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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

Emacs is full of these.

In its defense, Emacs predates most modern UI paradigms (including, y'know, Ctl-C/V for copy-paste, or calling things "windows" vs "frames"), and is very conservative about updating defaults due to inertia.

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Do you have a list of favorites?

On Mac, assign traditional keybinds to Command/⌘ shortcuts (⌘-C/V for copy-paste, -S for save, etc).

Display the current column number in the modeline with (setq column-number-mode t)

Delete the selected area when overwriting by enabling (setq delete-selection-mode t)

Save sessions (all open buffers/files) automatically on quit with (setq desktop-save-mode t)

Display line numbers in the left gutter with (setq global-linum-mode t)

Wrap lines (with a convenient icon in the gutter to indicate line continuation) with (setq global-visual-line-mode t). Bonus: linum-mode compatible!

Skip that startup screen with (setq inhibit-startup-screen t)

Remove the limited and redundant icon toolbar with (setq tool-bar-mode nil)

Make emacs automatically refresh buffers whose underlying file has changed (and has no local unsaved modifications) with (setq global-auto-revert-mode t)

All of the above variables can also be customized through Emacs' excellent Customize, which is better than individually doing each (setq ...) I wrote above.

And these are just from a quick skim of my .emacs file... Decades ago, when a college friend espoused the merits of Emacs, I didn't get it because my first experience with a vanilla setup was so... limited. This is also why people will laud more "batteries-included" distributions like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs.

I agree that you need to customize Emacs rather heavily before it can be used as a "modern" editor.

I'm not a fan of most of your changes though, which highlights how hard it is to have defaults that please everybody in something as complex as Emacs.

Thanks! I added

```

  (setq  column-number-mode t

  desktop-save-mode t

  display-line-numbers t

  global-auto-revert-mode t)

  (delete-selection-mode)

  (global-display-line-numbers-mode)

```

`delete-selection-mode` when set as a variable didn't work.

`display-line-numbers` appears to replace `global-linum-mode`

the desktop-save-mode option is gold... thanks

Emacs is unbelievably full of them, but at the very least if it's missing a switch you can program it yourself easily (and fix any bugs yourself too). Not sure if that's a pro or a con, but the option is there.

> you can program it yourself easily

I consider myself a seasoned programmer, but after a decade I continue to fail to do any significant customization (other than a tidy .emacs leveraging use-package (since before it was cool^H^H integrated by default)).

Lisp's syntax is easy, but Emacs' API surface and concepts are bewildering, especially due to its aforementioned mismatch with modern terms.

I found it somewhat hilarious that you wrote a prose sentence with nested parentheses then began the next sentence with "Lisp's syntax is easy"

(: ;)

Eh. I think that's just of how emacs IS and the tutorials I remember all dealt with it.

I also don't think they were jackasses by default...

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