What's new in Emacs 29.1

Daniel Mendler (minad on GitHub) et al. have some seriously awesome packages. The latest one I’ve fallen in love with that I haven’t yet added to bedrock is Jinx [1]: a fast spell-checker that supports multiple languages in the same buffer, checks spelling of words based off of font-lock class (read: spell checking in doc strings and comments but not in actual code) and a slick interface that makes correcting words a breeze.

I’m so happy to hear you’ve found some helpful things from bedrock! Happy hacking!

I left emacs around 2018 or 2019 after 8 years of use as my main. A couple weeks ago I started configuring neovim to use it as my main editor outside of work. I'm doing mostly what I did back when I started with emacs which was copy and pasting the code that the plugin creaters advised and go from there. My main takeaway is that Lua is an immensely better language than Lisp for this use case, and when something goes wrong I feel the same about the stack trace.

I've had a better experience tweaking the configuration in Lua as well. I never tried neovim's starter frameworks (NVChad, LunarVim, etc) so I can't compare them to emacs's. I was never able to use well emacs's frameworks because either they were too convoluted ann hard to customize or kept crashing.

Also when opening or formatting large files (sometimes not so large) emacs would freeze for a very long time. Also, LSP was not around, or was in its infancy, so my experience with code completion and intellisense was very poor, but perhaps that has changed.

Finally, emacs's plugin called "Magit" is a godsend and I lack a similar tool ever since.

With all that said emacs was very special for me because it fueled my passion for open software and being able to control and customize the tools I use. I really hope it got better and keeps kicking!

Haven't done a full writeup, but Doom Emacs is _really_ nice.

Takes a little while to acclimate, but it's very useful once you're used to it.

I can share my perspective, as doom emacs user for some years (3, I think) who after some back and forth switched to neovim (I've had some vim experience before). If I had to summarize my emacs experience I would say that I like the idea, but I do not like the implementation. It is undoubtedly a cool project with an enormous scope, but while vim is a sharp tool complementing the terminal and usage of other tools, emacs is a kitchesink, which tries to pull everything in. There is no problem with it per se, but the quality of emacs solutions is often hit & miss. These are very generic (ideological) complains, I can name some concrete issues I've uncounted.

- The ecosystem is sometimes difficult. There is always a lot going on in terms of various completion frameworks and spellchecking. It is cool, but often you choice will have some consequences down the line. You like eglot, as a simple and faster alternative? Fine. But it does not support DAP, now you have to pull heavy LSP, treemacs and other 30 packages.

- Treesitter is a chance missed, they've introduced alternative mods for it, with a separate names, which makes it necessary to rewrite the hooks and generally makes a huge mess for no good reason. I guess, the reasoning was like "we do not want to force an external dependency", but there is simply no good reason to regex parsing if you have treesitter and it will be the standard, I am quite sure. Some kind of config switch for a mode would be a better solution.

- It is notably slower than neovim. I cannot describe it, it is more of a "micro-stutter here, micro-stutter there" feeling. It is more visible if you intend to use it for everything or as an IDE replacement, as an advanced editor emacs has a fine performance.

- The UI is... I don't know, I can never predict where a buffer will appear. Emacs in general will pop up a lot of buffers. Sometimes you can close them with q, sometimes you will have to hide them. "Inconsistent" is the word which comes into my mind.

- Org is outstanding as a technical outliner, so-so as a GTD tool. Sync problems and lack of good mobile clients shows.

- Configuring and introspection are good. I still have no idea how to debug my neovim config, for example, it is a non-issue in elisp, you don't even need to restart it, just eval parts of you elisp code!

- Embark is also a very very cool idea.

- Modern completion frameworks are good, vertico, marginalia, orderless - they are easy to configure and very performant. I just like Telescope in neovim more, since it looks better and shows a bigger code preview.

- Evil is a very good vim-like layer, but also quite heavy and sometimes you will have to deal with emacs keybindings. They are not bad, though, it makes sense to learn at least the basics. Due to evil I will leave the keybindings out in general, you can have it either way in emacs. Evil is the best vim implementation outside of vim/neovim.

I've settled on neovim with fish shell, git in console and occasionally lazygit and it is fine. It is hard to describe, but a focused, fast and composing editor is very pleasant to use. I also find neovim more aesthetically pleasant, although it is really just a personal perspective. But what is certainly is, is being simpler. Maybe it is just a natural consequence of aging, but I recognize a lot of value in simple tools: A lever espresso machine instead of a microcontroller-ridden monstrosity with a tablet attached, go instead of rust, console tooling instead of an IDE. Neovim just fits in.

The "bling" depends on the use case, emacs has many packages not all of which can be installed and in use at the same time.

Yes, we are :)

I just published my newly hand-rolled config https://github.com/adityaathalye/dotemacs

At some point if/when I upgrade to 29.1, I will be able to delete some lines such as the ones that install use-package. :)

It's the whole point of Emacs that it's malleable and can (should) be tailored to the own personal users needs.

Wait until you learn about users of that editor called vim.

I fully understand GNU's ideology and I understand no one owes me an Emacs that runs smoothly on Windows. I'm just sharing my experience so far.

So how does the slow tasting freedom help achieve that goal?

Emacs runs perfectly on macos though

Installing evil mode was surely one of the first things I did :) Right after set a dark theme ofc.

I became persuaded of the superiority of eshell when I could use corfu for completions. So. Cool.

Thanks, I'll take a look at these eshell batteries.

I ran Emacs on Windows and used it every day for most of the past year, first natively and then in WSL. I can confirm that performance is many, many times better on WSL, in lots of ways.

Unfortunately, WSL's GUI support is extremely buggy on multimonitor setups (and maybe elsewhere), so you may have to restart your Emacs session often to get window management or even just clicking around to work right.

Could FAT be actually better than NTFS in this regard?

> You are meant to press Ctrl with your right hand when you press C-x.

I've been using Emacs for several years now, and I think the real solution is to turn Caps Lock into another Ctrl.

The right Ctrl key is in a very uncomfortable position whether I press it with my pinky or with the base of my hand, so in practice I basically never use it. The left Ctrl key is not as bad, but it's still not comfortable if I need to press it often. Caps Lock, however, only requires a slight adjustment of my left pinky finger to press. Simultaneously pressing x with my left ring finger is slightly weird, but not uncomfortable. There are some other keys on the left side that don't really comfortably combine with left Ctrl or Caps Lock, but I don't run into them often enough for it to be a problem.

> You are meant to press Ctrl with your right hand when you press C-x.

Nothing's stopping you from doing it that way, but since Steele and Moon started writing EMACS in 1976 on the PDP-6 and the PDP-10 and probably used VT52 terminals to access those systems, you're probably expected to have a control key on the home row to the left of the caps lock. The VT52 does not have a control key on the right side of the keyboard. I've found that Emacs's ergonomics are greatly improved by swapping the caps lock and left control keys on modern, IBM Model M-inspired keyboard layouts.

> Imagine pressing C-j C-m (or C-jm) for example.

I'm not sure what it means since I just pressed <C-j> <C-m> and I had zero issue about this. I stated in the first post that I use capslock as ctrl.

> How does the OS affect whether you close Emacs between sessions or not?

I didn't say that I close Emacs between sessions. I meant (I supposed) some Unix people use tools like vterm and magit so they don't even switch to another terminal app. I instead constantly switch between Emacs and Windows Terminal.

Just do it, and learn to use the reflog ("l r" from magit buffer). Although of course be aware of the few things that can trample your workdir like reset --hard. If in doubt, commit/stash everything, to the thing, then see what it did.

For extended docs beyond the minibuffer, I've found that M-x eldoc works very nicely with eglot and follows the Emacs way.

Did that this morning. Been using Doom for years as my config base and got tired of not really "knowing" emacs and not being able to quickly solve problems. Finished my own mostly vanilla emacs conf this morning.

With Vertico in Doom Emacs (via the Helpful package), I find a lot of stuff like this by doing `SPC h f` and then "vertico" and a list of functions containing that string in the name pops up.

It looks like it's in Text > Database in the "Emacs Lisp" manual, not the "Emacs" manual.

> https://medium.com/really-learn-programming/setting-up-tree-...

The author made this story available to Medium members only. Sign up to read this one for free.

/sigh

For reference, here are my versions

    ________________ M-x emacs-version
    GNU Emacs 29.1 (build 1, x86_64-apple-darwin18.7.0,
    NS appkit-1671.60 Version 10.14.6 (Build 18G9323)) of 2023-07-30
    
    ________________ M-x describe-mode (for C++)
    Minor modes enabled in this buffer: Font-Lock Tree-Sitter-Hl Tree-Sitter
    The major mode is C++//l mode defined in cc-mode.el:
    
    Major mode for editing C++ code.
    Using CC Mode version 5.35.2
    
    ________________ M-x describe-mode (for ts)
    Minor modes enabled in this buffer: Font-Lock Tree-Sitter-Hl Tree-Sitter
    
    The major mode is TypeScript mode defined in typescript-mode.el:
    Major mode for editing typescript.
    
    ;;; typescript-mode.el --- Major mode for editing typescript
    ;; URL: http://github.com/ananthakumaran/typescript.el
    ;; Version: 0.4
    ;; Keywords: typescript languages
    ;; Package-Requires: ((emacs "24.3"))

    ________________ os
    % uname -srm
    Darwin 19.6.0 x86_64

    % sw_vers
    ProductName:        Mac OS X
    ProductVersion:     10.15.7
    BuildVersion:       19H15

LSP as a protocol feels like somebody documented IDE features, then exposed those directly at the protocol level. It's absurd. When last I checked, I could register a function to be used to apply syntax highlighting when the LSP server identifies a change, but you couldn't make any explicit queries against the known parts of the syntax.

I wanted to query the LSP server to tell whether the point was currently located within a string, but as far as I could tell, the LSP server couldn't be queried for the syntax type. You can ask for "selection suggestions", you can ask for "semantic tokens" within a specific range, but you cannot ask for the semantic token containing a single specific point.

Have you profiled things and have data to show JSON handling is the root of the performance issues?

Treesitter will make LSP servers obsolete at some point I believe. The parser framework also comes with query API you can use for semantic analysis of code — it’s about more than just syntax highlighting. Therefore, with treesitter you should be able to do everything what a language server does for you — inside the editor‘s process.