[HN Gopher] What's new in Emacs 28.1?
___________________________________________________________________
What's new in Emacs 28.1?
Author : abzug
Score : 350 points
Date : 2022-04-06 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.masteringemacs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.masteringemacs.org)
| etra0 wrote:
| I remember seeing vim as a complex solution for text editing, and
| I didn't touched it for that same reason. A couple of years later
| I spent sometime learning it and now it's my day-to-day tool for
| writing code.
|
| I feel the same with Emacs, I've been reading (very little) about
| it and I wonder if I dedicate the same time I did for learning
| vim I'd be in the Emacs bandwagon, but at the same time I don't
| feel _that_ curious about it, because I feel happy with vim.
|
| I've tried some versions with vim bindings but the problem
| remains the same, the energy to explore the rest just wasn't
| there.
| egl2021 wrote:
| For me, the big feature in editors is mouseless editing. With
| emacs my fingers never have to leave the keyboard. When I
| started out in the Dark Ages, vi offered the same benefit, but
| multiple buffers were easier in emacs, so I ended up with
| emacs. I use some emacs extensions (e.g. ctags recently), but
| that's a secondary benefit.
|
| So from my perspective, you've already gotten most of the
| benefit just with vi. YMMV. If emacs were to disappear today,
| I'd probably switch to vi and be perfectly happy.
| amon22 wrote:
| I was avoiding Emacs for years because I heard that it's a huge
| timesink, so I kept using Vim and later NeoVim. Last month I
| started learning Clojure(great language btw) and after some
| consideration I decided to give Emacs a try. It's my new
| favorite thing, it was a pleasure to learn. It took about 4
| sessions to get productive with it, a couple of days. Really
| not that much of an effort. After a bit of tinkering, I feel
| like Emacs is what I was always looking in other IDEs. (Neo)Vim
| is a great text editor, but I was never able to customize it to
| a point where I was 100% satisfied with it. With Emacs it took
| a couple of weeks. If you end up giving Emacs a try, I would
| advise using the native keys, at least until you're comfortable
| with the editor. When in Rome... Also, masteringemacs.com has a
| great beginner article, I highly recommend it.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| > If you're using projectile or something else, start switching
| over; this is the new default target for all other integrations
|
| It is pretty sweet something like this is getting built in, but I
| have not found a replacement for 'with-project-root from the (now
| seemingly missing) project-root package.
|
| edit: Oh, they also add a new 'with-existing-directory' macro
| that should be easy to compile to do the same thing. sweet.
| pimeys wrote:
| Wayland support didn't make it... Oh well it is in version 29.
|
| I've been using the wayland version with libgccjit many months
| now from their git repo and it is extremely snappy and stable
| editor.
|
| My strategy to keep all of this together is a nix derivation that
| compiles the latest master branch with all the plugins. Oh and my
| config is an org file with clear comments...
|
| https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/tree/main/desktop/emacs
|
| All reproducible...
|
| Btw. I recommend SystemCrafters video series Emacs from scratch.
| It teaches how to make a vanilla emacs to work like doom emacs
| does. It was helpful for me to understand the magic behind
| doom...
|
| https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bB...
| asoneth wrote:
| I aspired to learn Emacs but gave up a number of times.
|
| It's in that category of things that I believe would be Good For
| Me but that have such high activation energy that it never
| becomes a high enough priority. It's like the documentary I keep
| skipping over in my streaming queue, the free weights gathering
| dust in the basement, or the guitar I finally gave away after
| having only learned a few chords.
|
| There's got to be a word to describe the realization that
| something is probably never going to be high enough priority to
| me to be worth the investment.
| pzone wrote:
| The best reason to use Emacs is that it's fun. Would you learn
| the guitar because it's "good for you" to learn it or because
| you enjoy playing music? I think the only sustainable
| motivation is the latter. If learning Emacs is simply a chore
| with an abstract promise of "productivity" as a reward you're
| not missing out on anything.
| Decabytes wrote:
| The post yesterday about Pharo 10, and the Lisp Curse repost has
| me thinking about text editors again. I think that some fusion of
| the introspection abilities of Smalltalk with the good parts of
| Emacs might allow us to create the text editor of the future(tm).
| One that take everything good about Lisps and everything good
| about programming in Smalltalk. I'd need to actually explore how
| Smalltalk does its IDE environment to be able to comment more,
| but I was initially very impressed with the programmability of it
| during the video I watched about it.
| gjvc wrote:
| The native compilation part is the highlight. Could someone who
| knows about these things explain the difficulty Debian has in
| getting emacs 28 in -unstable ? (currently on 27 according to
| https://packages.debian.org/unstable/emacs)
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| FWIW, emacs is extremely easy to build from source.
| gjvc wrote:
| it is, and i do, but i got bored of doing that a few years
| ago, and prefer to use 100% packaged stuff.
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| apt install guix :)
|
| This gives you guix "FD" and its great on top of debian for
| emacs especially (and you can move a lot of your emacs
| packages into guix as well).
|
| The apt packages handles most of this but its good to
| follow along a little -
|
| https://guix.gnu.org/en/manual/devel/en/html_node/Installat
| i...
| gjvc wrote:
| thank you! I will try this now and let you know... very
| helpful.
| JNRowe wrote:
| It has only just been released. You can compare the release
| dates1 to the package dates2 to see how long it tends to take
| to be packaged and migrate.
|
| 1 https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates
|
| 2 https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/emacs
| gjvc wrote:
| misses the point of my question
| olau wrote:
| Well, it's a one-man team.
|
| I'm not a Debian developer, but did email Rob Browning some
| years ago, asking if he would perhaps consider trying to make
| it a team effort. I don't think I ever got a reply. I
| appreciate the work he's done to maintain Emacs in Debian for
| decades (!), but it would be nice if someone could give him a
| hand. For instance, it looks like 27.2 wasn't packaged despite
| being released a year ago.
| gjvc wrote:
| That explains it, thank you.
| KabirKwatra wrote:
| I started using Emacs as my primary editor about a year ago with
| doom. Emacs 28 has good changes, but it's missing pixel scrolling
| which at this point almost every other editor has. I believe
| Emacs 29 is going to finally include the feature. There's a
| pretty good plugin called good-scroll.el that does exactly this
| on older versions, but it can be buggy sometimes.
| latticed-mood wrote:
| viksit wrote:
| Given all the emacs ninjas here - what's the best way to do
| JSX/TSX formatting while playing nice with js2-mode, tide and
| web-mode? I've been stuck for months on finding a good config and
| almost wanted to move to VS Code to try it out. Then, while using
| it I just couldn't do without emacs buffers and panels
| flexibility -- so moved back :))
| srcreigh wrote:
| Prettier the buffer every once in a while.
|
| Tide mode can be pretty annoying with JSX. I try to be okay
| with temporary syntax imperfections and get in the zone with
| the actual changes.
| [deleted]
| aporetics wrote:
| I gave up on getting these modes to consistently format. It
| seems really fragile and never quite right. So now I just have
| prettierjs set up and I don't have to think about it.
| mplanchard wrote:
| prettier-emacs[0] works well, and IIRC I think the JS/TS
| language servers can handle formatting, if you're using LSP or
| eglot!
|
| [0]: https://github.com/prettier/prettier-emacs
| rayiner wrote:
| I was an Emacs user back in my software writing days, but I
| thought I had left it behind when I became a lawyer. Over the
| past month or two however I've moved more and more of my workflow
| over to Emacs.
|
| I started with using Org Mode and PDF tools for note taking and
| reviewing PDFs and task management:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30492373. More recently I
| switched my email over to mu4e:
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/mu4e. Unfortunately I can't get
| it to interface properly with Office 365, which has heavily
| locked down POP/SMTP. So I used a couple of Power Automate flows
| to store incoming emails into a maildir format directory in
| OneDrive, which I then read from mu4e:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir. I also use Power Automate
| flows to grab my calendar and store it to Org files, and watch
| for queued emails and send send them. Power Automate is just
| about the worst programming environment ever devised, but because
| UNIX systems like RFC 2822 (email) and maildir are so simple it
| didn't take much fiddling at all!
|
| Ironically, writing a bit of glue to get everything into Emacs
| offers better integration between email, calendar, todos, and
| notes, than just using Office 365's own tools. After trying a ton
| of web/electron based tools for these purposes, going back to
| Emacs makes me think of this scene from Star Wars:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7hb8AYnRb-4
|
| I'm using the Emacs 28.1 test release on Windows and the Emacs-
| Mac Port on Mac: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-
| mac/src/master/. The latter has nice features like double
| buffering that make Emacs, while not modern feeling, quite
| presentable.
|
| For such a huge change, the elisp native compilation works
| extremely nicely with every package I've thrown at it. Totally
| stable and ready for prime time.
| podiki wrote:
| Funny, just dealt with the whole O365 authentication just this
| week. With moving to 2 factor authentication you need to use
| OAuth 2 to do anything with it. I have my (work) O365 email
| forwarded, so I do have normal IMAP access. I use isync/mbsync
| [1] to receive email, goimapnotify [2] to get pushed new email,
| read/reply/etc with mu4e [3] and org-msg [4] and org-mode, and
| until recently just plain SMTP to send mail. This last part
| will break with 2 factor, but found oauth2ms [5] to set up the
| OAuth to work with O365 SMTP. The trick was to find the "tenet
| ID" from the Azure page of your organization and to use
| Thunderbird's credentials [6] (or another mail program, since I
| can't make new app registrations on Azure to have my own
| "application"). That should also allow you to use IMAP with
| OAuth 2 as well, but haven't done that since I still have the
| forwarding. (As usual, I think the Arch Wiki [7] covers most of
| this too.)
|
| [1] http://isync.sourceforge.net/
|
| [2] https://gitlab.com/shackra/goimapnotify
|
| [3] https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html
|
| [4] https://github.com/jeremy-compostella/org-msg
|
| [5] https://github.com/harishkrupo/oauth2ms
|
| [6] https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-
| central/file/tip/mailnews/base/s...
|
| [7] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Isync#Using_XOAUTH2
| pen2l wrote:
| Are you using viper or evil-mode often (or some other thing
| which gives emacs vi bindings, I think there are a couple)?
| Because navigating text with emacs gives me the emacs pinky,
| I'm wondering how folks deal with that. Transposed cpslck with
| ctrl?
| jpeloquin wrote:
| I remapped control to the bottom row, whichever key my thumb
| naturally rests on. Usually alt. Also moved \, [, ], enter,
| and backspace to avoid reaching for them with my right pinky.
| I think if your fingers start feeling even a little bit
| weird, you should keep remapping keys until they feel good
| all the time. Doesn't make sense to wait for it to get worse
| before taking action.
| achikin wrote:
| There is an extensive guide on moving Ctrl on different
| OSes/Window managers, which can be found in the EmacsWiki
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MovingTheCtrlKey
| JHonaker wrote:
| I mapped Control to a key under my thumb instead of Caps
| Lock. That's where it was originally when they chose the
| binding anyway. It's very comfortable now.
| rayiner wrote:
| No. In my youth I just played through the pain, but I
| recently just ordered this:
| http://xahlee.info/kbd/xbows_keyboard_review.html
| pen2l wrote:
| Fair (though I recommend you give kinesis a try:
| https://kinesis-ergo.com/keyboards/advantage360/ ).
|
| Separately, I just want to throw it out there, you guys
| should try sublimity: https://github.com/zk-phi/sublimity
|
| Particularly, the minimap is awesome because it provides an
| intuition about where one is and that just feels nice.
| darrylb42 wrote:
| How did you learn that keyboard exists? It is not on
| their keyboard page. Kinesis needs a better organized
| site.
|
| I got the Freestyle2 a few weeks ago, enjoying it, still
| have some issues finding the navigation keys, home, end
| etc. I really like having my arms pointed straight rather
| than angled in like with a normal keyboard. Keys are a
| bit mushy, went from cherry blues.
| spudlyo wrote:
| This model is not yet in full production, and while they
| claim it will be shipping this summer, it's possible we
| won't see it this year.
| achikin wrote:
| I set the key left to the spacebar (usually Alt or Cmd) to
| act as Ctrl in Emacs, so I can press it with my left thumb.
| This can be done in the Emacs config like this
| (setq mac-control-modifier 'command) (setq mac-command-
| modifier 'control) (setq mac-option-modifier 'meta)
| (setq mac-control-modifier 'super)
| b3morales wrote:
| Note that these variables are specific to the Mac Port
| (https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/).
| They use an `ns` prefix instead of `mac` in a build based
| on the GNU mainline. And presumably something else entirely
| on another OS.
| achikin wrote:
| It's mac-specific, but not Yamamoto port specific. You
| can also find them in the vanilla EmacsForMacOSX port
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS#toc24
| untilted wrote:
| my .02$: get an ergonomic keyboard (I use the MS Sculpt
| keyboard nowadays), and learn to type like a pianist (use
| both hands, don't be afraid to move them to minimise strain).
| achikin wrote:
| Sculpt is an amazing keyboard for programmers who need to
| press a lot of hotkeys. It has short spacebars and huge
| modifiers, very comfortable for your thumb. Not to mention
| it is split, negative tilted, tented and has a built-in
| wrist rest.
| untilted wrote:
| Agreed, the Sculpt coupled with an vertical mouse has
| been a game changer for me
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yeah the caps lock switch is critical I think, since then you
| can press that key without curling or twisting the finger.
| Look at technique for musical instruments that require
| applying pressure with that finger, eg cello, they go through
| a lot of trouble sometimes to avoid that particular
| contortion bc of its lack of control and the long-term stress
| it puts on the hand.
|
| If that doesn't work I know people who have used a usb foot
| pedal and it seems to work well for them.
|
| Or, if vi bindings work for you, just use vi bindings.
| There's no nobility in the emacs bindings. I like them but if
| something else works better just use it.
| R0flcopt3r wrote:
| The trick is to hit ctrl with the part of your hand where
| your pinky attaches to it. Now all you do is rotate your
| wrist slightly, and you hit ctrl. Doesn't work very well on
| flat/low-profile keyboards, doable with thinkpads, not at all
| possible on macbooks.
| spudlyo wrote:
| This trick gave me some pretty bad pain in my left hand
| after a month or so. Remapping control to CAPS LOCK worked
| for me for years, but what really helped was when I
| switched to a keyboard that had six keys on each thumb
| cluster, which allowed me to map control and meta to the
| thumbs.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Which keyboard, if you don't mind my asking?
| macintux wrote:
| Mapping control to its original keyboard placement, caps
| lock, is the first thing I do on any new computer/keyboard.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Because navigating text with emacs gives me the emacs
| pinky,
|
| I had RSI issues early in my career (not Emacs related), and
| learned some tricks that come handy with Emacs.
|
| Your keyboard has two control keys. Use both of them. In
| particular, use the "opposite" one. If you want to press C-c,
| use the _right_ Control key with your right hand. If you want
| to press C-l, use the _left_ control key with your left hand.
| This way you 're distributing the work with both hands and
| are not twisting your hands into weird shapes trying to get
| both buttons with one hand.
|
| And also: Once you do this, no reason to insist on using your
| pinky to hit Control. I often use my thumb as well.
|
| I never got the Emacs pinky.
| coderdd wrote:
| > If you want to press C-c, use the right Control key with
| your right hand
|
| First thought: but C is on the right.
|
| Second thought: ah, I use Dvorak
| gjvc wrote:
| map capslock to be a control key.
| p_l wrote:
| The emacs keybindings evolved on keyboard with two
| control keys on both sides, later augmented to have
| replicated (starting from space bar) control meta super
| Hyper keys. A PC104 keyboard's main sin for emacs akt
| where control should be - but not requiring pinky for
| bucky bits
| BeetleB wrote:
| Although it's the canonical solution, that would be a
| degradation for me. It's more ergonomic to use two hands
| to enter any modifier sequence. Mapping Capslock to
| Control doesn't provide extra benefits to my solution.
|
| The other problem people have with the pinky is that
| they're twisting their wrist while typing, which is also
| against more ergonomic guidelines. The recommendation is
| to move the whole arm. Once you get used to that, there's
| no good reason to use the pinky to hit Ctrl (even when
| rebound to Caps lock). I would guess over half the times,
| I'm using some finger other than the pinky to hit Ctrl.
| tom_ wrote:
| I curl my little finger and press Ctrl with the first
| knuckle. No hand movement required in my case.
|
| (There's a picture of my hand doing this on Xah's site
| somewhere, to which he's added a warning about potential
| long term effects; but I've been doing this for over ten
| years now, with no ill effects noted.)
| anthk wrote:
| Did Emacs solve their freezing issues on background I/O?
| clircle wrote:
| I wish we could have double buffering on Windows as well...
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| >[...] I started with using Org Mode and Org PDF for note
| taking and reviewing PDFs[...]
|
| I wonder, what is "Org PDF"?
| rayiner wrote:
| Sorry, I meant pdftools and org-pdftools:
| https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Ah, cool, thanks! I'll give that a try...
| pfortuny wrote:
| For mu4e and Exchange, I use:
|
| -offlineimap
|
| both linux and macos.
|
| and in my home laptop, davmail because it allows me to use 2FA,
| which has been implemented at my Uni for external use.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| Davmail is great.
|
| I've found mbsync/isync more performant than offlineimap.
| pfortuny wrote:
| yes everyone says so but I am not keen to change now, just
| out of laziness: there are too many tender points...
| imglorp wrote:
| As usual https://xkcd.com/297 on point
| ww520 wrote:
| Thanks for the tips on PDF tools.
|
| I also save org files on shared folders to sync among different
| machines. I use GnuPG via the epg package to encrypt all files
| before saving to the shared folders. GnuPG has relatively good
| cross platform support that I can move the encrypted files
| between different platforms.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I gave up the fight to get Emacs to read Outlook emails.
| Instead, I figured out how to set up Org mode links to Outlook
| emails, as well as a VBA macro to create an Org mode TODO item
| based off of an email.
| iib wrote:
| You may want to try using DavMail [1] for interfacing with
| Outlook. It is a reverse-proxy for email, so it talks to
| Outlook, and then mu4e can talk to DavMail directly.
|
| [1] http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
| rayiner wrote:
| How the hell did they break email? You need a browser with JS
| to log into your email server?
| [deleted]
| HelloNurse wrote:
| For instance, the Microsoft SMTP server in the cloud is
| picky about SSL/TLS protocols and ciphers.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Isn't 2022 wonderful?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Alas, in some orgs you will need permission to authenticate
| davmail to Outlook. My IT department has not approved
| davmail.
| pfortuny wrote:
| How can they tell?
|
| Honest question because I fear my uni will start doing this
| out of "security ".
| rayiner wrote:
| Office 365 requires SMTP/POP/IMAP to use an "xoauth"
| authentication scheme which relies on getting an
| authentication token from a web browser. The process of
| getting that token involves sending a request that
| includes an application ID.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/297/
| dv35z wrote:
| I'm interested in emacs / org-mode / org-roam. My goal is to have
| a local notes solution (replacing Obsidian, Apple Notes), and
| have the notes automatically published on the web as a
| crosslinked personal knowledge base. I have somewhat achieved
| this with Obsidian/markdown files + git + Hugo + Render. I write
| stuff. Check it into git. Push, and it deploys as a website. Feel
| pretty good about cobbling that together. But Obsidian/markdown
| is tough to replicate the cross-link nature & ease or use of a
| wiki, and it still doesn't help out with Task, calendar, etc.
|
| I've taken a couple swings at setting up Emacs... oof, but as a
| newbie to the ecosystem, but frankly its just been tough to plow
| through. Each guide/tutorial seems to have a whole different set
| of packages, settings, etc; then we get into Doom emacs, etc.
| I've got keyboard shortcuts printed out - but I still end up in
| weird jams where Emacs has opened up 3+ panes (buffers), and I
| can't figure how to even close/quit them.
|
| Truly, it reminds me of when I jumped head first in the Java
| ecosystem, trying to figure out (1) java, (2) intelliJ, (3)
| Spring boot. Too many simultaneous brain battles...
|
| What I'm hoping to find is a "Zero to Functioning personal
| information system (notes, todo, contacts, calendar, kb)" guide.
| I suppose, written for a willing & motivated newb?
|
| From reddit, online tutorials, walkthru videos - it SEEMS the
| pieces are out there. But I'm hoping to find the guy who figured
| this all out a year ago, documented a functional-but-opinionated
| stack / workflow, and I could follow that for awhile (as training
| wheels).
|
| Can anyone suggest something like this? I'd be even be willing to
| pair up with someone and document/publish this, if it doesn't
| exist.
|
| I mentioned it on another Emacs HN thread: I'm convinced of the
| power of this stack, but I'm hoping someone does the "Unix -->
| NeXT -> MacOS", and puts together the Easy Button of this.
|
| For example, my brother is writing a book - he's not super
| technical but can get around. I can tell that he would benefit
| from this system - but I can't fairly recommend it, because hell
| - I haven't been able to coherently get it to work, and doubting
| he would want to be modifying init files and all that.
|
| Hoping this plea for Emacs help reaches a previously frustrated
| newbie who figured it out, who can help me out (and others).
| Thanks!
| bananamerica wrote:
| Org roam is pretty cool but with less features than actual
| roam. I had to force myself to use it but after that it's fine.
| The big disadvantage of all things Org is that unless you're
| doing very simple and using only defaults, there are no
| reasonable mobile workflows. You pretty much need a PC, or
| termux+keyboard for it to make any sense.
| charesjrdan wrote:
| Craft.do is a good solution to your problem if you don't mind
| closed source.
|
| I personally have started using logseq.com though, it is a good
| fully open source file system based approach. It supports
| markdown and org mode, and I store the files in an iCloud Drive
| folder so I can access stuff on my phone (though it's not quite
| as slick as craft, and setting up an auto deployed website
| would have to be done manually whereas craft does it for you)
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >but I still end up in weird jams where Emacs has opened up 3+
| panes (buffers), and I can't figure how to even close/quit
| them.
|
| <meta>-x close-buffer will do the job.
|
| Actually, using <meta>-x allows you to execute _any_ emacs
| function, whether it has a key binding or not.
|
| Even better, emacs will suggest completions (and once you are
| down to a single potential completion, tab completion works
| nicely) as you type the function name.
|
| And if you don't know the name of the function you want/need,
| <meta>-x apropos will allow you to search for what you want --
| with regexp support.
|
| All that said, depending on your use case, it mightn't even be
| necessary to modify your init file at all.
|
| I'm not a previously frustrated newbie (I started with Lugaru's
| epsilon[0] back in the early 1980s, moved to straight-up emacs
| in the late 1980s and never looked back), but I'd be happy to
| help.
|
| That said, using emacs' built in help/info/apropos tools, not
| to mention just using <meta>-x <start typing function names>
| would almost certainly be a better way to figure out how things
| work than asking me (but don't let that stop you from doing
| so). And definitely better than googling/ddging/whatevering
| what you're looking for. '<meta>-x info' and/or <meta>-x help
| are good places to start.
|
| HTHAL.
|
| [0] https://www.lugaru.com/
| nanna wrote:
| Here's an outline of a emacs/org-roam/org-publish based setup,
| which might be of help?
|
| https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/my-personal-wiki-setup
| AlanYx wrote:
| Have you seen this? https://github.com/nobiot/Zero-to-Emacs-
| and-Org-roam It's still a work-in-progress but it may be along
| the lines of what you're looking for.
|
| Personally, I wouldn't recommend setting up org-roam at first.
| It's excellent, but it's just going to be too daunting for a
| beginner when combined with all the other things. I'd start by
| just learning emacs and org-mode. Core org-mode has enough
| functionality built-in to start building knowledgebases, and
| the org-mode manual is excellent. You can add-in org-roam
| later. (And you might find that org-roam is overkill and
| something like howm mode to get backlinks is enough.) The
| beauty of emacs is that you can move your notes from one system
| to another easily.
| NeutralForest wrote:
| I've been using Emacs for 2/3 years now, especially to take
| notes. It's been a bit difficult at the beginning but I really
| enjoy it now, it's provided many features I needed to organize my
| thoughts.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| I almost wish I never tried Emacs. Ignorance is bliss, and Emacs
| ruined all other text editors for me.
|
| There are absolutely areas that others do better, but the self-
| documenting "living program" nature is too much to give up;
| everything you ever need to know or do is a few keystrokes away.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > ruined all other text editors for me
|
| Emacs has a text editor too ?!!?
| didibus wrote:
| Agree, but for me, there also are simply some features no other
| editors have, especially when it comes to navigation.
|
| Some examples are all the ivy autocompletion, command
| autocompletion, dired, adjust-parens, windmove, smart parents,
| expand and contract region, agressive-indent, avy, swiper,
| hydra, and so on.
|
| And it seems whatever I think about exists. Every time I go:
| How do I? There's a solution, and if not, I can just quickly
| add a function for it myself.
|
| That's what keeps me in Emacs. Some other editors are more
| polished, and have better UX, might be more responsive, but
| there's always something they don't have and I miss from Emacs,
| or something that I don't like how they do it and I can't
| customize to my liking.
| karencarits wrote:
| How did you approach Emacs to make it such a valuable tool? I
| have tried to get started with Emacs a few times but the
| initial resistance has been too large
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's a bit of an extreme instance but when I toyed with good
| old turbo pascal 7.0 ide (dos era) I was shocked by the
| quality of it (turbo pascal), brilliant on every aspect, mind
| blowing for the size and era. Yet the minute I tried to edit
| code I felt straightjacketed by the editor, you can only do
| what's built in. It was a stupid need for region aware
| edition.. nothing fancy but I was still stuck.
|
| Ability to extend your system with a quick `eval` and adjust
| keybindings when needed is a very hard drug to me. And I'm
| not in the fanatic period anymore but still.
| chimprich wrote:
| I think the only way is to bite the bullet and accept the
| somewhat steep learning curve. Unlike the other suggestions I
| think it's best to start off with a vanilla Emacs setup
| (rather than one of the fancy distributions), because it's
| better to start with a very simple setup and then build on
| that.
|
| The initial Emacs setup is very basic and quite ugly, but
| good for learning. Follow the built-in tutorial.
|
| After learning the basics, create an init.el file, learn to
| use the use-package package, and start off trying out
| interesting packages to make your life better. I would
| suggest finding a good theme and giving helm a go to begin
| with.
| wiz21c wrote:
| For me things started to get interesting once I set up CUA
| mode to have the same key shortcuts as in the usual Windows
| world (ctrl-C for copy, ctrl-V for paste and so on). Once I
| got that I was able to work on text file, programs etc. Then
| I slowly added packages (took months) as I was
| needing/discovering them. And now, what I like is that I can
| use the same configuration on Linxu and windows (I switch
| often between my work PC in my home PC). Org mode is really
| usefull although I just get the bare minimum. LSP makes a
| difference too. And the community is great: so much things
| happen all the time. The openness really makes a big
| difference. So in the end, I love it :-)
|
| (and I don't like modal editors :-) )
| dotancohen wrote:
| I speak with a heavy VIM accent, so Emacs never clicked for
| me until I tried SpaceMacs. I mostly use Emacs only for org-
| mode, though.
|
| The truth is, I think that I've outgrown SpaceMacs and ready
| to try vanilla Emacs with Evil sometime. But SpaceMacs was
| definitely the gateway to getting me into org-mode, and that
| really is revolution in being able to organize my life.
| slk500 wrote:
| You have to find specific need that emacs will fulfil. Org-
| mode is the key. Don't try to use it like IDE for coding for
| a start.
|
| I recommend start with video tutorials:
|
| 1. Mike Zamansky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49kBWM3RQQ8&
| list=PL9KxKa8NpF...
|
| 2. Rainer Konig org-mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQS0
| 6Qjnkcc&list=PLVtKhBrRV_...
| gumby wrote:
| Ironically, part of the problem for the newbie is the
| enthusiasm of the heavy users, which can make getting started
| feel overwhelming.
|
| Just bare emacs is a great editor. You only need a few
| commands, and then can incrementally learn more as you go.
| Often, when you learn some new command or new package you'll
| wonder "how did I manage to use emacs for all this time
| without knowing this?" But the answer is: you were able to
| get a lot done with what you already knew.
|
| I've been using Emacs for over 40 years and have a very short
| init file with only a small amount of customization. And I
| still learn a new command or package every couple of weeks.
| pzone wrote:
| Spacemacs
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| What parts did you find difficult?
|
| When I first started, I found the keybindings odd, but now I
| love them since the core set of shortcuts--C-a, C-e, C-f,
| etc.--work "everywhere" from the terminal, to GNU readline-
| based programs, to even native macOS text boxes. If you don't
| like the default keybindings, you can change them or use the
| Evil package [0] for Vim bindings.
|
| If you want to get up and running quickly, I'd check out Doom
| Emacs [1] which is easier to configure and takes care of a
| lot of configuration for you. I personally use a reasonably-
| minimal config I wrote myself [2]. If you like to tinker, I'd
| recommend writing your own config, as it will also teach you
| a lot about Emacs.
|
| If you have any questions feel free to reach out--contact
| info in my profile.
|
| [0] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil [1]
| https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs [2]
| https://github.com/jonpalmisc/.emacs.d/blob/master/init.el
| bko wrote:
| Do you use it as an IDE? That's the part I had trouble with
| (react/typescript and python). I could get it almost there,
| but essentially what I would need is a VS Code mode. A side
| panel with the collapsible directories, double click into
| them, global search, linting, syntax, etc.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| I use it at my current job in which I work in a large C++
| codebase. I formerly used CLion.
|
| Whether Emacs is an IDE or not depends how you define
| IDE. I use Eglot [0] for LSP integration; this gives me
| IDE-like features like "jump-to-definition", syntax error
| highlights, warnings, etc. and integrates with company-
| mode [1] for code completion. This handles most of my
| needs for writing code.
|
| As for other things like a file tree, I've found that the
| built in `project-find-file` command combined with
| `vertico` [2] and `orderless` [3] makes finding files and
| navigating around projects easier; that pair behaves
| similarly to CMD+P in Sublime Text or VS Code. There are
| file tree packages out there, but I've found that I don't
| really need a file tree in practice and that I prefer
| navigating around projects with fuzzy file search and
| grep.
|
| [0] https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot [1]
| https://github.com/company-mode/company-mode [2]
| https://github.com/minad/vertico [3]
| https://github.com/oantolin/orderless
| green7ea wrote:
| Give tide a try. I use it daily with typescript and it's
| great :-)
| BeetleB wrote:
| As a heavy Emacs user for over a decade: I still use IDEs
| instead of Emacs for programming. Emacs has plenty of
| uses outside of SW development. Only recently did I
| manage to set up my Emacs to have IDE-like capabilities
| for my Python work. But if I switched to a C++ job, I'll
| use an IDE. And _maybe_ , over the course of a year or
| two, I'll bother setting up LSP for Emacs.
|
| It's totally fine to use IDEs if they make your life
| easier. In my last C++ job, I would edit code with Emacs,
| but keep Visual Studio open for the IDE conveniences.
| trey-jones wrote:
| You may have investigated this already (or discovered it
| setting Emacs up for python), but lsp-mode just about
| works out of the box (for most languages). Extremely
| minimal setup required. Maybe a few configs for lsp-ui to
| suit your own taste.
| Hedepig wrote:
| Have you tried Doom Emacs?
| bko wrote:
| I (try to) use spacemacs. I heard they're similar. Is
| Doom Emacs better for an IDE type experience compared to
| spacemacs? I'm mostly on Ubuntu if that matters
| karencarits wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience! I guess my problem was
| to remember all the shortcuts and keybindings and how to do
| things, and having to look them up all the time was
| tiresome - but I guess the steep learning curve has some
| fruits in the end
| ghosty141 wrote:
| At my new job a colleague mentioned he used emacs and I
| basically took it as inspiration and started trying emacs
| myself, I'm very accustomed to vim after 4-5 years of heavy
| usage so I started with the evil package (evil-mode) and went
| from there.
|
| It boils down to using the already known vim keys for basic
| actions like splitting the window, save a file etc. and
| creating keybinds for anything else I needed. So I customized
| any keybind to my liking, I didn't really adopt the emacs
| binds since I find many of them to be quite unintuitive.
|
| It took me like 2-3 weeks of constant configuration to get to
| a productive config that covers all my needs (from
| autocompletion, to colorscheme) and I still edit my config
| every 1-2 days since I discover new small "itches" and then
| fix those.
|
| For example: I always want my compilation output to be on one
| monitor -> always open the compilation buffer ("output") in
| its own window. Perfect!
|
| To me emacs is like a platform that I can use to build my
| "own" perfect text editor that does exactly what I want it to
| do without really any compromises. This is where emacs
| shines, the endless possibilities and nothing that holds you
| back and says "no the editor is not meant to do X".
| gaze wrote:
| I've been using emacs on and off for about 20 years and I don't
| really get the fanaticism. Org mode and magit and all these
| things are cool. I like that you can hack it. But -- to me it
| never stops feeling like an ongoing project when you try to
| live your entire life in it.
|
| I like it obviously otherwise I wouldn't still be using it, but
| it will never exactly feel elegant to me. More like a good text
| editor and a hundred other tools all duct taped together.
| alyandon wrote:
| I forced myself to use emacs for about 6 months coming from
| IDEs and vi(m) to get past the "this is unfamiliar" stage.
|
| At the end of the day, it was a very nice text editor with a
| development environment embedded in it and the ability to
| tweak things to my work flows was certainly interesting.
| However, I never enjoyed the seemingly unintuitive default
| key bindings and I often found myself disappearing into
| rabbit holes and tweaking stuff just to make everything work
| more smoothly. Ultimately, I decided that was time I should
| have been spending on more productive pursuits.
|
| To this day though, I don't regret giving emacs a spin and I
| still swap caps lock and ctrl on all my systems. Remapping
| that key binding is helpful for so many things outside of
| emacs.
| ljm wrote:
| I don't have the fanaticism either but I always fall back to
| emacs because it can quite easily assimilate the advances
| made in other editors without requiring too major changes to
| emacs itself.
|
| In fact, my config these days is basically vanilla emacs with
| some of the UI stripped away, the modus theme, and a few
| language-specific modes for syntax highlighting. I don't use
| evil or hydra or any such thing any more. The only thing I
| have a sticking point with is exec-path-from-shell messing
| with $PATH in my env because of how it works.
|
| I guess the reason it works well for me is because I try not
| to write code, so I don't need a massive toolkit that helps
| me write code as efficiently as possible. No-code is bug-free
| code, maximise the work not done, etc.
| novocantico wrote:
| I used Emacs almost exclusively for half a decade and got
| pretty good at it. But I feel like VS Code is the natural
| evolution of all the great ideas of Emacs. So I use VS Code
| almost exclusively now.
| antiframe wrote:
| I feel that VSCode is missing the number one critical
| feature of Emacs: the ability to inspect and change the
| program as it's running.
| trey-jones wrote:
| And don't forget the number two critical feature: the
| ability to call yourself an Emacs user!
| novocantico wrote:
| Sure you can. Open up your VS Code extension in a VS Code
| window and live-debug it. I'd bet the process is probably
| very similar when editing VS Code yourself, but the point
| of the extension system is that you usually shouldn't
| have to.
| antiframe wrote:
| That's cool. The one thing I missed in VS Code when I
| last used it a few years ago was a link to the
| implementation in the documentation of each function.
| Maybe I will give it a try again someday. But honestly
| giving up Magit, org-mode, slime, and elpy will be hard.
| novocantico wrote:
| One pretty decent Magit alternative I found was lazygit.
| For a long time after quitting Magit/Emacs I just used
| git's CLI, but lazygit is pretty great.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Yeah the LSP ecosystem is so much nicer than the
| machinations hacked into text editors over the last 20
| years. When you get down to it a modern editor is just a
| process manager for language servers, a global event
| bus/RPC layer across them all, and a UI layer. Instead of
| reinventing bespoke versions of those things, just solidify
| it using standard protocols like JSON RPC, HTML for UI,
| etc.
| anthk wrote:
| >. Instead of reinventing bespoke versions of those
| things, just solidify it using standard protocols like
| JSON RPC, HTML for UI, etc.
|
| That's ironic.
| wiz21c wrote:
| ironic ? it depends on the age of the author :-)
| _hl_ wrote:
| Absolutely. Emacs is a great UX layer, only lacking a
| modern UI rendering layer. Would be nice to have emacs
| with a DOM-based rendering engine.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I'm not sure I love that idea, but I'm guessing that's
| the direction Nyxt is heading in.
| novocantico wrote:
| I mean I wholeheartedly agree but that nick
| Hedepig wrote:
| I thought LSP was available for emacs?
| bananamerica wrote:
| It is.
| ghosty141 wrote:
| For me it doesnt even come close to it. Maybe if you wtite
| your own plugins but even then there are many limitations.
| The one-window problem for example.
|
| In emacs I can overwrite ANY function wherever it is from
| my config and change for example how shr (an html renderer)
| handles/styles headings. Its crazy!
|
| One MAJOR thing that emacs does better is making things
| work together. I have orderless installed for matching
| strings in ANY completion. It works everywhere while in
| VSCode you cant even get close to that.
|
| VSCode is great if you like the default and dont want to
| ,,build your text editor" cause thats what emacs basically
| is. Its a toolbox with which you can build the editor to
| fit your exact needs with almost no limitations
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| The cohesion and interoperability of Emacs packages is
| hard to find elsewhere. When I tried Neovim recently, it
| was blatantly obvious and I was quickly turned off by how
| each plugin creates psuedo-TUI elements and prompts for
| input slightly differently.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| I like to tinker and hack on things, so I enjoy maintaining
| my Emacs config to an extent.
|
| However, I draw the line at "text editor" with Emacs. I have
| no desire to read my email, paint pictures, or compose music
| inside Emacs--there are better tools for that.
| akho wrote:
| I like having my email in Emacs, so i can reference it from
| org. I also like to write mails in Emacs. Triaging mails in
| notmuch-emacs is also quick and painless. Reading HTML
| mails, though -- not so much.
| donio wrote:
| For email I disagree. notmuch and mu4e are very good and
| being able to apply your normal text editing tools in a
| text oriented context like email is very useful. If there
| are better tools out there I haven't found them yet.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > to me it never stops feeling like an ongoing project when
| you try to live your entire life in it.
|
| and that's the fascinating thing about it. What the OP called
| a 'living program' Smalltalk people called 'human-computer
| symbiosis'. Software as a fully transparent, introspective,
| organic thing you can directly interact with and change even
| as it runs.
|
| There's actually very few software like it, and if anything
| philosophically more and more software tends towards the
| static unix "one tool one job" mantra.
| FR10 wrote:
| Indeed, I started with VIM when I was in uni and things were
| kinda slow. After a few weeks/months I was very happy with it
| and it truly felt as a productivty booster. (I switched between
| VSCode with vim keybindings and Neovim). Then, for last year's
| AoC I wanted to explore Lisp, so after weeks of trying out sbcl
| and running it thru the terminal I finally tried Doom Emacs.
| And for me too, its been a journey, its a "text editor" that
| truly exemplifies what a good 40yo+ piece of software should
| be.
| spudlyo wrote:
| A couple things about the content of this post, that people
| aren't talking about. Mastering Emacs by Mickey Petersen is a
| solid book on Emacs and a good companion to the official manual.
| Mickey usually has an update to Mastering Emacs not long after a
| new version is released, which is great. I'm thankful for his
| many contributions to the Emacs community, and I really enjoyed
| reading his thoughts on the new features and additions to Emacs
| 28.
|
| Secondly, the breadth of the changes in Emacs 28.1 is staggering,
| especially considering that Emacs 27.1 was released some 19
| months ago. I think it's safe to say that despite all the hand-
| wringing about the antiquated email-centric way that Emacs is
| developed, an impressive amount of work is getting done. Emacs
| development is alive and well.
| ReneFroger wrote:
| This collection page of Emacs packages: https://emacs.zeef.com
| contains only packages which are last updated at least 2 years
| ago, and it's already an impressive amount to me, which
| indicates that Emacs community is also very active, despite
| having - in IT terms- a very ancient editor.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Finally, native compilation is part of the release. In day to day
| use, it provides a nice speed bust in many use cases.
| theredpilldeal wrote:
| Just waiting for my distro to update Emacs.
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| It's actually fairly easy to build yourself. No really
| esoteric dependencies, and you can install it to $HOME
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Yeah, but there can be various hiccups.
|
| e.g. I compiled Emacs to run on Redhat Linux. Since I
| wanted to compile it with --with-native-compilation flag, I
| had to install Redhat's developer tools to get libgccjit.
| These tools are installed in /opt/rh/devtoolset-10/root. An
| enable script is provided which modifies the
| LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH.
|
| After compilation, I was able to launch Emacs from my bash
| terminal, but only after running the enable script (i.e.
| sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the correct directory). In a fresh
| terminal or after logging out and logging back in,
| launching Emacs gives the error:
|
| emacs: error while loading shared libraries:
| libgccjit.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such
| file or directory
|
| Moreover, launching from application menu fails. I was able
| to get it to launch by modifying the binaries rpath, but
| then emacs gave lots of libgccjit.so errors afterword, when
| trying to lazy compile different internal applications:
| error invoking gcc driver.
|
| I also tried compiling on Mac, but found myself
| experiencing a variety of issues that I didn't want to
| spend time thinking about. So I went with someone else's
| pre-built binaries.
| truncate wrote:
| I found mac installation pretty straightforward, and
| works quite well. I've been using for work for few months
| now. brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus
| brew install emacs-plus@28 --with-native-comp
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I was talking about compiling.
|
| I use macports, and refuse to use brew (for a variety of
| philosophical reasons) so that option wasn't available to
| me. I often use the binary from
| https://emacsformacos.com/ but afaik it hadn't supported
| native compilation as yet. So I found some prebuilt
| binaries on github.
| ta988 wrote:
| What are your issues with brew? Not starting an argument
| here but trying to understand better.
| 0des wrote:
| Boost
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| ouch!
| rcconf wrote:
| I miss Emacs, but I moved to Visual Studio Code. I used Emacs for
| over 8 years so releases like this use to make me so happy.
|
| On the bright side, I still use Emacs bindings in Visual Studio
| Code. Maybe I should spin up Emacs again and give it another shot
| on my new M1 (maybe it can do the auto complete stuff faster
| now.)
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > give it another shot on my new M1
|
| https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html#nonfree
| https://emacsformacosx.com/
| JHonaker wrote:
| The worst part about Emacs is the bindings. :D
|
| The reason I'll never leave Emacs is that if I want to change
| something, I can. It doesn't really matter what it is. This
| might be technically true in something like VS Code (although
| Atom was much easier in this regard), but it takes a lot more
| effort and scaffolding to do something like write a single
| function and bind it to a keymap in VS Code.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| One of the best parts is the bindings! They are present in
| most shells/terminals, GNU readline-based programs, and even
| native macOS text field. If you're in a terminal or using a
| terminal-based program, there's a good chance pressing any of
| the core Emacs keybindings does what you expect it to.
| R0flcopt3r wrote:
| the M1 is the fastest emacs-lisp machine there is. Give it a
| go!
| deagle50 wrote:
| Yes you should!
|
| `brew install d12frosted/emacs-plus/emacs-plus@29 --with-
| native-comp --with-no-frame-refocus` is easy as pie and gets
| you the latest build with native comp and smooth trackpad
| scrolling.
| R0flcopt3r wrote:
| Can confirm, I run this on my M1 works great!
| matthews2 wrote:
| Thank you to everyone that contributed to Emacs for another great
| release :) (also thank you Mickey for explaining all the
| changes!)
| [deleted]
| epolanski wrote:
| OT for this particular release, but I'd like to point out that
| one of the best features of emacs and its ecosystem is that
| plugins, libraries and software are almost always self-
| documenting.
|
| You want to read the documentation or delve into the
| implementation of a feature of your programs it is literally
| right there in your editor instead of having to jump to some,
| potentially outdated, website documentation or having to figure
| out where to look at things from a sterile github page.
|
| I wish that the idea of self documenation was more widespread in
| other ecosystems.
|
| E.g. the ecosystem I know most, JavaScript, would have this
| potential, but very often dependencies are compiled and there is
| no such self-documenting culture so best case scenario you get
| types you can _almost_ trust and some jsdoc that you can _almost_
| trust.
|
| I guess the fact that the lisp and elisp community in particular
| has always cultivated this practice is the deciding factor rather
| than the languages itself.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| This is the culture in golang, too, and it's great.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Not only that but jumping to the source code for whatever
| command you are looking at is just a key press away. Edit the
| source, hit another key or two and you've just live patched
| your editor.
| jaster wrote:
| Yeah emacs was a revelation for me on this regard, that the
| idea of "Free Software" could be more than just providing souce
| code and license.
|
| Emacs is actually explicitly designed to give you full power to
| explore, discover and modify it in order to tailor it to your
| needs and whims.
| epolanski wrote:
| It is actually amazing, emacs is probably the best example of
| a "living" program you can modify interact and debug directly
| while you are coding it.
|
| Obviously lisp has been designed around its REPL and
| debugging experience and the concept of "living programmable
| programs", but emacs reaches an insanely high level of
| business complexity, far higher than any software any of us
| probably writes at work and yet modifying and learning the
| very program you are using with the program itself is a 30+
| years old solved problem that apparently ecosystems outside
| lisp dialects seem not to pick up.
| kidsil wrote:
| Only thing I'm missing from Emacs is the ability to completely
| freeze all packages and configs.
|
| As soon as I feel like everything is stable and great, it decides
| to update 180 packages while I'm trying to edit a file and
| destroys something in my setup.
|
| If anyone knows a way to prevent all updates and "freeze" a
| version that would be excellent.
| tikhonj wrote:
| I use Emacs with Nix, which parses my config for use-package
| declarations and installs them for me. Emacs packages are
| pinned the same way as anything else in Nix and, as a bonus, it
| can also manage non-Emacs dependencies.
|
| I wouldn't recommend Nix _just_ for a reproducible Emacs
| config, but if you end up considering Nix for broader reasons,
| being able to use it for Emacs could be a nice bonus :)
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| You might want to check out straight.el [0] in replacement of
| package.el; it can pin package versions, etc. It is used by the
| very popular Doom Emacs [1] to lock package versions for
| reproducible config reasons.
|
| [0] https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el [1]
| https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
| seanw444 wrote:
| Haven't yet needed to freeze a package, but I can confirm
| that setting up your packages is stupid simple in Doom
| (Straight), and freezing them equally so.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Only thing I'm missing from Emacs is the ability to
| completely freeze all packages and configs.
|
| Weird - Emacs by default does not auto-update packages. I do it
| manually as needed. Are you using Vanilla Emacs or something
| else?
| gnuvince wrote:
| I haven't used it myself, so I cannot speak for it, but
| straight.el [1] has functionality to freeze the version of
| packages.
|
| [1] https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I used Emacs for 20 years, contributed to popular open source
| emacs projects, and am the maintainer of a couple of emacs
| packages with small numbers of users.
|
| It's wonderful and extremely powerful having everything in lisp;
| don't bother with emacs if you're not interested in writing lisp.
|
| One silly thing that I could never get to grips with is the way
| the minibuffer always seems to get stuck asking me a question,
| but the cursor isn't in the minibuffer. Or it's in some sort of
| recursive minibuffer mode. So many times I've just mashed C-g
| repeatedly in irritation!
|
| I stopped using Emacs last year in order to access the high
| quality LSP experiences that are available for Typescript and
| Rust and other languages in VSCode. I'm firly happy with the
| configurability of VSCode and generally fairly happy with the
| move. VSCode needs Emacs' window-configuration registers though.
| nanna wrote:
| > One silly thing that I could never get to grips with is the
| way the minibuffer always seems to get stuck asking me a
| question, but the cursor isn't in the minibuffer. Or it's in
| some sort of recursive minibuffer mode. So many times I've just
| mashed C-g repeatedly in irritation!
|
| This happens to me all the time too! Anyone have a fix?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > don't bother with emacs if you're not interested in writing
| lisp.
|
| Strong disagree. I used Emacs as a power user heavily for about
| a decade with virtually no elisp knowledge (beyond simple
| conditionals and setting variables - I couldn't write a loop
| for example).
|
| Once I learned elisp ... it hasn't been a game changer. Sure,
| occasionally I tweak things the way I like it with custom elisp
| code, but there are enough config options and packages out
| there to do what I need without my having to write elisp code.
| mplanchard wrote:
| FWIW lsp-mode does a great job of integrating with language
| servers in emacs. I and two of my coworkers use emacs with
| rust-analyzer, and it's generally been a very positive
| experience.
| kovek wrote:
| I always like to ask: Has the pixel-scrolling story gotten better
| on Emacs? I like how I can scroll smoothly on Visual Studio Code.
| AlanYx wrote:
| pixel-scroll-precision-mode is in the mainline (Emacs 29), but
| didn't make it into Emacs 28.
|
| If you're on a Mac, the railwaycat port has the equivalent
| already.
| Jim_Heckler wrote:
| Not sure if it's included in 28.1, but its been overhauled on
| master. https://youtube.com/watch?v=LNK1DnPOqms
| ghosty141 wrote:
| Its sadly not, I believe it will be included in version 29
| emacs28 wrote:
| In addition to the native pixel-scroll-precision-mode in Emacs
| 29, there's also a MELPA package called good-scroll which
| implements pixel-wise scrolling for other emacs versions also.
| deagle50 wrote:
| d12frosted/emacs-plus/emacs-plus@29 on Homebrew is my fav way
| to install master on a Mac. Trackpad scrolling is smooth even
| at 120hz.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| It amazes me that developers pick closed source Jetbrains and
| Microsoft spyware for the program they rely on to make a living
| when Emacs and Vim/Neovim get better by leaps and bounds every
| year. Emacs has packages that VSCode can only dream of having and
| with Emacs distributions or really just lsp-mode you can have a
| full fledged IDE with 0 fiddling. I recently did some digging
| into the editor usage of noteworthy programmers by going through
| interviews (usesthis.com was a great resource) and found that 99%
| of programmers whose names are recognizable are still using
| Vim/Emacs. Clearly these tools are not holding anyone back from
| doing great things.
|
| Edit: Just yesterday HN was overtly critical of Warp for being a
| proprietary, closed source, telemetry laden terminal, but they'll
| suddenly lose their morals when it comes to text editing over
| perceived conveniences of an IDE vs. a "text editor" with LSP.
|
| The point of Vim/Emacs isn't just that they are good editors. It
| is also you voting with your installs and money for free and open
| source tools. You already reap the benefits of the Linux
| ecosystem, the least you can do is help out by picking a FOSS
| editor.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| With 0 fiddling? not my experience at all. has something
| changed?
|
| I use Emacs for lots of things, but I've long since changed to
| Pycharm for Python programming. That's been close to 0 fiddling
| for real. Its been pretty good for JS programming too.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Does Emacs ship with LSP support out of the box? They've had a
| habit in the past of ignoring similar features that were
| arbitrarily perceived as "proprietary" or not open enough.
| jaster wrote:
| Don't think out of the box, but https://github.com/emacs-
| lsp/lsp-mode works rather well with emacs 28 from my
| experience. Emacs "distros" such as Spacemacs and Doomemacs
| both make using it a nearly "out of the box" experience.
|
| (not supporting the editor/ide war troll, just trying to
| contribute some useful info here)
| tored wrote:
| I remember when one of my first professional mentors jokingly
| said that all those years spent in university was to write your
| own .emacs file so you had one when your career started. He was
| a bit shocked that mine was almost empty.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| This kind of comment gives us emacs-users bad reputation. Emacs
| isn't perfect, dissing people that don't use it is not helping
| anyone.
| lunarplague wrote:
| How do I go about learning emacs when my job requires me to
| work in a M$ environment, and I have limited free time? I tried
| learning and felt overwhelmed, and I would like to make strides
| to make vim or emacs my primary editors for home use, but
| Visual Studio / Jetbrains just make development incredibly
| easier to not let the tools prevent me from just writing the
| code.
| NeutralForest wrote:
| There are "distributions" such as Doom Emacs or Lunar Vim to
| get started with a setup from the get-go.
|
| Otherwise, the website linked above is a good way to get
| started, there's also an integrated tutorial in Emacs (C-h
| t).
| Bancakes wrote:
| You miss the point. I want to click 3 buttons and have a usable
| IDE. Nothing will ever replace visual studio's debugging GUI.
| allarm wrote:
| Emacs it's not an IDE (out of the box), so it's not your use
| case, obviously.
| lunarplague wrote:
| If OP wants to compare Emacs to Visual Studio and
| Jetbraines IDE's, then we are going to compare features.
| allarm wrote:
| Go ahead comparing apples and oranges, what can I say.
| willbw wrote:
| I'm going to assume this isn't trolling and if it is, you
| fooled me.
|
| I've use Vim professionally, as well as VSCode and Jetbrains
| IDEs and dabbled in Emacs - the idea that one can replicate
| what IntelliJ does for Java for instance in any other IDE or
| text editor is to me, nonsensical. The amount of configuration
| it would require in vim/neovim/vscode to replicate the
| refactoring ability of IntelliJ alone would take you longer to
| setup than it would to code whatever project you're working on.
|
| Saying that Vim or Emacs have "zero fiddling" compared to
| Jetbrains IDEs is a statement that is so vastly different to my
| experience (doing plenty of fiddling in both) that I would love
| to hear the backstory of how IDEs hurt you.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| Emacs distributions are built for people who want zero
| fiddling. Fiddling in of itself is not bad. Fiddling is how
| you learn, and this is a profession that requires constant
| learning and tinkering. Most of features of a modern IDE are
| unnecessary or are actively harmful to developing good code.
| Thinking, taking your time, writing as little code as
| possible, and organizing a project so it can be easily
| understood and modified with nothing other than a text editor
| are positives that an IDE actively inhibits by trying to be
| helpful.
| fredoliveira wrote:
| You're going back and forth. On your first post, you talk
| about all the things Emacs/Vim have that VSCode/Jetbrains
| can't possibly have. On this one, you talk about how less
| features is a good thing. Regardless of where you actually
| stand on that particular point, you're still comparing
| apples to oranges.
|
| It is also worth noting that I have never had an issue
| jumping from vim to VSCode (or vice-versa) on the same
| project. Neither of the two need any extra metadata or
| configuration. They just work, and I'll choose whichever
| tool makes sense for whatever I'm doing at the moment. As,
| frankly, I think everyone should. This fixation over one
| specific type of tool over another is unnecessary: go with
| whatever _you_ are most productive with.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| What I mean is that the notion that Emacs/Vim require
| endless fiddling is unfounded. It caters to both the
| people that want something easy to use, and those that
| want endless customization. For those that want something
| easy to use, Emacs distributions are built and maintained
| by very experienced Emacs users who curate and put
| together an Emacs with everything you need. All you have
| to do is use it, which doesn't even require much learning
| thanks to `which-key` integration.
|
| Productivity is a bad word. Productivity can mean low
| value busy work, or it can mean high value thinking. High
| value thinking leads to longer term success, because it
| is not easily bought or replaced. It requires an
| individual who has invested in a breadth and depth of
| knowledge by not choosing the path of least resistance.
| We should choose tools that optimize for this type of
| long term success. Choosing free and open source software
| is a choice for long term sustainability of our industry.
| Choosing a tool like Vim/Emacs is a long term choice
| towards individual success.
|
| This is the philosophy I follow, and I have been very
| successful with it both financially and in terms of
| making an impact on the industry. It isn't novel either,
| I simply emulate the many, many expert programmers who
| universally choose to still use Emacs/Vim despite the
| existence of "smarter" IDEs.
| youerbt wrote:
| To be fair Java is an outlier here (there are few others I
| guess, C# comes to mind) and I would consider it a weakness
| of a language to require a complex IDE to do anything
| nontrivial comfortably.
|
| I agree with you tho, I was looking for my options to develop
| in Java with Emacs and decided to not even try.
| [deleted]
| mateuszf wrote:
| > It amazes me that developers pick closed source Jetbrains
|
| JetBrains Intellij Idea Community Edition is open source
| ilovecaching wrote:
| Jetbrains products are only partially open source, which
| makes them non-free and still spyware due to telemetry we
| can't see.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > Jetbrains products are only partially open source
|
| You mean the repository at [0] contains code which is not
| licensed under an open source license? The only license
| mentioned at the root is Apache 2.
|
| [0] https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Do you have a reference for "Jetbrains products are ...
| spyware due to telemetry we can't see."
| seanw444 wrote:
| If the source code of what you are running is not fully
| available, assume it contains telemetry or data
| collection.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I assume every stranger that calls me is a scammer. That
| does NOT mean that everyone who calls me IS a scammer.
| jawilson2 wrote:
| It is packed in a small teapot orbiting the sun somewhere
| between Earth and Mars.
| ziml77 wrote:
| That's the "beauty" of phrasing it like that. It's
| impossible to prove or disprove.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| "you can have a full fledged IDE with 0 fiddling" - that is
| 100% not a thing that has ever happened to me whenever I go and
| look at emacs/vim!
|
| Modal editing is not really something that is needed anymore,
| and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language
| just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button
| ...
| rayiner wrote:
| Emacs isn't a modal editor!
| bennyp101 wrote:
| That's true, my bad. I've just only ever used it with evil
| (I find the chords even harder to remember!)
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I refer to it as a chorded editor. Of course there is viper
| mode.
| epicide wrote:
| I agree that neither vim nor emacs are "0 fiddling" [0].
| However,
|
| > Modal editing is not really something that is needed
| anymore
|
| Honestly, I'm not sure it was ever "needed", but that's not
| really the point IMO.
|
| It's hard for me to think about editing text in any way other
| than how Vim handles it. Part of that is admittedly just
| familiarity, but I think there's also something to the idea
| of treating strings as more than just arrays of characters.
| Once you start thinking about your text and code as nouns of
| various sizes and granularity [0], losing those feels
| cumbersome.
|
| In order to achieve the latter, you either need modality or a
| huge number of control hotkeys. Vim takes the former approach
| while Emacs (and IDEs) takes the latter.
|
| So yes, you can achieve the "crowning feature" of Vim (IMO)
| without modality, but I don't see modality itself as being a
| pro or a con as much as a design choice. If you don't prefer
| it, more power to you.
|
| > and a lot of people don't have time to learn a new language
| just to move about in their IDE - just click the mouse button
| ...
|
| This also works the other way. I don't want to have to learn
| where all the buttons are in $IDE just to move my text about.
| Thankfully, many IDEs include a Vim mode or plugin for it,
| but those are never quite the same.
|
| Every tool has some level of learning curve. If you want it
| to be more flexible, powerful, and to get the most out of it,
| that learning curve is gonna be steeper. That goes for both
| IDEs with their buttons and Vim with its modal commands.
|
| For something that you might use for hours on end every
| single day for professional work, putting in some time to
| learn it pays dividends. For both Vim _and_ IDEs.
|
| [0]: In vim parlance, this is effectively what "movements"
| operate on. They sort of define these objects via
| implication.
| youerbt wrote:
| As long as your input device is optimized for inserting text
| (and your keyboard certainly is) modal editing is surely
| something desirable for programming.
| adlpz wrote:
| I'm not saying that yours is necessarily the case, of course I
| don't know, but I feel like lots of people that hold opinions
| like yours greatly underestimate the amount of functionality
| that comes with something like a Jetbrains IDE.
|
| It's not even about the editor itself, nor the graphical or UX
| stuff. It's the crazy level of introspection and of
| _understanding your code_ those IDEs bring. My daily experience
| is just insanely better than with anything else I 've tried.
|
| In something pretty weakly typed like PHP you can happily
| rename methods and classes, refactor and extract code, move
| around namespaces, and the IDE keeps track of everything for
| you. You also get _very_ smart autocomplete, snippets,
| integrated debugger with REPL, the whole thing.
|
| I've played around with all sorts of vim and emacs
| distributions and settings and nothing ever came close.
|
| Maybe it's just I don't have the time to set it up propert ly.
| But if that's the case, it's still a point in my favor here.
| devin wrote:
| For a long time I would have agreed, but LSP has democratized
| the space quite a bit. If an editor has a good LSP story,
| it'll be able to do all of the renaming, extracting, finding
| references, etc.
| dfinninger wrote:
| Eventually, maybe. But Java, Python, and Go are just _so
| good_ in the IntelliJ suite. Switching between VSCode at
| home and IntelliJ at work make it readily apparent that
| there's still a gap.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| I have used Jetbrains IDEA and Clion extensively to
| understand the other side. An IDEs heavy introspection isn't
| necessary, and perhaps actively harmful towards writing and
| reading code. It's rigid policy over tools like git is
| certainly actively harmful. If it takes an IDE to write your
| code, then it will likely take an IDE to read your code. They
| are tools that allow you to take shortcuts were you
| shouldn't, and rob you of valuable knowledge. Programming is
| about thinking and continual learning and IDEs sell you the
| complete opposite. They help you build unsustainable projects
| where only a computer can understand the binary AND the
| source code. The other point here is that the gap between IDE
| and text editor has only gotten smaller over the years and
| was closed considerably by LSPs. It may not be a perfect
| match in features, but small niceties are not an excuse for
| using closed source spyware for your text editor. They also
| do not make the difference between the success or failure of
| one's work.
| adlpz wrote:
| > If it takes an IDE to write your code, then it will
| likely take an IDE to read your code
|
| I can agree with that. However, _the real world_ is filled
| with random legacy projects, massive enterprise
| applications where a dozen developers came and went over a
| decade, quick-and-dirty MVPs and everything in between.
|
| If you are paid to write well-crafted code that fits nicely
| within the limitations of your editor, that's great. But
| for the rest of us who have to deal with the realities of
| this industry, a helpful IDE makes it so much bearable.
| tored wrote:
| As with every tool you should of course have the knowledge
| to do things properly without the tool, but not using a
| good tool is like saying we should use old style shovels
| instead of a modern excavator because the excavator shields
| us from understanding the back breaking process of the
| shovel. Now it is true that we programmers could need a
| good workout but doing things more infectively because of
| some immeasurable consideration of what is "harmful" is
| probably the reason we are still stuck in the 70s of
| tooling in many languages.
|
| However what I do think is important is that every project
| should not actively discriminate against any of the
| alternative tools, in every project I manage I encourage
| every programmer to use the editor/IDE, shell or operating
| system they are most conformable with (but they need of
| course to manage their environment themselves and deliver
| the code in time).
| charcircuit wrote:
| >If it takes an IDE to write your code, then it will likely
| take an IDE to read your code
|
| There is nothing wrong with this. We shouldn't let old text
| editors hold back the productivity of programmers.
| b3morales wrote:
| It's not "old text editors". There are current tools for
| viewing source (pull requests/diffs a prime example) that
| are extremely good at what they do but are language
| agnostic. As is so often said, _code is read more than it
| 's written_. If I can't understand the source without
| pulling it into my IDE, that adds a lot of friction to
| these reading tasks.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Those other tools you work with can become more advanced
| to in order to keep up with the improvements your IDE
| offers. You want to inline a diagram to your code? That
| image should show up both in your editor and in the diff.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| There is lots wrong with this and with this mind set.
| This is not about "productivity" at all but about being
| auditable and working in a team.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Expecting your teammates to use an IDE does not get it
| the way of working in a team. In my experience as a team
| we have a default IDE for everyone to use and a
| configuration file for it so everyone's is using the same
| settings. Usually you could use a different IDE if you
| could configure it to act similar, but making sure
| everyone uses the same tools doesn't prevent you from
| working as a team.
| criddell wrote:
| You can write shitty code in Emacs as well. I'm certainly
| guilty of that.
|
| Steve Jobs once said that a computer is like a bicycle for
| your mind. It's an amplifier of sorts and an IDE fits into
| that metaphor. It will amplify the good and the bad. It's
| up to you, as a professional, to develop the skills
| necessary to use the tools in ways that make sense for
| whatever it is you are working on.
| howinteresting wrote:
| I can write the same code _significantly_ faster with an
| IDE because of all the autocompletion and code navigation.
| I don 't use the version control features other than the
| occasional blame, preferring to stick to a command line for
| that.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| The speed at which you write code is meaningless. Write
| speed is not the bottleneck for software development.
| What's far more important is that you take your time,
| pick names that a human can read and understand, write
| code that a human can read and understand, and write
| documentation. An IDE simply does not help with any of
| the things that lead to good software. If it did, the
| push to turn software engineering into cheap labor would
| have been successful, which it wasn't. Software
| engineering is still part art, part math, and 90% a
| mental activity and not a physical one.
| howinteresting wrote:
| This is simply not my experience. For example, an IDE
| lets you rename a variable or type in a semantic fashion,
| making it easier for me to iterate on names and land on
| something that people understand.
|
| There's a huge mental component to coding (I doubt it's
| 90% though). In any case, an IDE makes that _easier_ by
| getting the boring physical stuff out of the way quicker.
|
| And the speed at which you write code is quite
| meaningful. I can easily write 1000 lines of high-quality
| Rust code on a good day with just the LSP (rust-analyzer)
| for support. More recently, I started a project that hit
| some bugs in rust-analyzer -- working on it was a
| comparatively miserable experience.
|
| Edit: Never mind, I see above that you're comparing a
| full-fledged IDE to just using an LSP. I consider LSP to
| be in the IDE category; I agree that LSP is just about
| where I want to be and that a full JetBrains-like IDE is
| overkill. What I don't like is not having any sort of
| code completion or rename support.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I'm frequently very impressed with Pycharm's autocomplete
| suggestions. It is very context sensitive, and frequently
| seems to guess what I'm trying to do next.
| almost wrote:
| As someone who uses Emacs for (almost) all my editing needs and
| has done for about 17 years I just don't understand how you can
| have these beliefs. LSP-mode is great and now with things like
| Spacemacs and Doom Emacs getting setup and getting things
| reasonably configured is a lot easier. But still!
|
| VSCode is pretty cool and is easy to use right out of the box.
| It does some things with ease that would be very hard with
| Emacs. And JetBrains looks like it does some amazing stuff.
|
| I still end up sticking with Emacs myself, but the idea that
| that it's perfect and simple and for everyone and that there's
| no sensible reasons to use the other options is just insane.
| ilovecaching wrote:
| It amazes me there are Emacs users that don't understand the
| importance of free software. You're using the editor devised
| by the free software foundation, but you only want to talk
| about convenience. Convenience is not an excuse to switch to
| corporate made closed source spyware.
| hbn wrote:
| I'm sure your boss will be real impressed by how ethical
| you are as your colleagues get their work done 2x faster
| than you
| almost wrote:
| I just can't think why you might have trouble convincing
| people to try it :p
|
| But you yourself bought up convenience in your original
| comment. If your argument is a purely moral one then no
| need to specify how little fiddling is required to get LSP
| working. But I do think if your only argument is yelling at
| people about it being immoral to use VSCode you ain't going
| to get far. Why not talk about the cool things Emacs has
| while acknowledging the things it still has that could be
| improved?
|
| VSCode is open source by the way, MIT not GPL but you can
| go compile it yourself (or use VSCodium).
| efficax wrote:
| How many of us do you think work on "free" software? I
| write proprietary software and i use proprietary software
| to do it because it pays my mortgage. I drank the fsf Kool
| aid as a kid, then i grew up and had to put a roof over my
| head and my children's. It's great that some people get to
| make a living producing free as in speech software, but
| that's kind of like getting into the NBA. The rest of us
| have to contend with reality
| tored wrote:
| The largest spy organisation in the world, Google, uses
| mostly free software.
| criddell wrote:
| You might be surprised that many of us use Vim or Emacs and
| also VSCode or Sublime or Visual Studio or IntelliJ or XCode or
| ...
|
| Every tool has strengths and weaknesses. Plus, some of us enjoy
| learning new tools and find it fun to switch things up
| occasionally.
| devin wrote:
| Cheers to this. My primary is emacs, but I consider myself a
| pretty solid vim user, and I've been picking up VSCode for
| typescript stuff.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Even the TypeScript LSP is extremely featureful in Emacs. I
| thought about using VS Code for that stuff, but decided to
| see how the experience was in Emacs first, and now I'm no
| longer considering VS Code.
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| Cool, any thoughts on what's new in Emacs 28.1?
| ioseph wrote:
| I use neovim within vscode. All the power of vim but with
| intellisense and debugging working with minimal configuration.
|
| As for telemetry, all my work lives in Azure so I assume
| Microsoft are already collecting what they want about our
| codebase (which is publicly visible) already.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I've been using vi since 1985, built a suite of development
| tools based on a custom fork of Elvis in the 90's and have been
| using vim professionally since the mid 90's. I've dabbled with
| emacs on and off for most of the 80's and 90's, including
| supporting a subset of the Elvis tools on emacs. I still fire
| up emacs now and then to see what's up.
|
| The idea that either emacs or vim are a "0 fiddling" drop in
| replacement for Goland or Pycharm is ludicrous. I probably
| could get vim up to the point where I was as productive as I am
| with Goland/PyCharm but it would definitely NOT be a "0
| fiddling" process.
|
| I can't believe debugging and learning a new code base would be
| ANYWHERE as easy with vim as with Goland/PyCharm.
|
| Also, both Goland and PyCharm have pretty good vim plugins so
| my day to day editing IS vim. Sometimes I hit stuff that I can
| do faster in actual vim and I switch over.
| abzug wrote:
| Honest question from someone who never used any product from
| JetBrains: what those IDEs gives you in order to learn/debug
| a new codebase in such easy way?
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Not OP but having used both PyCharm and Emacs, I really
| like PyCharm's visual debugging - when at a breakpoint you
| can see all variables in memory, their types, dictionaries
| and objects are nested. A lot easier than vanilla pdb.
| joe_fishfish wrote:
| Good luck writing an iOS app in emacs.
|
| (Well, good luck writing one in Xcode, for that matter.)
| gspr wrote:
| Knowledgeable Emacs folks in this thread: Does anyone know the
| status of Wayland-native Emacs? It's my last X/XWayland
| application, and it looks _terrible_ on high-DPI displays.
| NeutralForest wrote:
| The pure GTK branch has been merged into master and I use right
| now with KDE (and Wayland). I had to adjust the font size but
| other than that, I didn't meet any issue.
| gspr wrote:
| That's amazing news! Does that mean one can expect this
| feature in Emacs 29?
|
| Edit: I just noticed that LWN has a news entry that explains
| just this - https://lwn.net/Articles/890405/ (short answer:
| yes).
| NeutralForest wrote:
| Just like you said indeed!
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| This was the main reason I built emacs 28 from source on Ubuntu
| about 3 months ago. Sadly Ubuntu 22.04 still sticks with emacs
| 27.1 :(
| klik99 wrote:
| > Adding right-click context menus is a natural extension to
| Emacs's already-extensive support for the mouse (even if a lot of
| people don't use it.)
|
| If emacs could support plan9 acme-style chords with custom
| commands then I'd probably use the mouse a lot more in it - acme
| convinced me that mousing around can be just as fast as being on
| the keyboard if the UX is well designed.
| antics9 wrote:
| Acme was my daily driver for a couple of years (mainly
| writing). Went back to Emacs because of org-mode; it's just
| _that_ powerful.
|
| I mostly miss chording and Acmes way of finding and opening
| files. It was intuitive and nothing felt hidden; like the
| commands and dired feels in emacs.
|
| But I guess Acmes functionality could be added to emacs by
| elisp, no?
| chrisfinazzo wrote:
| Is mouse-mouse enabled by default?
|
| Can the insertion point be moved by clicking in a particular
| location?
|
| As of recent versions of macOS, emacs isn't included by
| default. Last I tried, in terminal-mode emacs, the answer to
| the above questions seems to be no - with no reasonable
| explanation why this is the case.
|
| I'm more than willing to do everything else from the keyboard,
| but these are basic oversights that have yet to be corrected.
|
| EDIT: Is mouse-tracking actually the feature that enables this
| behavior?
| jaster wrote:
| emacs "gui" perfectly supports the mouse out of the box.
|
| For use in a terminal (after using both for some time, I find
| the gui version better tbh), see https://www.gnu.org/software
| /emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Te...
| ghosty141 wrote:
| I personally think GUI mode is simply better. There is no
| real advantage to running emacs in a terminal imo.
| spudlyo wrote:
| Hard disagree. Sometimes the terminal is the most
| efficient way to run Emacs on a machine in a remote data
| center that has a mountain of CPUs, GPUs, memory, and
| disk. TRAMP can be slow and inefficient. A LSP server
| process on a huge monorepo can chew up a large amount of
| memory and CPU on startup. Running all of this stuff
| locally on the actual hardware your code needs to run on
| is great.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| On Debian with the distro package, I never even thought about
| mouse integration. (On the Xorg interface. So much basic
| stuff - not emacs stuff, but really basic stuff - has been
| moving into DEs that I don't think the bare console is usable
| anymore.)
|
| The insertion point is moved by clicking and by using the
| scroll wheel (now that I've thought about it, maybe I should
| change that second one), clicking and dragging and double
| click change the selection.
|
| I normally don't use the mouse, but for moving text between
| windows it's nice.
| a_e_k wrote:
| M-x xterm-mouse-mode gives an experience in the console
| that's pretty darn faithful to the full GUI when it comes
| to mouse interaction. Clicking, selection, and scroll wheel
| all work pretty much as expected. Even menus and pop-menus
| work; the new TTY menu in 28.1 is pretty slick!
| jaster wrote:
| I have been testing Emacs 28 for a few weeks now, as it was
| reported to improve performance on LSP integration (which was
| sometimes sluggish for me with rust).
|
| I have to say I wasn't disappointed. It's now comparatively
| blazingly fast. I hugely recommend to give it a try if you work
| in emacs with LSP.
|
| Since my distro had not packaged it yet, I installed it from guix
| instead (package `emacs-next`). It worked like a charm.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| emacs-next is how you installed lsp?
|
| I tried installing a lsp package at some point, but I couldn't
| figure out if it was actually doing anything over and above the
| language major modes. Not sure if it was actually doing
| anything at all actually.
| jaster wrote:
| Sorry, to clarify: I used the package `emacs-next` from guix
| to install emacs 28. You still need to install and configure
| emacs-lsp along with the LSP backend(s) you want to use.
|
| I'm currently using the doom-emacs "emacs distro"
| (https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs), so doom is taking
| charge of setting up emacs-lsp for me.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Thank you for that. I haven't really checked out any of
| these distros (doom, prelude, etc.), but maybe I should.
|
| One of the issues I have is that I work on multiple
| disconnected servers, and so I usually end up installing
| emacs on all of them. Using tramp is an option, but often
| times I just want a local editor because I find myself
| needing one in the context I'm working in. But all the
| servers run slightly different OS versions, etc.
|
| Maybe a mangaged-for-me distribution that does most
| everything I want without me fiddling with it is the way to
| go.
| jaster wrote:
| For me it was worked relatively well.
|
| I track my config in a git repo, and doom-emacs is rather
| helpful on what external tools must be installed for
| various configuration "layers" (like when working with
| such and such language). When using LSP, it can even
| proposes to install an appropriate language server in
| some cases.
| nanna wrote:
| Do we have any idea when 28 will be available through the
| regular guix Emacs package?
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