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. 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.

Tree-sitter that just works

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

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

kill-region-dwim fixes a decades-old papercut. Set it to 'emacs-word and hitting C-w with no active region kills a word backwards instead of signalling an error.

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)

although the brief time I used Magit I was enamored I gotta say. I tried lazygit recently and it evoked the same feeling I had when trying Magit for the first time

There's a bajillion ways to do this, some might even involve writing an html file and launching a remote server and tunneling and using a browser and what not. But no! ChatGPT wrote 20 lines of elisp code. I add a tramp basepath, open the text file, and got exactly what I needed. Need any behavior changes, callbacks, transformations? Modify, eval expression, new behavior!

I asked ChatGPT what other system I can use to achieve the same effect. The best answer it gave was neovim. No, neovim can't do that with the same degree of ease.

Disappointing and amazing at the same time.

The drawback of the emacs approach in my case is the tramp latency. To speed things up we'd want to add prefetch and that's gonna be much more than 20 lines and C-x e

treesit-auto-install-grammar

Sweet. GLP1 for my .emacs!

I have to use the pgtk channel, because Wayland.

pgtk/stable is 30.2, pgtk/edge is 32.0.50. Version 31 is not even offered on snap, in none of the channels. I am running on edge (32.0.50) with no problems.

I use emacs --daemon instead of tmux inside my agent sandbox for session permanence and portability. A full editor rather than a layer between me and my editor. I can even waypipe the client windows if I want mouse support.

Emacs is a fine weapon. And one that grows with you over the years of honing it to perfection. Nothing else compares.

I'd like to, but there is currently a RAM shortage

Please, if you have something to do with Emacs, can you review this for NetBSD and OpenBSD when using gtk3:

https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/1621-emacs-30-wxaw

The issue was traced to library xinput2, when compiled with '--without-xinput2' the issue does not occur. But I do not know if that is something that Emacs can address.

If you've ever built a three-window layout and then wished the editor pane were on the other side, these do the job and keep every buffer in place while they're at it.

I built a tmux like buffer manager. So I can just pick a window, press Alt-F#, and switch that pane over to whatever buffer I want. It's super easy to even display the same buffer twice but in different panes.

If you're using one without the other you're going to have a bad time.

If I want to change layouts I just close panes down to one and then open it up in the configuration I like. Then I just switch to each pane and Alt-F# the correct content into it.

Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without it:

https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/open-source-with-profanity-in...

https://smackernews.com/item/36621699 HN

DonHopkins on July 6, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Open source code with profanity in comments is sta...

The original terminal emulator terminal.el in gnu emacs, written by mly (Richard Mlynarik), was particularly salty. I finally tracked down a copy, but it looks like somebody complained and in 1990 it was begrudgingly cleaned up a bit, so some of the worst stuff was moved out into a separate file called term-nasty.el for posterity (you, here, now), so as not to give "in to the pressure to censor obscenity that currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US" (oh, Richard <3 ):

https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emac...

1990-08-26 Richard Stallman (rms@mole.ai.mit.edu)

* terminal.el: Move possibly offensive comments to term-nasty.el.

https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li...

[...]

    ;; disgusting unix-required shit
    ;;  Are we living twenty years in the past yet?

    (defun te-losing-unix ()
      nil)

    ;; (A version of the following comment which might be distractingly offensive
    ;; to some readers has been moved to term-nasty.el.)
    ;; unix lacks ITS-style tty control...
    (defun te-process-output (preemptable)
      ;;>> There seems no good reason to ever disallow preemption
      (setq preemptable t)

              ;; I suppose if I split the guts of this out into a separate
              ;;  function we could trivially emulate different terminals
              ;; Who cares in any case?  (Apart from stupid losers using rlogin)

                                     (?\C-b . te-backward-char)
                                     ;; should be C-d, but un*x
                                     ;;  pty's won't send \004 through!
                                     ;; Can you believe this?

                                     ;; Did I ask to be sent these characters?
                                     ;; I don't remember doing so, either.
                                     ;; (Perhaps some operating system or
                                     ;; other is completely incompetent...)

                         ;;-- Not-widely-known (ie nonstandard) flags, which mean
                         ;; o writing in the last column of the last line
                         ;;   doesn't cause idiotic scrolling, and
                         ;; o don't use idiotische c-s/c-q sogenannte
                         ;;   ``flow control'' auf keinen Fall.
                         "LP:NF:"
                         ;;-- For stupid or obsolete programs
                         "ic=^p_!:dc=^pd!:al=^p^o!:dl=^p^k!:ho=^p=  :"
                         ;;-- For disgusting programs.
                         ;; (VI? What losers need these, I wonder?)
                         "im=:ei=:dm=:ed=:mi:do=^p^j:nl=^p^j:bs:")))

              (setq te-process
                    (start-process "terminal-emulator" (current-buffer)
                                   "/bin/sh" "-c"
                                   ;; Yuck!!! Start a shell to set some terminal
                                   ;; control characteristics.  Then start the
                                   ;; "env" program to setup the terminal type
                                   ;; Then finally start the program we wanted.
                                   (format "%s; exec %s"
                                           te-stty-string
                                           (mapconcat 'te-quote-arg-for-sh
                                                      (cons program args) " ")))))

    ;;;; what a complete loss

https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li...

    ;;; term-nasty.el --- Damned Things from terminfo.el
    ;;; This file is in the public domain, and was written by Stallman and Mlynarik

    ;;; Commentary:

    ;; Some people used to be bothered by the following comments that were
    ;; found in terminal.el.  We decided they were distracting, and that it
    ;; was better not to have them there.  On the other hand, we didn't want
    ;; to appear to be giving in to the pressure to censor obscenity that
    ;; currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US.
    ;; So we decided to put the comments here.

    ;;; Code:

    These comments were removed from te-losing-unix.
      ;(what lossage)
      ;(message "fucking-unix: %d" char)

    This was before te-process-output.
    ;; fucking unix has -such- braindamaged lack of tty control...

    And about the need to handle output characters such as C-m, C-g, C-h
    and C-i even though the termcap doesn't say they may be used:
    ;fuck me harder
    ;again and again!
    ;wa12id!!
    ;(spiked)

    ;;; term-nasty.el ends here

Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty:

https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m...

Noah Friedman, Aug 3, 1992, 4:54:20 AM

In article <15i2n9...@hal.com> wood...@hal.com (Nathan Hess) writes:

In article <FRIEDMAN.9...@nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, friedman@gnu (Noah Friedman) writes:

>It's by no means necessary, but it's funny.

Along the same lines, look at lisp/terminal.el

Of course, terminal.el is actually useful, albeit not terribly powerful.

(and terminal.el is pretty mild compared to some of the other things I've seen written by mly. :-))

Incidentally, a lot of terminal.el has been rewritten in version 19.

Too bad... I liked all the variable names and comments in the original.

Jamie Zawinski, Aug 5, 1992, 12:40:38 AM

In the FSF-distributed Emacs 19, the obscenities (will) have been stripped from terminal.el, though they are preserved in a file called term-nasty.el, to avoid appearing to bow to the censors.

In Lucid GNU Emacs, terminal.el will remain as nasty as it ever was.

-- Jamie "Truth, Justice, and the Fucking First Amendment" Zawinski