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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

I've found the latest revisions of Emacs to be incredibly ugly, and I have to turn off most of the crap (menus, etc.) to be comfortable.

Stock Emacs also seems to want to open up a minibuffer when I've told it "please just edit this set of files". It's also got some idea that I want to to suspend the shell I launched it from (er, no, not ever).

The argument I see on forums is: "Well, the right way to use Emacs is to just start it and then never leave, so you only have to get that stuff out of the way once."

So I spend 30 minutes figuring out the right elisp stuff to disable so I can get rid of the crapware.

Crapware in Emacs. What's next, AOL sponsorship splash screens?

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This is the same problem I've run into. I want to try living in Emacs, because there's pretty much a mode or package for everything, but a few of the basics don't work quite right to a point where that is usable yet. For instance, terminal emulation. There's terminal mode and eshell, but if you have even a mildly complicated PS1, all you get are control codes everywhere. Just strange, off-kilter behavior.

At this point, I'd be happy if I could just embed iTerm2 in a buffer and be done with it.

Have you tried "M-x ansi-term" ?

Yup. It only looks slightly less weird than eshell or regular term mode. Still makes my ZSH prompt look screwy and still causes strange breakage with apps (iotop was completely unusable, for instance, as was anything ncurses based)

If you prefer a more vim-like workflow (i.e. jumping in and out of your editor from your shell), a good solution is to fire up emacs in daemon mode to run in the background, and then connect to it using emacsclient.

I automatically run

  emacsclient --daemon

when my OS boots up.

In my .zshrc and .bashrc files, I use the aliases

  alias e='emacsclient -t'
  alias vi='emacsclient -t'

to give me quick access to emacs from the shell.

I'm not sure if this addresses your problems entirely, but it does keep you from having to deal with all of the crap that loads on startup.

UniPress Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs aka Soft Hoarder Emacs) had a VI emulation mode, that when you went :q, switched you back into a shell buffer that had its mode lines hidden, with all the keyboard bindings set so you couldn't tell you were in Emacs.

The only vi command I know is :q!

Earlier this week I was using ed(1) to edit a conf file, because (as the parent says) I only know one vi command :-)

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