I am not sure what is going on with here recently, maybe I have overgrown the place, or maybe everyday a little by little this place is getting filled with people who shouldn't be talking about CS.

LSP and TS just make it easier to standardize across editors and languages.

[0] https://github.com/jiahaoxiang2000/claude-code-zed

Got some good success with GLM-4.5-Air running locally recently. Still mainly using claude code max though.

I can start extending it on every possible dimension without even having to write any code into a file - I can open a scratch buffer, write some Elisp and evaluate it in-place.

What else can provide a complete environment where one can code, debug, manage version control, read documentation, run terminals, manage projects (I search through Jira in Emacs), and even handle email or browse the web without ever leaving the editor? I'm reading this thread and typing this comment in Emacs, btw.

While modern "IDE"s like IntelliJ or VS Code offer polished, pre-configured experiences for specific languages, Emacs takes integration to a philosophical level where everything shares the same keybindings, configuration language, and conceptual model, making it less of an application that integrates other tools and more of a platform where all tools become native citizens of a unified computing environment.

Honestly, the big barrier to entry for Emacs is finding the time to configure it to your liking. The best way is to use it along with your IDE and existing tooling, slowly integrating Emacs into your workflow piece by piece and tinkering with it when you have a bit of time but always with a goal in mind i.e. window (pane in modern vernacular) management, showing symbol documentation in a hoverbox, adding spell checking to comments or inline git blame.

And sure, there are lots of bits that you need to get used to at first, how copy and paste works out of the box without CUA-mode for one, but they're that big of a deal after a short while as some people make them out to be.

I'll say this though, Emacs is like tiling window management, you either love it and extol its virtues everywhere or you look at its proponents like aliens from another galaxy.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMVIJhC9Veg

(Among other things)

By which I mean you can make your IDE with it, but it's not an out of the box thing, and it'll be bespoke and unique for you.

With LSP and treemacs and company mode, it's a pretty decent IDE. It just requires you to get all the pieces set up the way you want.

I use default emacs keybindings, which are a bit friendlier with this since they're similar to the bash/readline keybindings it uses... but it's still jarring.

I know only one person from my dozens of developer friends and colleagues who is using neovim.

1 - https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim

A lot of people are excited about the Qwen3-Coder family of models: https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-coder-687fc861...

For running locally, there are tools like Ollama and LM Studio. Your hardware needs will fluctuate depending on what size/quantization of model you try to run, but 2k in hardware cost is reasonable for running a lot of models. Some people have good experiences using the M-series Macs, which is probably a good bang-for-buck if you're exclusively interested in inference.

I'd recommend checking out the LocalLlamas subreddit for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

Getting results on par with big labs isn't feasible, but if you prefer to run everything locally, it is a fun and doable project.

or:

2. https://frame.work/es/en/desktop

3. https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/developer/dgx-spark/ => https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/reservations/ (cheapest is 3k)

From ergonomics of the UX, performance, portability, design sense (!!) and theming?

It's like Sun and GNU in the 90s. Those UI/UX folks getting pissed their perfect HSL wheel and black balance got dicked with by some PM which is why the GitHub theme is great not legendary?

They go home and rice Arch or NixOS and just shit on the dayjob stuff.

These people are artists, and hacks follow.

edit: My black balance is calculated on a per-display basis with an HSL-space transform from a hero color by the same NixOS module tree that builds the background from it's own source code as SVG and renders it before downsampling it for the specific display it's on. Of like two people helping beta it, both said roughly "using another desktop is like using the screen at the ATM". DHH is doing something similar with Arch, he's not quite as far along but this is the future.

https://cdn.some.pics/b7r6/68936c070fa56.png

https://cdn.some.pics/b7r6/68936d79c607c.png

I'm not sure there is a rigid enough definition of IDE to say whether Emacs qualifies or not. I think it does by virtue of its extensibility, but I could definitely see a legit argument that it's merely an editor because it doesn't have a lot of the tooling of something more modern. I think what you consider to be an IDE (IntelliJ, VS, etc) is something that didn't exist until modern GUIs. Prior to that, terminal based things like Emacs (or LSE on VMS) were the closest analog.

Dijkstra said computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes.

I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.

I have a .vimrc file with LSPs and whatnot. But it was from 3 years back. These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box. I would say the choice of editor is the least consequential thing in one's understanding of "CS" and programming methodologies. On the other hand, using debuggers, profilers, monitoring tooling can have a real impact on how you solve some problems.

Your argument is that calling Vim niche should exclude someone from being able to talk about CS. Please rethink your stance and your tone and consider if you’re helping the discussion.

But yeah, I broke my home Emacs setup somehow so that rust-mode no longer works in some situations. I have my config in git, though, so maybe I'll figure it out!

At least I've started migrating to use use-package for configuration, to bring some structure to the configuration.

Zed does seem rather interesting, but I don't ever see it being as configurable/extensible at runtime as Emacs. I suppose one could always just implement such features into the Zed itself; I presume its code is not too indimidating, given it's a modern code base and not likely to break in unexpected ways.

It was my observation around 12-18 momths ago that LLMs are weirdly good at elisp (which kicked off all the // hypermodern stuff I'm doing.

I think he's onto something with efrit, I havent gotten it dialed yet but its reaaallyy promising.

https://melpa.org/#/claude-code

VS Code on the other hand is designed to fracture [1]. MS can and has given proprietary API access to their blessed tools, forcing others to go through their much less capable extension API, hence the plethora of vscode forks. Even if you had the most motivated, excited group of people wanting to work on the latest and greatest LLM interactions with VS code, they would most likely be forced to fork. On the other hand, it just takes one motivated Elisp dev to implement whatever they want and make any external package they want integrate with it.

Also, I think the derision from the Emacs community may be a bit overblown. I'm constantly seeing AI/LLM related plugins appearing for Emacs and they tend to get decent traction (e.g. https://github.com/karthink/gptel).

[1] https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

I'm guessing there's a lot of grumbling on the mailing list about non-free AI services. That's fine, you can ignore that. 3rd party modules will provide, and there's nothing core can do about it.

https://github.com/emacsmirror/ob-aider

Is this just a fun project for now, or could I actually benefit from it in terms of software production like I do with tools like claude code?

I am interested in carefully tailoring it to specific projects, integrating curated personal notes, external documentation, scientific papers, etc via RAG (this part I've already written), and carefully chosing the tools available to the agent. If I hand tailor the AI agents to each project, can I expect to get something perhaps similar to the performance boost of Claude code for $2000 (USD)?

If not $2000, then how much would I need? I'm pretty sure for something like $75000 I could do this with a large deep seek model locally, and certainly get something very close to claude code, right?

Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel

https://web.archive.org/web/20200110131523/http://www.inform...

That joke was dumb from the beginning and has fallen into complete irrelevance years ago - Emacs actually can and does vim better than Vim, GVim, and Neovim, or any vim plugins for other IDEs. I'm saying this with a confidence of a die-hard, experienced vimmer.

The package define a list of tools that gptel can use to inspect and edit a project. The tools are packaged as a preset so all you have to do is add "@macher" to your prompt to include the tools & update the system directive.

Define "more modern"? Language servers, Git integration, refactoring tools, debugging? Emacs has all of those. Sure, VSCode and IntelliJ give you this stuff out of the box, but they can't match Emacs features like editing the same file in multiple ways at once (indirect buffers), instantly checking what any key does, or changing any behavior on the spot. What looks "outdated" about Emacs is actually its openness - while other IDEs hide everything behind pretty buttons, Emacs lets you see and change how everything works. You actually own your tools instead of just using them. In that way, Emacs isn't just modern - it's timeless.

Where IDEs impose hierarchical workflows, Emacs says 'no gods, no masters, only defun' It's not a cathedral or a bazaar - it's an infinite commune where every buffer is a consensus decision you make with yourself.

——

¹ - Peter Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat who said "fuck nobility" and became one of anarchism's main theorists.

I also have to use it via a proxy server I set up to get around the corporate firewall which explicitly blocks it. The company like the results but wouldn't like how I get them..

More corporate ridiculousness

So I subscribe to a new one every month to try out while still shoveling like 150$/mo at Claude cause it's consistently been the best and the one I use the most. Cursor as well has been good for their completion model which surpasses anything else I've tried for inline/multiline/jump completions.

But I've also tried supermaven, codeium/windsurf, copilot, zed. I guess from the company's perspective, a couple hundred bucks a month is well worth the time of keeping us all up to date with ai tooling.

  ;; c
  (use-package c-mode
    :ensure nil
    :defer t
    :mode "\\.cu?\\'"
    :config (setq c-default-style "gnu"
                  c-basic-offset 2)
    :hook ((c-mode . lsp)
           (c-mode . bmacs-ide)))

Integrating with a new language ecosystem is a significant amount of work for me because it involves making choices about what packages to configure and how, and which external dependencies to go with (e.g., which LSP server to use). I try to make those choices carefully, and for a lot of projects I touch in only a dabbler in those languages. It takes time to figure out.

But for actually managing external dependencies (LSP servers, linters, static analyzers, etc.), I use Nix (in particular devenv.sh) and direnv so that Emacs doesn't have to download them; it just finds them on the path. I also sometimes configure those tools via Devenv as well, creating an in-repo RC file for them and pointing to it with an appropriate environment variable. Then my configuration lives in source control and the rest of my team can use the same tools regardless of editor choice.

https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell

It can extract PATH and other environment variables from your login shell configuration.

Still using it because of the massive amount of customizations accumulated in a time span close to yours. I'm often tempted to switch, but if I look back, what other editor would have served me for ~20 years, mostly unchanged? I remember writing lots of macros for Visual Studio 6 and then Microsoft revamped the object system of their IDE with .NET. My understanding is that Visual Studio plugins may not work from an IDE version to the next. Yes, customizing Emacs requires time, but so does relearning a new environment every few years.

I do use other editors, however, for things that would require too much time to configure in Emacs, or for which I prefer a GUI interface. For example, at the moment I'm working on a C++ project in Emacs, yet for debugging and a Git GUI I have VSCode open.

>> Is neovim better in this space?

Maybe, because of the bigger use base of NeoVim/Vim.

>> Should I be learning how to debug elisp better to understand how the commands interact with my environment?

Definitely.

>> I've been using emacs keybindings (in Dvorak at that)

Hi, mate! (^_^)

>> for so long I don't know if I'd enjoy the neovim editing experience.

What? No [Neo]Vim user has ever ported Emacs keybinding to Insert Mode? O_o

In the meantime this delaying didn't stop the non-free alternatives, but it did slow down adoption of the core project. This is attrocious project management that is driving people to non-free software. In the most egregious cases (bzr and CI build farm), it was done only because of his ego and wanting the FSF to matter.

That sure is a choice of name for your project!

It would be really interesting to see a version which exposes Vim as an MCP. I would love to see Claude Code work on the active file, reading from open buffers, typing Vim motions, and taking advantage of Vim features like find/replace and macros. It would be closer to the real pair programming experience, whereas the read and write experience is slow and disjointed from editing.

8 years user here so still an emacs noobie, but I switched to nvim two months ago and haven't opened emacs in a month. Just slapped on lazy.vim and have been toggling the different AI tools in LazyExtras.

I do find the ecosystem a lot better in nvim and it seems the community around nvim is more publicly engaged with new AI tooling - check out ThePrimeagen for example.

[0] https://github.com/emacscollective/borg

I also recognize the author's name because I use their direnv integration package all the time! That one is great, too.

But on a lot of displays (including a couple of the ones I use all the time) the panel can't really do it well, and so there are all kinds of hinting and cheats and other workarounds, and so to get perceptual black, you actually wind up cranking the lum up a little, and that's what I've tried to do with the baseline Ono-Sendai Hypermodern blacks, is give a range of options starting from absolute black, and going up incrementally to GitHub "black"/darkest which is a very expertly designed grayscale (their designers on this are world class), but it's light, it's really high to cope with just about any panel.

If you want to try it out, you can pop these codes into whatever way you set colors:

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/581295d8bb905ef598a05fdf2810a07...

The "Ono-Sendai Memphis" grayscale starts at #000000.

The main annoyance is dealing with newlines

So if you want it to be, yes and with a lot of support out of the box these days.

This plugin does indeed support that functionality. It implements an MCP server using pure Lua and Neovim primitives. It not only notifies Claude Code about the currently open file and selected lines in a file, but also opens diff views whenever Claude Code attempts to make a file change.

I'm curious how fluid that is. My experience with Emacs keybindings has been, well, variable to say the least. Maybe the vim-alike folks can make better experiences. Readline's emacs bindings are a bit lacking but still fairly good for day-to-day usage.

There's an `emacs` community that recognizes the history without being involved in any contemporary sense.

The entities he is so adamant against are not benign or passive, they actively try to capture your freedom for rent seeking behaviour.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc, have not got to where they are without this behaviour and they are so powerful that they have in many cases captured even public money from large governments for decades and are exceptionally sticky once allowed in.

LLM provide an exceptional opportunity for us to free ourselves from these captor interests, but we need to looking to develop them.

RMS has been proven correct on so many things from standard Microsoft behaviour, and planned obsolete to the licensing rug pulls of so called open source projects.

The question is not about stopping non free, that's a ridiculous objective, but if you don't have any principles you are going to have nothing solid to stand on in response to their nefarious and extractive behaviour.

The Levy book Hackers has a ehole third of the book about it.

I'm personally a fan of `ono-sendai-blue`, but I have a friend in a defense adjacent space and I gather `ono-sendai-tactical` is enjoyed there. The blacks in these reference palettes are a reasonable starting point for many displays, you'll want to hint for your specific one to get optimal outcomes.

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/581295d8bb905ef598a05fdf2810a07...

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/fbbfb1cf2a3d14927bbe621a9050522...

The other tooling feels niche to me.

(The existence of a Vim config file disables Vi compatibility mode.)

In my current role (contracting at a gov dept in a part that uses Rails and PostgreSQL) it's about 30% using vim or neovim.

In the rest of the department where it's .net and Microsoft all the way, the devs likely have never heard of vim.

While I don't appreciate the weight of an IDE, the time commitment to create (and maintain!) a config for vim/nvim with LSP, agents, etc., loses out to the relative ease of adding vim-style modal editing to the IDE.

It's good for what it is but I don't love that I have to change to a whole-ass new editor to get access to the agentic additions, when alternatives that require an API key or a more flexible CLI tool can do a better job.

Also, I don't remember the last time when I worked with anyone who writes code and uses Windows.

Anecdotal experiences can lead to a warped understanding of reality; in mine, Windows and non-emacs users are niche.

WebStorm was probably the biggest reason why it took me so long to switch to Emacs. My biggest fear was that if I invested in learning Emacs, and at some point I'd inevitably find that something simply couldn't be done in it, and I'd be forced to go back and my idyllic life would be ruined. God, how wrong I was. Not only have I found _everything_ I needed, I actually discovered radically different ways of solving problems.

In the end, turns out one thing jetbrains did right - they have nailed the marketing - I surrendered without resistance. My biggest regret is not trying out Emacs sooner. I wish someone very persuasive showed me things I did not know were possible. That's why I get very vocal about it - kids have zero idea what they'd be missing.

I dunno, I feel it stopped being like that for me long ago. Perhaps I'm just a "tinkerer" and maybe I never even minded improving my setup. But like I said, at some point, my workflow has become purely "goal-oriented" - whenever I see a problem, I either:

- Make a todo list item and forget about it until next time

- Or start writing some Elisp (if the problem is simple enough)

Let me share some practical examples of each.

One day I got annoyed that it was taking me more than a minute to search for my own comment on HN, around some interesting conversations. I made a todo list item. Then at some point I wrote a function, then later I published a package. I can't even tell you how effing nice it feels now - takes me seconds to find relevant stuff.

The other day I was reading a pdf, while taking notes. pdf-tools has this nice feature called pdf-view-themed-minor-mode - it adjusts the colors of the document to the colors of your theme, nicely blending the pdf into your editor. I use it all the time. I also use a package called circadian.el - using Emacs' built-in solar calendar, it adjusts the color theme based on the time of day. So, my color theme changes automatically, but it doesn't get automatically reflected in pdf documents I previously had opened. Not a biggie, I still can do it manually, yet it took me a few minutes to concoct an advising function that runs after (load-theme) and sets the colors in every pdf. Of course, why do something manually that the computer is supposed to figure out without your assistance?

Now, neither pdf-tools maintainers, nor the author of circadian.el know about my customizations. If any of them make some changes that break my beautiful zen fidgets, why would I even get mad about it? I'll try to fix it, and if it takes me longer than three minutes, I'll just remove it altogether and go back to toggling it manually - not a biggie, never was.

That has become my philosophy that probably extends beyond Emacs - my terminal, my browser, my WM, etc. The world is never meant to be perfect for everyone. But you can make it perfect just for you. I learned that it's better to apply ideas that enable you to build your perfect world, than someone else's perception of what _your_ ideal world should be. That's why for an individual programmer, choosing FOSS tools almost always yields better results in the long run. In a team setting that may be a bit difficult, but if you get inventive enough, you can always find workarounds. This is what Emacs taught me that no other tool ever did - the instinct to never settle for the status quo. Whenever something bothers me, I either discover workarounds on the spot or make it a todo item.

There are sometimes small differences, like sometimes a Python package with native dependencies will fail to build in some Linux environments but not on macOS or vice-versa, but generally you don't, even then, need to special-case things by operating system to make them work uniformly.

As for overall support, macOS is a more chaotic and quirky environment: macOS updates break applications or remove APIs more often than Linux updates do, macOS updates nuke configuration files in `/etc`, or blindly steamroll system users (low UIDs), the login shell doesn't manage environment variables or other aspects of the GUI session, etc. These are extra hurdles that Nix has to work around on macOS. But it generally works well and the only real hooks that Nix needs into your environment are some shell scripts that need to be sourced on startup. If you know how to manage your PATH and shell initialization in general, you can do it with Nix. (Additionally, one distributions of Nix itself includes some extra software for managing these hurdles that works pretty well at the cost of a more opinionated and more "invasive" install-- check out "Determinate Nix" if you're interested.) Other than that, it's basically the same as on Linux. Package selection is good, things mostly work the same way.

Nix's support for platforms other than Linux and macOS is less mature. In years past, efforts have waxed and waned, but in the past few years there've been some concerted and persistent efforts to make Nix and Nixpkgs more usable on Windows, NetBSD, and FreeBSD. Even native (e.g., not just cross-compilation from other platforms) support for Windows is actually a thing!

You can also easily set up "remote builders" to local VMs for Linux and FreeBSD so that you can transparently build packages and environments for those platforms on your Mac, if that's a frequent choice of development platform.

Overall I'd say it's pretty good, but I don't personally know much about the current status of FreeBSD. It looks like there are a few hundred FreeBSD-specific packages in Nixpkgs, and there's also a fork of NixOS based on FreeBSD called NixBSD. Most packages include "platforms = [ unix ];" in their metadata, which means they're at least intended to build for not just Linux and macOS but also FreeBSD, but I don't know if Hydra is building binaries for any FreeBSD platforms. If it's not, then many packages may be untested and have small build problems. My guess is that at worst, Nix on FreeBSD is probably slightly behind where Nix on Linux was when I got into it 7 or 8 years ago. At that time, Nix still felt amazing and very worth it, but certainly required a willingness to learn how to package things and fill in gaps yourself to get the most out of it. Consider dropping by NixOS' Matrix community; I'm sure there's a FreeBSD channel. --

1: https://github.com/abathur/resholve/

He said many stupid things when it was outside of his domain of mathematics and algorithms.

niche /niːʃ,nɪtʃ/ (adjective) denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.

It's definitely possible but I genuinely don't understand how people work for decades and still move their hand all the way to the arrow keys just go move the cursor to another word. Especially when the solution for this inefficiency is so accessible, existed for decades and is widely available in almost every tool. It's something that goes against the spirit of the medium which is all about automation.

Slow your roll. Nothing you write will matter in six months.

I’d love to hear more about your workflow if you have time to share!

While this may sound condesending, I believe it's understandable where the snub is coming from. VSCode doesn't need evangelism - it has become the de facto standard that every programmer is expected to know. Emacs occupies a different position entirely, and when curious newcomers encounter comments like "I used Emacs for 15 years before switching to...", they draw conclusions that may not reflect the full picture. Upon closer examination, these long-time "experts" often reveal they barely engaged with Emacs beyond basic editing - they've never published packages (which is actually far simpler than creating VSCode extensions), never written custom functions, never even added a simple advice for their own needs. This isn't truly "using Emacs"; it's merely dabbling in it.

Unlike conventional tools where years translate to expertise along a predictable curve, Emacs rewards deep engagement over mere time served. When someone who spent years passively using Emacs criticizes it publicly, they inadvertently discourage potential users who might have discovered something transformative. The damage is disproportionate: criticizing VSCode barely makes a dent in its massive user base, but dismissing Emacs can deter the very people who would thrive in its ecosystem - those willing to invest in understanding a tool that becomes an extension of their thinking rather than just another tool.

Therefore, of course I would be confrontational. I honestly have not ever seen an accurate, honest, factual review of Emacs criticism and comparison with other tools in the same space, because simply there isn't any other tool that operates at the same level. Critics compare surface features while missing that Emacs is essentially a different category of software altogether.

And that's a good thing, for the most part. Someone needs to hold the hard-line stance. It'll never happen, but it pulls things in that direction. We're all free to do what we like and use whatever software we choose, and part of the reason we have that choice is because the hardliners refuse to budge.

It does mean they make unrealistic demands and occasionally hold back useful functionality, but it's better than not having them around.

But as a guy who is a known enemy of the Valley establishment to begin with rebuilding from all that? When I say I'm dead serious, I'm being earnest.

If you don't have a family/community safety net and/or a plugged-in nepo golden age network?

Stack cash on hand like your life depends on it, because it fucking does.

Anecdotally a lot of managers use Emacs, though that may be an age thing.

(I use emacs for Real Work, unless that Real Work involves a JVM. Still do all the git stuff in emacs/magit, though)

For Claude Code I'm rapidly switching anything I want "vibe coded" into Hadkell for code, Dhall for config, and check-heavy Nix for deploy. Between that and some property tests that I seed and then have Opus elaborate on, you can put Claude Code so restrictive that it just hits the compiler in a loop until useful code comes out. Its trapped: I hoist CLAUDE.md in from the Nix store so it physically can't edit out the brutal prompts around mocks and lies, and -Wall -Werror in GHC gives it nowhere to hide, all it can do is burn tokens and desperately Web Search tool until it gets it perfect ish or I cut off its money because this requires a real LLM minimum and likely a real programmer. If there's a property test welded into the type system it can't even fail to use a parameter: that's an error Claude.

I have a bunch of elisp in // hypermodern // emacs for things like OpenRouter integration and tool use, but frankly, stock gptel is so strong I always wonder if I'm getting my money's worth trying to tune it into the asymptote.

Happy to answer any more questions.

Most people don’t want to become experts in the editor. The editor is a means to an end: writing code, writing text, etc. This comment suggests to the new user: if I don’t program Emacs and publish packages in it, I’m not really using it, I’m just dabbling in it. But I don’t want to program the editor, so I shouldn’t use it at all.

I also don’t think the comments you criticize discourage users who would have discovered something transformative. Someone interested in programming their editor isn’t discouraged by someone who complains that Emacs is missing some modern prettiness, or that it’s not popular. There is plenty of Emacs evangelism that will hook those receptive to it.

I would like to balance out your comment by saying: it is just fine to, as you would say, dabble in Emacs. Don’t write advice. Don’t publish packages. Use customize. Don’t write a .emacs. Use the pull-down menus. It is still a delightfully powerful and well-documented editor even if you do none of the “expert” things. The developers have added so many of these features precisely so Emacs is easier to learn and use, and don’t let commenters who call you a dilettante convince you that if you’re not an Emacs Lisp maestro, you shouldn’t bother with Emacs.

I don't know man, whenever I see comments like this, I just don't get it - there's just no "switching" for me personally to anything, like ever, I just don't even see the possibility for it.

The question that always gets me is like: "were you just using it like ... I don't know to edit text? That's all you've done with it?..."

I have no idea how would I be able to do my things in anything else, whatever that is - Nvim, Sublime, Helix, etc.

- How would I control video playback from my editor while taking notes?

- How would I annotate PDFs?

- Or, create and manage Anki cards - my flashcards are just my notes, they don't require a different medium to exist.

- Or how would I test APIs - I don't need to use stuff like Postman - all my endpoint investigations are in my notes. Documented and perfectly reproducible.

- How would I manage my dotfiles? I use Org-babel for it and it makes my entire system immutable - is it better than Nix? I dunno, it just works and it's simple.

- What would I use for file management? I just wrote a wrapper that uses rsync to move large files around, how would I ever do anything like this in other than Emacs? How would I mark all the files that are over 1GB, older than three months and match a given regexp?

- In Emacs, I can move my cursor to a piece of plain text like "RFC 959", "SAC-28410", or "my-org/some-service#182" and immediately start reading shit - it intelligently recognizes that the first one is an RFC document, another is a Jira ticket and the third one is a Pull-request on GitHub.

- I can type a single query and simultaneously search for it on Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, GitHub, Hacker News or my own browser history, and I wouldn't even know how to do that in something that's not Emacs.

- In Emacs I can type a shell command and pipe results into a buffer, or pipe the content of a buffer to a shell command.

- In Emacs, my color theme changes depending on time of the day, because Emacs has built-in lunar and solar calendars.

- How would I read and manage my email in Helix?

- How would I track time? Clock in/out of tasks, generate time reports, do pomodoros?

- How would I search, browse and read Hacker News and Reddit?

- How would I create presentations?

- How would I test database queries?

- How would I manage Docker containers?

- How would I read man pages?

- How do I translate text?

- And how would I interact with LLMs?

...

Nope, there's no "switching" for me. It's just not possible. My entire life is woven into this text-based operating system. My thoughts, my work, my communications, my entertainment - they all exist as interconnected plain text that I can grep, link, transform, and version control. Every keystroke I've memorized, every workflow I've perfected, every piece of data that references another - it would take years to rebuild this in whatever there might be, and I'd still be left with a pale imitation. Emacs isn't just where I edit text; it's where I live.

A simple reductive example. Imagine a great software leader that leads an org that writes great code and generally achieves the org's goals, but once a week, they say something offensive that discourages 1/10th of new users. A better leader would be someone who does all of the same things, except for the offensive comments.

I am saying that RMS makes offensive distracting comments, and regularly makes project manager choices that slow the adoption of free software. If you criticize him, people come back to "but he's right philosophically" which he is, and that misses the point. He has wrapped the FSF into an ego play for himself where he is in control or at least an important roadblock to software progress. If RMS cared as much about software freedom (as opposed to his ego) as he says, he would work to allow better leaders to develop and have power in the FSF org.

" look at neovim at this network socket and get current selection"

This actually works :)

signed:

someone who was broke fifteen years ago and has been stacking cash on hand ever since.

Also as another Emacs user I'm wondering what lesser known packages or elisp snippets do you use? gptel, magit, tramp and org-mode are the usually touted killer features, but what else do you use in the Emacs ecosystem?

I take it this is all back-end work? Have you tried out one of the Haskell-y front-end languages? Elm?

> Both of these are very (!!!) well complimented by magit, which is so good at AI supervision it seems designed for it, by a genius.

Can you expand a little on this point?

I'm not saying "don't dabble in Emacs", dable all you want. Just use the damn tool - it's not that hard. To use the tool you just need to use the fucking tool with the intent to fucking use it. When someone says something like "I used Emacs for a decade as just a text editor" to me it sounds like: "I had this smartphone for the past two years and used it only to make calls. Not even video - I never bothered to figure out how that works..."

Emacs is a Lisp-based event-loop, with an embedded editor in it. This is of course a "simplification", but that will do. What do you do with a Lisp interpreter? You feed Lisp programs into it. Try writing some Lisp, it's not that hard. Swallow you hubris, swallow your pride - whichever you prefer and stop blaming parenthesis, bad weather, ThePrimeagen's mustache, sanctions or AI. With AI tools these days it may even feel like playing a video game.

You don't need to be "an expert" there are no "experts" in Emacs, there's no "career ladder," progression system, no ranks and shoulder straps, I don't know anyone who gets paid even just a little bit more for simply being good in Emacs - I certainly don't. Use it or not - just don't think of being "a newbie" or becoming "an expert" you either enjoy it or not, whichever it is - it's fine.

And by the way, I personally think I would've loved to witness my kind of evangelism back when I was still a tool, just much younger.

Let me know if you have any questions (or suggestions for that matter, it's rough in places).

And a shitty job is no guarantee of a shitty room now, you see homeless people still in the Best Buy shirt they were wearing when they got laid off, and Best Buy is nowhere near the worst job.

I thought working hard and being really good at computer stuff was basically some kind of bare minimum job guaranteed, that being free with my money might mean not retiring young. Didn't realize tech employment was war.

Wrong. Won't make that mistake again.

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/84c6ab80c0b8bd5267b8c436e4d00a8...

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/23cfacbf181c9b0447841c798345a79...

The AI stuff doesn't work without this running:

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/449faab9b5be00867f2e8053c610bdb...

That lets me publish my API vendor keys without issues:

https://gist.github.com/b7r6/fe96bd0cc37d72c1991d84d1984371b...

I aspire to be a lot faster than this stuff (I've built faster stuff than this) but this is quite a good library (amazingly good by OSS standards, good stuff in this area is rarely OSS, props to the maintainers): https://github.com/crypto-chassis/ccapi, in particular this library does a really good job of being correct across a lot of surface area, it's serious people doing it, and there are forks of it that use DPDK floating around.

If by who's paying for it you mean the big Anthropic bill? My boss's boss is pretty enlightened about the fact that learning how to use AI well is expensive, so when I'm on a tight schedule I get a pretty forgiving budget for the model fees. It's a pretty serious perk in the sense that it's really expensive to master using these things :)

- You're a sinner, a wrong-doer, and you must repent.

- This world you have not yet experienced is wonderful. Let me tell you about it.

Many, probably most, respond better to the second form.

Looking at your list, I guess what it came to for me is that getting an excellent UX for any one of those given tasks is only possible by using a tool made for that job. Probably, I can get a very good experience using Emacs, or maybe even excellent, but it would take a lot of time for me to tweak a plugin or write my won.

Video playback: Are you playing your youtube or jellyfin videos in Emacs? Well, that's pretty cool, I just have a firefox tab open for one or the other, on a second screen. If I want to pause or skip, I `META-l` to that window on my second screen (i3wm) and use vimium bindings or the native player bindings to interact with it.

Annotate PDFs: I don't do this anymore. I used to hand-annotate in various tablets as an experiment, but in the end all my notes got digitized to a note taking application anyway (org mode, previously) so I just highlight things, handwrite notes when needed in a notebook, and then summarize them in a note taking application (or write them there directly).

Anki cards: I used to do this in emacs as well. Now I don't use anki at all anymore. I didn't find any improvement in my life, conversations, or blog posts from memorizing all these facts (and this includes memorizing words in my Mandarin learning journey). Instead all I seemed to be doing was exhausting what little learning energy I had on "the dreaded flashcards." Plus it was tedious to write and maintain them, even though it was happening right there in the same org file I used to take these notes.

I'd be curious to learn more about your API testing setup, that sounds very cool! At work, our API is served via FastAPI and there's swagger docs automatically available that I can browse in a web browser if I want, or I just in nvim `SPC f f` to open a fuzzy file finder and find the model definition I want and look at the endpoint directly, or I can do the same to find the kubb-generated react hook, or typescript model, for the endpoint. For other projects, I guess I browse the API docs in a web browser.

I've never heard of using org-babel for managing dotfiles, that's a cool idea! I just have them in `~/.configs/` which is a git repo that I mirror to a private github repo.

Re: file management: I do the same but just using either `mini-files` in nvim, or, just some combination of gnu tools in a terminal. If I need a script I usually write one in python or bash. Being able to do so in lisp sounds pretty cool, though.

Text under cursor - what modes is that? That's pretty cool. I just browse jira tickets and pull requests in a web browser. I've never found desktop apps, terminal wrappers, etc, to be as good as just whatever a given company is shipping for their webapp (e.g. I tried managing github PRs in magit using that magit-forge thing but didn't find the experience that great compared to github's webapp).

That is a very cool mode you have for searching, I think I saw something like that on reddit once, but my thought on it is the same now as it was then - why wouldn't I do that but on google.com or search.brave.com, both of which already search wikipedia, google, youtube, github, and hacker news? I can type the same into the address bar of my browser and it'll do the same but also search my web history.

Piping shell commands into a buffer is indeed very cool. You know much more about the terminal than me, I can tell. However naively I could just do this `whatever | nvim`, right?

I saw your comment about the color theme change, that's so sick and I admire you for setting that up. For me, just `vscode-default-high-contrast` was fine 100% of the time I had emacs open, or in nvim `kanagawa-dragon` is fine as well. I don't knock you for having a changing color theme, I just don't really see the point for me.

I used to manage my emails in mu4e and it was fine, but after getting fed up with html emails not rendering correctly, or send email failing silently occasionally and not realizing it, or missing emails for some weird reason, I let go and just switched to thunderbird. I miss having 100% keyboard interaction with email, but thunderbird gets it all done reliably: reply-all, CC, BCC, archive, whatever. I may try out mutt one day though.

I used to track time very well in org mode and that is an extremely useful feature. I thought it was very cool to send to-the-minute invoices to my clients. I would generate time reports and have them added to my `org-roam-daily` entries. So much interesting data! Then I realized, for my own journal, it was an overwhelming amount of data that was basically useless to me, and for my clients, they didn't give a shit, they'd pay me either way, so I started just roughly estimating my hours based on start/end times and that was good enough, got me paid basically the same amount, and took me less time and effort. I do keep a hobonichi techo journal where I annotate the week-view with a general overview of what I get up to hour to hour which is nice to keep me on task and make me quickly realize if I am addicted to a new book and spending too much time reading it.

As for searching reddit, I am a recovering reddit addict and don't use it anymore, though I used to just use it in firefox with ad blocker and using reddit's "old" mode. Hacker news I'm also addicted to and try to avoid using it too much, but again, I just use it in a web browser. Increased friction for my addictions is good: I stay logged out of these sites and only log in when I really need to interact for some reason. This is especially great for twitter which I can't even interact with in any way if I'm logged out.

I always thought it was cool that people were creating presentations in org mode, so I tried it once and then went to give a talk on job hunting at a local university. They didn't have a way to plug an arbitrary device into their projector, so they asked me to email them the microsoft slides files, or send them a link to the google drive presentation, and they obviously had no idea how to install emacs. I didn't have that so had to quickly copy my presentation to google. Google slides works 100% of the time at all the talks and presentations I give so I just use that now. My presentations are quite simple so it's not too much trouble.

As for testing database queries, again, what mode are you using? That's very cool. I test them in dbeaver or in psql directly.

Same question for your docker containers. I just use some combination of `docker ps` or editing docker-compose files, alongside netstat, cloudflare, and portainer's web ui.

I read man pages using `man {whatever}`. Out of all the things you've mentioned, this is the one where I'm actually not curious how you do it in emacs, I just want to know why lol. Come on, opening a terminal and typing `man` isn't that big of a deal, surely!

I translate text using the google translate web UI, which easily lets me switch languages, upload images, etc. I didn't know emacs had a mode for this, that's interesting but I can't imagine it to be quite as smooth as the webUI is...

LLM integration in emacs looks very interesting, I'd like to try it. I like that it can actually use claude's ide mode. As far as I know, no nvim plugin can do that yet. However, right now I don't think any IDE integration works as well as the tab-completion proprietary model cursor uses, that lets me just TAB TAB TAB TAB get something done really quickly. I think their agentic mode is ok, I liked the git-style accept/reject changes thing, but I can do the same by doing claude code in a terminal and then just checking the changes in magit, or, now I use lazygit. Or just `git` commands directly. Personally I'm still chasing the dragon from that first Cursor hit. I really don't want to use Cursor but I want to have something with as-good tab completion and nothing in emacs (before) or nvim (now) has come close, but I will be trying the modes mentioned in this thread!

Regarding org mode in general, I now use a combination of a handwritten daily journal, as well as Trilium-next note taking, which I found to just be a more feature-rich and portable experience in the ways I need it to be, whereas org-mode was feature rich in a way that didn't matter to me. Turns out a super-powerful tagging and organization method for my tasks didn't actually help me stay organized or get more tasks done, but a simple yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily task list supported by a handwritten piece of paper work much better for me. No need to know if a task is for work or pleasure or what the GTD context for it is, I can just check my notebook (or trilium daily entry) to see what needs to get done.

I'm not trying to convince you to "switch." I'm envious of how well you've tailored your emacs to yourself - you're the destination I thought I was headed for when I wrote that blog post linked above. I never arrived, which perhaps is sad, but on the other hand, I spent a lot of time doing a lot of other things, which is just life, I guess!

What I see quite often is when people profess years of using the tool and finding it unsatisfactory, only to reveal (if ever) that they've engaged with just its surface layer. It's like someone saying they found a piano limiting after years of only using it as a percussion instrument. My point is about embracing Emacs as a Lisp environment from day one - not because everyone must use it this way, but because that's what it actually is. When you treat it as 'just an editor' you're working against its design rather than with it. Those who embrace its programmable nature early often discover possibilities they didn't know they were looking for. Yes, this may mean a slightly steeper upfront commitment, but it also means actually using the tool rather than having square-peg-round-hole mismatched expectations.

It's not about choosing nicer or harsher messaging, it's about the truth, and it comes from the heart - I personally, of course, regret years wasted in vain instead of finding Emacs sooner; it works great for me. I understand it may not work that well for everybody, and I'd rather they realize that sooner, instead of wasting years of their lives. I also spent a long time trying to rationalize Emacs in my own head, because I kept approaching it from the wrong angle, but I am happy I didn't quit. Some people may not have that kind of patience.

No. This is exactly the sort of talk that turns people off from Emacs. You can use it as "just an editor." Indeed, read the GNU Emacs Manual. It almost entirely describes "just an editor." An excellent editor. The user needs to consult the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual only if extending Emacs is desirable.

Comments like this one suggest that Emacs is designed only to be programmed and that if the user does not program it, the user is "working against its design." This is just as false as saying that a Vim user who writes no VimScript is working against Vim's design. No, the user who doesn't program the editor is...using the editor. As designed.

You can, sure - sometimes we all do, when we need to debug a faulty package, we run it with the -Q option. I've been working for many years with people who use Emacs, have many friends who use Emacs, have mentored complete newbies and regularly discuss advanced topics - I have yet to meet someone who uses Emacs as is - with no customizations whatsoever. In fact, if I meet anyone who does that, I would very much be interested in learning their rationale, and perhaps even try to question their mental or emotional state.

Vim on the other hand, is very different in this, there are in fact plenty of users who do use it with zero customizations, daily.

> read the GNU Emacs Manual.

Okay. Let's do it... M-x info-emacs-manual - the very first two sentences - "Emacs is an advanced, extensible, customizable, self-documenting editor. This manual describes how to edit with Emacs and some of the ways to customize it." The third paragraph right there, at the very top, already explicitly says: "For information on extending Emacs, see Emacs Lisp". Five words pertaining extensibility in just three opening paragraphs, against only a couple of cognates of "editor".

What the heck are you even trying to argue here? Rephrasing your point doesn't change the underlying fact - Emacs is first and foremost an "extensible editor", not "an editor that can be extended (if desired)" - the emphasis is on "extensible", not on the "editor". That's what sets it apart from literally any other tool that gets used as "just an editor".

If regurgitating the factuality engrossed in the manual, ardently or otherwise, turns some people off from Emacs - so be it, like I already said before - it's probably for the best. Better for them, better for the Emacs community.

> I'd be curious to learn more about your API testing setup, that sounds very cool! At work, our API is served via FastAPI and there's swagger docs automatically available that I can browse in a web browser if I want, or I just in nvim `SPC f f` to open a fuzzy file finder and find the model definition I want and look at the endpoint directly, or I can do the same to find the kubb-generated react hook, or typescript model, for the endpoint. For other projects, I guess I browse the API docs in a web browser.

I used restclient for this for a long time and that was great, but recently it got archived. Some of its functions are about to become deprecated so I'm thinking of moving to hurl-mode. I've used hurl a bunch so maybe that's where I'll end up. This is one of those things I don't like about emacs. The ecosystem is small enough where elisp tools just end up abandoned. CLI tools end up being better because their ecosystems are larger.

> I always thought it was cool that people were creating presentations in org mode, so I tried it once and then went to give a talk on job hunting at a local university. They didn't have a way to plug an arbitrary device into their projector, so they asked me to email them the microsoft slides files, or send them a link to the google drive presentation, and they obviously had no idea how to install emacs. I didn't have that so had to quickly copy my presentation to google. Google slides works 100% of the time at all the talks and presentations I give so I just use that now. My presentations are quite simple so it's not too much trouble.

Try generating PDFs of your presentations. I find that this works pretty much everywhere too. Even locked down computers on college campuses can generally just open up the default PDF reader and render your PDF. And if you're just doing text slides with maybe a graphic or two, then a PDF should be easy to generate.

I'm very tempted to switch, or at least try neovim. My reasoning to switch goes something like:

"The core of nvim is small and mostly depends on Unix-ish tools communicating using pipes. These tools tend to be better supported than a lot of sparsely supported elisp that lives in emacs. Moreover it's easier to debug neovim issues because it's a matter of spawning subprocesses and subshells and simply pushing data into/out of pipes."

I'm not sure if this thesis is correct. I may be off-base how much better support nvim actually has and maybe I'm walking into another emacs, in which case I'd stick with emacs. But also, I just love the editing experience of emacs. I love its chorded commands. I love the kill ring (never understood why folks would use cua-mode.) I love the fluency with which you can record macros. I love writing bits of elisp to automate the stuff I need. It's this experience that I'm not sure neovim can replicate, especially modal editing. I'm also a Dvorak typist and vim ergonomics seem very QWERTY-based.

But I'm very curious how well my thoughts stand up to reality.

> getting an excellent UX for any one of those given tasks is only possible by using a tool made for that job.

That's true, but only to a certain extent. You see, when you look at Emacs' pieces individually, it's really difficult to see it as a perfect tool for any job. Emacs isn't the best email client, it certainly doesn't have the best web browser, it isn't the greatest debugging tool for any given programming language, it's not the best version control tool, etc. But that's when you look at each of the features in isolation. What makes Emacs the overall greatest thing is that it has the ability to act like glue, and things can work in harmonious integration, I've spoken about that before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131735 "I cannot compare one or multiple selected aspects of Emacs, because in my view that is a pointless mental exercise — I have the holistic comprehension of Emacs features and only can speak about the emergent properties that arise from their integration. To isolate individual features would be like asking a fish to compare water to air - I exist within this environment so completely that I cannot meaningfully separate its components from the unified experience they create."

> it would take a lot of time for me to tweak a plugin or write my own.

It may take a long time regardless of what tools you use. It all boils down to the mastery of a chosen tool. The majority of beginners focus on shiny trinket features and text editing machinery of Emacs instead of reaping the fundamental principal truth about it - Emacs is not really a mere text editor; in fact, it's a kind of Lisp machine with a text editor embedded in it. Once someone understands that, accepts Lisp with all its enormous power and some unavoidable flaws, that fundamentally changes the entire philosophy of using Emacs to accomplish things.

Now, that's all axiomatic inscribed acoustics, let's get down to less theory:

- For video playback control I use mpv.el with some customizations. Turns out mpv player has IPC and can be perfectly controlled from Emacs, I bet Neovim users do that as well. It's nice when taking notes or when I need to review a bunch of videos in a folder. I have a transient I use to play, rewind, speed up, etc., all directly from the current buffer. It's great.

- I use org-noter for annotating PDFs - it's really nice. I just can't read any technical or scholarly sources without taking notes. And these notes are never disconnected from the source - I can always see my notes next to the exact page. I never needed to find a way to actually embed the notes in a way so I can read them on my phone or tablet, but I bet these days it would be just easier to run Emacs - Android lets you and I don't own Apple products anymore.

- > I don't use anki at all anymore

Oh, that's sad, because there is plenty of research done that proves the effectiveness of spaced repetition. Starting from Ebbinghaus and Pimsleur in the beginning-mid of the prior century, to the modern empirical studies - Cepeda, Kornell, Karpicke. Meta-analyses of Dunlosky and Carpenter. There's recent neuroscientific evidence - Smolen, Zhang, Byrne, et al.

What I like about anki-editor that my flashcards are just my notes - I don't need to maintain some special format, somewhere else. These days, I even often generate flashcards using LLMs and sync them to my phone.

- For testing API endpoints I use Org-mode source blocks. For simple queries - ob-http, for data-heavy stuff I use verb.el - what I like about it is that it exposes hooks where I automatically convert json response to Clojure data structures. IMO Clojure is hands-down the best tool for quick data manipulation. I would have a src-block with `:wrap src clojure` in the header, then I can immediately start exploring the data - slicing, dicing, grouping, mapping through it, visualizing it - all without having to send new requests over and over again. I'm pretty sure I can do the same thing with ob-http by advising corresponding functions, but verb.el has public hooks that are well documented, so... Besides, using org-mode source blocks allows me to pipe that data into any other different language - e.g. Python.

... I'm having to split it (HM whines that my comment gotten too long)...

Oh that technique is just bananas - my entire system is in a single .org file, I'm sorry I can't share it - it contains private stuff and I just never thought about separating and encrypting it, I don't want to accidentally put something in public portion of it. So, I have source blocks with headers such as:

    #+begin_src gitconfig :tangle ~/.gitconfig :tangle-mode (identity #o444)
       ... it contains my gitconfig values
    

    #+begin_src gitconfig :tangle (if (eq system-type 'gnu/linux) "~/.gitconfig" "no") :tangle-mode (identity #o444)
    

I have some other tricks like merging only the values I care about with the entire config template, for example for my terminal. Kitty's config template is self-documented, so I'd like to preserve all that, including the values I keep commented out, but I don't want having to include the entire template in my .org file, I only want k/v pairs I modify. What I do is that I run elisp functions on org-babel-tangle-finished-hook, one of them would force Kitty to generate config template, then grab the values from my config and merge them in there. Org-mode files can contain executable elisp, so my single org-mode file is not only declarative, but when needed it also uses imperative instructions. The simplicity of this is ingenious. The only remaining bottleneck for bootstrapping any new machine - VM, EC2, Desktop - Linux and Mac for me is to get a hold of Emacs, cloning my dotfile.org and running org-babel-tangle - usually takes less than two minutes.

- Dired for file management is superb. It's better than anything I ever used before. I have all the trinkets there - icons, vim-style navigation, subtrees, etc. I don't know if you know this already, but Dired stands for "DIRectory EDitor" - you can fully edit your directory structure, recursively, using whichever tools you have in Emacs - multiple cursors and such, you can edit it as if you're editing plain text, and when you commit, it unravels this new structure onto the filesystem - that's just nuts.

- > Text under cursor - what modes is that

For intelligently recognizing patterns in plain-text I use Embark, it's very cool and it's relatively straightforward to add new types and commands recognizing it. If you never used Embark, I highly recommend it - it adds context-aware actions - so if the cursor is at a url, it knows what to do with it. It works great with Consult and Vertico. Another alternative which I have never tried is Hyperbole. I just never explored it, because Embark I guess covers it for me, but maybe there are things there I'm unaware of, it's probably best to expire both.

- For searching on HN I use consult-hn, a package of my own. It's published on MELPA. There's a demo in the readme, where I show how I read HN and Reddit and do some other interesting things, like extracting all urls from a thread.

- > I could just do this `whatever | nvim`, right?

Well, the thing is - when you do that in Eshell, the stuff stays within the Emacs session, buffers remain as part of your workspace, you can append to existing buffers and the result is immediately available for searching, macros, etc. Your command output always remains a first-class citizen in your editing environment.

- For automatic color theme change I use circadian.el. It's a relatively simple package that utilizes Emacs' built-in solar calendar.

- > I used to manage my emails in mu4e

Long ago I got annoyed by inconsistencies in mu4e and switched to notmuch. I don't use email as much anymore as I used to, but notmuch for me works better for mailing list discussions. What I like about using email in Emacs is that I can link to any email in my notes, and can jump to it directly from my notes - which I also don't use a lot, but it's nice to have. I also have some customizations, like finding a given email and opening it in gmail in the browser, or identifying a given email in a mailing list and opening it in the web interface, etc.

- > I used to track time very well in org mode

Yeah, I don't do much of that anymore, except for pomodoros. Pomodoro technique is great and it lets me focus on specific tasks and track the time spent on each, but I have never used it for serious analyses. However, I still can if I ever need to do that.

- > I am a recovering reddit addict and don't use it anymore

Those fuckers shadowbanned my account of many years for no good reason, and now all my previous comments and posts are not publicly available. I tried to send appeal requests for weeks, every single day, but they seem to be going into a void. I used to be very active there, but now I realized those imbeciles just broke the whole idea of what makes Internet, and I don't use it much anymore.

- Presentations in org mode. I don't remember when I had to do it last time, but I had great success with org-reveal. There are a bunch of different ways to create presentations in Org-mode, reveal is just one of them.

- For testing database queries I still use org-mode source blocks, it looks something like:

    #+begin_src sql :engine mysql :dbhost 127.0.0.1 :dbport 6009 :database mydb
    ...

- > Come on, opening a terminal and typing `man` isn't that big of a deal, surely!

Yeah, of course, on the surface it isn't. But you know what I often do (because I can)? I would open a man page in Emacs, using either (man) or (woman) command - typically the second one on Mac. Then, I can select a region of text, narrow my buffer to it and just start typing LLM requests, e.g., "can you explain this part, etc..." That alone makes kind of a big deal for me, not to mention that it's all within the same environment - all the keybindings still work the same, I have imenu, narrowing, etc.

- > I didn't know emacs had a mode for this, that's interesting but I can't imagine it to be quite as smooth as the webUI is...

Ha, you have no idea. First of all, because it's once again, tightly integrated, I can immediately start translating - active region, word-at-point, my killring content, etc. I speak multiple languages and it's not so atypical for me to try to translate things in the midst of typing or reading text - the speed and the efficiency Emacs allows me is beautiful.

But that's not all. Check this out. I'm learning Spanish, alright? So when I want to translate something like "The colonel was born in 1939...", what does GTranslate do? It translates it into "El coronel nació en 1939", and that totally makes sense, right? But guess what? I really needed to see it like this: "El coronel nació en mil novecientos treinta y nueve", because, well, I'm still getting acquainted with the numbers. How would one do it in literally anything else, any other plugin - for Vim, for VSCode, etc? For VSCode, you'd probably have to talk to the maintainer of an existing extension, make PRs, or even make your own. In Vim, you'd have to rewrite an entire function. What did it take me? Like 15 minutes and a few lines of Elisp. Did I have to learn the internals of GTranslate API? No. Did I have to rewrite an entire function that sends the payload there? No! Here's what I did: Using the built-in profile I've identified the function that sends the payload, and advised it. I added an advising function that just before sending the payload, checks the text, finds a pattern, then sends that portion for processing, to the number-to-words function. Guess what? I couldn't even find implementation of such a function in Elisp, and I didn't have time to write my own. I simply delegated the task to the npm package. Hacky? Sure. Stupid? Well, maybe. Yet, it does work. Maybe shit ain't so stupid if thy shit works, eh? Tell me if such simplicity is ever possible in other editors.

- > LLM integration in emacs looks very interesting

Oh, once again, you have no idea. It's just beyond amazing. Using gptel, I can send LLM commands virtually from anywhere - like I'd be typing commands in Eshell and I can just ask an LLM for the proper options for, I dunno, docker-compose, or something. Right there, in-place.

That example alone is very illustrative of what makes Emacs such an amazing tool - the best of everything - you always have access to all the tools you can imagine - I can use spellchecking, thesaurus, translation and LLM while I want to type something in a git commit message, Jira comment, Slack thread, etc.

I'd be talking to someone on the phone, and they'd ask me to spell out some cryptic thing - like a ticket number - no problem, Emacs can help me here, I'd select it, and run (nato-region), it spells it out using NATO alphabet.

I need to quickly figure out the difference between two dates - no worries, built-in calendar has a way for it.

It's just really difficult for me to imagine any scenario, a use case that is text-related and Emacs can't help with for any reason.

Not long ago I wrote a command to OCR the content of my clipboard. Because I didn't want to distract my colleague when he was showing some stuff over Zoom. I didn't want to keep interrupting him with "hey, hold on, can you send me this url?", "wait a minute, I'm taking notes here...", etc.

> I never arrived

It's quite alright, even though it is never a destination but still a journey.

I hope I was able to open your eyes to how empowering Emacs can be. But hey, I'm a die-hard vimmer, I use evil-mode, and I do use Neovim too - it's a fine tool for certain things where Emacs can feel too big and too clunky.

I can recommend at least trying neovim, but I had a much easier transition than perhaps you will, since I used `evil-mode` in emacs ;) So I've been a primarily modal editor for 8 years, and actually don't remember any of the chorded commands from my initial days learning emacs. I took one thing from that time: putting CTRL where CAPS is, then I installed evil-mode and never looked back.

I will say as someone who was feeling the start of RSI, I do find vim's bindings to be a lot less painful than emacs chorded commands.

But, I don't know if a "switch" is in the cards for you, from what you've said, because of the Dvorak and that you'd be learning vim and modal editing at the same time. As I understand it, dvorak vimmers can either rebind everything to be in "the same place" to maintain the inherent layout comfort of vim, and lose the mnemonics (`dtp` delete to "p"), and then have to deal with a full rebind on top, or, they can rebind nothing to maintain mnemonics and reduce startup cost, but then have the layout be super wonky and un-ergonomic. Neither sound that pleasant to me. You're right, vim bindings are very qwerty focused.

Also I desperately miss the kill-ring and still hit my binding for it. There are "registers" in nvim and I bet I can find some plugin or write something in lua that will let me switch, on paste, between my "most recent yanks," but I haven't learned how to do that yet.

Macros are great in vim, I think just as powerful as emacs. Lua is also very powerful, but of course, nothing beats the fact that Emacs is a REPL of elisp that you can modify on the fly. Nvim so far as I understand it must reload to register LUA changes (you can still run lua to modify buffer contents though).

However, I do believe the nvim community is more talkative than the emacs one, and busier. Maybe this is because more content creators are vim/nvim-forward, than emacs? I know like, 2 emacs youtubers, and 10 vimmers, some of whom are super famous for other stuff unrelated to programming.

I agree with you on focusing more on unix-ish tools and staying in terminal. It's something that attracted me to nvim. I realized I had been learning a lot of basically one ecosystem, emacs, when instead I could be learning tools that are available on any unix-based machine. Of course you can install emacs on anything, even android, but you gotta install it and get it running. Plus I just feel a lot cooler piping things between unix commands :P

Anyway, for me, the transition was fine. I slapped on lazy.vim and have been basically 99% as productive at work as I was with emacs, only making a couple mistakes here and there. I love the default bindings lazy.vim came with and adjusted to them well. If you do want to try it out, I recommend lazy.vim if you're considering trying out one of the nvim ide packages.

I can't share my personal experience, because I never tried switching either to Dvorak or Colemak - I never conceived my typing speed to be a bottleneck - I type faster than I can think of words (but that might be because I'm not a native English speaker), but I've been a vim user for a very long time, and thus I've talked to many vimmers. I have heard several stories that switching to another layout wasn't incredibly difficult, but I suppose the experience would be very personal.

> Macros are great in vim, I think just as powerful as emacs.

Not quite. In Emacs, you can not only record and replay macros, they are fully editable entities.

Vim macros mostly are limited to sequential keystrokes, there's no vars, no if/then logic, no loops, there's no prompting for input, no data manipulation. From practical point these don't really matter, but what sets Emacs apart that you can record a keyboard macro and then fully edit the corresponding elisp code it translates to. Which also allows you to embed logic in a macro - you can inject Elisp evaluation directly during macro recording, which in practice allows you to do things like: "Loop through lines until you find a blank one" inside a macro.

> Maybe this is because more content creators are vim/nvim-forward, than emacs?

That might be true, most Emacs users don't even bother sharing their "secret" knowledge. Some interesting bits quietly sit, marinating in private repos for years, sometimes decades without ever making into a package.

One thing you might be missing here - there is a ton of Emacs Lisp out there. GitHub alone contains some enormous amount of Elisp. It's pretty mind blowing - I suspect there's more Elisp in the wild than Common Lisp and Clojure combined. And of course, I don't need to remind you that Elisp is not a general-purpose language. It's made for one and one objective only - to serve as a configuration language for Emacs, it doesn't get used in anything else.

Even with all the current and increasing popularity of Neovim, it will probably take a while to catch up with Emacs in terms of written code and solutions for it. Case in point - Org-mode. It's been around for a long time; it is an incredibly ingenious system. Alas, so many attempts to clone it to work in something else still haven't gotten too far.

btw, folks, if you have time, join our discussion today at 6PM Central Time https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx