can you elaborate? Heavy vim user here, have considered using emacs in vim mode to quell a decades long nagging curiosity. Just need a compelling nudge.
Doom emacs and Spacemacs are both good starter kits to give you an idea of what you could do.
Yeah, come on. NBD yo.
;-)
I just use emacs for programming, not note taking or email reading or the other things people love it for. Strengths: magit, wgrep, vterm, buffer management, plugins & packaging. Weaknesses, irritations, embarrassments: yaml-mode, responsiveness, overlays & mini-buffers.
There is also an ecosystem of applications for Emacs that are really good. They don't require you to use Emacs as your editor (you can run, say, Magit as a standalone instance) but if you do, they integrate really well with each other.
Neovim is great, I use it almost every day. But it just can't replace Emacs. That is the most annoying part of Emacs - there's simply no alternative to it. If you accept it with all its quirks and weirdness and embrace the malleability, stick with it for a while - at some point you may discover some enormous feeling of empowered liberation from years of bullcrap you had to deal with without even realizing.
Here's a comment I posted on /r/emacs couple of weeks ago:
So yes, Neovim is snappier, and so what? I'm genuinely curious, I consider myself a die-hard, hardcore vimmer. Yes, I use Emacs today, but I'm still a vimmer. I sometimes use Neovim too - having vim skills comes handy with pure terminal workflows.
So, honest question - why should it appeal to me - the idea of ditching Emacs and moving to Neovim (or whatever) full-time?
- I have a few thousand notes in my Org-Roam note taking system. My notes can contain anki-cards - my spaced-repetition content is just my notes; my pdf annotations - they are just my notes; my health records - are just my notes; I don't need to use Postman - my API investigations - are just my notes.
- I don't need to use Ansible, Chef or Nix to maintain my dotfiles - they are tangled from an .org file - I just need Emacs to bootstrap the whole system.
- I read Reddit and Hackernews in Emacs.
- I manage my email in Emacs.
- My Telegram is in Emacs.
- I search Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, DuckDuckGo, and more without leaving Emacs.
- I write everything in Emacs (even this very comment), because I have thesaurus, spellchecking, definition and etymology lookup, translation, dictionaries, LLM integration - I can ask AI at the point of typing text (in just about any buffer).
- My AI coding assistant is in Emacs.
- My PR reviews happen in Emacs. Everything git related happens in Emacs. I go through my GitHub notifications in Emacs.
- I watch videos with Emacs - it allows me to control them directly - I can speed up, mute, pause the video, extract transcript - all while taking some notes.
- I do my Jira in Emacs.
- I open and search through Slack threads in Emacs.
- I learn programming languages through exercism.io in Emacs.
- My file manager is in Emacs - I have tried so many different ones - mc, yazi, ranger - nothing beats Dired in customizability and capabilities.
- I access my browser history and even browse and switch tabs of my browser - in Emacs.
- I even OCR text out of screenshots with Emacs.
So now tell me, why should I care that there is something, anything, whatever - snappier, prettier, shinier, more popular? Why should I ever feel FOMO, if it can never do even the small subset of what my current system is capable of doing today?
In the past I've investigated emacs enough to appreciate that asking someone for their emacs config is a mix of Futile + Way Too Personal + Too Much Work (on their part, explaining etc). But do you perhaps have a blog or something somewhere about your setup, so noobs who aspire to that kind of emacsdom could get an idea of what is possible and how you're doing it?
- Org-Roam is a widely known and popular package. However, I moved to Vulpea, because it has much faster and improved indexing. Over the years I have accumulated few thousand notes and vanilla Org-Roam indexing became a bottleneck.
- For spaced repetition I use anki-editor and some yasnippet templates to quickly create cards. There exist multiple packages for Anki and other kind of cards.
- Tangling dotfiles (or any files) from Org is a known trick. Many manage their Emacs configs that way
- API investigations are a bunch of Org-mode source blocks. I use ob-http and verb.el
- For Reddit and Hackernews, I use hnreader and reddigg with some customizations on top
- For email I use notmuch. Some prefer mu4e
- For Telegram - telega.el
- For universal search - consult-omni
- For writing - mw-thesaurus, jinx, define-it, wiktionary-bro, google-translate, sdcv
- For LLMs - gptel-agent and ECA
- For PRs - code-review.el
- For watching videos a custom transient atop mpv.el
- For browser history - browser-hist.el
- Last two pieces are of my own doodling, you can find them in my config - I keep procrastinating, I need to make them into separate packages.
No, I do not have a blog - I'm a peculiar writer. Like Russians say: writing is like pissing - you should do it only when you can't hold it anymore². I guess I'm not there yet. I do occasionally publish some YouTube vids, I have a channel with a pretentious name³.
Feel free to ping me with any questions, it will be a real pleasure to be of help . I'm sure you can find a way to contact me directly - I'm pretty easy to find.
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¹ https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d
² "to write" and "to piss" in Russian is the same word - писать. The difference only in pronouncing.