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Comments (134)

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  mesrik
  "Is anyone still using emacs?"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
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  gentooflux
  This stuff all looks great, I can't wait to upgrade to 31 and then forget about all of it and just keep using Emacs the same way I have been for the past 20 years, /again/
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  jerf
  "Is anyone still using emacs?"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.
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  jlouis
  If you do any kind of serious work, you need a text editor. Emacs is still one of the best around. It's fast. It's configurable. And it's under your control. You won't suddenly find your text editor "upgraded" with tons of new features you never asked for. It's all opt-in.
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  bryanlarsen
  Systems like Emacs that are hyper-configurable via a text file seem tailor made for modern LLM's. If you've got a little bit of Emacs experience but bounced off of it because the learning curve was too steep I highly recommend diving back in with your agent. Agents are really good at setting up and maintaining your .emacs/init.el.
• xenophonf
  > Tree-sitter that just worksHallelujah 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 That's csh, BTW, just like the Founding Fathers intended.
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  xedrac
  I'm happy to see these improvements. One thing that has always been annoying with Emacs is how much configuration is required to get a modern editor going. Things like Doom Emacs, and Spacemacs try to solve that problem, but both feel far removed from vanilla emacs. I wish Emacs came with several presets so with a single line, you could transform the editor to different base points. For example, most devs want treesitter highlighting and LSP enabled by default. Why not have a preset like (preset-base-ide-1), so we don't need 200 lines of configuration before we can function? Instead we could build off of a much closer starting point.
• mark_l_watson
  Reading Rahul's post I got excited to build Emacs 31 from source, but reality occurred and I decided to wait for the release. I also like his articles on setting up Emacs.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
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  Snoddas
  I realize I've missed a lot.Someone should write an Emacs guide for people who haven't meaningfully touched their .emacs since the early 2000s
• scoops_
  Wow, auto install treesitter grammars, editable xref, transposing window layouts, speed bar as a side window in frame, I had no idea any of these things were coming and were all some passing thoughts I’ve had in the last few weeks “it would be cool if this was supported OOTB”. Some dreams do come true!
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  asimovDev
  back in 2nd year of university I remember thinking that vim is complicated so i went with Emacs. Now after using vim for couple years , I can't imagine going to Emacs and learning it. The availability of vim emulation in majority of text editors and IDEs has been a lifesaveralthough 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
• dschrempf
  Emacs is the best. Thanks a lot for writing this up!
• jcgrillo
  It's so refreshing to see emacs just sticking to its guns and getting solidly, steadily better over the years. Inspirational, even. This is how software should be. Can't wait for all the tree-sitter improvements!
• AlphaGeekZulu
  I am always a little bit puzzled with the versions. I use Emacs from Snap on Ubuntu.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.
• mfld
  Very cool! Looking forward to try out the xref and markdown features. The latter becomes increasingly important since the developer community at large seems to disagree with org-mode being the superior syntax...
• arikrahman
  Excited to try out the native frame transposition this update and how it plays with pgtk
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  dosisking
  "Is anyone still using emacs?"I'd like to, but there is currently a RAM shortage
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  pdyc
  I have been using Emacs for more than a decade, and I was always excited about the features. But with AI, something has changed. I no longer type/edit that much. Recently, LSP stopped working, and I was completely oblivious to it for about a week. Earlier, something like this would have been a major annoyance.
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  slyrus
  Have they fixed MacOS startup performance yet? ISTR some post about why faster CPUs were making emacs even slower on startup. Seems to have gotten worse over the years.
• tmtvl
  Nice to know sr-speedbar can finally be retired. It works fine, but fewer external packages means simpler config.
• bogometer
  >treesit-auto-install-grammarSweet. GLP1 for my .emacs!
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  bryanlarsen
  "Is anyone still using emacs?"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.
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  mediumsmart
  30.2 is as far as I am willing to go. Happy travels.
• anon
  undefined
• RahulMJ
  Thanks for sharing, frou_dh! Author here btw :)
• whacked_new
  I recently sifted through a bunch of tagged entries in a text file, where each entry had a json array of image names, but the images resided on a remote server. I basically wanted a program that could detect if the cursor was on an image name, and display it on the right.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
• jmclnx
  Thanks for your work.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-wxawThe 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.
• DonHopkins
  It's nice to hear the emacs terminal emulator has gotten some love, after all the controversy about the nasty language that used to be in its source code, which rms moved out to a separate file after somebody complained.Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without it:https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/open-source-with-profanity-in...https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621699DonHopkins 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 Note to the gentle readers: "wa12id" stands for "with a 12 inch dildo".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 AMIn 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.elOf 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 AMIn 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
• Nikhil37475
  [flagged]
• huflungdung
  [dead]