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Comment by ctrlmeta | Hacker News Reader

> I know I'm a bit of an emacs user, but for this I've been using visual studio code because of one extension in particular: Cursorless.

Honestly want to know how many people here use Emacs like this? I thought Emacs users live their lives in Emacs. I know people who move more and more of their workflows into Emacs with packages like vterm, EAT, lsp-mode, pdf-tools, etc.

Are there seriously Emacs users who only a "bit of an emacs user". What is your workflow like? How do you decide when to use Emacs and when to use other tools? VSCode and Emacs have a lot of overlap in their purpose. How does this switching in and out of tools that overlap in their purpose feel?

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I use emacs like that. When first getting into it, 20 years ago, I was very much as described above - slowly pulling everything in my life into emacs. And then the iPhone arrived, and I started pulling out things that I wanted to do mobile: email, to do lists, and eventually notes, and recipes. Most recently, I’ve started doing JavaScript in VS code, as the LLM assistants are better than what I’ve got in emacs, but I suspect this is temporary.

I find the emacs works best when it does everything, but there’s stuff it just doesn’t do, so I do that stuff elsewhere. I look outside of emacs if I think the task is going to be done mobile, and even then, I generally choose a solution that produces plain text so I can do it inside emacs if required - but sometimes that just doesn’t work out.

How many do you know in real life?

I suspect a lot of this is selection bias: the Emacs discussion you see online is often coming from fanatics rather than people who use Emacs without blogging about it.

> How many do you know in real life?

2 emacs users and they do everything in emacs.

> I suspect a lot of this is selection bias

Exactly and that's why I want to know more from those who don't do everything in Emacs and how they decide when to use Emacs and when to use another editor and how mixing both editors in your life works out for you.

I use Emacs for editing computer programs (and version control, some documentation, etc), as a calculator, and for interacting with R via orgmode. I don’t use it for reading email, editing other documents (gdocs, wiki, jira, etc), browsing the web, or even interacting with shells (I might call sort from Emacs but I don’t use shell-mode or similar.

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