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Comment by jypepin | Hacker News Reader

I really started to get lost when he started talking about never wanting to leave his text editor, wanting to read his emails in Emacs, browse the web in Emacs, have slack and discord in Emacs, etc.

Serious question: Why? Is it that hard to alt+tab? Especially, why would you want such distracting features inside your editor, while you are trying to focus and work?

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You need to change the way you frame this phenomenon. Don't think of Emacs as an editor, but as a fully-introspectable and runtime-modifiable OS built on the "plaintext is king, but 2D" paradigm, that has a high-level language runtime (elisp), and comes with a set of default applications, one of which happens to be a text editor.

The desire to never leave Emacs isn't about making it slightly easier to view e-mails next to code. It's about making it possible to use the same autocomplete, same syntax highlighting, same recursive regex search, same multicursor editing, same whatever "magle this thing and put it in your calendar" hack you wrote the other day, on anything that's made of mostly text - e-mail, chats, code, prose, process lists, directory listing.

You'd probably have to experience it to believe it, or at least see some Emacs-as-OS user live, but this unification of all computing under a sane, end-user programmable, highly ergonomic interface can boost your productivity and experience in a way that isn't seen anywhere else today, not even during regular Linux use.

And even for applications that try to emulate Emacs, they all emulate default Emacs, not your Emacs setup.

It helps if you reframe your question. Emacs facilitates working outside of silos. If you're using Outlook for e-mail, for example, there are some built-in mini-silos you can interoperate with (decent calendaring, decent contacts database, fairly simplistic task management, etc.), but if you want to take notes about an e-mail you received, you might end up alt-tabbing to OneNote and then pasting some text, then writing a deadline down there and then alt-tabbing to Outlook to set up a reminder (there is separate reminder functionality in OneNote but it's rudimentary), then alt-tabbing to Slack and maybe adding a comment there related to the e-mail. The promise of Emacs is working in a single environment for all of this. One more-or-less consistent interface on top of everything.

And, I would add, in an entirely keyboard-driven way. I appreciate, as an Emacs user, how much I can get done without using the mouse.

> Is it that hard to alt+tab?

incidentally, alt+tab is broken on MacOs. It cycles between programs, not windows - so if you have mutiple terminal windows open, you're screwed. You can use the alternative alt+` to cycle between windows of the same app, but that doesn't go to the least recently used window, but cycles through them in order - which is also useless when having many terminals open. Then you can pay like 15$ to get a tool like witch (just to get basic OS functionality), but that tool is slow and broken.

So on a Mac it can be pretty hard to alt+tab.

Trackpad + 4 finger swipe works wonders for this problem.

I’ll agree it’s not as immediate as a good alt+tab, but it allows you to directly choose a different window from the same application.

Not exactly what your asked for, but this is what I do:

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Mission Control:

Set "Move left a space" to: Control + 9

Set "Move right a space" to: Control + 0

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys...

Set "Caps Lock" key to: Control

I don't get where that is broken.

On other operating systems, alt+tab goes to through the list of least recently used windows. So when working between two windows, one hotkey switches between them. On Mac, that's not possible if the two windows are part of the same app (or also when windows are distributed across multiple work spaces).

Being able to switch between apps, windows, and tabs is different from just windows and tabs. I prefer the former because the hierarchy allows you to find arbitrary things with fewer keypresses overall (as opposed to mashing alt-tab through a long flat list).

Except there's no such capability.

It takes mental effort. Imagine your coworker asks you which version of your app is running on staging and if the latest modification runs without throwing an error. Sure, alt-tab to your terminal and 5 commands later you’re in your app‘s repl to answer that but by then you had to switch your context. Opening your custom helm search for your servers which then displays a new window with your docker instances on staging plus pressing enter to dial into a repl session there is not only convenient, it reduces mental effort

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