When I started using Emacs, I didn't think I'd use it much except for org-mode, which was the reason I started learning it. Then, as my usage expanded, I didn't think I'd want to use it for anything beyond org-mode, programming, and core text editing functions. Certainly not email or any of that other foolishness. Flash forward a couple of years and here I am, looking into making Emacs into my actual X window manager [1] so that I finally use it for everything, period.<p>I recognize that the practical arguments in favor of doing this are limited at best. Sometimes people "Emacs evangelize" by talking about how living entirely within the program allows them to have one text editing paradigm for everything in their lives; even though that is indeed nice, non-users aren't wrong to be skeptical about the practical benefits, given the amount of effort that will probably be involved. The secret is that for many Emacs users, it's just plain fun -- hence the things shown in this article, and also EXWM.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm</a>
This reminds me of the story Steve Yegge told about Emacs powering Amazon's customer service for years:<p>> Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it.<p>> People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them.<p><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-Lisp" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...</a>
I once wrote a patch to Emacs to make it possible to build it as part of buildroot. The problem here is that buildroot does cross-compiling, and Emacs has no native support for cross-building. However, qemu was able to help by emulating the target arch at user-space level (I didnt even know this worked, very nice). I am not sure if that hack still works today, since the Emacs dumper was recently rewritten AFAIK.<p>Regarding Emacs being an universal UI platform, I wrote a metapost to emacs-devel to celebrate that fact very recently. Indeed, Emacs is the only platform I know which can be used to write programs which work on the terminal and with a GUI toolkit alike. I call that modality-independant.<p><a href="https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00286.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00...</a>
Hi, I'm the original author of the article.<p>I'm quite surprised to see this got posted and made it to the front page.<p>I'm a bit late to the party.<p>Don't hesitate to ask questions, though.
I have been a Vim user for as far as I can remember. Now I am transitioning to Emacs. I keep hearing that you can "live" in emacs but I can't seem to have that revelation, yet.<p>For example, I often find myself quit Emacs to jump to a different directory just to open a file. I think I am doing this wrong. I have tried Dire/Neotree but those are not providing enough convenience imo.<p>Do you you a workflow or setup to "live" in emacs? Note: I use pure Emacs and not spacemac or Doom.
I recently saw a TikTok from a (I believe) non technical Mac user describing how to use the Doctor/Eliza bot to save on therapy. I was pretty impressed!
Just to give an alternative perspective, I use emacs almost exclusively in the terminal through SSH. It is very convenient to be able to SSH into a host running emacs daemon and immediately have access to my existing session doing everything from irc and email, to editing scripts and tex files. X11 forwarding would be too sluggish and things like tramp don't keep you connected to irc. I do accept though that emacs in the GUI is probably how the majority of users are using it, so not moaning, just giving perhaps an alt use case.