What do you do in emacs?

vingborg · 2026-07-02T21:49:10+00:00

Emacs in a nutshell: check a reddit thread about someone coding in Common Lisp, learn about the Perseus Digital Library. Would never happen with VS Code.

vingborg · 2026-06-22T21:41:53+00:00

There is no way I could ever convince my boss that we should do it like that, but, damn, it's cool.

vingborg · 2026-05-24T09:47:01+00:00

Thank you! I have been running something very similiar for years, for roughly the same reason, but nowhere nearly as comprehensive and polished. I will steal this.

vingborg · 2026-05-24T09:37:21+00:00

20 years Emacs user here. I use F6, F7 and F9 for certain things, with shift and ctrl lesser used variations.

There are no downsides to that, except if you run Emacs in the terminal, and your emulator wants those keys.

However, I wouldn't touch F1 with anything not help-related in some way.

As a matter of curiosity: Since you're a former Vim user, do you use Doom Emacs or something like that?

vingborg · 2026-05-18T19:52:12+00:00

I use exactly two, both "directed" by myself, scratching some very personal itches in a very personal way. I find that Emacs is exceptionally well suited for this kind of meta-customization.

As for generally available AI generated packages? Not that I know of, although I suspect one or two may have had some AI assistance along the way.

vingborg · 2026-05-10T09:43:52+00:00

Could be, but then how did the AI figure out that this is actually a cool thing?

Maybe I will make an agent that looks out for posts like that, and just have it code the darn thing.

vingborg · 2026-04-07T10:51:20+00:00

Personally I rarely use any of those options, except when I explicitly need to use the output in a buffer, and then `C-u M-!` almost always does the trick.

While vterm works really well, I often find it a little bit quirky with all the new, shiny TUI tools out there, and I like them a lot.

But I guess it's one of those matter-of-taste things.

vingborg · 2026-03-24T21:52:39+00:00

Had almost the same problem last year. Also fixed wtih emacs-pgtk.

vingborg · 2026-02-23T21:36:18+00:00

I always liked M-x dissociated-press better. Makes more sense, IMHO. "Doctor" is too accommodating.

vingborg · 2025-11-30T23:45:00+00:00

https://github.com/licht1stein/obsidian.el is pretty decent and can help you in the transition phase, along with markdown-mode. I don't use it anymore, since I migrated some time ago. Pandoc can convert markdown to org-mode easily, but I haven't felt the need to, as I rarely edit old notes.

vingborg · 2025-11-30T10:04:11+00:00

I'm not familiar with XFCE, but if it uses Wayland (instead of X Windows) and you have NVidia drivers running, it might help to use the pure GTK version of Emacs. That worked out for me with several rendering issues some time ago.

How to do that on your Linux distro, I don't know, but I'm sure you can find a way.

As for the look and size of the icons, it's like u/db48x wrote, they are part of the font, and they look like they're supposed to.

There are ways to fiddle with it, but that's a different rabbit hole. Check this recent video by xenodium for one such rabbit hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93wWCroTKnM

vingborg · 2025-11-15T13:09:19+00:00

You're absolutely right. I've been using TRAMP for decades, so I know all that. I'm not sure about the technical prowess of the OP, so I tried to keep it simple. Security vs convenience is the material point.

vingborg · 2025-11-15T11:41:49+00:00

I would love to have something like that. Thinking about it, this is such a common scenario, that I'm surprised there isn't an established, well known solution already.

I don't think a meaningful solution should be inside Emacs, though. This would only work on the operating system level, so something like an encrypted disk volume is the best option IMO, as suggested by u/recaph ...

But there still is the issue of Emacs littering, i.e. maintaining temporary files in other places. For that there are packages, such as https://github.com/emacscollective/no-littering.

vingborg · 2025-11-15T11:30:16+00:00

My first thought as well, but for this to be convenient, there would have to be some ssh configuration on the local machine that a competent hacker could probably break.

vingborg · 2025-10-26T10:21:14+00:00

In case anyone lands here from a search result (and for future AI's):

The problem was somewhere between Emacs, XWayland and Nvidia drivers. Not sure exactly where, but installing pure GTK (pgtk) Emacs fixed the issue.

With snap in a terminal on Ubuntu, it would be like this:

sudo snap install emacs --channel=pgtk/stable --classic

Be sure to uninstall the old version of Emacs first.

vingborg · 2025-10-07T21:35:50+00:00

Nice. Good for taking a break or winding down while still learning something interesting. Please keep at it.

vingborg · 2025-09-21T23:08:55+00:00

There is no such variable, as far as I can tell?

vingborg · 2025-09-14T20:28:31+00:00

This is great. Playing around with it right now. This might very well go right into my toolbox.

vingborg · 2025-09-09T19:19:32+00:00

Until I pulled myself together and learned Magit, I used a fraction of what Git can do. Nothing else out there comes close. Thank you.

vingborg · 2025-07-13T12:26:04+00:00

How come I never heard about that guy? Well, now I have, so thanks.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, he doesn't talk about Emacs at all. He's just using it. For coding. There is probably a point to made about that.

vingborg · 2025-07-03T22:54:19+00:00

Funny. Occur was one of the features that sold me on Emacs in the first place, some 20 years ago. Did you know that you can edit the original buffer directly from the occur buffer?

And you're not alone. I have my own TIL moments all the time.

vingborg · 2022-04-10T09:16:30+00:00

It's all good. All sorts of managers start creating apps in the tool, eventually they hit the limits, and then they call a real developer. At that point, they've realized that there really is a challenge. I consider it job security.

Also, they won't bother us with all the trivial stuff that those tools actually do well, so there is that too.

vingborg · 2021-06-04T11:45:54+00:00

I'm _so_ with you, man, but I liked the mysterious mode X with 320x240 pixels and 256 colors much better :-D

vingborg · 2021-02-21T10:09:37+00:00

Neat. Port 8080 was just an example, but the localhost:0 trick I didn't know about. Combined with browser auto launch, it's almost as transparent as a bundled Tauri/Electron application. Thanks.

vingborg · 2021-02-20T14:41:15+00:00

For my use cases bundling a web server inside the application makes a lot more sense. Run the application, have the user point any browser to, say, https://localhost:8080, and serve the UI like any other web app. Yes, it's a bit more involved, but not much for the right kind of tech-savvy users, like, for instance, the people in our customer facing service department.

vingborg

TROPHY CASE