> I'm curious what emacs users are doing these days.
8 years user here so still an emacs noobie, but I switched to nvim two months ago and haven't opened emacs in a month. Just slapped on lazy.vim and have been toggling the different AI tools in LazyExtras.
I do find the ecosystem a lot better in nvim and it seems the community around nvim is more publicly engaged with new AI tooling - check out ThePrimeagen for example.
> 8 years user here so still an emacs noobie, but I switched to nvim
I don't know man, whenever I see comments like this, I just don't get it - there's just no "switching" for me personally to anything, like ever, I just don't even see the possibility for it.
The question that always gets me is like: "were you just using it like ... I don't know to edit text? That's all you've done with it?..."
I have no idea how would I be able to do my things in anything else, whatever that is - Nvim, Sublime, Helix, etc.
- How would I control video playback from my editor while taking notes?
- How would I annotate PDFs?
- Or, create and manage Anki cards - my flashcards are just my notes, they don't require a different medium to exist.
- Or how would I test APIs - I don't need to use stuff like Postman - all my endpoint investigations are in my notes. Documented and perfectly reproducible.
- How would I manage my dotfiles? I use Org-babel for it and it makes my entire system immutable - is it better than Nix? I dunno, it just works and it's simple.
- What would I use for file management? I just wrote a wrapper that uses rsync to move large files around, how would I ever do anything like this in other than Emacs? How would I mark all the files that are over 1GB, older than three months and match a given regexp?
- In Emacs, I can move my cursor to a piece of plain text like "RFC 959", "SAC-28410", or "my-org/some-service#182" and immediately start reading shit - it intelligently recognizes that the first one is an RFC document, another is a Jira ticket and the third one is a Pull-request on GitHub.
- I can type a single query and simultaneously search for it on Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, GitHub, Hacker News or my own browser history, and I wouldn't even know how to do that in something that's not Emacs.
- In Emacs I can type a shell command and pipe results into a buffer, or pipe the content of a buffer to a shell command.
- In Emacs, my color theme changes depending on time of the day, because Emacs has built-in lunar and solar calendars.
- How would I read and manage my email in Helix?
- How would I track time? Clock in/out of tasks, generate time reports, do pomodoros?
- How would I search, browse and read Hacker News and Reddit?
- How would I create presentations?
- How would I test database queries?
- How would I manage Docker containers?
- How would I read man pages?
- How do I translate text?
- And how would I interact with LLMs?
...
Nope, there's no "switching" for me. It's just not possible. My entire life is woven into this text-based operating system. My thoughts, my work, my communications, my entertainment - they all exist as interconnected plain text that I can grep, link, transform, and version control. Every keystroke I've memorized, every workflow I've perfected, every piece of data that references another - it would take years to rebuild this in whatever there might be, and I'd still be left with a pale imitation. Emacs isn't just where I edit text; it's where I live.
I envy your level of emacs knowledge! I did a lot of things in it, but not as many as you: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/my-emacs-environment/ I really wish I had finished my blog post I'm working on right now about my new life stack that no longer involves emacs, it'd contain all the info I'd like to convey here.
Looking at your list, I guess what it came to for me is that getting an excellent UX for any one of those given tasks is only possible by using a tool made for that job. Probably, I can get a very good experience using Emacs, or maybe even excellent, but it would take a lot of time for me to tweak a plugin or write my won.
Video playback: Are you playing your youtube or jellyfin videos in Emacs? Well, that's pretty cool, I just have a firefox tab open for one or the other, on a second screen. If I want to pause or skip, I `META-l` to that window on my second screen (i3wm) and use vimium bindings or the native player bindings to interact with it.
Annotate PDFs: I don't do this anymore. I used to hand-annotate in various tablets as an experiment, but in the end all my notes got digitized to a note taking application anyway (org mode, previously) so I just highlight things, handwrite notes when needed in a notebook, and then summarize them in a note taking application (or write them there directly).
Anki cards: I used to do this in emacs as well. Now I don't use anki at all anymore. I didn't find any improvement in my life, conversations, or blog posts from memorizing all these facts (and this includes memorizing words in my Mandarin learning journey). Instead all I seemed to be doing was exhausting what little learning energy I had on "the dreaded flashcards." Plus it was tedious to write and maintain them, even though it was happening right there in the same org file I used to take these notes.
I'd be curious to learn more about your API testing setup, that sounds very cool! At work, our API is served via FastAPI and there's swagger docs automatically available that I can browse in a web browser if I want, or I just in nvim `SPC f f` to open a fuzzy file finder and find the model definition I want and look at the endpoint directly, or I can do the same to find the kubb-generated react hook, or typescript model, for the endpoint. For other projects, I guess I browse the API docs in a web browser.
I've never heard of using org-babel for managing dotfiles, that's a cool idea! I just have them in `~/.configs/` which is a git repo that I mirror to a private github repo.
Re: file management: I do the same but just using either `mini-files` in nvim, or, just some combination of gnu tools in a terminal. If I need a script I usually write one in python or bash. Being able to do so in lisp sounds pretty cool, though.
Text under cursor - what modes is that? That's pretty cool. I just browse jira tickets and pull requests in a web browser. I've never found desktop apps, terminal wrappers, etc, to be as good as just whatever a given company is shipping for their webapp (e.g. I tried managing github PRs in magit using that magit-forge thing but didn't find the experience that great compared to github's webapp).
That is a very cool mode you have for searching, I think I saw something like that on reddit once, but my thought on it is the same now as it was then - why wouldn't I do that but on google.com or search.brave.com, both of which already search wikipedia, google, youtube, github, and hacker news? I can type the same into the address bar of my browser and it'll do the same but also search my web history.
Piping shell commands into a buffer is indeed very cool. You know much more about the terminal than me, I can tell. However naively I could just do this `whatever | nvim`, right?
I saw your comment about the color theme change, that's so sick and I admire you for setting that up. For me, just `vscode-default-high-contrast` was fine 100% of the time I had emacs open, or in nvim `kanagawa-dragon` is fine as well. I don't knock you for having a changing color theme, I just don't really see the point for me.
I used to manage my emails in mu4e and it was fine, but after getting fed up with html emails not rendering correctly, or send email failing silently occasionally and not realizing it, or missing emails for some weird reason, I let go and just switched to thunderbird. I miss having 100% keyboard interaction with email, but thunderbird gets it all done reliably: reply-all, CC, BCC, archive, whatever. I may try out mutt one day though.
I used to track time very well in org mode and that is an extremely useful feature. I thought it was very cool to send to-the-minute invoices to my clients. I would generate time reports and have them added to my `org-roam-daily` entries. So much interesting data! Then I realized, for my own journal, it was an overwhelming amount of data that was basically useless to me, and for my clients, they didn't give a shit, they'd pay me either way, so I started just roughly estimating my hours based on start/end times and that was good enough, got me paid basically the same amount, and took me less time and effort. I do keep a hobonichi techo journal where I annotate the week-view with a general overview of what I get up to hour to hour which is nice to keep me on task and make me quickly realize if I am addicted to a new book and spending too much time reading it.
As for searching reddit, I am a recovering reddit addict and don't use it anymore, though I used to just use it in firefox with ad blocker and using reddit's "old" mode. Hacker news I'm also addicted to and try to avoid using it too much, but again, I just use it in a web browser. Increased friction for my addictions is good: I stay logged out of these sites and only log in when I really need to interact for some reason. This is especially great for twitter which I can't even interact with in any way if I'm logged out.
I always thought it was cool that people were creating presentations in org mode, so I tried it once and then went to give a talk on job hunting at a local university. They didn't have a way to plug an arbitrary device into their projector, so they asked me to email them the microsoft slides files, or send them a link to the google drive presentation, and they obviously had no idea how to install emacs. I didn't have that so had to quickly copy my presentation to google. Google slides works 100% of the time at all the talks and presentations I give so I just use that now. My presentations are quite simple so it's not too much trouble.
As for testing database queries, again, what mode are you using? That's very cool. I test them in dbeaver or in psql directly.
Same question for your docker containers. I just use some combination of `docker ps` or editing docker-compose files, alongside netstat, cloudflare, and portainer's web ui.
I read man pages using `man {whatever}`. Out of all the things you've mentioned, this is the one where I'm actually not curious how you do it in emacs, I just want to know why lol. Come on, opening a terminal and typing `man` isn't that big of a deal, surely!
I translate text using the google translate web UI, which easily lets me switch languages, upload images, etc. I didn't know emacs had a mode for this, that's interesting but I can't imagine it to be quite as smooth as the webUI is...
LLM integration in emacs looks very interesting, I'd like to try it. I like that it can actually use claude's ide mode. As far as I know, no nvim plugin can do that yet. However, right now I don't think any IDE integration works as well as the tab-completion proprietary model cursor uses, that lets me just TAB TAB TAB TAB get something done really quickly. I think their agentic mode is ok, I liked the git-style accept/reject changes thing, but I can do the same by doing claude code in a terminal and then just checking the changes in magit, or, now I use lazygit. Or just `git` commands directly. Personally I'm still chasing the dragon from that first Cursor hit. I really don't want to use Cursor but I want to have something with as-good tab completion and nothing in emacs (before) or nvim (now) has come close, but I will be trying the modes mentioned in this thread!
Regarding org mode in general, I now use a combination of a handwritten daily journal, as well as Trilium-next note taking, which I found to just be a more feature-rich and portable experience in the ways I need it to be, whereas org-mode was feature rich in a way that didn't matter to me. Turns out a super-powerful tagging and organization method for my tasks didn't actually help me stay organized or get more tasks done, but a simple yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily task list supported by a handwritten piece of paper work much better for me. No need to know if a task is for work or pleasure or what the GTD context for it is, I can just check my notebook (or trilium daily entry) to see what needs to get done.
I'm not trying to convince you to "switch." I'm envious of how well you've tailored your emacs to yourself - you're the destination I thought I was headed for when I wrote that blog post linked above. I never arrived, which perhaps is sad, but on the other hand, I spent a lot of time doing a lot of other things, which is just life, I guess!
So how did the switch to neovim go? I'm very interested in where you ended up. Please share a summary if a full blog post is too hard!
> I'd be curious to learn more about your API testing setup, that sounds very cool! At work, our API is served via FastAPI and there's swagger docs automatically available that I can browse in a web browser if I want, or I just in nvim `SPC f f` to open a fuzzy file finder and find the model definition I want and look at the endpoint directly, or I can do the same to find the kubb-generated react hook, or typescript model, for the endpoint. For other projects, I guess I browse the API docs in a web browser.
I used restclient for this for a long time and that was great, but recently it got archived. Some of its functions are about to become deprecated so I'm thinking of moving to hurl-mode. I've used hurl a bunch so maybe that's where I'll end up. This is one of those things I don't like about emacs. The ecosystem is small enough where elisp tools just end up abandoned. CLI tools end up being better because their ecosystems are larger.
> I always thought it was cool that people were creating presentations in org mode, so I tried it once and then went to give a talk on job hunting at a local university. They didn't have a way to plug an arbitrary device into their projector, so they asked me to email them the microsoft slides files, or send them a link to the google drive presentation, and they obviously had no idea how to install emacs. I didn't have that so had to quickly copy my presentation to google. Google slides works 100% of the time at all the talks and presentations I give so I just use that now. My presentations are quite simple so it's not too much trouble.
Try generating PDFs of your presentations. I find that this works pretty much everywhere too. Even locked down computers on college campuses can generally just open up the default PDF reader and render your PDF. And if you're just doing text slides with maybe a graphic or two, then a PDF should be easy to generate.
I'm very tempted to switch, or at least try neovim. My reasoning to switch goes something like:
"The core of nvim is small and mostly depends on Unix-ish tools communicating using pipes. These tools tend to be better supported than a lot of sparsely supported elisp that lives in emacs. Moreover it's easier to debug neovim issues because it's a matter of spawning subprocesses and subshells and simply pushing data into/out of pipes."
I'm not sure if this thesis is correct. I may be off-base how much better support nvim actually has and maybe I'm walking into another emacs, in which case I'd stick with emacs. But also, I just love the editing experience of emacs. I love its chorded commands. I love the kill ring (never understood why folks would use cua-mode.) I love the fluency with which you can record macros. I love writing bits of elisp to automate the stuff I need. It's this experience that I'm not sure neovim can replicate, especially modal editing. I'm also a Dvorak typist and vim ergonomics seem very QWERTY-based.
But I'm very curious how well my thoughts stand up to reality.
Ah, PDF, that would have been smart :P
I can recommend at least trying neovim, but I had a much easier transition than perhaps you will, since I used `evil-mode` in emacs ;) So I've been a primarily modal editor for 8 years, and actually don't remember any of the chorded commands from my initial days learning emacs. I took one thing from that time: putting CTRL where CAPS is, then I installed evil-mode and never looked back.
I will say as someone who was feeling the start of RSI, I do find vim's bindings to be a lot less painful than emacs chorded commands.
But, I don't know if a "switch" is in the cards for you, from what you've said, because of the Dvorak and that you'd be learning vim and modal editing at the same time. As I understand it, dvorak vimmers can either rebind everything to be in "the same place" to maintain the inherent layout comfort of vim, and lose the mnemonics (`dtp` delete to "p"), and then have to deal with a full rebind on top, or, they can rebind nothing to maintain mnemonics and reduce startup cost, but then have the layout be super wonky and un-ergonomic. Neither sound that pleasant to me. You're right, vim bindings are very qwerty focused.
Also I desperately miss the kill-ring and still hit my binding for it. There are "registers" in nvim and I bet I can find some plugin or write something in lua that will let me switch, on paste, between my "most recent yanks," but I haven't learned how to do that yet.
Macros are great in vim, I think just as powerful as emacs. Lua is also very powerful, but of course, nothing beats the fact that Emacs is a REPL of elisp that you can modify on the fly. Nvim so far as I understand it must reload to register LUA changes (you can still run lua to modify buffer contents though).
However, I do believe the nvim community is more talkative than the emacs one, and busier. Maybe this is because more content creators are vim/nvim-forward, than emacs? I know like, 2 emacs youtubers, and 10 vimmers, some of whom are super famous for other stuff unrelated to programming.
I agree with you on focusing more on unix-ish tools and staying in terminal. It's something that attracted me to nvim. I realized I had been learning a lot of basically one ecosystem, emacs, when instead I could be learning tools that are available on any unix-based machine. Of course you can install emacs on anything, even android, but you gotta install it and get it running. Plus I just feel a lot cooler piping things between unix commands :P
Anyway, for me, the transition was fine. I slapped on lazy.vim and have been basically 99% as productive at work as I was with emacs, only making a couple mistakes here and there. I love the default bindings lazy.vim came with and adjusted to them well. If you do want to try it out, I recommend lazy.vim if you're considering trying out one of the nvim ide packages.
> You're right, vim bindings are very qwerty focused.
I can't share my personal experience, because I never tried switching either to Dvorak or Colemak - I never conceived my typing speed to be a bottleneck - I type faster than I can think of words (but that might be because I'm not a native English speaker), but I've been a vim user for a very long time, and thus I've talked to many vimmers. I have heard several stories that switching to another layout wasn't incredibly difficult, but I suppose the experience would be very personal.
> Macros are great in vim, I think just as powerful as emacs.
Not quite. In Emacs, you can not only record and replay macros, they are fully editable entities.
Vim macros mostly are limited to sequential keystrokes, there's no vars, no if/then logic, no loops, there's no prompting for input, no data manipulation. From practical point these don't really matter, but what sets Emacs apart that you can record a keyboard macro and then fully edit the corresponding elisp code it translates to. Which also allows you to embed logic in a macro - you can inject Elisp evaluation directly during macro recording, which in practice allows you to do things like: "Loop through lines until you find a blank one" inside a macro.
> Maybe this is because more content creators are vim/nvim-forward, than emacs?
That might be true, most Emacs users don't even bother sharing their "secret" knowledge. Some interesting bits quietly sit, marinating in private repos for years, sometimes decades without ever making into a package.
One thing you might be missing here - there is a ton of Emacs Lisp out there. GitHub alone contains some enormous amount of Elisp. It's pretty mind blowing - I suspect there's more Elisp in the wild than Common Lisp and Clojure combined. And of course, I don't need to remind you that Elisp is not a general-purpose language. It's made for one and one objective only - to serve as a configuration language for Emacs, it doesn't get used in anything else.
Even with all the current and increasing popularity of Neovim, it will probably take a while to catch up with Emacs in terms of written code and solutions for it. Case in point - Org-mode. It's been around for a long time; it is an incredibly ingenious system. Alas, so many attempts to clone it to work in something else still haven't gotten too far.
Oy vey, I guess I'll have to get more prescriptive than enumerative. I do seriously appreciate your wonderment and the invitation for less emotional and more scholarly discourse.
> getting an excellent UX for any one of those given tasks is only possible by using a tool made for that job.
That's true, but only to a certain extent. You see, when you look at Emacs' pieces individually, it's really difficult to see it as a perfect tool for any job. Emacs isn't the best email client, it certainly doesn't have the best web browser, it isn't the greatest debugging tool for any given programming language, it's not the best version control tool, etc. But that's when you look at each of the features in isolation. What makes Emacs the overall greatest thing is that it has the ability to act like glue, and things can work in harmonious integration, I've spoken about that before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131735 "I cannot compare one or multiple selected aspects of Emacs, because in my view that is a pointless mental exercise — I have the holistic comprehension of Emacs features and only can speak about the emergent properties that arise from their integration. To isolate individual features would be like asking a fish to compare water to air - I exist within this environment so completely that I cannot meaningfully separate its components from the unified experience they create."
> it would take a lot of time for me to tweak a plugin or write my own.
It may take a long time regardless of what tools you use. It all boils down to the mastery of a chosen tool. The majority of beginners focus on shiny trinket features and text editing machinery of Emacs instead of reaping the fundamental principal truth about it - Emacs is not really a mere text editor; in fact, it's a kind of Lisp machine with a text editor embedded in it. Once someone understands that, accepts Lisp with all its enormous power and some unavoidable flaws, that fundamentally changes the entire philosophy of using Emacs to accomplish things.
Now, that's all axiomatic inscribed acoustics, let's get down to less theory:
- For video playback control I use mpv.el with some customizations. Turns out mpv player has IPC and can be perfectly controlled from Emacs, I bet Neovim users do that as well. It's nice when taking notes or when I need to review a bunch of videos in a folder. I have a transient I use to play, rewind, speed up, etc., all directly from the current buffer. It's great.
- I use org-noter for annotating PDFs - it's really nice. I just can't read any technical or scholarly sources without taking notes. And these notes are never disconnected from the source - I can always see my notes next to the exact page. I never needed to find a way to actually embed the notes in a way so I can read them on my phone or tablet, but I bet these days it would be just easier to run Emacs - Android lets you and I don't own Apple products anymore.
- > I don't use anki at all anymore
Oh, that's sad, because there is plenty of research done that proves the effectiveness of spaced repetition. Starting from Ebbinghaus and Pimsleur in the beginning-mid of the prior century, to the modern empirical studies - Cepeda, Kornell, Karpicke. Meta-analyses of Dunlosky and Carpenter. There's recent neuroscientific evidence - Smolen, Zhang, Byrne, et al.
What I like about anki-editor that my flashcards are just my notes - I don't need to maintain some special format, somewhere else. These days, I even often generate flashcards using LLMs and sync them to my phone.
- For testing API endpoints I use Org-mode source blocks. For simple queries - ob-http, for data-heavy stuff I use verb.el - what I like about it is that it exposes hooks where I automatically convert json response to Clojure data structures. IMO Clojure is hands-down the best tool for quick data manipulation. I would have a src-block with `:wrap src clojure` in the header, then I can immediately start exploring the data - slicing, dicing, grouping, mapping through it, visualizing it - all without having to send new requests over and over again. I'm pretty sure I can do the same thing with ob-http by advising corresponding functions, but verb.el has public hooks that are well documented, so... Besides, using org-mode source blocks allows me to pipe that data into any other different language - e.g. Python.
... I'm having to split it (HM whines that my comment gotten too long)...
- > I've never heard of using org-babel for managing dotfiles
Oh that technique is just bananas - my entire system is in a single .org file, I'm sorry I can't share it - it contains private stuff and I just never thought about separating and encrypting it, I don't want to accidentally put something in public portion of it. So, I have source blocks with headers such as:
That's quite straightforward, innit? The readonly mode is for so I am not tempted to manually change the file, and prefer making changes in my dotfiles using (org-babel-tangle) command. Then I have another corresponding part of the same file: You can see that the first part would write to ~/.gitconfig on any system, the second part only does it on Linux, e.g. gpg program path differs.I have some other tricks like merging only the values I care about with the entire config template, for example for my terminal. Kitty's config template is self-documented, so I'd like to preserve all that, including the values I keep commented out, but I don't want having to include the entire template in my .org file, I only want k/v pairs I modify. What I do is that I run elisp functions on org-babel-tangle-finished-hook, one of them would force Kitty to generate config template, then grab the values from my config and merge them in there. Org-mode files can contain executable elisp, so my single org-mode file is not only declarative, but when needed it also uses imperative instructions. The simplicity of this is ingenious. The only remaining bottleneck for bootstrapping any new machine - VM, EC2, Desktop - Linux and Mac for me is to get a hold of Emacs, cloning my dotfile.org and running org-babel-tangle - usually takes less than two minutes.
- Dired for file management is superb. It's better than anything I ever used before. I have all the trinkets there - icons, vim-style navigation, subtrees, etc. I don't know if you know this already, but Dired stands for "DIRectory EDitor" - you can fully edit your directory structure, recursively, using whichever tools you have in Emacs - multiple cursors and such, you can edit it as if you're editing plain text, and when you commit, it unravels this new structure onto the filesystem - that's just nuts.
- > Text under cursor - what modes is that
For intelligently recognizing patterns in plain-text I use Embark, it's very cool and it's relatively straightforward to add new types and commands recognizing it. If you never used Embark, I highly recommend it - it adds context-aware actions - so if the cursor is at a url, it knows what to do with it. It works great with Consult and Vertico. Another alternative which I have never tried is Hyperbole. I just never explored it, because Embark I guess covers it for me, but maybe there are things there I'm unaware of, it's probably best to expire both.
- For searching on HN I use consult-hn, a package of my own. It's published on MELPA. There's a demo in the readme, where I show how I read HN and Reddit and do some other interesting things, like extracting all urls from a thread.
- > I could just do this `whatever | nvim`, right?
Well, the thing is - when you do that in Eshell, the stuff stays within the Emacs session, buffers remain as part of your workspace, you can append to existing buffers and the result is immediately available for searching, macros, etc. Your command output always remains a first-class citizen in your editing environment.
- For automatic color theme change I use circadian.el. It's a relatively simple package that utilizes Emacs' built-in solar calendar.
- > I used to manage my emails in mu4e
Long ago I got annoyed by inconsistencies in mu4e and switched to notmuch. I don't use email as much anymore as I used to, but notmuch for me works better for mailing list discussions. What I like about using email in Emacs is that I can link to any email in my notes, and can jump to it directly from my notes - which I also don't use a lot, but it's nice to have. I also have some customizations, like finding a given email and opening it in gmail in the browser, or identifying a given email in a mailing list and opening it in the web interface, etc.
- > I used to track time very well in org mode
Yeah, I don't do much of that anymore, except for pomodoros. Pomodoro technique is great and it lets me focus on specific tasks and track the time spent on each, but I have never used it for serious analyses. However, I still can if I ever need to do that.
- > I am a recovering reddit addict and don't use it anymore
Those fuckers shadowbanned my account of many years for no good reason, and now all my previous comments and posts are not publicly available. I tried to send appeal requests for weeks, every single day, but they seem to be going into a void. I used to be very active there, but now I realized those imbeciles just broke the whole idea of what makes Internet, and I don't use it much anymore.
- Presentations in org mode. I don't remember when I had to do it last time, but I had great success with org-reveal. There are a bunch of different ways to create presentations in Org-mode, reveal is just one of them.
- For testing database queries I still use org-mode source blocks, it looks something like:
- For managing Docker there's docker.el, you can also directly explore any given container using TRAMP-mode, you'd just navigate to /docker:container-name:/path/to/file, and that also works for k8s pods- > Come on, opening a terminal and typing `man` isn't that big of a deal, surely!
Yeah, of course, on the surface it isn't. But you know what I often do (because I can)? I would open a man page in Emacs, using either (man) or (woman) command - typically the second one on Mac. Then, I can select a region of text, narrow my buffer to it and just start typing LLM requests, e.g., "can you explain this part, etc..." That alone makes kind of a big deal for me, not to mention that it's all within the same environment - all the keybindings still work the same, I have imenu, narrowing, etc.
- > I didn't know emacs had a mode for this, that's interesting but I can't imagine it to be quite as smooth as the webUI is...
Ha, you have no idea. First of all, because it's once again, tightly integrated, I can immediately start translating - active region, word-at-point, my killring content, etc. I speak multiple languages and it's not so atypical for me to try to translate things in the midst of typing or reading text - the speed and the efficiency Emacs allows me is beautiful.
But that's not all. Check this out. I'm learning Spanish, alright? So when I want to translate something like "The colonel was born in 1939...", what does GTranslate do? It translates it into "El coronel nació en 1939", and that totally makes sense, right? But guess what? I really needed to see it like this: "El coronel nació en mil novecientos treinta y nueve", because, well, I'm still getting acquainted with the numbers. How would one do it in literally anything else, any other plugin - for Vim, for VSCode, etc? For VSCode, you'd probably have to talk to the maintainer of an existing extension, make PRs, or even make your own. In Vim, you'd have to rewrite an entire function. What did it take me? Like 15 minutes and a few lines of Elisp. Did I have to learn the internals of GTranslate API? No. Did I have to rewrite an entire function that sends the payload there? No! Here's what I did: Using the built-in profile I've identified the function that sends the payload, and advised it. I added an advising function that just before sending the payload, checks the text, finds a pattern, then sends that portion for processing, to the number-to-words function. Guess what? I couldn't even find implementation of such a function in Elisp, and I didn't have time to write my own. I simply delegated the task to the npm package. Hacky? Sure. Stupid? Well, maybe. Yet, it does work. Maybe shit ain't so stupid if thy shit works, eh? Tell me if such simplicity is ever possible in other editors.
- > LLM integration in emacs looks very interesting
Oh, once again, you have no idea. It's just beyond amazing. Using gptel, I can send LLM commands virtually from anywhere - like I'd be typing commands in Eshell and I can just ask an LLM for the proper options for, I dunno, docker-compose, or something. Right there, in-place.
That example alone is very illustrative of what makes Emacs such an amazing tool - the best of everything - you always have access to all the tools you can imagine - I can use spellchecking, thesaurus, translation and LLM while I want to type something in a git commit message, Jira comment, Slack thread, etc.
I'd be talking to someone on the phone, and they'd ask me to spell out some cryptic thing - like a ticket number - no problem, Emacs can help me here, I'd select it, and run (nato-region), it spells it out using NATO alphabet.
I need to quickly figure out the difference between two dates - no worries, built-in calendar has a way for it.
It's just really difficult for me to imagine any scenario, a use case that is text-related and Emacs can't help with for any reason.
Not long ago I wrote a command to OCR the content of my clipboard. Because I didn't want to distract my colleague when he was showing some stuff over Zoom. I didn't want to keep interrupting him with "hey, hold on, can you send me this url?", "wait a minute, I'm taking notes here...", etc.
> I never arrived
It's quite alright, even though it is never a destination but still a journey.
I hope I was able to open your eyes to how empowering Emacs can be. But hey, I'm a die-hard vimmer, I use evil-mode, and I do use Neovim too - it's a fine tool for certain things where Emacs can feel too big and too clunky.
You should really start a youtube channel with Emacs workflows screencasts :)
I have. I just suck at it splendidly and not getting any better https://www.youtube.com/@ilemming
btw, folks, if you have time, join our discussion today at 6PM Central Time https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx