precompute

It uses the LLM favourite left border decoration. Pass.

This is fixable if you introduce another abstraction layer: a small split kb :)

0/$ doesn't matter when they're both one layer down.

You're right. Using vanilla emacs as an IDE means configuring evil, eglot and window management. You can use doom/spacemacs but they hinder future customizability because you'll be fighting against your config and doom's upstream changes.

Conjure looks great but IMO it's not a 1:1 substitute for tight coupling between editor functionality and internal tooling. If neovim gets 80% of the way to a productive coding setup then emacs helps hone that last 20%.

I wrote the following in response to a comment that was deleted before I could post my reply.

> Do you have any examples of these Emacs shortcuts that simplify your life?

> I tried using Emacs with Evil but I was just using it as a somewhat laggier Vim.

Learning how to use prefix arguments and writing interactive functions have been very useful. Whenever I want functionality that's just a little different than what Emacs provides, I can always write a function and bind it.

Emacs also comes with regional undo/redo and has great undo tree visualization plugins.

Another feature I've come to appreciate recently is the built-in per-frame and per-window tabs. I moved from using separate frames to using tabs. Tabs inside tabs lets you visit many files at once while keeping visual clutter to a minimum. (In Emacs parlance, a "frame" is the window your WM handles, and a "window" is a visible child of that frame)

Also, outline-minor-mode is really nice for annotating files with headings. You can define custom regexp and sidestep collaboration restrictions and quirky formatting.

The calc is super-useful.

file-local variables are useful. directory-local variables are incredible, they set up custom environments for all folders at the same level / below them. Imagine doing a (let) but over a directory structure.

Vim has default C-p completion. Emacs has hippy-expand, which IMO is better. Some glue around hippie-expand can also make it work with a drop-down completion interface like corfu.

Some examples:

In tab-bar-mode the tab nav functions don't wrap around. So I wrote a small wrapper around the tab nav functions. It's about 10 lines of elisp and handles forward, backward and tab creation. For neovim this would've been much more difficult. In emacs it involves basic functions: interactive, let and cond.

I have a small package that opens new scratch buffers and inherits the major-mode of the buffer it was invoked from. Very useful to write temporary code. One shortcut and it always works.

I have a function that opens all dired selected files in a new tab/frame. Great for organization. Basically you open dired, mark files and run the commands, and they're open in a new tab, and all marks are unmarked. So you can very quickly structure a project for work.

Another function that moves forward/backward to the next logical file. Saves me a trip to find-file / dired.

I have a monorepo that I code in and it has different folders for different languages / folders. Because it's a monorepo, file completion shows ALL files in the monorepo. And running a LSP server also starts at the monorepo root, which is not ideal. With directory-local variables, I can set a custom file (like .gitignore) to denote a repo root. So emacs (and LSP servers via Eglot) will consider the presence of that file the repo root and make it work like an independent repo. ((nil . ((project-vc-extra-root-markers . (".gitignore")))))

(I've been using Emacs longer than I used vim, so my experience is skewed. I also used it as a laggy vim (Doom Emacs) for the first few years, and then moved to a custom config, which helped me really understand what was happening under the hood)

Perhaps there is a vim plugin for each one of these; but I certainly wouldn't be able to do ALL of these by myself in vim! Also because many of these are built-in emacs functions, they're guaranteed to be supported for a very long time.

You should try using evil again. I use it full-time and 90% of my non-web-browsing work is in Emacs (the other 9% is in the terminal). It's very stable and IMO more full-featured than plain vim. In time you'll pick up some native emacs shortcuts to simplify your life but you'll still have modal editing everywhere. Best of both worlds.

> Then, I simply grow tired of staring at the same thing every day.

Use different mixed-pitch fonts for different directories. Use a different header/modeline.

Emacs is a necessity for me. I can't function without it. Moving functionality off emacs to the web browser or another clunky UI application is a straight downgrade.

> My company was recently acquired. My company was currently going through a platform modernization. The company that acquired us is also going through a platform modernization. They acquired us specifically to use our new platform. Our platform isn't even fully built yet. I'm doing 100% of the coding. I'm tasked with finishing the platform, migrating all my companies existing customers to the new platform, migrating the new company's existing customers to new platform all while continuing to sell to new customers. The company is pushing AI-first EVERYTHING. I'm not allowed to hire. The new company had 20+ people working on their platform. I'm now expected to do it with 5. I had to fight for those 5. They thought I should be able to do it with 1 engineer. They are cutting people 30% annually over the next 2 years. 200+ employees to ~60-70. And they are asking me if I'll be ready in Q1 or Q2 next year. Our product person gave AI the legacy code bases to generate a report of all features and gaps. I supposed to go through an HTML file that is easily 100+ pages long and a spreadsheet with 30 tabs and hundreds of rows each. I pushed back that it's not fit for human consumption and let's start with high level gaps and they're acting like I'm not a team player or something. It's ridiculous.

This is crazy. LLM usage has somehow convinced people that it's $999 for not just knowing where to place one nail, but for knowing where to place an almost infinite number of them. Disingenuous marketing by the big players does not help either.

it's painful to read.

Zune'd

My Zune 30's still kicking! Ipods aren't.

Nice, a model for google-fu.

Uniting children with the machine god, what could ever go wrong?

Yes! Nintype is incredible and is the only reason I refuse to upgrade my phone.

Impressive. It loads so quickly! What was this made with?

Awesome.

The big problem here is that devices can not be re-registered. It's a mean move from Amazon, and will make it difficult to re-enable extra features. However, those devices have multiple jailbreak methods available, so there's really no loss if you can take that extra step. All books are presumably still available on the kindle app / website, and because you already bought them you can pirate them.

Kindles have the best text rendering (imo), and calibre can be used to sideload books. My PW1 had stellar text rendering. My next kindle, Kindle 10 had a lower PPI but decent text rendering. I now use a PW5 and the text is flawless.

Kindle's UI does suck, though. Very slow and the keyboard is glacial. Still, page turns are zippy and it collects highlights in a central file, which is very handy.

Yes! This is the way. https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian/

Yes, emacs is equally performant in GUI and TUI. And frames can be opened in both GUI and TUI on the same socket.

For me, TUI is a dealbreaker because:

- No mixed-pitch support: I use mixed-pitch fonts in org-mode buffers and in outline faces in prog-mode buffers. And fonts are just plain nicer on the GUI, and it's much better to look at.

- No SVG support: (I might be wrong about this) I have a custom modeline with SVG artifacts and the artifacts fail silently on the TUI

- Keybind conflicts: I am not used to accounting for the terminal's keybinds. Also, I use xfce4-terminal, which does not support the Hyper modifier (which I use extensively).

Emacs has globally shared buffer state amongst the frames that share the same "base frame" (no idea what this is called) or the same socket (could be wrong here).

Anyway, you can start N emacs instances and they can all have individual buffer states.

Emacs is not primarily a TUI program (although it does have a TUI with the -nw). The TUI version of emacs lacks visual customizability and introduces unnecessary overhead (terminal!). Use the GUI.

Text insertion lag is something I haven't experienced since 2019. Config issue?

project-find-file might be slow because of low gc-cons-threshold. I know consult gets around this by temporarily raising the threshold. These days, you can use the feature/igc branch to make these operations faster (although they are pretty fast anyway).

If you think emacs lacks <fundamental feature X>, think again!

>a lot of cruft

Like what? Emacs is written in C and there are ports of it out there (all half-abandoned). Emacs, the way it exists, works very well.

Startup time does not matter, use the daemon. Opening a new frame is ~instantaneous.

I practically live in Emacs and it's not slow at all. It's very zippy, and my setup isn't the lightest!

There's a new branch (feature/igc) with incremental garbage collection (via MPS) that makes routine actions faster. I've been using it and it has been incredibly stable and has completely eliminated stutters (which used to happen very infrequently, but were present). Also, to me, it seems like it improves latency. The cursor feels more responsive.

Wow, that's so cool!

Yes. And once you have the unlock code, you can re-lock the bootloader and unlock it as many times as you want to.

This article is a portrait of three Sociopathic Zoomers : the twitter poster, the cheating app guy and the teenage scammer. All three are net negatives to society.

Depends on the amount of effort you put into them, and the kind of work you do on the computer. Regular users should stick to regular keyboards. Power users (like programmers) can spend a few months with a split keyboard and customize their layout and come out the other side with a personal brain-computer interface (fingers + keyboard).

I agree. I've had the same experience. Moved to Colemak on my Corne and can still type ~60WPM on a normal qwerty keyboard.

Many people (including myself) use small split keyboards and are very happy with them. You don't need a kinesis to avoid wrist movement, DIY keyboards (like the corne) work just as well.

I moved from a regular keyboard (freestyle hunt-and-peck) to a corne (touch typing), ditching qwerty for Colemak Mod-DH. It took me six months to really get comfortable with it. At month four I was almost ready to kick off the training wheels (the training wheels here being the layout printout I looked at while typing).

Five years later, I have no regrets. It's easily the best thing I've done for productivity, ever. My fingers are my BCI. Effortless.

I keep the two halves far apart: wider than my shoulders so my arms are angled outwards and my chest is up and I'm sitting up straight. And I modified the keymap to work just the way I intuitively expect it to.

I can still type ~60wpm on qwerty on a standard keyboard. My phone is qwerty and I have no issues typing on it. Muscle memory of my posture and arm position makes this possible.

This is crazy!

RIP.