bugs, all other things being equal. I am not necessarily questioning as to whether emacs has more bugs; my point is that the comparison/analogy does not work as means of quality assessment.
  - weinzierl 4mo ago
    If you look at the output of mathematicians and their biggest discoveries it suggests that it is similarly limited for mental tasks.
    - kensai 4mo ago
      Probably this category of mental tasks. For politicians it's the other way around. Prolly you need to have some 'elder statesman' skills as well as wisdom to achieve greatness. Deng Xiaoping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping) started changing China at the venerable age of 70+ moving forward until his death almost two decades later. Do not underestimate wisdom as a cognitive skill, even if in today's world we tend to discredit it because of agism.
shevy-java 4mo ago
Emacs is a great OS. If you complement it with vim then you may have a working editor as well, provided you know how to exit from vim.
- __patchbit__ 4mo ago
  Emacs is the AI acupuncture livecode needle probe into AI robotics. Pair it with Helix editor for the old and true, refresh new experience.
- neutronicus 4mo ago
  Just use the emacs-native implementation (evil-mode).
mintflow 4mo ago
Nice write up about Emacs, ruler-mode is a thing I never used before. Recently I finally start to C-X M-x to do text scaling, the typing is hard even as near 2 decades user of Emacs.
DonHopkins 4mo ago
I LOVE Emacs, but I HATE it when I have the irresistible urge to edit text, but Emacs has dead batteries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo
noelwelsh 4mo ago
The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a dent: when people boot it up it has to have the good stuff right in their face. This also means ditching the "vanilla Emacs only" snobbery. That said, I'm the kind of person to invest time in my editor and I appreciate this post.
- lycopodiopsida 4mo ago
  There is no "problem" in emacs (there are big technical problems, but not this one) and no need to get "most people" on emacs - the ecosystem is healthy by all means and only increasing. The "out of the box" experience could be better - but for emacs users. Those, who expect VS Code, should just install it and live happy.
  - pfortuny 4mo ago
    On your first paragraph: exactly. This is not a competition, Emacs is just shared software, not part of a market.
- kqr 4mo ago
  That would be a problem if the Emacs project needed to attract new users that aren't "the kind of person to invest time in" their editor. I'm not sure it does. Emacs has a healthy user base of people like you and I and appears to receive stable funding from the FSF. I don't see that changing any time soon. Emacs can be Emacs and be just fine the way it is. I will keep suggesting new users should aim to get as close to vanilla as they have patience for, because that will teach them more about the powerful virtual machine running their text editor, and the ways it can be bent to do their bidding.
  - jr_isidore 4mo ago
    appears to receive stable funding from the FSF No, about ten underemployed or semi-retired graybeards on the emacs.devel mailing list burn most of their waking hours futzing with emacs. That's not an exaggeration. They receive no remuneration.
quertyrecord74 4mo ago
Also karthik is the author of gptel mode.
internet_points 4mo ago
TIL about ruler-mode; now I can delete my own half-assed implementation of the same. And compare-windows looks really handy. I was about to write a note in my init file to my future self telling me to start using that, but then I saw there is already a note there from my past self, telling me about compare-windows. scroll-all-mode seems useful, but it seems to only handle keyboard scrolling, not mouse-wheel?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- internet_points 4mo ago
  ...except ruler-mode uses dragging of middle mouse button to move the fill column, which on my system scrolls.
  - db48x 4mo ago
    Then simply change the keybindings. Use `C-h k` and then middle click on the ruler-mode’s header to find out what command is bound to the middle mouse button, then bind that same command to a different mouse button: (keymap-set ruler-mode-map "<header-line> <down-mouse-3>" #'ruler-mode-mouse-grab-any-column)
    - internet_points 4mo ago
      [dead]
zelphirkalt 4mo ago
Cool blog post. Though I think the blog post would benefit from having a table of contents. Some things one might know about or not be interested in, but one has to scroll through them anyway.
glimshe 4mo ago
Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.
- gpderetta 4mo ago
  No, I think that ̶w̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶m̶u̶t̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶e̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶e̶u̶r̶o̶m̶a̶n̶c̶e̶r̶ emacs will merge with claude instead.
  - volemo 4mo ago
    Already did: https://github.com/stevemolitor/claude-code.el https://github.com/stevemolitor/claude-code.el /j
- willXare 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kristjansson 4mo ago
    C-u 0 M-x asi-optimize-everything (The prefix arg disables paperclips, for obvious reasons )
- rgoulter 4mo ago
  I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies. LLMs are powerful at dealing with text. And Emacs is highly extensible and typically text-oriented. Already I see people say that LLMs much Emacs much easier to use (since you can ask an LLM to come up with the elisp for you), but I reckon what Emacs provides ought to be useful the other way. With Emacs, it's common to see people favour bringing various parts of the system all within Emacs. I'm reminded of that when I've seen how useful it can be to provide API access to logging/code/documentation when asking an LLM to troubleshoot. With LLMs, there are several uses cases I see which are a natural fit for org-mode, and just imitated in markdown. -- e.g. org mode have TODO items, checklists, tables (including spreadsheet functionality), code blocks, tagging/properties.
  - 4mo ago
justinhj 4mo ago
Both Emacs and Neovim reward rtfm and working up from a vanilla configuration to your own custom one. The distribution style packages for these editors make the user skip all that initial learning and discovery. It leads to people writing plugins and packages that simply replicate what was already possible. I have written plenty of elisp myself only to find out I was rewriting builtin functionality. I'd also say that both editors are fully discoverable but you have to first learn how to use the various help available. Emacs is a bit ahead here with its help options, letting you search for functions, variables, info and man pages, apropos (fuzzy search) and more. In short start vanilla and explore; this kind of blog really helps with that.
jr_isidore 4mo ago
Half of the obscure features mentioned required the author's massaging to make useful to himself. The history of these "solutions looking for a problem" is common, some guy reveling in a rabbit hole of his own creation, the only difference being that guy was old enough to have a gnu.org email address whereas the rest of us publish our dabblings on github as third-party packages. This reminds me of the fading but ever present power of institutionalism. For probably good reasons we accord higher respect to the Tonight Show than some rando podcaster. But at least in emacs's case, there really is no quality difference between a "batteries included" mode and one off the rack.
ascii0eks84 4mo ago
nah, vi/vim forever.
Steeeve 4mo ago
Back when I was on usenet, it was a common joke that all real programmers used emacs - and at the time I was a vi guy. It took me so long to get the muscle memory to do what I needed in vi that I thought I'd never change. But sure enough, I'm a nerd, and just like when I tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I decided to spend two weeks learning emacs. Absolutely frustrating for a few days. But I've been on emacs ever since. Some years I didn't update my emacs config or install any updates at all. Some years, that's MOST of what I did. No shade at all to VIM or any other community of evangelists who have taken the time to get all the power they can out of their toolset. What works for you works. But between org-mode and the 70 other features that I've come to know and love (like projectile, flycheck, ivy, m-x butterfly, yasnippet, etc.), I'm never looking back. I will occasionally use another tool for a specific purpose, and sometimes those tools have features and niceness that is hard to beat, but most of what I do professionally is just plain typing and I'm way more productive in emacs than any other typing tool. Pretty cool that after all these years I can see an article like this and learn a thing or two as well. Thanks OP!
- kqr 4mo ago
  But you can get the best of both worlds by using Evil. That gets you Emacs-the-platform with Vim-the-editor.

366 points by signa11 4mo ago

tptacek 4mo ago

I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired.

rirze 4mo ago
Try it out! It has its own learning curve, but it's convenient to use in quick and dirty situations.
- wafflemaker 4mo ago
  Love that the "don't mess something up accidently" aka input lock is working in dired too(C-c C-q) Here it turns off input lock, so you can freely edit filenames in a dir like if it was a regular text buffer.
unlogic 4mo ago
Check out sunrise-commander, it is Dired reskinned as a dual-paner. Love how convenient it is to have a powerful integrated file manager.
- kqr 4mo ago
  Is sunrise commander stable these days? I tried using it maybe a decade ago and back then it had a tendency to mess up window layouts and leave weird buffers around. I notice there's now a GitHub repository which has two spurts of work in its history that probably didn't exist when I last used it – have they improved its usability?
amszmidt 4mo ago
Fun fact. DIRED pre-dates EMACS. DIRED on ITS is also similar enough to today’s DIRED.
kickingvegas 4mo ago
NGL, I find the Dired UX out of the box to be frustrating given its reliance on remembering key bindings, so much so that I ended up writing both a Transient menu and a context menu for it, both available in the Casual and Anju packages on MELPA, respectively. If interested, you can read more about them in the following links: https://kickingvegas.github.io/casual/Dired-Usage.html https://kickingvegas.github.io/casual/Dired-Usage.html https://kickingvegas.github.io/anju/Dired-Mode-Context-Menu.html https://kickingvegas.github.io/anju/Dired-Mode-Context-Menu....
yxhuvud 4mo ago
It has a million features I don't use. But some features are really, really nice, like C-q for editing file names (C-x-s to persist changes once done). Rectangle editing is so, so nice to have when renaming multiple files.
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  C-q just tells me the buffer is read-only. How does that work?
  - scoops_ 4mo ago
    They probably mean ‘C-x C-Q’, which toggles a buffer with its read-only state. In this case it lets you edit the contents of the dired buffer (i.e directory or file names) to changing the buffer to wdired-mode, and then ‘C-x C-s’ to save the contents of the buffer, which changes the names and places the buffer back into read-only (dired-mode)
    - SoftTalker 4mo ago
      Yes, that worked! Thanks. Though it was C-c C-c to save and exit the r/w mode.
fridder 4mo ago
dirvish is nice
m463 4mo ago
I think 's' is sort. More seriously, what I would like to do is ediff files (only the differences) in two directories (have the changed files together one line after the other) or, ediff two arbitrary lists of files and have them show up in ediff.
rpdillon 4mo ago
wdired is still magic to me. Use it almost every day.
dired_fan 4mo ago
Like you, I've been using emacs (gnu) for decades, and dired is my directory/file manipulation tool, for both linux and windows. I never see a desktop with files/folders or anything like that, it's dired for everything. For example: Just a few minutes ago, in a directory with lots of PDFs, I did: - wdired to rename pdfs to a consistent convention. Did this with the awesome multiple-cursors package, then interactively spell-checked and corrected my renamed pdfs. All within writeable dired :-) - delete several non-pdf files - mark several possible duplicate files and dired-do-shell-command with sha512sum - move several pdfs to another directory (split window and open target dir, mark files to move, one-button move using dired-dwim-target. - mark several pdfs and open with reader app Obviously that's all do-able with a shell or traditional file manager GUI, but dired was a total win here. Multiply that win by a hundred times per week, and that's a quality of life enhancement.
- kqr 4mo ago
  > dired-dwim-target Aha! That's what's been missing in my life! Thank you.
agumonkey 4mo ago
it's bare but i'm surprised people would get confused by it, it kinda follows the usual shortcuts over bare unix util output: mark/select, delete, rename, compress, encrypt then maybe you dislike the low-discoverability of shortcuts, i think someone added a transient layer (aka a visible shortcut summary with some state management for options)
iLemming 4mo ago
I have an opposite argument - no other file manager ever worked for me and I tried and keep trying so many. And not because Dired "is so much better" or "far more capable", or "has better default keybindings", or due to my muscle memory or Stockholm syndrome, no. It's because I can always introspect every single feature of it, override any command, integrate things with any other packages. I honestly think that we (programmers) collectively went backwards when we tried to abandon Lisp. Why aren't there [popular] apps with a built-in true Lisp REPL for file management, email, version control? Misunderstanding (or complete incomprehension) of Lisp lead us to the mess we're in today. Some may say: "people made their choice", etc. Well, like so many times in history, majority is not always right, but quite the opposite. We spent almost 2000 years building with inferior Portland cement, which degrades in seawater within decades, instead of using techniques perfected by Romans. We keep piling the crap, making CO2 emissions even worse. And only because we lost the recipe. The Pantheon built with Roman harbor concrete that strengthens in seawater still stands. Emacs is the Pantheon of software - the monumental example of what we've lost, the shining display of continuous progress in a world of regression. It is heartbreakingly sad because there's now an entire generation that has no clue, because they have not witnessed the decades of callback hell. They don't know anything (or wouldn't even want to know) about "Beating the Averages", Greenspun's Tenth Rule, Gabriel's "Worse Is Better" and how he was so conflicted about his own essay that he spent a decade writing rebuttals under a pseudonym. Lisp won't ever die, but it will never regain its former supremacy. Because for humans, economic/social reasons matter more than technical merits.

buzzwords 4mo ago

I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.

binary132 4mo ago
I’ve come to believe that this is less an emacs problem and more an “emacs plugins that try to do way too much stuff / take too much control” problem. I’m on vanilla emacs (I don’t even use use-package) and my config never breaks any more, even when upgrading major emacs versions. I think it’s about doing things in harmony with the emacs way instead of trying to take over the UI/UX. Emacs Live was always broken when I was using that.
- zelphirkalt 4mo ago
  use-package is now in standard Emacs, so I would count that towards the Emacs way. But I agree that it is very stable and for me also doesn't break, even though I use use-package a lot and install many key packages. Maybe it is important to note, that I don't need everything there is out there and that I remove not well working packages quickly after trying them. From time to time I also look at my init file and get rid of no longer used stuff.
globular-toast 4mo ago
What "updates" are you referring to? In more than 15 years of using Emacs I've not once been blocked from doing work due to any kind of breakage.
- jjav 4mo ago
  Right, I can't understand what this breaking refers to? I've been using emacs every day all day every time I'm front of a computer, since 1991. I need only one finger to count the pieces of software I've been using that long that have never crashed or broken on me in any way.
- 4mo ago

gnulinux 4mo ago

My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024. > This is largely a discoverability problem In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinations of packages. I know how to use dired, I know how to install elisp packages, I know how to write emacs lisp myself. The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large packages with "batteries" because any additional package added can bork some random, seemingly unrelated package. E.g. back in the day (maybe around ~2020s or a bit before?) I've been using Spacemacs without vim keybinding, and although batteries were included and I was happy, this issue I mentioned above was even bigger. Because I constantly had to deal with installing a package and discovering that it broke some unrelated LSP, programming, or autocomplete package. It gets quite a bit frustrating at some point. Since this LLM madness started, I never really installed anything LLM related to Emacs, and have been using other text editor for LLM related stuff, Emacs for everything else (especially if there is a strong Emacs package, e.g. agda2-mode is incredibly good, almost flawless!) Again, just my humble two cents. Obvious Emacs is amazing, and in many ways it's still my go-to, I just think that the biggest issue for me has always been randomly broken packages. Maybe I'm a terrible elisp programmer, that's possible! But I've been using emacs everyday for decades, so idk...

skydhash 4mo ago
Both you and the sibling common by buzzwords have the same contexte: You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way. Most package assumes something standard and you can expect something to break if your configuration isn’t.
- shevy-java 4mo ago
  > You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way I heard a similar argument about vim's billion configuration options. At some point I simply got tired of having to tweak it and switched to a better editor (not emacs though; both vim and emacs are losing in any debate, but it's a fun debate nonetheless since both camps think software can only be written with these two editors; everyone else must be clueless and skillless).

QwenGlazer9000 4mo ago

All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix. I used to be on neovim, and that ecosystem compared to emacs feels like this image: https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes, but I also think the ecosystem is more slow moving than other editors which helps. The editor is older than most devs after all.

shevy-java 4mo ago
The irony is that the vim camp can use just the same "argument" here about emacs. So that is a weird comparison to want to make here. > The editor is older than most devs after all. Well, being old does not automatically mean better. Peak human physical performance typically happens, with some exceptions (Justin Gatlin, if we ignore the use of enhancement drugs) in younger years; see Usain Bolt's fastest time achieved when he was young (23 years, in 2009). For mental tasks it is not so limited, but for physical peaks it is often in the younger years. For some software projects it also is the case that older age means more code, which in turn automatically mean smore bugs, all other things being equal. I am not necessarily questioning as to whether emacs has more bugs; my point is that the comparison/analogy does not work as means of quality assessment.
- weinzierl 4mo ago
  If you look at the output of mathematicians and their biggest discoveries it suggests that it is similarly limited for mental tasks.
  - kensai 4mo ago
    Probably this category of mental tasks. For politicians it's the other way around. Prolly you need to have some 'elder statesman' skills as well as wisdom to achieve greatness. Deng Xiaoping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping) started changing China at the venerable age of 70+ moving forward until his death almost two decades later. Do not underestimate wisdom as a cognitive skill, even if in today's world we tend to discredit it because of agism.

shevy-java 4mo ago

Emacs is a great OS. If you complement it with vim then you may have a working editor as well, provided you know how to exit from vim.

__patchbit__ 4mo ago
Emacs is the AI acupuncture livecode needle probe into AI robotics. Pair it with Helix editor for the old and true, refresh new experience.
neutronicus 4mo ago
Just use the emacs-native implementation (evil-mode).

mintflow 4mo ago

Nice write up about Emacs, ruler-mode is a thing I never used before. Recently I finally start to C-X M-x to do text scaling, the typing is hard even as near 2 decades user of Emacs.

DonHopkins 4mo ago

I LOVE Emacs, but I HATE it when I have the irresistible urge to edit text, but Emacs has dead batteries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo

noelwelsh 4mo ago

The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a dent: when people boot it up it has to have the good stuff right in their face. This also means ditching the "vanilla Emacs only" snobbery. That said, I'm the kind of person to invest time in my editor and I appreciate this post.

lycopodiopsida 4mo ago
There is no "problem" in emacs (there are big technical problems, but not this one) and no need to get "most people" on emacs - the ecosystem is healthy by all means and only increasing. The "out of the box" experience could be better - but for emacs users. Those, who expect VS Code, should just install it and live happy.
- pfortuny 4mo ago
  On your first paragraph: exactly. This is not a competition, Emacs is just shared software, not part of a market.
kqr 4mo ago
That would be a problem if the Emacs project needed to attract new users that aren't "the kind of person to invest time in" their editor. I'm not sure it does. Emacs has a healthy user base of people like you and I and appears to receive stable funding from the FSF. I don't see that changing any time soon. Emacs can be Emacs and be just fine the way it is. I will keep suggesting new users should aim to get as close to vanilla as they have patience for, because that will teach them more about the powerful virtual machine running their text editor, and the ways it can be bent to do their bidding.
- jr_isidore 4mo ago
  appears to receive stable funding from the FSF No, about ten underemployed or semi-retired graybeards on the emacs.devel mailing list burn most of their waking hours futzing with emacs. That's not an exaggeration. They receive no remuneration.

quertyrecord74 4mo ago

Also karthik is the author of gptel mode.

internet_points 4mo ago

TIL about ruler-mode; now I can delete my own half-assed implementation of the same. And compare-windows looks really handy. I was about to write a note in my init file to my future self telling me to start using that, but then I saw there is already a note there from my past self, telling me about compare-windows. scroll-all-mode seems useful, but it seems to only handle keyboard scrolling, not mouse-wheel?

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
internet_points 4mo ago
...except ruler-mode uses dragging of middle mouse button to move the fill column, which on my system scrolls.
- db48x 4mo ago
  Then simply change the keybindings. Use `C-h k` and then middle click on the ruler-mode’s header to find out what command is bound to the middle mouse button, then bind that same command to a different mouse button: (keymap-set ruler-mode-map "<header-line> <down-mouse-3>" #'ruler-mode-mouse-grab-any-column)
  - internet_points 4mo ago
    [dead]

zelphirkalt 4mo ago

Cool blog post. Though I think the blog post would benefit from having a table of contents. Some things one might know about or not be interested in, but one has to scroll through them anyway.

glimshe 4mo ago

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

gpderetta 4mo ago
No, I think that ̶w̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶m̶u̶t̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶e̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶n̶e̶u̶r̶o̶m̶a̶n̶c̶e̶r̶ emacs will merge with claude instead.
- volemo 4mo ago
  Already did: https://github.com/stevemolitor/claude-code.el https://github.com/stevemolitor/claude-code.el /j
willXare 4mo ago
[flagged]
- kristjansson 4mo ago
  C-u 0 M-x asi-optimize-everything (The prefix arg disables paperclips, for obvious reasons )
rgoulter 4mo ago
I do wish that Emacs was more popular with LLM technologies. LLMs are powerful at dealing with text. And Emacs is highly extensible and typically text-oriented. Already I see people say that LLMs much Emacs much easier to use (since you can ask an LLM to come up with the elisp for you), but I reckon what Emacs provides ought to be useful the other way. With Emacs, it's common to see people favour bringing various parts of the system all within Emacs. I'm reminded of that when I've seen how useful it can be to provide API access to logging/code/documentation when asking an LLM to troubleshoot. With LLMs, there are several uses cases I see which are a natural fit for org-mode, and just imitated in markdown. -- e.g. org mode have TODO items, checklists, tables (including spreadsheet functionality), code blocks, tagging/properties.
- 4mo ago

justinhj 4mo ago

Both Emacs and Neovim reward rtfm and working up from a vanilla configuration to your own custom one. The distribution style packages for these editors make the user skip all that initial learning and discovery. It leads to people writing plugins and packages that simply replicate what was already possible. I have written plenty of elisp myself only to find out I was rewriting builtin functionality. I'd also say that both editors are fully discoverable but you have to first learn how to use the various help available. Emacs is a bit ahead here with its help options, letting you search for functions, variables, info and man pages, apropos (fuzzy search) and more. In short start vanilla and explore; this kind of blog really helps with that.

jr_isidore 4mo ago

Half of the obscure features mentioned required the author's massaging to make useful to himself. The history of these "solutions looking for a problem" is common, some guy reveling in a rabbit hole of his own creation, the only difference being that guy was old enough to have a gnu.org email address whereas the rest of us publish our dabblings on github as third-party packages. This reminds me of the fading but ever present power of institutionalism. For probably good reasons we accord higher respect to the Tonight Show than some rando podcaster. But at least in emacs's case, there really is no quality difference between a "batteries included" mode and one off the rack.

ascii0eks84 4mo ago

nah, vi/vim forever.

Steeeve 4mo ago

Back when I was on usenet, it was a common joke that all real programmers used emacs - and at the time I was a vi guy. It took me so long to get the muscle memory to do what I needed in vi that I thought I'd never change. But sure enough, I'm a nerd, and just like when I tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I decided to spend two weeks learning emacs. Absolutely frustrating for a few days. But I've been on emacs ever since. Some years I didn't update my emacs config or install any updates at all. Some years, that's MOST of what I did. No shade at all to VIM or any other community of evangelists who have taken the time to get all the power they can out of their toolset. What works for you works. But between org-mode and the 70 other features that I've come to know and love (like projectile, flycheck, ivy, m-x butterfly, yasnippet, etc.), I'm never looking back. I will occasionally use another tool for a specific purpose, and sometimes those tools have features and niceness that is hard to beat, but most of what I do professionally is just plain typing and I'm way more productive in emacs than any other typing tool. Pretty cool that after all these years I can see an article like this and learn a thing or two as well. Thanks OP!

kqr 4mo ago
But you can get the best of both worlds by using Evil. That gets you Emacs-the-platform with Vim-the-editor.