> Once the user is sufficiently (l)ionized, they're no longer receptive to neutral positions.
Every step in this argument (particularly this one) seems tenuous at best, and in need of citations.
161 karma · joined November 27, 2014
Every step in this argument (particularly this one) seems tenuous at best, and in need of citations.
gptel-agent ships with an elisp-eval tool out of the box, BTW.
Also, mpv supports lua scripts for a variety of actions on YouTube (or other streaming) videos, such as showing you YouTube's recommended videos in the video player, clipping and downloading videos, sponsorblock and submitting sponsorblock segments, and so on.
I've been doing this for almost a decade, and I do recommend it. In my experience, just importing my YouTube subscriptions into a feed reader was a positive experience. I've had a daily digest of mostly interesting videos and rarely (if ever) the urge to browse YouTube.
But with YouTube's recommendation algorithm out of the picture, it does mean that you'll have to find some other way of discovering new channels.
> ...
> One of the truths preached in the Gospel of Mac is that ALL programs need to be consistent with one another, and use the same visual look, menu hierarchy, and keybindings for corresponding commands.
I started using Emacs on a Mac recently and was pleased to discover that it is, in fact, consistent with other programs.
- Cmd-C/X/V work as expected (copy/cut/paste from system clipboard)
- Cmd-Z undoes,
- Cmd-O brings up the open-file dialog, Cmd-T opens a new tab,
- Cmd-F invokes search and Cmd-L goes to line, and so on.
It uses the same global menu bar as other programs, and setting the font from the menu works. The only thing that didn't work is using Cmd-Shift-? to search through menu bar options. This is GNU's official MacOS build, not the custom-built emacs-mac or emacs-plus packages.
Last year I helped a non-programmer get started with Emacs (for the first time) on a Mac. After a couple of weeks their only remarks were that the customize interface looks a little dated and the config/custom file has a weird format. They never brought up the keybindings or other UI as an issue. Now I understand why -- Emacs is a reasonably good citizen on MacOS.
I use Elpaca instead of the built-in package manager, which is better designed (declarative package specification) and fully asynchronous. The UI is also more thoughtful, with more granular search-as-you-type capability and easy git commit reviews of pending package updates.
package.el is catching up to Elpaca in features, but async installs/updates is not one of them.
> How does eat detect a visual command in eshell?
eat-eshell-mode doesn't detect visual commands and launch a separate eat buffer, like eshell-visual-commands do. It filters all process output in eshell and handles term codes. It turns the eshell buffer itself into a terminal, so that vim or whatever runs in eshell.
> It sounds from your description like vterm is faster than eat.
vterm is faster than eat, but a dedicated eat buffer is fast enough for most common TUIs. An eshell buffer with eat-eshell-mode is slower.
It runs full-fledged TUIs like vim and ncmpcpp in Eshell slowly, but is good enough for quick fzf uses. It's perfectly fine for "small" dynamic elements like the spinners and progress bars used by package managers.
Just remember to use system pipes (with "*|") instead of Elisp pipes (with "|") if you're piping data into an interactive TUI application like fzf in Eshell.
I use gptel-agent[1] when I want agentic capabilities. It includes tools and supports sub-agents, but I haven't added support for Claude skills folders yet. Rolling back the chat is trivial (just move up or modify the chat buffer), rolling back changes to files needs some work.
Emacs is single threaded and can't offload any elisp code. Even the stuff it can offload as background OS processes report in to the main loop and share time with editing, so a chatty background process can and does frequently lock up Emacs. So I'm surprised that VSCode, whose runtime is better suited to async jobs, ever feels slower than Emacs.
pdf-tools is quite slow and a memory hog. emacs-reader is a replacement for it (still in development) that already blows every PDF reader I've ever used out of the water in performance:
Not an error on your end. Live previews for _new_ fragments are only supported when entering \[..\] and \(..\) delimiters, and not $..$ and $$..$$. With the latter you'll have to preview it manually once, and live previews will update from then on.
Fixed the typo, thank you for reporting it.
There is, but we haven't managed to merge it into Org mode yet because we (the feature authors) and the Org maintainer have been busy with other things.
Here are some screencasts:
- https://share.karthinks.com/olp-auto-mode-env-1.mp4
- https://share.karthinks.com/olp-auto-mode-inline-1.mp4
Here's a longer explainer (this is part 2/2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u44X_th6_oY
Here are instructions if you want to try the fork of Org mode that provides this feature: https://abode.karthinks.com/org-latex-preview/
You can, see the command subed-crop-media-file.
https://github.com/sachac/subed/blob/main/subed/subed-common...
On the other side, there are many MacOS-specific features supported by Emacs, with the recently added dictation support being one of them. If a MacOS feature is missing, it's much more likely to be due to a lack of manpower than a desire to maintain feature parity with Linux.
As of last week you can insert a link to a plain-text file in a chat buffer to include its contents in the prompt. It must be on a line by itself. In Markdown it looks
[like this](/path/to/file)
with Org links in Org chat buffers.
This feature is disabled by default to minimize confusion. To enable it you can flip the header line button that says "ignoring media" to "sending media". This works for sending images and other media too, if the model supports it.
gptel can use MCP server tools in Emacs by integrating with the mcp.el package, here's a demo: https://i.imgur.com/WTuhPuk.mp4.
mcp.el: https://github.com/lizqwerscott/mcp.el
Relevant gptel README section (you'll have to unfold the details block): https://github.com/karthink/gptel?tab=readme-ov-file#model-c...
For example, I would like to set options that are a few menus/button clicks deep in the Windows control panel (either the "classic" or new variant) using keyboard shortcuts/navigation. Or navigate the Windows registry editor. I'm not aware of a way to do this.
Do you have a reference for this? I've often needed to control Windows using only a keyboard and failed to do so. I'm aware of most shortcuts in this list[1] but these are for a few very specific things. (As an aside, I also remember controlling the mouse with the numpad using the Mouse Keys accessibility setting but this is worse than both keyboard shortcuts and the mouse.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts
Everyone including the maintainers would like this to happen. The arguments against it are technical hurdles. Emacs is a large ball of global state and the lisp evaluator hooks into everything, including the display engine, so it's not clear to anyone how to disentangle things to the point where the interpreter lock can be released.
Emacs cannot do this. There are many Emacs libraries or packages that need this feature (Org babel is a big one, transclusion is another), and have to work around its absence in hacky ways.
I use Elfeed in Emacs, which satisfies all your requirements -- except bypassing paywalls -- and is the best RSS reader I've ever used. For context, I've used at least ten RSS readers since 2005 before finding Elfeed in 2018.
Installing packages does not need to block either, there is no architectural limitation here. The Elpaca package manager for Emacs provides async, parallel package updates. Loading packages into the Lisp image will block though, there's no way around that.
The other big source of input lag is garbage collection, and there are some ongoing efforts to use the MPS library in Emacs for a copying, concurrent GC. This is a big change and I don't know if this experiment will go anywhere, but Eli Zaretskii and co are trying.
It's not an accident -- reading through the emacs-devel mailing list, it's easy to see how much effort the maintainers pour into backward compatibility. It's one of Emacs' unspoken guiding principles[1].
At the same time, it's not that surprising either. Emacs does not have other objectives that more modern languages/ecosystems do: no revenue or growth targets, corporations or VCs breathing down its neck, or a mandate to be "modern". Its most vocal and experienced users, who are also its volunteer maintainers, decide what its priorities should be. Since they've been using it for decades, backward compatibility is high on the list.
[1]: It's "spoken" guiding principles being to further the goals of the GNU project.
gptel has a buffer-centric design because it tries to get out of your way and integrate with your regular Emacs usage. (For example, it's even available _in_ the minibuffer, in that you can call it in the middle of calling another command, and fill the minibuffer prompt itself with the text from an LLM response.)
For organizing LLM chat logs in Emacs, there are many solutions. Here are a few:
As a basic solution, chats are just text buffers/files, so you can simply store your conversations in files in a single directory. You can then see them in dired etc -- and they are ripgrep-able, can be integrated into Org-roam or your choice of knowledge management system.
If you use Org mode, you can have branching conversations in gptel where each path through the document's outline tree is a separate conversation branch. This way you can explore tangential topics while retaining the lineage of the conversation that led to them, while excluding the other branches. This keeps the context window from blowing up and your API inference costs (if any) down.
If you use Org mode, you can limit the scope of the conversation to the current heading by assigning a topic (gptel-set-topic). This way you can have multiple independent conversations in one file/buffer instead of one per buffer. (This works in tandem with the previous solution.)
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Tools tend to compose very well in Emacs. So there are probably many other solutions folks have come up with to organize their LLM chat history. For instance, any feature to handle collections of files or give you an outline/ToC view of your Markdown/Org documents should work well with the above -- and there are dozens of extensions like these.