Worth it? How do you justify the effort learning this?

>How do you justify the effort learning this?
i would have just spent the time on this garbage site anyway

>>105976018 (OP)
Probably not worth it with highly extensible editors available today, but for basic usage I find it easier to learn than vim.

>>105976018 (OP)
There is nothing else like orgmode. It’s literally impossible to make orgmode on other text editors. Vim’s orgmode plugin is garbage.

>>105976018 (OP)
I’m a Macfag who doesn’t want to give up his option key for alt so I decided it wasn’t for me
If I wanted to program in a lisp I’d suck it up and probably use it at least for lisp programs
If I really wanted org-mode I might suck it up
I use VS Code primarily and helix if I want something that works in a terminal
VS Code has a LOT of plugins so I’m not tempted to bother with something that requires me to press three keys to save

Why isn't there something similar to emacs but uses python instead of niggerious lisp?

>>105976105
lol kys

>>105976107
That's the main thing people don't want to use emacs tho. Gatekeeping mindset is cancerous.

>>105976018 (OP)
Not a single person has even managed to explain to me what the fuck emacs is in a way that I would understand.
People compare it to vim so I assumed it would be a text editor but apparently it also runs doom and you can use it to browse the web.

>>105976105
Emacs still has minor performance issues. They should not be turned into major performance issues.

>>105976135
Imagine Visual Studio Code but written in Lisp instead of TypeScript in Electron and also made in the 80s

>>105976018 (OP)
>How do you justify the effort learning this?
It was fun.

>>105976330
>hurting yourself is fun

>>105976338
Skill issue.

>>105976338
>learning things at a slow, relaxed pace while sipping warm tea and chewing on salty nuts in a cozy comfy room is hurting yourself

>>105976018 (OP)
only if you plan to use particular modes, i use the following every day:
org-mode (with agenda)
magit
hyperbole

as a text editor alone, it aint worth it.

>>105976105
neovim uses lua

Suggestions of learning material for Emacs? Opinions on XahLee guy?

>>105976518
C-h i

>>105976518
https://github.com/protesilaos/emacs-lisp-elements

Open the org-mode version in Emacs. When your cursor is inside an Elisp code block, hit `Ctrl-C Ctrl-C` to execute the code and see the results.

It's also available here:
https://protesilaos.com/emacs/emacs-lisp-elements

why wouldn't you invest time in learning good tools for your career? a career will last decades.

>>105976743
u mean vscode

>>105976743
You argue for nano, vim and vscode then. Emacs's sinkhole trap for the autistic, nothing more.

>>105976765
>>105976774
>microꜱoyft™ vscode
zoomers faggots GTFO

>>105976774
Sneed

>>105976625
Already finished it

>>105976625
>>105976982
it's a boomer way
just manage to install gpt.el package, add api-key.
Then ask any movements and basics.

>he needs effort to type text on computer
that's why nobody takes linux seriously.

>>105977003
I know about basics, movements and windows.
Here is what I don't know:
- how to mark a place and return to it efficiently just like vim
- difference between registers and mark
- whatever undo is doing
- fido vs ido vs smex vs 1000 plugins that kinda do the same thing but I don't even know what they do
- why org mode is so popular?

>>105976135
It's basically a Lisp machine. Development in Lisp machines is intended to feel like a conversation with your computer.
Emacs is meant to emulate that. It also is the best example of what the free software movement is meant to be about, in the sense that most free software is open source, but you can't necessarily modify it freely because there's too much of a barrier to doing so. Emacs leverages Lisp's natural extensibility to kind of let you control exactly how you want Emacs to behave. That's why people call it an "extensible" editor.

>>105976018 (OP)
Couldve learned it, instead of learning sublime text then vscode then neovim.

>>105976105
CudaText

>>105976018 (OP)
I love it, but I can't say it's worth it for someone who doesn't like (1) programming in Lisp and (2) spending time tweaking stuff. I have changed many things in my configuration, including most keybinds that are outside of 'evil-mode' (i.e. VI keybinds).

I won't say how big my configuration is, because it would honestly discourage new people. I have written it over the years, and you can start with something like Doom Emacs or Space Emacs. I eventually switched to GNU Emacs because it's more stable than the other two, and it's not written by faggots.

doesnt do anything better than vim + shell

>>105976135
>GNU Emacs is sometimes called an "extensible editor", but it does
much more than provide editing capabilities.
>It is better to refer to
Emacs as an "extensible computing environment"
From the intro to elisp manual
Emacs is a lisp interpreter made to be the frontend to underlying computer utilities (dired=ls,cd,cp,rm...) and to have various utilities to aid in your standard computing needs.
What computer "power users" tend to do is get many different commandline programs to do different tasks like vim for programming and cmus for music. Emacs aims to provide these things in an interconnected environment. With Emacs these collected utilities have the same theme, are configured in the same language and the same place, and can see each other if necessary.
These are the things most commandline power users would want in the first place and that is what emacs does out of the box.

>>105976018 (OP)
>>105977850
For an individual thing it is probably not worth it (except org-mode maybe).
Emacs is at its best when you use all the integrated parts. I would recommend building your own config in vanilla emacs. Start slow, replacing one thing at a time with emacs (dired for file management, later org-mode for note taking, and so on).

>>105977919
aka tinkering all life and getting nothing meaningful done

>>105976060
>I’m a Macfag who doesn’t want to give up his option key for alt so I decided it wasn’t for me
how is that a problem with Emacs

>>105977970
emacs is the problem

>>105977932
People say this about window managers too, but after the initial setup tinkering is for fun.

>>105977981
I never had to "give up" my option key when using Emacs. also you can always rebind whatever modifier you want.

>>105976018 (OP)
> learning vim keys
> an hour
> learning emacs + EVIL
> an hour
> fucking around with your emacs config file
> a lifetime
It doesn't take that long and there's nothing better than Magit.

>>105976018 (OP)
>How do you justify the effort learning this?
It's less a learning effort and more a doing effort, that is instead of learning how to perform some new task you just write a function to do it

>>105976037
>for basic usage I find it easier to learn than vim.
For basic usage I would use openbsd mg

>>105976105
I'll make the logo!

>>105976018 (OP)
i've gotten a hang on writing code thanks to Emacs, so it was worth it for me. but that's not an argument for you, op, because you're a faggot to whom learning something catching your attention and curiosity requires effort.

>>105978619
why are you pissed off

I worked in a shop where running a dev environment could only reasonably be done on a (old) remote server, because working without actual production data (db and static files) was near impossible.

In this context, Emacs tramp (buffer over SSH) is a Godsend.

I would style advice someone on the fence to really consider if they feel like they're fine with managing the Emacs configuration files like a small software project in a niche lang just to have a half-decent text editor for programming

>>105978976
emacs config files don't have to be huge. you have the same kind of people who spend all their time ricing their configs just like those WM losers, but it's not necessary.

M-x ielm

>>105978709
because
he didn't learn emacs and he lied
or
deep down he thinks it's not worth it

Emacs is an interstellar spacecraft that's primarily used to drive nails. Vim is a hammer.

>>105976018 (OP)
>Worth it?
no

>>105976059
there's org mode in Zed
https://github.com/hron/zed-org

>>105976018 (OP)
I don't.
I use the superior option called gVim

>>105976135
I'll try: Emacs is what your entire computer/OS would be if lisp machines made it into the consumer market. Imagine being able to edit everything within your OS's GUI in real time without having to reload/reboot the machine. Imagine having full access to every function within its code and being able to bother modify it, see its output, and combine it with any other function.

In emacs you can simply use a key stroke (M+x) and execute any function contained within the program. It has a small C code to handle getting it going then everything else is in pure lisp. Which means it can be modified however you want through simple scripting. You can modify it at run time or you can place your modifications into a file that's always executed at start-up. This file is called init.el within emacs.

I use emacs daily. It could replace my entire OS if I wanted (I've done that in the past) but I choose not to go that far. I use emacs to view pretty much every kind of text and image file. I've created major and minor modes for some of them that don't work out of the box.

For example: I wanted a way to view manga. By default emacs can do this with docview but I wanted something more comfy. I made a manga viewer in about 100 lines of lisp code. It works better than existing viewers like calibre while having all the same abilities (and more). It took me less than 15 minutes to make it.

Emacs is like having another OS. It can do much more than vim. org-mode alone is worth learning emacs for. I can create and export any kind of document with emacs. latex, doc, pdf, html...anything. I also get all the features of IDEs when editing code without all the crap that comes along with most IDEs. I can also compile the code with a key stroke and instantly see the results.

Once you get into emacs nothing else comes close to what you can do with it.

>>105979280
great, except a lot of what makes org great are the addons.

>>105979413
(cont.)

The vim vs. emacs holy war boils down to the following. People into vi/vim are on the "UNIX as an IDE" train. Which is fine and works fine. They prefer to use other small POSIX tools like the terminal and various other things in combination with vim/vi to do their work.

Emacs is more about doing all those things within emacs. Emacs has several terminal emulators as an example. You can do all the things you'd normally need multiple applications for within it. Provided you've set it up correctly and pulled in some packages for whatever you need.

Plenty of people have already mentioned magit. It's very popular and it's probably the best way to interact with git repos. A lot of people use emacs just for that alone.

Emacs isn't hard to learn. It takes maybe an hour to go through the included tutorial that teaches you all the basic key bindings. Which boil down mostly to ctrl+x, alt+x, or some combination of those. For example; To switch between buffers you do ctrl+x+b. That brings up the buffer list then you simple pick one and jump to it. You can have multiple buffers on screen as well. Think of it like a WM.

You can change the key binds to whatever you want. A lot of people coming from vim change them so it emulates its way of doing things. I don't suggest this. I suggest getting plain old emacs and slowly editing your init.el until everything is just how you like it. Also swap ctrl key over to capslock.

My emacs has about 25 packages loaded at start up. Takes less then 2 seconds. I run it as a daemon. I pretty much live inside of it all day.

>>105979456
Explaining org-mode to people that haven't used it is kind of hard. No one understands why it's great until they've used it and get it. I love org-mode so much it makes planning my week out much easier. Then there is the ability to write a document and export it into multiple formats. I write all my web pages in org-mode now as an example. I haven't used other editors that attempt to emulate what org-mode can do but I seriously doubt any of them come close to emac's org-mode and all the add-ons you can add to it.

I've never understood this "tinkering is bad" stuff people post. It isn't like you're constantly changing stuff with your WM or emacs. I spent maybe a day getting things like I wanted then maybe another hour or two changing stuff once I discovered better ways to do something. After that my customized emacs and WM have stayed the same for years now. I've used them on several different computers. I just drop my init.el into ~/emacs.d/ and compile my customized dwm and I'm good to do anywhere in less than a minute. Even when I can't bring my WM I can always bring my init.el as long as emacs is installed.

I don't mind using vi when working with remote servers. But doing it in emacs is much better. I don't really like modal editing. I hate having to switch modes. I prefer using ctrl+something keybinds more. Since pretty much everything else uses them to.

>>105979607
Everyone uses Emacs differently. I make multiple Elisp functions each day. It's just addictive as hell. And I don't plan my week. So I don't use org calendar features. But I do use ord-mode because it's basically a default format with my thousands of emacs key bindings, nothing more nothing less.

>>105979693
I use calendar to keep me from being lazy. I throw a bunch of shit I need or want to do into it. That way when I first load emacs and get dashboard it's right in my face. "Need to do x,y, and z today. y need to be done by <day>." That sort of thing. Doesn't mean I'll actually get around to doing them but it's helpful for keeping me on track. I know a lot of people don't use the dashboard but I find it helpful for this sort of thing and quickly getting back to whatever I was working on the last time I was using emacs.

I don't really write a lot of elisp. I use emacs more to work on C and perl stuff. A bit of everything else too. I got all my modes for different languages set-up with the usual tools. No AI shit though. Don't find it that helpful for what I do.

My main gripe with emacs lately is the OS I use keeps updating poppler lately. Which breaks pdf-tools. So I have to go into ~/emacs.d/ weekly now and delete pdf-tool's directory. Thankfully, if I restart emacs after that it'll build it automatically again against the new poppler and all is well. Hopefully, they'll slow down with the constant updates soon.

I find emacs to also be the best text editor for writing man pages and creative writing. I don't know why. You'd think that would be the same everywhere but I seem to get things done more quickly with emacs. Probably because of the spell/grammar checking and the ability to have multiple buffers. So I can see whatever I need to reference quickly. It's much better than what I used to use that's for sure.

Wish I would have learned emacs sooner. I played with it a bit when I first got into computers but I didn't get it. Took a few years before I came back and learned to love it.

Also if OP is still around. If you want an emacs style editor with its keybinds without all the elisp stuff and add-ons I highly suggest mg.

https://man.openbsd.org/mg

It's basically a middle ground between vi/vim and emacs. It's a small text editor with emacs style bindings. I use it all of the time now. Last I checked it has available in most Linux repos. Very nice tool I wish more people knew about.

>>105979794
There's also GNU Zile which is configurable in Lisp. It's basically a middle ground between mg and GNU Emacs.

https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/

>>105979247
Weird way to reduce the differences. Nevermind the fact that Vim and its derivatives are not free software and that most people are primarily using NeoVim which is essentially trying to replicate Emacs.

>>105976129
>That's the main thing people don't want to use emacs tho
Wrong

>>105980109
There is no way to really replicate emacs with vim/neovim. But that doesn't stop people from trying and making a huge hacky mess. It's kind of like the people that produce shit like DOOM emacs. Where they do everything they can to replicate vi in an editor that was never designed to work that way to start with. You can do it. But it's a house of cards that can fall over at any time.

Which is why I always suggest people start with vanilla emacs. Go through the included tutorial. If you really want vim-style editing you can easily set that up on your own and you'll understand how it actually works. Where with something like DOOM good luck figuring it out. You don't know how to use vanilla emacs and you don't know anything about what's in init.el. So you'll spend way more time navigating that than you would have spent setting up emacs yourself.

>>105976129
>Gatekeeping mindset is cancerous.
If you bother to go into the emacs IRC channel and other places where people hang out you'll find they're very helpful and friendly. Learning elisp is not that hard. It's very easy language.

>>105980149
I don't know why some people like to recommend vanilla Emacs. I started Emacs with spacemacs, and I've been using for years. I think It doesn't hinder you from the understanding of Emacs or elisp. Bloated Emacs distributions usually have massive help documentations and useful default packages and functions. Finding hiden features belongs to those packages is very fun.

I'm the one who makes custom elisp functions each day.

>>105978709
i detest muh learning is muh effort mindset deeply. it's cancer. you are not in so much pain you cant even sit without suffering, you do not suffer from some kind of illness affecting your thinking ability detrimentally, you aren't drained dry on a shitty hellhole job for cucks to pay retarded loans your relatives took in desperate times, etc etc more projecting etc. you are able to "waste" muh precious time freely posting here, you might as well dedicate a lazy ass hour in a week to check out a program yourself instead of asking retarded baitfag questions.
>>105979056
wrong on both accounts. emacs IS my editor of choice, and i genuinely like it, which's enough reason to deem it worthwhile.

>>105980324
I started with emacs way before the bloated versions existed. I learned with the o'reilly emacs book and elisp book. I guess it feels weird to just start with a bunch of stuff I don't understand and probably won't need. I can see starting with all of that to get started, but then I'd feel more comfortable only having what I used added onto vanila. But I like everything on my systems clean.

>>105976135
I dunno man but it can do just about anything for you
Shame it lacks a decent text editor tho

>>105976018 (OP)
...ethics?

>>105980628
i don't really get why you'd start off with a pre-configured emacs if you have no use for the extensions it adds

>>105980709
I see it mostly as a tech demo.

>>105980709
>>105980628
We are just different, man. I like the top down approach I guess. I used to read the entire dictionary when I was young.

>>105980780
I started emacs with this documentation

>>105980813
You wasted a lot of time.

>>105980899
Well, Considering the packages I installed and self-written personal Emacs functions, the size of spacemacs is small

I wish I learned emacs instead of vim, but I'm too far gone now.

>>105980899
>>105980941
And honestly I think I would waste a lot of energies if I started off with the vanilla Emacs.

>>105980951
There's room in your brain for both. Stuff like evil wouldn't exist otherwise.

>>105981010
>And honestly I think I would waste a lot of energies if I started off with the vanilla Emacs.
I agree with this sentiment. Although I don't use Spacemacs anymore, I started with it, and I learned a lot while using it. Some people act like there's no way you can learn the real Emacs if you start with a curated configuration, but Spacemacs is still Emacs. I still have access to all the same Elisp. It's also setup to be extremely usable from the very beginning, and they've supplemented Emacs own built in docs with their own very well written docs which are in org-mode.

You absolutely CAN learn a lot about Emacs through Spacemacs. I would not even know a lot of what Emacs was capable of as a newb had Spacemacs not shown me. My Elisp knowledge was ZERO when I started. Getting a config that's even a tiny fraction as usable as default Spacemacs would have taken me days at that early stage of my Emacs use.

>>105980951
The nice thing about having learned vim is that you can take all that you learned and keep using it in Emacs through evil. It's like having vim and adding the Elisp ecosystem to your arsenal.
https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide
https://melpa.org/

>>105980109
>Nevermind the fact that Vim and its derivatives are not free software
Vim is free software and compatible with GPL nigga: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Vim

Maybe you're thinking about the rant Stallman wrote about helping niggas in Uganda but those posts are no longer in his site. Still free software.

>>105980951
It’s never too late.
I started off with ed and edlin, then switched to micro emacs for years (with occasional full emacs, or xemacs use when we upgraded from Sun3 to microsparc) then did visual studio for a decade, then back to fill blown emacs in the 2010s and thereafter.
Also in there was a few years on TurboPascal and TurboC, which use WordStar keybindings and “Brief” (from underware) for 8088 assembly as well as mainframe editors like xedit.

Everything *but* vim. I can get around in it though.

>>105976018 (OP)
If you would like the worst LSP experience in a single threaded language made up entirely of parentheses then yes its worth it

>>105983613
emacs sisters our response?

>>105976018 (OP)
It's just a text editor, man.

>>105976105
There is Helix that will use Scheme but we don't know if that's broken promises or real.

>>105976018 (OP)
>Worth it?
Yes, to this day it's the only text editor that supports multiple inputs without needing any downloads or graphic libraries
>How do you justify the effort learning this?
I never actually learned this shit everything can be found with a google search, and AI is good enough to answer your two cent questions

>>105984301
People are already writing plugins.
https://helix-plugins.com/
The main devs of Helix want to merge it in soon.
https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675#pullrequestreview-3018763923

>>105980620
oh no, this two-bit normie again, aren't you supposed to be devising stratagems on backstabbing your coworkers in order to feed your kid for one more lousy paycheck? now get off my board, I rebuke you satin.

>>105984529
nice assumption, but way off the mark. mine, however, stays on the point as there is no refutation of my argument (that you call and consider learning an effort). thus, you remain a faggot. i'm not beholden to listen to your screeching demand to leave this thread.

>>105980324
>I don't know why some people like to recommend vanilla Emacs.

Few reasons why I do this: If you learn vanilla emacs you aren't lost when your init.el fails to load for whatever reason. If the entire thing is broken and all you have is default emacs you aren't stuck because all the custom keybinds don't work and all the packages you thought were there by default aren't working. The best thing to do is to use vanilla and go through the tutorial. Since the tutorial is interactive you can spend a couple of hours going through it. Now you've learned all the default bindings and can manage buffers.

From there you can start messing around with packages. Adding what you need one-by-one and fixing anything that might fail to work right off within them. Same goes for whatever theme you want. You can add them one-by-one and see how things in the init.el change and effect the entire environment. You also get a chance to rely on built in stuff instead of automatically relying on packages for the same things. There are a lot of things I used to use packages for that were worse versions that what comes built into vanilla emacs. Vanilla emacs has _a lot_ of things that are hidden or not exposed by default. Hell it has a web browser and IRC client built in.

A big part of using emacs is making it your own. Starting with vanilla gives you a chance to do that and is helpful for learning elisp along the way. I used to use hundreds of packages myself. Now I have a grand total of 27 packages and I could do without a bunch of those. Another point: Each package is a possible exploit into your machine. So I like to audit everything myself. Much easier to do that when you've built up your config yourself.

>>105983645
It isn't as bad as people make it out to be. I used EXWM as my primary WM for years and I never ran into a problem ctrl+g couldn't get me out of. I'd love to see proper multithreading in emacs and there has been some progress mad towards it on the mailing lists over the years. But it's a hard problem to solve and there aren't enough people with commit access that know the code base to get it done. Plus you have to worry about breaking nearly 50 years of packages and people's custom configurations while you're doing it. So I suspect it'll be awhile yet before it happens.

In practice I don't find it to be a huge issue. I rarely have anything that blocks the thread on a modern machine. It wasn't that big of a deal even in the 90s when I first started using emacs.

What I'd really like to see is an entire OS built around a lisp dialect. So a modern lisp machine I guess. I'd love to have a small micro-kernel with an init written in a lisp dialect along with the entire userspace and GUI. That way you could modify everything in real time and do it without re-compile/reboot. Wish I was in the timeline where Hurd got finished by 1992 because that's probably where we'd be by now. GNU Shepherd is a really nice init by the way. I was running Guix for about 6 months as my primary work machine along with EXWM for the WM. Really enjoyed working with that init.

But FSF projects have always suffered from the same problem of being ultra strict on contributors and refusing to play nice with others. Which is why Hurd will never be finished and things like Shepherd don't see wide spread adoption despite being really good. I wish it or s6 was more popular and chosen as the init for major distros. They're both really nice and much better than systemd.

>>105977970
It’s not, but I think it’s a good reason for me to not use it
I dropped Kakoune and picked up Helix for the same reason

>>105985441
Does apple shit not have a super key or something? I dedicate super to my WM and my applications get alt+ctrl. I've never felt like I have a lack of keys doing it that way.

I also swap ctrl with caps. That's the first thing I do on any new system I setup.

>>105976018 (OP)
>How do you justify the effort learning this?
40 years ago, emacs was here. 40 years from now, it will still be here. With emacs, you learn one editor for your entire life. Want to learn how to useCLion instead? what if jetbrains goes bankrupt five years from now?

>>105986352
vim exists

>>105986421
Its not the same. It never will be. I use vi all of the time and used vim for a long time. Emacs is a different animal all together. You can do a lot with vim but it'll never be equal to what emacs can do.

Vim is for people that want to use unix as an IDE. Emacs is for people that want to use emacs as an IDE. With emacs the underlying OS doesn't matter once you've got it set up. Every now and again you'll hit a quirk if you attempt to use it on Windows but everywhere else it's solid 100% of the time.

>>105977040
>how to mark a place and return to it efficiently just like vim
I usually just split off a new window in the same buffer and use it to navigate to the thing I need and then close it again

>org mode
It's neat because you could edit notes and tables almost like it's WYSIWYG, but it's still plaintext so you could copy it in a mail or open it with any other editor.

>org mode
ots vscode and google notes for me chief

>>105977040
>how to mark a place and return to it efficiently just like vim
>>105986897
What you're looking for is called bookmarks:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Bookmarks.html

Works really well with dashboard. I get a list of them when I start emacs and can go straight to where I was in a document. Navigating to them from any buffer is also easy of course. But it's nice having an overview of the last 5-10 upon start up.

>org-mode
Imagine writing one document and exporting it to
>HTML (webpage with design elements and all)
>Latex
>Markdown
>pdf
>anything else you desire
That's the kind of thing you can do with org-mode. But it does so much more. I suggest watching some videos of people using it to see what I mean. If you want to do something org-mode can do it out of the box or a package exists to add it. I'm learning new things about it all of the time and I've been using it for years.

>>105976018 (OP)
I used to use GNU Emacs, but then switched to Neovim. Why the fuck would anyone bother with Emacs? I really don't want to do everything in Emacs, I really don't.

>>105981010
Learning vanilla Emacs is the right way to learn. Using a third-party config, like Spacemacs, Doom Emacs, or Aquamacs, as a beginner is massive cope.

I started using Doom Emacs last year. I mostly like it, but I still don't understand anything people say when they talk about why emacs is great. I've yet to see an explanation of org mode that isn't just markdown with extra steps. I can't imagine what I would use it for anyway. I've never touched elisp. I don't see the appeal of endlessly tweaking a config or writing my own plugins.

I think I lack the imagination to take real advantage of emacs.

>>105987885
It sounds like a dogmatic dictator. You can use Emacs freely

>>105988299
Every Emacs user should learn vanilla.

>>105988299
You could use it however you want. But using a distro like doom/spacemacs is how you end up like this: >>105987965

The vanilla install+its tutorial which takes less than an hour to run through would have taught him everything he doesn't know and explained a bit for why org-mode is so well loved.

If you use a distro and don't bother to learn how it was put together you end up doing dumb stuff like manually doing shit for years and years you could have done automatically with an M+x and typing in a short function name.

The point of emacs isn't the text editor itself. It's all the things you can do from the text editor and how it allows you to automate your work flow. I gave this example before but lets look at something like a comic/manga viewer. Which is just extracting images from a .zip/.rar archive and displaying them as pages. The main application for this on most machines is Calibre these days. Let's look at what is required to run it. On my current OS it pulls in:
>py3-html2text, py3-apsw, py3-dateutil, py3-html5lib, py3-jeepney, py3-regex, py3-pillow, py3-dnspython, py3-msgpack, py3-netifaces, py3-zeroconf, py3-css-parser, py3-cssselect, py3-cssutils, py3-lxml, py3-markdown, py3-toml, py3-webencodings, py3-CherryPy, py3-beautifulsoup, py3-html5-parser, py3-mechanize, py3-qtwebengine, py3-qt5
>desktop-file-utils
>gettext-runtime
>xdg-utils
>libwmf
>png
>python3
>shared-mime-info
>poppler and popplerqt and poppler-utils
>hunspell
>hyphen
>icu4c
>libstemmer
>podofo
>gtk4-update-icon-cache
>qtbase

All this to open an archive and display images and/or text. Now compare to emacs: It can openly it natively. If you want something nicer than docview's default about 50 lines of elisp total. With a better interface that what Calibre gives you.

>>105988496
so what's so special about org-mode? you haven't answered a bit

>>105976018 (OP)
>How do you justify the effort learning this?
I was learning Common Lisp and Emacs is the premier IDE for Common Lisp dev.

>>105988496
Note that I'm not saying emacs can't be a bit of a glutton and get out of control quickly if you decide to add hundreds of packages. But if you build up your own config starting with vanilla you shouldn't get to that point. Or you will and then downsize. Since it takes awhile to learn which packages you like and which you never end up using even if they sound like something useful when you first stumble upon them. The distros people make can be useful from trying stuff out sometimes. But I still think it's better to start from the default and work your way up. That way you'll understand how everything works and how it all fits together.

I've really downsized my own config over the years. I used to run a bunch of packages but now I've learned to use what comes with emacs by default when I can. It got plenty of additions since I first started using it years ago and some of the packages are just attempting to do too much or don't fit well with other packages I like.

>>105988579
I primarily use it for keeping notes and writing documents. For example, I wrote a man page for a large application recently. I wrote it in org-mode. When it came time to publish it I was able to export to both html directly to the website's style and to plain text for inclusion with the package itself. I could have exported the exact same document to pdf, epub and any other format you can think of. All without having to manually write markup or converting it for each and every format. It's much more than markdown. I can do babel functions right in the middle of my documents. Direct export to latex using my own custom templates. My personal agenda/schedule is done through org-mode. It can handle recurring events and everything. I can quickly check my agenda/to-do lists and mark them as I finish tasks. I now maintain all my websites through org-mode.
(cont.)

>>105988688
I maintain/manage my static websites purely through org-mode. I write plain text with basic markup and it exports the document to HTML automatically. I can even upload the result directly to the server without leaving emacs of course. I do a bit of literate programming using org-mode. Where my code is contained within blocks which are within a org document. This way I can write long comments and thoughts without filling the code with a bunch of long comments. I have friends that are also emac autists so we can create org documents together and share them in real time. Doesn't sound like something you'd want until you're working on something that has to be released in 24 hours and three people are all hacking away on different parts of it. Very useful for group projects.

You either get org-mode or you don't. Lots of people use emacs for years before they stumble upon org-mode. Then once they get it they're hooked for life. I can't stress how useful it is if you're doing a lot of writing (technical or otherwise) and programming like I am. org-mode is why I continue using emacs instead of using mg+rest of POSIX tools as my IDE. There is nothing else like it and there is a package for org-mode that supports working with just about anything you can think of.

Right now one of my main uses for org-mode is maintaining an outline for a book I'm working on. All my research and references are in that file. I can embed content and hyperlinks to things I need to reference. I'm also writing the book within org-mode of course and using org-mode is very helpful for doing things like adding footnotes. When it comes time to publish I'll be able to export the work to multiple different formats as required by the publisher. One for them to check, edit and send off for printing. Another to make the .epub version. If I want to generate a pdf or mobi version it's a simple export. Four different file formats all generated from the same source file. Could do html too of course

>>105988665
>>105988688
>>105988749
If you aren't annoyed by this guy's voice this is probably the best place to learn org-mode if you need a visual aid and don't want to read the documentation on the FSF's website.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVtKhBrRV_ZkPnBtt_TD1Cs9PJlU0IIdE

Covers everything from basics to exporting/publishing.

org-mode is one of those things that is so simple it sounds stupid at first but once you get your head around how it works you can't go back to how you were doing things before. Of course it helps if you have an actual use for it and aren't just playing with emacs to play with emacs (I don't put down anyone doing that. Helpful to learn elisp and I wish I would have stuck with it when I first tried it instead of writing emacs off as being overly complicated and bloated).

Emacs is _really_ ugly in the default config so I understand why a lot of people take one look and nope the fuck out. It also used to be pretty bloated. I guess it still is but compared to modern applications it's nothing. So the old argument of it being too big to run on a home desktop isn't valid anymore imo. Not much gained from sticking to ed/vi/vim/nano if you're concerned about 'bloat'.

Editing init.el is also much easier now that it was in the past. I converted my entire config over to use-package awhile ago. I'm happy I did. A lot of people have started writing their config in org-mode now because that's in vogue. But I don't and probably never will. I prefer to keep init.el as small as possible and I don't run that many packages these days.

>>105988345
>>105988496
Im able to scratch up from the bottom, and I don't have huge problem when it comes to writing in a vanilla Emacs. But I use most of the features that spacemacs offers, and there's no need to develop it own my on.

>>105988998
If you like the distro and it aligns with your work flow then great for you. I'm sure having a community of people helping maintain that configuration is helpful. For me I don't use a lot of stuff those distros include. I don't like how they tend to include a lot of extra stuff to please a handful of users for their distro. I want my own custom config that's not inline with what a lot of people like these days. Same reason why I maintain my own WM now.

It took a long time to settle on what I like and I still change things now and again. But for the most part I haven't touched my personal emacs config in a long time aside from trying out a new package every so often. If anything it's getting smaller as I age.

>>105987885
I don't think Aquamacs is a third party config. it's simply Emacs adapted for macOS specific GUI (Aqua), just like emacs-mac from Mitsuharu is.

>>105987162
>I really don't want to do everything in Emacs, I really don't.
Some people do, and that's OK. Do what makes you happy.

>>105987965
>I've never touched elisp.
One's enjoyment of Emacs is proportional to one's proficiency in Elisp. That's what makes it fun. The moment you mold Emacs to do a very specialized little task to improve your workflow, it's a very satisfying moment.

>>105988969
>Emacs is _really_ ugly in the default config
I always see this sentiment repeated but I never understood it. What's so bad about it? I find it quite appealing, the colours and everything.

>>105976018 (OP)
>Worth it?
no
>How do you justify the effort learning this?
its fun

>>105991471

>>105991693
Nothing wrong with any of it. The mode-line is uncluttered and inobtrusive, and the menu- and tool-bars expose new users to a plethora of commands.

>>105992131
I mean the design looks shit

>>105992264
Let's see how you've configured it to make it less ugly

>>105984480
>https://helix-plugins.com
>https://github.com/nik-rev/ghost-text.hx
Interesting

>>105977850
>Emacs aims to provide these things in an interconnected environment. With Emacs these collected utilities have the same theme, are configured in the same language and the same place, and can see each other if necessary.
truly the dream. unfortunately everything I've tried to do in emacs other than text editing has turned out to be kinda buns compared to just using the standalone equivalents.

>>105994284
just get good at coding, duh

>>105994356
i mean at that point if i have to write my own programs I'd prefer to write them as proper standalone programs rather have them confined within emacs

>>105976018 (OP)
It was worth it before superior alternatives came along. Now, I think it's better to just use VS Code.

>>105979413
>>105979515
read

>>105995222
ok retard

>>105976059
what's the usecase? seems like a glorified note taker/task manager. taskwarrior and vim work fine for me`

Emacs lads are not supposed to fight against vim pp.

We have to find a way how we can turn the emacs in to AI agent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTMyzeKKb0o

>>105995875
Org is greater than the sum of its parts, you have to use it to understand it. It uses a plaintext format but does all sorts of shit that plaintext usually can't do.

>>105996790
You've reached full Orgmode mental illness when you start using it as a spreadsheet.

>>105996798
https://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/spreadsheet.html

>>105976018 (OP)
>How do you justify the effort learning this?
Why should I?
Its not like Emacs was made obsolete by NeoEmacs or anything like that.
Its just perfect and unparalleled when it comes to extensibility that Vi and co. can only dream of.
I use Evil-mode and enjoy the best of both worlds.

>>105976018 (OP)
>Worth it?
if you have to ask, the answer is no.
>How do you justify the effort learning this?
learning emacs is usually a symptom of a greater overarching autistic desire to fully and wholly become one with The Machine.

its not really something you 'choose' to learn - rather, emacs chooses *you*.

>>105988998
Whatever you like from Spacemacs can be emulated in Vanilla.

>>105976018 (OP)
Are you a jeet? I've noticed commits and MELPA packages from japs, chinks, etc. and of course White people. No jeets though. Emacs appears to be jeetproof.

>>105991290
Yeah, but like, what tasks? I don't have a workflow to automate. I just type in text and save it to a file. What are you doing that requires some custom plugin? I don't get it.

>>105988496
I went through the vanilla tutorial and came away with no better understanding. I gave up on vanilla and went with doom because the keybinds seem far more discoverable.

>>105980682
>it can do just about anything for you
can it jerk me off

>>105999226
I know but I don't need to do that

>>105976018 (OP)
I honestly don't know. Maybe I could do whatever I want in VScode or vim or cursor, but I've never used it before. It wouldn't be a fair compare if I didn't use it innit. But I've been using emacs for a dacade and I just like it

>>105976018 (OP)
I just recently started programming. I set up Emacs as my first ever Editor after VScode since I started learning lisp and reading through my book I needed an editor that supports lisp without much hassle. So i set up a simple Emacs config. And just recently I also tried out Nvim.
So far for Emacs I like the package manager melpa, I like the language it feels like the config is easier to read and understand what stuff does. Setting up LSPs for Webdev was kind of a pain but idk if it was my retardation. Keybind stuff was easy though or switching buffers. I like that you can have your terminal and other stuff directly inside Emacs and you dont have to leave it.
For my Nvim config it just werked very quickly.
I set up everything I need and more (ie intendation highlighting or fzf in project), which I never got around to in emacs.
And the biggest set back for Emacs is that it just feels slower than Nvim. I got everything in nvim that I also have in emacs AND it is just more snappy and faster (which is so relevant for a text editor).

I think I just dont get the specific use case for Emacs over Nvim? Like people rave about magit but what does it do so much better than something like tig? I never tried Org mode so maybe thats the thing. I guess its strength is that if you really get into org-mode and elisp you can do everything and dont have to switch terminals like in nvim which I can see being annoying. Am I overlooking something here? Especially Nvim being faster just feels so much better, its what got me disliking vscode in the first place as its soooo slow.

Emacs is a harder sell when you already have everything configured the way you want it in a linux install.

I don't really feel like starting over from scratch and reimplement everything in elisp when my setup with vim, i3, and many little programs do what I want.

It's an interesting idea for sure, and I have messed around with it a bit, but I can never be fucked to deep dive. Could use the same time to work on my projects instead

>>106002297
You don't have to start over from scratch.
You don't have to use all of Emacs.
You can just use little bits of it.

My Emacs journey started with me keeping an Emacs open on the side for my diary that I kept in org-mode. I used vim for the majority of my work at the time, but I liked org-mode so I used Emacs just for that. Over time, I learned more about Emacs and Elisp, and eventually... when I realized evil was a good enough approximation of vim, I switched.

Vim users are kind of lucky, because they don't lose much at all when they switch to Emacs thanks to evil. Instead, they end up gaining tremendously.

any suggestions on learning Emacs?
Longtime vim user and vim motions are intuitive to me, but every time Ive tried emacs I get stuck on the most basic shit.

>>105976018 (OP)
>Worth it?
ini 2025? nahhhh

M-x doctor

it's really fun and you are fast when you use it

>>105995875
I use it for notes and it's good but I think there's plenty of other plain text options that would do fine as well. I don't know what other projects have so not confident this is exclusive to org-mode but three things that I really like are 1. it integrates with references well thanks to org-cite (built in) but is much better with the help of citar and org-roam. I can add references to my notes and those references become links I can use to open the PDF, go to the web page, or open the notes specfic to that reference. 2. Templates are nice for filling in some metadata about notes. 3. It has great source code support. Like when writing a code snippet it can open a temp buffer to write in the languages' mode.

Other than that I use it to write actually documents and it's a nice writing environment. I'm using it right now to write a presentation with beamer. I've used it for reveal.js presentations. And I just used it to write my dissertation. I think it's a nice layer on-top of LaTeX which makes writing that much cleaner. I also finally got around to figuring out how to write a Makefile to export from org-mode -> PDF and that makes it a lot better for multi-file writing.

>>106004458
Evil mode. imo modal is the way to go. It always made sense to me and is much more comfortable than emacs key-bindings

Vscode do amazing things without any concerns, it just works. And the design is beautiful. I don't think emacs lad do this shit easily in emacs like the vscode user did

>>106006908
Why do these young men today all look like they're wearing makeup and lipstick? Have genetics declined so much that they're coming out of the womb looking like girls?

>>106006939
emacs need more fresh people unlike the gatekeeping metalhead look havers

>>106006950
You didn't answer my question
>needs more fresh people
For what? To make shitty youtube videos attempting to make money off ads?
>gatekeeping metalhead look
At least we don't look like women.

>>106007031
This year isn't 1980 man, The face looks healthy and good

>>106006144
It's been over since the rise of LLMs

>>106007120
>The face looks healthy and good
He's wearing makeup...

>>106007308
Does it matter?

How I miss the days when faggots got stomped behind the school gym and people would openly ridicule some faggot for wearing make up. Although looking closer I see this is just some pajeet attempting to scam everyone with an LLM generated image. But I stand firm in my opinion that people under the age of 30 look like fags and their shit is all retarded.

I thought things were bad the first time I saw a high schooler wearing skinny jeans a few years after I graduated. I never thought things would get as bad as they are now.

>>106007332
Boomer freak.

>>106007354
At least he's not a faggot.

>>105979280
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead

>>106001924
Exactly. You can stick with vanilla because that's all you need.

>>106009801
vanilla is shit

>>106004458
http://xahlee.info/emacs

>>106012062
based emacman

>>106004458
>any suggestions on learning Emacs?
Open Emacs
Press ctrl+'h', then 't'

>>106006908
>the design is beautiful
jeet coded comment

>>106014184
We're overrun with ESLs and stinking pajeets. See:
>>106007120
>The face looks healthy and good
>healthy and good

>>105976037
Agreed. You only need just a few basic key strokes for using it. Everything else you just look up as you need it. Using it for 25 years now and I only use 0.01% of the commands.

>>106004458
>any suggestions on learning Emacs?
Enable which-key. If you have Emacs 30.1 or newer, it's built in so there's nothing to install. Just add this to your config.
(which-key-mode 1)

If you have an older version of Emacs, add this to your config.
(use-package which-key
:ensure t
:config
(which-key-mode 1))


https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key
What it does is show you what options you after you press a key. For example, if you press C-x and then wait a second, you might see something like pic-related.