emacs (from the Greek Everything-MACroS)

echo "emacs" > ~/.xsession thread. Blog about your computing philosophy, your config, your workflow, what computing you can and can't do or manage from within emacs, your instances of creative emacs artisanship and to-do list for your personal setup.

Spacemacs in da house. CS schooling did its work and killed my hobby for computers, now I want everything to just werk, and what I look for in emacs is an automatable environment that can be programmed to work for me with as less contact as possible with the computer. It shouldn't be surprising that I'm into python as well. I'm also offline most of the time so the included discoverable documentation is kinda better than pressing f1 to have my browser pop up and say "can't open program.sourceforge.com/about coz ur offline noob". Right now I'm seeing how much of my computing I can integrate into emacs, that's bittorrent, mpv, web browser, shell and things like that. I'll go out of emacs and take the mouse when it comes to media editing and design, gimp, ardour and krita are pretty great pieces of software that I don't think I'd be able to throw into emacs. For those, I'm working on a WM config (or maybe using rofi, dmenu or xbindkeys) to make use of the other thumb, on that AltGr key, for doing things outside of emacs like spacemacs does with the left thumb on the spacebar to do things within emacs. tl;dr I like what you can do with computers but I don't like interfacing with them (redshift, colmak, staning desks and things like that only go so far) so I try to automate my soykaf by throwing everyting into emacs, particularly spacemacs.

>>15514 Only software I found that could be actually used as a lab notebook: 1. org-mode for scheduling and keeping track of experiments. can embed results / images / links to other files. 2. integrate code for data processing and analysis (mainly R with ESS). 3. simple note taking and writing, add references with org-ref. 4. at the end it's one shortcut to compile down with latex for a report or presentation. Nothing else really compares. It's so outrageously better and more powerful than all the junk being peddled as an electronic lab notebook these days. >>15516 Same, only thing I'm missing is a (simple) way of drawing or making diagrams in emacs. Anyone got some tips for emacs on a mac? Have to use one at work unfortunately.

>>15516 You and I sound quite similar, although you're a bit ahead of me. I'm currently attempting to move everything into emacs with evil, I mostly program in scheme, and I use colemak mod-dh. >>15517 >Same, only thing I'm missing is a (simple) way of drawing or making diagrams in emacs. Folks apparently use artist mode and ditaa to acheive this. I was wondering if anyone has any experience using emacs-w3m. w3m is my browser of choice and I really want to migrate to emacs-w3m but it seems to have performance issues, typically taking something like 5 - 6 times as long to render a page as it would take normally in xterm. I was wondering if anyone could confirm or deny this on their system.

>>15514 Love/hate relationship. Irreplaceable, but fossilized. I use Emacs for all of my local text editing: markdown, common lisp, LaTeX, Scheme/Racket, writing emails with Mutt, even Java for my CS degree. I use M-x shell when I need a terminal for tasks related to the current file, otherwise I keep external programs away from Emacs. I also use Org Mode in a pop-up window (I can pull it up with a key command from anywhere on my computer, so I don't have to interrupt the flow of my work if I think of something to deal with later) for task management and certain text lists. Kind of like some other technologies, Emacs has absolutely retarded defaults and doesn't do a good job of intuitively providing the most common commands to new users. In general, my policy is to try to learn the commands for a new feature or plugin, but rewrite the keybindings if they don't make sense to me. I understand the reasons for Emacs' drawbacks, but I really, really, would like some of them to be fixed. It's like Common Lisp, where you have 30+ year users who won't budge positions on antiquated syntax or other things, because their workflow is so entrenched. Emacs could be so much more, but it's stuck with old soykaf. Pros to Emacs (minus the cliches like configurability): - It's FLOSS, all the associated benefits - It's faster than market-dominating text editors - Org mode is really useful to have while you're coding, built into the editor - most simple things can easily be figured out with some Googling or the help Cons: - Organization of the entire program is NOT intuitive, down to the terminology for extremely common things like text wrapping (auto-fill-mode). there are 100s of things like that I've experienced - it's customizable, but requires customization of things that should just have sane defaults. for instance, the "better-defaults" package fixes some really basic things that shouldn't have to be fixed. - poor security if you want to use plugins besides the default repos (even those I'm not very confident about) - I'm running out of energy to finish this but basically the "it works out of the box" design principle isn't there if you want to actually need to program with Emacs. And I understand some of the reasons for this, and the benefits of customizing things to your liking, but I've definitely wasted too much time setting up things that should already work

Hello everyone, I'm looking for a sane way to disable all colors everywhere in Emacs while still allowing monochrome emphasis features like bold, italics, underline, & invert on a whitelist basis. I find most of this sort of thing distracting but search, flyspell, paren-mode, & whitespace-mode are very helpful, so I would like to be able to use them. Anyway I tried (global-font-lock -1) but this broke whitespace-mode and left color in the minibuffer and in some minor modes, and I tried (push (cons 'tty-color-mode 'never) default-frame-alist) but this didn't do anything at all. Thanks for your help.

>>15701 I do not think your critique is all that valid. There is no reason to use emacs other than it is customizable. Since it is customizable, bad defaults are a non-issue. I mean, give how customizable emacs is, almost everything is a non-issue :) I would also like you to elaborate on "intuitively providing the most common commands." I had a couple of coworkers quit emacs saying copy-pasting was not intuitive. What they ment by intuitive was that the keys they are used are not the default keys in emacs. I am afraid people tend to conflate intuitiveness with familiarity. Now, if you read the intro, everything should be crystal clear. NOTHING in emacs should be familiar, because it comes from a different time and place than where most computing gets done. I dont think its fossilized, it moves slowly, but there is some progress with every new release. I can assure you my init files are not fossilized at all. I have also wasted too much time setting up my emacs. but I have also automated hundreds of hours of work. I think I have a positive balance now. and tinkering with my init files is way more fun than doing things that can be automated.

>>15823 I love emacs, it's one of my favorite works of software that i've ever used in my life. i don't think you are really countering >>15701 effectively at all. by your comments, I'm not really seeing what is inherent in customizability that makes it a defining characteristic. let's think about systems that are complete sandboxes which make absolutely no assumptions about how any user will interface with it. if every single keybinding is ~intended~ to be redefined for your preferences, what does that say about the system's design? i believe it says that the system is just a text buffer with a lisp api; that it has no ideology about its ergonomics and workflow. that it has no philosophy about programming and development cycles. that it has no idea about how the human hand and a keyboard can work harmoniously. let's not kid ourselves, you and i both know this to be completely incorrect when it comes to emacs; it has a very idiosyncratic and interesting ideology about how it wants used on a computer. therefore, customization is not the keystone feature of emacs, nor is it the motivating ideology of it. on the topic of keybindings and your coworkers, the emacs default keybindings are not liked by many users, and i'm inclined to believe that those who do like them are themselves entrenched in a particular way of thinking. anecdotally i know far more emacs users who have drastic redefinitions of keybinds (custom or evil) than i do users who use defaults, due to wrist strain and un-ergonomic hand movements. listen, i too have burnt tons of personal time on yak shaving my inits and researching how to achieve certain ways of working with it. but the reason i use it is not because it lets me change whatever i want. i use it because there is no other editor that can perform all of the functions of a full ide in such an extremely, shockingly performant manner. i like it because org mode is incredibly clever and useful (again, an ideology in its usage). i also like it because elisp is fun. the fact that it can be customized is an enabler, not the motivation.

>>15517 >>15618 I'd like to change my response concerning drawing diagrams in Emacs. I've been researching TeX and I've discovered a wonderful program called 'MetaPost' which lets you draw arbitrary reusable diagrams. It doesn't meet your 'simple' criterion necessarily, but because you can abstract types of diagrams it should be rather 'simple' to use once you have the basic forms established. I'm currently reading 'Computers and Typesetting: Volume C' (The MetaFont Book) for the purposes of creating a font and haven't found it particularly overwhelming.

>>15803 Try https://github.com/atykhonov/tao-theme-emacs

>>15858 That's pretty close to what I want. It might be that making my own theme would be the best way to go about it, perhaps I'll fork this one, thanks lain.

I use vim for everything and try to control every bit of software on my desktop and laptop with vim-like controls. For that I use the vimium-addon on chromium and have set up my .config/i3/config in such a way, that my WM is also controlled vim-like

>>15866 A lot of people (myself included) use emacs for this, and to provide a more integrated & programmable computing experience. Just Emacs with evil, & evil-collection, then you can access almost all of the standard Emacs goodness aswell as most things you might want to add with vim keybindings. This includes a webkit based browser, music player, irc client, mail client, pdf reader, window manager, etc. and all directly inside of Emacs.

>>15618 >I was wondering if anyone has any experience using emacs-w3m. w3m is my browser of choice and I really want to migrate to emacs-w3m but it seems to have performance issues, typically taking something like 5 - 6 times as long to render a page as it would take normally in xterm. I was wondering if anyone could confirm or deny this on their system. This seemed to be a issue with my OS's packaging of either emacs or w3m. While there is still some latency after switching it's not substantial enough to justify avoiding the browser.

>>15866 This is the real fight in the editor wars. Vim users try to make every other program behave like Vim whereas Emacsers want to integrate everything else into Emacs. >>15862 Please share your fork if you do customise it. I'm currently using Tao for exactly your reasons.

>>15914 >This is the real fight in the editor wars. Vim users try to make every other program behave like Vim whereas Emacsers want to integrate everything else into Emacs. I think this is certainly what Emacs has going for it, but I think rather than Vim users being disinterested in integration they're just more interested in simplicity and performance. >Please share your fork if you do customise it. I'm currently using Tao for exactly your reasons. Of course!

I had a fun idea this morning to have a single org file with all the configuration for my entire system on it with a elisp function to split that file into new files, tangle, correct permissions/owners, and then move them into their proper places. That way I could very quickly restabilish a new system if I need to, have very simple version control/backup, a good explanation of my reasoning for doing something which no doubt happened long ago, a single file/buffer to remember for all my settings, and the ability to render a single document on how I do my computing. I think most people do this with a shell script, multiple files, and in a illiterate style, so it'd be a interesting contast even if there isn't neccessarily a huge advantage.