Posted by frou_dh 6 hours ago
Thank you! No more:
(defun cutregion-or-killword (beginning end) "Kills region if marked else backward kills word." (interactive "r") (if (use-region-p) (kill-region beginning end) (backward-kill-word 1)))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-w") 'cutregion-or-killword)
Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch.
Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves.
Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CLI much much convenient and faster than moving hand to reach cursor keys.
My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more. Long time ago it did work. And I have no idea why feature was dropped some rewrite.
e: s/deadline/readline/g
Yes, even in Codex and Claude Code.
> Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari... My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more
Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite: I had to finally bite the bullet and migrate to Firefox because Chrome/ium switched to GTK4 which removed key themes support.
(That's OK though, I should've moved off Chrome a long time ago.)
The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. I wrote a small python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch to the appropriate layer.
[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata
[1]: https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/dotfiles/-/blob/master/kanata/.co...
So customizable- these days Claude will just change it for you, no need to learn the APIs if you're just interested in the result. Yes you're AI-slopping your config, but the drawbacks to that are super low (it's a personal editor, not something I'm inflicting on others)
*) https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard...
For speaking the truth.
Vi-lets, engage!
I think you mean readline?
Specifically none of these do anything like what they do in Emacs: C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-f and C-b.
This is on Linux, but ISTR finding the same state of affairs on MacOS many years ago during some previous iteration of this conversation.
They also don't work in VSCode.
I have never used emacs seriously as an editor, however, I couldn't work without magit. I even manually build emacs 28 so I can re-use the same set of magit configure files.
Yes. I had to briefly visit the world of VSCode during a period of time when it had better AI integration than emacs did, but since I got Claude working well inside of emacs I've returned to 100% emacs. There just isn't anything like the old editors, built in the 80x24 terminal era, for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once. I run a standard widescreen monitor with three vertical windows for emacs, each of which I often will break into two frames, so I can have up to six contexts active at once. I rarely do, but I frequently have 2 and 3. That's my entire 4K screen, full of code, usefully full of code. I'm not an IDE hater but they do put an awful lot of stuff on the screen that on a proportional basis I'm just not using as much as I use the code editor.
I had been getting somewhat nervous about emacs' long term prospects about 10 years ago. I would read the release notes for major versions and generally not be particularly excited about anything. Somewhere around treesitter something seems to have revitalized the project. It may well have been treesitter that revitalized it overall. You end up with a lot more wood behind fewer arrows when the project is able to put more work into generally-useful tools rather than every single language community maintaining their own separate mode for each language.
Now I am more excited about the major releases; for instance term issues are an issue for me with the aforementioned Claude integration. Not enough to stop me, but annoying. At the risk of saying something inflammatory to emacs fans, I feel like emacs is catching up to everything else better now... but it is catching up. It's getting easier to recommend it again as something you may want to seriously consider as a power-tool editor and not just something I used because I had 15 years of finger-experience with it and no significant reason to change. AI has eaten a lot of the IDE tools for me and you can type into a text box in emacs as well as you can anything else.
I still occasionally bring up VSCode now to use the debugger, I still don't feel like I have as nice an experience with that as I do with emacs, but my debugging habits have always been able to deal with doing something a little extra to do a debugging session. By its very nature, you're committing some time to the process just to do the debugging itself, no matter how slick the UI for it may be, so a bit of overhead isn't so bad.
Being a co-maintainer, I'm a bit biased, but I think you should try Ghostel (https://github.com/dakra/ghostel) if you aren't already. And if you are, you should report bugs so we can fix them :)
Otherwise, I think the main advantage over Vterm and other Emacs terminal emulators is that it handles modern fancy TUIs a lot better than Vterm. It's backed by libghostty-vt so supports all the new fangled escape codes. It has a bunch of tricks to force fallback glyphs to the terminal monospace grid to remove the flickering effect when the glyph cells change size during TUI animations, most notably in Claude Code. Btop and Yazi runs great too, if you're into that sort of thing.
Plus a bunch of other things!
https://lawsofux.com/postels-law/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
>In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software that states: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". It is often reworded as: "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Jon Postel, who used the wording in an early specification of TCP.[1]
>In other words, programs that send messages to other machines (or to other programs on the same machine) should conform completely to the specifications, but programs that receive messages should accept non-conformant input as long as the meaning is clear.
Of course. Emacs has been my stable editor over many years, handling many languages that came along, surviving many other IDEs that came and gone (the latest being the Cursor sold out).
There're always new enhancements in Emacs, from multiple-cursor editing years ago, to LSP and tree sitter in recent years. Currently I just got into the vertico/marginalia/consult/embark combo packages. Embark with its context based actions seriously is an amazing underrated package.
1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve.
2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time.
Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.
UniPress[1] Emacs's vi emulation mode would actually flip you over to an emacs shell buffer when you typed :q, and the shell would recognize when you typed "vi foo.c" and flip back over to a vi emulator buffer instead of actually running vi, but INSTANTLY, since changing buffers in a running emacs was much faster than actually starting up a new vi process.
So die-hard vi users didn't have to re-learn their muscle memory, and could just stay in the same emacs all the time, while the same old emacs alternately flipped between pretending to be a shell, and pretending to be vi.
[1] "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.
Yes. I use it instead of tmux for that.
For my desktops, I use an Ergodox EZ keyboard and mapped ctrl and meta into the thumb clusters there.
Also claude-code-ide.el. try these
I've been trying to use agent-shell with OpenCode but the abstraction that agent-shell puts on top of it is too much. I can't figure out how to change the model. The command to do it doesn't do anything; I see the correct model list and seem to be able to select it, but then it doesn't change. If I just run "opencode" in the same directory it comes up configured the way I want. The Claude integration works with that workflow too. Opencode comes up with some baby CPU-only model that I've never heard of, and basically, it outputs syntactically correct English sentences but doesn't seem to do much more than that.
Since I mostly use Claude I haven't fussed with agent-shell much yet.
It is crazy nice how invisible the native compilation became.
2. Remove MELPA packages that are now part of Emacs
3. Go to step 1 when new version comes out
Except for tree-sitter. That's something I'll be investing time in.
I can just ask Claude, “make leader / toggle a terminal at the bottom of the screen , and leader t swaps it to the right side” and it’ll just do that. I liked a theme but I wanted it to also change the status line of the focused window, and it just did that for me. I had an issue where the neo tree would freeze for a few seconds, and Claude figured out it was a bad interaction with the git in our toolchain, etc etc.
I have my very own text editor that I customized in plain English! I could’ve learnt spent hours learning Neovim’s style of Lua, researching packages, debugging, etc, but this gets the same stuff done way faster and lets me get to work. This was the biggest thing that kept me going back to either a preconfigured Vim setup like LazyVim or vscode. Definitely recommend.
Claude did my neovim in about 45 seconds, with the instruction “make it work like my vimrc but better and using the cool new stuff” and it’s great! Not my daily driver, but serviceable as EDITOR and prettiest of the bunch.
Even with spaceman’s/doom and the amazing documentation it was always still so much work to configure emacs as a newer user. LLMS have made this nearly instant.
This is a bit of a ramble but it’s so amazing having emacs and an LLM now, I don’t even touch vscode anymore and only find myself touching things like IntelliJ when I really need to dig into something with a debugger.
Using an LLM on init.el is a lot easier than using it in your day job. A 2 line change that you told the LLM to make is easy to internalize.
I’ve been thinking of trying out emacs because I think the native gui can probably be even more powerful
Maybe there will be a resurgance of terribly obscure totally unique quirky configuration files for all these vibe coded apps, unique enough that they don't appear in the training data, so you have to hire real humans to sit at your elbow and help you!
There is Only One. En garde!
super slow on windows
I never asked for native compilation implemented via the trampoline technique, which increases attack surface (because it causes Emacs to routinely execute files in a known-by-attackers location in my home directory) and makes debugging harder, but I'm stuck with it if I want my Emacs to speak the Wayland protocol (and I do).
Ditto the clumsy bolting-on of lexical scope.
It also has nothing to do with Wayland.
And what's wrong with adding lexical scope!?
I do have some concerns about certain features but the ones listed do work, and work great.
A) which premade config to choose
B) what half of those settings even do (and do you need them)
C) a lack of “sane” defaults that use the built in abilities
Realistically walking through the article authors “emacs from scratch” config and seeing what can be done with the built in packages and how is hugely instructive but even then you only get that from walking through the config one line at a time and reading “help” documentation for most of it.
At this point emacs is so old that fixing the problem of “sane defaults” is probably near impossible if only for how much it would break existing configs. But it might be a good addition to the tutorial to provide a set of questions and answers (possibly with demonstrations) that allow a new user to generate their own config with some nice defaults. We can assume these days that most new emacs users are coming from some other editors, so asking questions like “do you want auto complete suggestions in an inline drop down like VSCode” could be a perfectly reasonable question and then it could add the correct configuration settings to config for you using just the built in functionality
A small number of people with taste and experience.
Like one hopes to be the case for every opinionated preset profile set.
I think I'm down to about 110 lines of ~/.vimrc now :}
It won't be a perfect transition, but it will make it a lot smoother.
Selfishly I wasn't willing to spend the time to master Emacs proper back then, but with the LLM craze now I find it much easier to hack on my configs.
I imagine it would take a lot of time, maybe. Any greybeards that do this?
Plus, frankly, a lot of people (myself included) who want a richer experience are pretty much just happy turning on emacs keybindings in VSCode or IntelliJ or whatever.
I have cua-mode and don't show startup message. What else do I need to modernize Emacs?
Plus now agent integration (aka GPTEL)
`treesitter` grammars _are_ easy to install.
`eglot` is available OOTB, `lsp-mode` is easy to install and configure if you prefer.
`gptel` is easy to install and configure.
I also don't think I'd ever call configuring Emacs "trivial" compared to more modern editors. Matching the out-of-box experience of something like VS Code or Panic Nova requires some work. This isn't really a knock against Emacs, but I think Emacs fans -- myself included -- need to be honest about that. It's quite possible I would have picked up Emacs years earlier if I hadn't been given the impression that it was just super duper easy, especially once you picked a starter pack. It is not, it probably never will be, and I've come to believe that starter packs are actually a bad idea for most new users. If you don't understand just what it is you're putting in your init.el file and why, then if you run into problems, it's going to be way harder to figure out how to fix them.
Apart from that, I don't have a lot I insist on, and my used emacs package space keeps shrinking.
That said lately I use lem more than I do GNU emacs.
First you need to define what is that much better starting point? Something VSCode like? I find VS Code a bad example of software development tooling (anemic file management, integration with external tooling is cunbersome, VCS integration is flimsy, Code viewing is poor,…).
VSCode is a swiss knife. It has a few tools that are handy for occasional needs. But Vim and Emacs provide a complete toolbox. Learn it once and be set for life.
The only reason we still have IDE is kafkaesque ecosystems that requires expansive and custom tooling just to make sense of it. People can use vim to write code for the Linux kernel but needs XCode for a 5 screens app.
Grooming a personal .emacs or .vimrc is fine if you're working alone, but when you're on a team of professionals working on an application built on a commercial platform, a standard workflow for development is essential and an IDE supplies all the tools, integrations, and conventions to cover the basics of such a standard. Do not underestimate their value.
I don't care what tools other developers use but in January I made my two dev Macs 'VSCode free' and use Emacs for everything. Feels better!
For decades I would spend tons of time experimenting with my Emacs setups but in the last few years I have been shifting to more out of the box experiences. I did write my own agentic coding platform in Emacs Lisp but I keep that separate from .emacs and .emacs.d
Someone should write an Emacs guide for people who haven't meaningfully touched their .emacs since the early 2000s
Should I consider adding tree-sitter into the mix?
Hallelujah and thank you, sweet little baby Jesus. Now I can get rid of this bullshit from my dotfiles:
rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
set _plat = windows
if ( `uname` == Linux ) set _plat = linux
if ( `uname` == Darwin ) set _plat = apple
set _arch = x86
if ( `arch` == arm64) set _arch = aarch64
gh release -R emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs download -p "*${_arch}*${_plat}*"
tar -C ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter --transform 's/^\(.*\.\(so\|dylib\|dll\)\)/libtree-sitter-\1/' -xzf tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz
rm tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz