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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I had no idea this was happening! You can still back it and apparently get Magit stickers.

Magit is so good that it's actually a reason to use Emacs in the first place.

> Wow, I had no idea this was happening!

This is, by far, my primary complaint about Kickstarter. They insist on sending me emails with "Things we like on Kickstarter". It is, generally speaking, full of absolutely irrelevant projects in the context of someone with a history on KS indicating I am only interested in technology projects.

It is truly infuriating because it always leads to exactly what you said: I had no idea project x was on KS.

I don't know what it is. Some kind of an internal cult. Or is it incompetence? They have my entire history on their site spanning years of supporting projects. Yet they think I might find campaigns about bow-ties and butterflies interesting? Unbelievable.

I wonder how much better campaigns could do if KS actually got their shit together?

> I had no idea this was happening!

It was actually posted to HN early during the campaign, but the capricious Gods of the HN Frontpage didn't bless the submission.

Fundraisers are penalized on HN because they don't fit the site mandate. There are always exceptions though. If we had known about this one we might have made an exception for it.

Ah, didn't know about this. It was a bit frustrating to see 15 attempts by happy Magit users to let HN know about the campaign fail miserably. Especially because a few weeks earlier "Emacs and Magit" [1] easily made it to #1. So when this thread at least managed to stay on the front page I figured that drama and success sell, trying to interest potential users in a tool that has more to offer than meets the eye, not so much.

By the way, this thread took a huge dive at some point - was that due to some manual penalty?

And now for something completely different: It just occurred to me that Magit's success is partially due to the use of Lisp, for reasons similar to those described in "Beating the Averages" [2]. Just thought that would be worth mentioning to give this more relevance to the HN crowd ;-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819256 [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Personally I figured that the words Emacs and Kickstarter in the same headline would induce lots of surprise with HNers. Alas, I didn't know about the penalty. Its existence is obvious in retrospect, though.

Org mode is the other reason.

Personally, I find that Helm is the third (although I'm aware it might not be a popular opinion).

I love Helm. Tab completion is fine when you know exactly what you want and the point is just to save some keystrokes. When completion involves some exploration is where Helm shines and is way better than tab completion, as it doesn't requires knowing the order of parts of the string to complete and support regexps.

When exploring some large code base, or trying to get at a rarely used emacs function or variable whose name you don't remember exactly (but it's about foo and bar for sure) there is definitely this fuzzy discovery element. And then the Helm approach is a blessing. Helm is completion + efficient exploration and discovery.

If you like Helm, check out Ivy, Counsel, and Swiper.[1] They do many of the things that Helm does, but are a lot faster, less buggy, and have a less unorthodox UI.

Also check out Hydra (by the same author).[2] That's really revolutionized my Emacs experience recently. It's customizable menu system you can add anywhere. I've put all those Emacs functions I keep forgetting exist in to it and now they're all at my fingertips.

[1] - https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper

[2] - https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra

> I've put all those Emacs functions I keep forgetting exist in to it and now they're all at my fingertips.

Can you share some of that? I've been meaning to get into Hydra, and would gladly look at some configs.

Hydra itself actually has a ton of really good examples here: [1]

But really the best place to start is with the hydra docs: [2] which not only has examples but detailed explanations of them too.

Regarding my own hydras, they're not quite ready for prime time. But when they are, I'll be posting them to r/emacs.[3] In the meantime, you can search there for hydras too: [4]

[1] - https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra/wiki/Hydras-by-Topic

[2] - https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra

[3] - https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs

[4] - https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/search?q=hydra&restrict_sr=on

spacemacs has a notion of transient states with menu systems like that that is a set of hydra menus. something like `spc w .` to get into a window transient state that shows you this menu: https://i.imgur.com/2VADwd9.png

or `spc b .` that gives you a bunch of buffer selection functions https://i.imgur.com/htj6xEn.png

quite useful and pretty easy to add to if you have a niche that is not being fulfilled by the standard spacemacs.

a more complex transient state might be for org-agenda

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/layers/%2B...

and a complete list of transient states here by searching for `define-transient-state` that you may feel compelled to copy.

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&...

I've tried twice to switch from helm (especially helm-projectile-grep) to the ivy ecosystem and I found the way that helm invokes the search tools to result in a much faster experience, and saw no reason to switch.

I like Helm, but Helm is thing that makes Emacs better at being Emacs; it's not a reason to use Emacs in the first place. But Magit is that.

I get that for some people org-mode is the same way, but I've never been able to make org-mode click.

I like and appreciate org mode a lot, but I could live without and not notice. Emacs is more my lispy scratchpad with OS batteries (I mean bindat, sockets, comint, eshell, <lang>-mode, ...)

Org-mode, has a huge amount of functionality in it. One response to that is that yes, it's amazing, a very impressive ecosystem. Another response is that the lack of single-purpose and modularity is maddening; it's tempting to say it's against the unix design philosophy etc.

Of course, that's also the old joke about emacs. Personally, as I got more heavily involved in software development, I wound my org-mode usage down to just outlining and syntax-highlighted source code blocks.

> Magit is so good that it's actually a reason to use Emacs in the first place.

This is a damn high compliment.

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