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Comment by logicprog | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of a more modern Emacs that uses the full power of Common Lisp a lot, but I worry I'd miss a lot of features. Does Lem have org mode, a good LSP system, something like projectile, and the ability to display images and GUI buttons and such? And most importantly, does it have an evil mode with doom/spacemacs style leader key support?

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Take a look at the GitHub readme[1]: “Lem supports other programming languages thanks to its built-in LSP client. You can choose between an Emacs and a Vim mode.”.

Although I wish they’d explore the Kakoune/Helix style of editing too, which I think will become a major competitor to Vim (and I personally prefer it myself).

However, I am also worried that Lem won’t gain any traction because the Emacs ecosystem is just too vast and has too many killer apps (Magit, OrgMode, Dired, the amazing built-in Help/Documentation - to name a few).

But it may very well become a modern Emacs alternative if they focus on better user experience, leave behind some idiosyncrasies of the past and create great alternatives or ports of Emacs’s most appreciated plugins. There is a great opportunity in starting from scratch, but I guess it is also a huge challenge to compete against decades of development, a huge community and a rich ecosystem.

[1]: https://github.com/lem-project/lem

Thank you! I actually found my way to its website and then downloaded, compiled, and briefly tried it after I posted this comment and discovered things for myself. It looks like it doesn't support a leader key so that's a pretty big blocker to me using it for even basic editing, but you're correct the bigger reason I won't use it is because it doesn't have the truly incredible emacs ecosystem.

Yes, I mean, I use all a lot of those things (haven't caught the org-mode bug tho, it's too incompatible with my attention-deficit...) but to be frank a lot of the stuff I jam into emacs (vertico, treemacs, projectile, all-the-icons etc) is in fact to get around UX issues with stock emacs.

I'd hope that a fresh emacs from scratch would just ship with something close to what those provide.

In the end my biggest beef with emacs these days is just the terrible lack of multithreading, bringing long pause and startup times. Most of my problems in the past have been rectified. Emacs 29 is really quite delightful and much easier to manage than ever before.

> magit

Lem has a wip Git mode: see status, stage files/hunks, commit, interactive rebase, basic hg and fossil support. (I added it)

It's WIP and undocumented yet (don't worry I'll document when ready, I love documentation ;) ) Use

   M-x lisp-eval-string RET (ql:quickload :lem/legit)

then

   M-x legit-status or C-x g

> Dired

Lem has a directory mode with some actions: sort (name, mtime, size), mark by regexp, rename, delete, find files…)

to answer for readers: yes:

Lem has a LSP system,

something like projectile (M-x project-find-file, M-x project-switch etc, still inferior but nearly there and easy to extend)

images: yes (the SDL2 version). It can display games (M-x tetris, it can run a real game engine)

evil: great vim layer, no leader key. I didn't see a discussion about that, you should come and ask ;)

and no:

GUI buttons: that's not a UI choice I guess, so no

no org-mode support yet, although it has an Emacs RPC, so the idea is to use it to bring org-mode.

not asked, but good to know:

it has a wip Git mode: see status, stage files/hunks, commit, interactive rebase, basic hg and fossil support. (I added it)

It has LSP, but not the other things, really, from what I saw. You'd miss a lot. No idea about the modal editing, not my thing.

Of course, it could be a foundation to build on, I dunno.

EDIT: yes after watching the presentation, it has a modal/vi type mode

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