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Comment by siraben | Hacker News Reader

I use Emacs every day, I practically live in it. However there are some things that I wish I could have:

- a good terminal mode so I don't need to switch to another terminal, the builtin terminals either lag badly after 10K lines of input or render/behave strangely when used with ncurses programs

- pervasive, non-blocking async, this has gotten better over time especially with language servers being on separate processes, however many common tasks block usage completely, such as upgrading/installing packages

The reason I bring this up is because imagine those points but applied to your window manager. Since Emacs is not multi-threaded, if something inside Emacs freezes your whole X session will become in blocked case you run Exwm. For the same reason, it is a bit more responsive.

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> a good terminal mode so I don't need to switch to another terminal, the builtin terminals either lag badly after 10K lines of input or render/behave strangely when used with ncurses programs

I found vterm[1] to be pretty reliable for any kind of "advanced" terminal use. Also much faster when dealing with large amounts of output.

[1]: https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm

For long output and ncurses, libvterm may suffice https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm. The rest of the time, eshell is very comfortable for me.

Agree on the terminals - I've never got on with any of the emacs options. I use mate-terminal within EXWM, so at least my terminals appear in the buffers list.

EXWM does indeed block when emacs is busy. I haven't found it a problem with my usage, but I imagine it could be annoying. Killing emacs ends the X session of course, as it's the window manager, but I rarely need to restart emacs. Useful trick: If emacs really is stuck and Ctrl-G isn't working, switching to a virtual terminal (eg. Ctrl-Alt-F2) and running `killall -SIGUSR2 emacs` will usually make it snap out of it. (I haven't had to do that for months, though.)

> Killing emacs ends the X session of course, as it's the window manager

If killing Emacs ends the session, that must have a different cause. Killing the WM doesn't usually end the session.

You can load your long running emacs session in a separate session within EXWM. For some reason the thought never occurs to a lot of EXWM users.

https://tech.toryanderson.com/2020/10/19/emacs-in-emacs-a-tr...

> Since Emacs is not multi-threaded

Seems weird that no one would have built a multi-threaded emacs by now.

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