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Zobat
iLemming
Emacs is weird. I think it changed something in my brain. Before Emacs, I never thought I would ever try controlling video playback from my editor. "Just why?" I probably would've said. I never thought I'd be trying to get the text from the active tab in my browser. Or search through my browser history. Or OCR the content of my clipboard, or control my WM. Dang, before Emacs, it didn't even occur to me to try to type just about any text in my text editor - which now makes absolute sense - why would I ever bother typing in my browser window, Slack, Zoom, or email client?
In Emacs, I have all the tools I need for dealing with text - thesaurus, spell-checking, definition and etymology lookup, search engines, translation, LLMs, etc. Why, oh why, wouldn't I ever try typing anything longer than two words in anything else?
Like, for example, while typing this very comment, I may come across a thought: "I think I already made a similar comment some time ago, let me find it..." What would a regular user do? They'd switch to the browser, navigate to HN, scroll to the bottom, type search query, lookup on the page, jump to the next, keep paging until they find it, copy, switch back, paste... What would an experienced Emacs user do? They'd search for it without ever leaving their editor, grab the stuff from the buffer and paste it - all within just a few keystrokes. Or if I need to find a url in my browser history - I'd just search for it and insert in-place - two keystrokes+search query.
It's not just faster - it is profoundly satisfying and liberating. It gives you the feeling of being in control. You don't have to deal with the quirks of specialized apps; you don't need to memorize tons of their specific keybindings; it gives you a straight path to extracting or injecting plain text.
That's why those who never made a wholehearted attempt to use Emacs just never get it. And those who have, never can understand why others don't even try to recognize the value.
Waterluvian
I hear stories like this and I can kind of see the proposition. But I’d be more eager to, somehow, see a long-running example of it all at work. I think I’m not so skeptical about what it can do, but somewhat skeptical that it’s actually as much of a paradigm shift as some describe it to be. I wonder if oftentimes it falls in the enjoyable hobby category of, “I just really enjoy upgrading my workshop.”
keybored
The distinction between a profound paradigm shift and something that can be denigrated as a pasttime is subjective and in turn no empirical investigation will draw out an objective conclusion.
iLemming
It is indisputably not a hobby, at least for me, personally it ain't. I've been coding long enough to see a difference between "oh, what a nice gimmick" and "how the fuck would I even do that, if I didn't know this way existed...". Long. My first programming language was Sinclair BASIC. The second PL I learned was Pascal. I picked up a few more over the years. I'm not trying to show off, nor am I claiming to be an outstanding programmer - I'm neither great nor terrible. I'm just saying I've been doing this shit for a long time, that's all.
It isn't a hobby, because Vim and Emacs allow me to perform in a way that I consider far more enjoyable, productive and satisfactory than I ever had before them. That is of course on a personal empirical basis - I cannot promise them having the same effect on anyone else.
In my opinion, after many years using many different tools, techniques, ideas and methodologies, frameworks, approaches, systems, platforms, workflows, philosophies, paradigms, strategies, practices, concepts, models, theories, and experiments, I personally find these two to be exactly the paradigm shift — in comparison to my prior experience when I didn't have them.
But let me be more specific - the paradigm shift I see is not in Emacs or Neovim as tools themselves. The paradigm shift I sense is in the grand ideas behind these tools - modal navigation and Lisp.
I honestly don't know why more people don't gravitate towards these ideas. Perhaps, because these ideas are kind of like 'meditation' - people say one can only experience the mind shift after practicing it for some time. I wouldn't know - I never practiced mediation for long. And that time required to see the shift can differ for every person - some may grok it quickly, for some, it may take decades without ever even clicking.
Also, you're wrong about "upgrading one's workshop" - it's a misconception that longtime Emacs users constantly have to tweak their configs. My config for example is pretty stable; I often make changes to it not because I have no choice, but because the task at hand calls for it. I write a lot of Lisp because it's an instrument for achieving specific goals and solving specific puzzles - work for which I get paid real amounts of real money. I get paid to use Emacs, not the opposite. So, no: definitely not a hobby.
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Zobat
I do like having access to stuff while doing similar stuff. Perhaps I'm just a little too lazy to learn that stuff while still getting paid to know other stuff. And I do have just about every tool/feature you mentioned, just not in a single user interface.
I guess the path to Emacs was more of a possibility/probability earlier in my career and I might find it later but for now I'll alt+tab to the browser and/or open a new tab when I need to look up any etymology and stick to navigating around Visual Studio like a pro while they still pay me to do it.
vector_spaces
The nice thing with emacs is that you can do as much or as little as you want with it. For me it started with basic text editing, then doing some git stuff with magit, then realizing emacs has wonderful capabilities around notetaking and to-do management in org-mode.
Like you, though, I work in orgs that are very Windows heavy, so I tend to use it more for my personal stuff rather than in my day job
iLemming
> I do have just about every tool/feature you mentioned, just not in a single user interface.
Well, just like I said - you're not getting it, we're talking past each other. It isn't about a "single interface" - not about cramming everything into one window, it's rather about seamless workflow integration. It's like having a command center that orchestrates your existing tools, rather than replacing them. The power isn't in the interface - it's in the programmable glue between your tools.
You say: "I'd open a new tab if I need etymology..." Sure, on the surface it feels like a fair point. However, when you have the ability to request something from any tool or service "at-point", right in the middle of typing a sentence or solving a specific task - it simplifes so many things, and you tend to use those tools more. It's basic psychological phenomenon called 'convenience effect'.
But that's the only half story of it. Here's the practical example I often use as an evidence. I use Google Translate, alright? On its own there's nothing special about it - other editors and IDEs, also probably have integrations like that if not even nicer with GTranslate or some other translating service, right? Yet check this out. I'm learning Spanish, and when I want to translate something like "Colonel was born in 1968", what would GTranslate do? It would translate the text leaving the numbers intact, and that's totally expected. But guess what? I am trying to gain better familiarity with numbers in Spanish, I really do need to see them in their written form.
How long do you think it took me to solve that little personal discomfort? No longer than fifteen minutes. First, I needed to find out what actually was sending the payload to GTtranslate endpoints. I launched Emacs' built-in profiler and performed a task of translation. I found the function. Then I advised it. Advising is an Emacs Lisp mechanism to prepend, append or override the behavior of any given function - built-in or third-party. So, I figured that if I convert the numbers to text first, then send the payload with that text instead of numbers, it will work exactly as I wanted.
I couldn't even find an implementation of numbers-to-word in Elisp, and I didn't want to spend any time trying to write one. So I delegated the task to an npm package. Now, my advising function adjusts the behavior of 'translate' function (that sends the payload) by detecting the numbers in the text and then runs nodejs, changing the payload, so GTranslate spits out: "Coronel nació en mil novecientos sesenta y ocho"
Did I have to write my own browser extension for that? Nope. Did I have to figure out how GTranslate endpoints work? Nope - I didn't even have to open their documentation page. Did I have to re-implement the entire command that sends the payload? Nope - I just needed to tweak one, specific aspect of it, with extreme granularity - the body of the function is ten lines long. If that's not some blackmagickfuckery, I don't know what that is. Maaaan, I wish someone has showed me some shit like that when I was much younger.
> Perhaps I'm just a little too lazy to learn that stuff
Here's a thing about ideas - and don't consider Emacs as a concrete tool, a mere editor, but think of the fundamental idea behind it. You don't need to "learn" ideas. You just have to cultivate some level of curiosity about them. Sure, you may later have to spend considerable time learning the concrete tools behind those ideas, but absorbing the idea is the first step.
And grokking basic fundamentals about the idea of Lisp is pretty trivial - one just needs to learn mainly two things - structural editing and REPL-driven development. Some may argue that even those are not specifically necessary to begin the journey.
You know how the "do" in Taekwondo, Judo, Aikido, Karate-do stands for "path" or "way"? There's no truly "learning" Aikido, you either practice it or you don't. It's a lifelong practice rather than something you "master" or "complete." The idea of Lisp is similar - it's not really something you "learn" in the traditional sense and then move on from. You practice thinking in Lisp.
The fundamental principles of Lisp - code as data, the power of the REPL, recursive thinking, functional approaches - these aren't just techniques you acquire. They become a way of approaching problems, a mindset you cultivate through practice. The practice never really ends - it just deepens.
I haven't done any martial arts, so I'm just spitting words here, but I bet, if I ask anyone who practiced Aikido for a long time if it makes their lives any better, I bet they'd tell me some koans about zen master pouring tea or some other shit that I'd immediately dismiss as complete bullshit, so I wouldn't blame you if you take my words the same way.
> I guess the path to Emacs was more of a possibility/probability earlier in my career
Just like Aikido welcomes practitioners at any age or stage of life, Lisp is always ready for new practitioners. The fundamental principles align here in more ways than one could imagine - "the journey is the destination", "wisdom over athleticism", etc. Many people discover their deepest appreciation for Lisp (or Aikido) later in life, when they have the patience and perspective to appreciate the subtleties. The best time to start is always now.
isbwkisbakadqv
I really want to learn eMacs but most of my work is in Jupiter notebooks in terra.bio - can eMacs interact with that?
eadmund
https://github.com/emacs-jupyter/jupyter exists. No idea if it’s awesome or terrible.
FWIW, Org Mode is what a native Emacs user might reach for as alternative to Jupyter notebooks: https://michaelneuper.com/posts/replace-jupyter-notebook-wit... That doesn’t imply that you should both try Emacs and replace Jupyter! Just be aware that if either you are using Jupyter for your own reasons or working with like-minded team there is an alternative which may be preferable for your use-case.
NDxTreme
The emacs everywhere package and a browser extension allow you to edit text live in the browser from emacs, every keystroke, copy/paste etc is mirrored in the browser.
I haven't used terra.bio, but this works for any text box, so should just work.
Of course, emacs has modes for Jupiter and other notebooks, as well a Org Mode and a way to run code from Org Mode to function similarly to such notebooks, just you can execute code in any language, not just python, and can then immediately use the results in the rest of your file, including tables. You can even reference tables in your code blocks.
bfors
How are you integrating with things like HN or your browser history?
iLemming
I'm glad you asked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud3Gmxg5UZg - Browsing Reddit and HackerNews In Emacs (7 minutes).
If you don't want to watch it:
https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader - for browsing HN.
https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-reddigg - for browsing Reddit.
https://github.com/agzam/consult-hn - for searching through HN.
https://github.com/agzam/browser-hist.el - for browser history.
bowmessage
Per the comment, he doesn’t have to, all prior written text is nicely stored in a file (probably an org file), already open in emacs.
qiine
this is inspiring, I am slowly getting to that same conclusion but in neovim... if I write text I want all my nvim fancyness... because oh boy is it fancy!
iLemming
Yup, Neovim is very awesome, I use it myself pretty much every day whenever I need to ssh to a remote host. There are many reasons though for why it is unlikely to dethrone Emacs as my main driver. Just like Emacs could never fully replace my photo-editing app.
It saddens me how people of Emacs often reject vim navigation outright, just as the broader programming community tends to dismiss the fundamental ideas that drive Emacs.
Neither represents a dogmatic religion, nor do they embody fundamental, conflicting truths about computing. No one needs to choose one and commit to it exclusively - they are simply tools, built upon some brilliant foundational concepts. Understanding and utilizing the ideas behind them may literally transform your life in mind-blowingly positive ways. I wish more people contemplated this profound truth, instead of thinking they have to stick with one, particular way of things.
uludag
As an Emacs users who often tries to do as many things as possible in Emacs, I would say that the more stuff you can do in Emacs, the more the various features in Emacs compound with each other, giving you more utility.
For example, I use the Verb package for making HTTP requests. So with Emacs as my HTTP client, I can do bulk HTTP request calls with keyboard macros. The HTTP requests can be stored in org-mode. I can write custom Elisp for special authentication scenarios. I can create new commands if I need them.
For this example, I can imagine (haven't used this myself) scenarios like creating a keyboard macro to shave off the first X seconds of a video usable with dired.
Some non-text-editing things in Emacs that are actually extremely useful:
- Git via Magit
- Managing files with Dired
- Media player with Emms
- RSS feeds with elfeed
and the list goes on and on...
Zobat
Using well thought out interfaces is a joy wherever we find them.
Something in your comment made me remember a DOS based file "explorer". Screen split down the middle with a folder-tree and file list on both sides. I remember hardly ever turning on the computer without starting that for one task or another. That was some serious UI pleasure, at least for the time. Ha, found it:
https://handwiki.org/wiki/Software:File_Commander
Ah, the nostalgia!
kickingvegas
Nostalgia no more! Midnight Commander/4DOS style file management can be achieved with Emacs Dired today and then some.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Di...
For your consideration, I built a keyboard-driven menu interface for Dired called Casual to help with discovery. https://kickingvegas.github.io/casual/Dired.html
shadowgovt
Getting deep enough into it, it basically becomes your shell, complete with the ability shells have to orchestrate multiple programs into a meta-program.
NDxTreme
Not to mention the actual eshell, implementation, or the ability to use any other shell in one of several terminals.
shadowgovt
Modern emacs is surprisingly powerful, far from "Doom on a pregnancy test" (image display and UI widgets are just features).
Looking at the code for this solution (https://github.com/xenodium/dotsies/blob/main/emacs/ar/video...), it's under 400 lines (excluding the require of three very common libraries and an ffmpeg dependency). I'm not actually sure I could pull off this feature in 400 lines of JavaScript (and the binding logic for going from node to ffmpeg isn't going to come to my fingertips nearly as fast as the logic for emacs LISP, although I know that varies from person-to-person).
Plus, once it's in emacs it can glue to other things. If I want to grab video from an email and trim it, I have tools in emacs to fetch particular emails, etc.
I think the most reasonable way to think about emacs hacks like this is "I could do this in a shell script... But why would I when emacs gives me interactivity, a REPL, and the advantages of buffer manipulation as a metaphor?"
brudgers
An Emacs tool to trim video most likely has a conventional Emacs API, conventional Emacs documentation, and was developed using conventional Emacs user personas. Modulo the skill of the tool’s developer, this means it won’t require a lot of unnecessary brain cycles to learn or use or automate.
It won’t require switching to a browser. It won’t require creating an account. No going to the app store. No license consent. No dangerous program warning. No turn on notifications. No unlock premium features. No an update is available. No marketing emails. No cookies.
It’s just gonna STFU and do what it says it does in a way that makes sense. And if it is good enough, it’s good enough. It won’t add bullshit to your day.
shadowgovt
And at under 400 lines of code, if you want to extend it or integrate it into an existing workflow, it's extremely straightforward to see what it's doing.
t_mann
While I'm not an Emacs aficionado and I find some of the stuff that people squeeze into Emacs weird [0], I have to vouch for OP here. It's a front end for ffmpeg. ffmpeg is a text-based utility and Emacs is a text editor. That actually makes sense. And judging by the screengrab it's a lot more ergonomic than plain ffmpeg. If I were an Emacs user I'd definitely consider using this, and it makes me kind of jealous.
[0] recent example from here: a proto social network that runs via org-files-over-http (as if we didn't have a markup language designed for http already) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889354
iLemming
> if we didn't have a markup language designed for http already
Org-mode is far more than just a markup. It is executable - you can have executable code-blocks (in different languages) that interact with one another. It is interactive - there are TODO items, agendas, and scheduling that integrate with your workflow. It has built-in calendar, deadlines, and habit tracking. It has spreadsheets with calculations, like in Excel. It is insanely programmable. I use it for various things, even some unexpected like managing my dotfiles - simpler and more predictable than Nix or Stowed, org-mode creates an 'immutable' version of my system.
Sure, it is also a markup, but the markup is just the interface to a much richer computational document model.
So, what you're finding to be weird is only because you are unfamiliar with it. It is in fact highly pragmatic, and there's nothing weird about it; you just have not experienced that firsthand, and that's alright.
t_mann
I get that Org-mode is extremely powerful, but I was talking about Org-social specifically. Take a look at the spec, does it use much programmability? To me it looks like just annotating a bunch of metadata plus a unique ID (which is actually just a timestamp, which seems problematic to me for a number of reasons, eg tracking edits, not being necessarily unique,...).
agentultra
There's some truth to the aphorism, "Emacs is a great operating system... if only it had a decent text editor."
I think Emacs is basically an elisp runtime that happens to have primitives like buffers, windows, etc upon which a text editor happened to be implemented.
It's more like a programming environment than a text editor. Sort of like Pharo Smalltalk, for example.
You can implement an HTTP server in elisp. You can render SVG, HTML, PDF. All kinds of things.
spauldo
This is the answer.
Emacs isn't an editor. It has an editor. And a bunch of other stuff. The core is written in C, but that's mostly a Lisp runtime and a display system. Everything else is written in elisp. If the runtime doesn't give you what you need, you can load dynamic libraries to extend its functionality.
alfiedotwtf
lol, logged in to say the same thing!
I found for me that the epiphany came when I realised three things:
1. Key bindings are just calling Emacs functions in the current runtime, which you yourself can call from Elisp
2. Holy shit, you mean every keystroke is ALSO just a function that you can call yourself meaning you can automate everything with Elisp?!!
3. Wait. Emacs is just an Elisp runtime where some of the functions can edit text buffers!!!!
Why is this cool? Because it means that Emacs is NOT an editor - it’s a virtual machine holding libraries of functions that do useful things, which YOU then customise into YOUR editor.
In other words - Emacs is a toolkit that allows you creator your own editor/environment, customised to your specific workflow. And if you don’t like it, you have the power to fix it yourself, which is in contrast to every other editor I know of which was built by the editor developers with their own idea of how you should edit text
rafram
The flaw in that metaphor is that elisp is a pretty suboptimal programming language for general-purpose programming. The standard library (in my limited experience) seems to use buffers as the base primitive and doesn’t help you very much if you want to do anything complicated without touching the current buffer.
db48x
This is a common misunderstanding about buffers. Buffers are the base primitive for text manipulation for a good reason; it’s a deliberate design decision not a handicap or a straitjacket. Think of a buffer as a string with a cursor in it, where it is always easy to manipulate the text at the cursor. (It’s implemented using a gap buffer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_buffer>, but you don’t need to know that.)
The operations you can do on a buffer include not just the usual string primitives like insertion and deletion of text, but _any_ editing command that you could use as a user as well. For example, if you want to move the cursor to the beginning of the line, call `beginning-of-line`. This is exactly the same function that is bound to `C-a`. Want to move to the next line? That’s `next-line`, which is bound to the `down` key by default. Want to drop the mark at the cursor position? Call `set-mark`. Want to search for something? `re-search-forward`. Now that you’ve found what you were looking for, you want to remove it from the buffer? Call `kill-region`, same as if you had typed `C-w`.
And commands build on other, more primitive, commands to give you complex behaviors. There are commands for creating, parsing, and sending emails, making HTTP requests and parsing HTTP responses, creating and parsing JSON, XML or HTML, etc, etc. You can create some JSON in the current buffer, send it off to the server via HTTP, and when the response comes back it swaps you over to a new buffer with the response. Or you can ask it to parse the response and just give you the body, etc. Basically any command you could interactively use as an Emacs user will work as part of a new Elisp program simply by virtue of the fact that it works on the current buffer. And the new Elisp programs you write can be used as commands by the user, and as parts of the user’s next Elisp program.
And switching buffers it not slow; all the buffers are in memory at the same time and the “current” buffer is just a pointer. The only quirk is that the pointer is stored in a variable instead of being passed as an argument to every single command you run. And that’s a good thing, because you would soon get tired of passing the current buffer to every single function you call!
sexyman48
Lego is a "programming environment," so avoid the obvious contrarian nit of "must be more general," and accept there's no better language-environment combo for constructing workflows than elisp and emacs -- yes, it's leaps better than bash and term.
natrys
Don't really see how the string (and other usual container types) or filesystem APIs are lacking in any significant way compared to stdlibs of other scripting languages.
I also believe that buffer as an abstraction strictly makes many harder things easier, to the point I often wonder about creating a native library based on elisp buffer manipulation APIs alone that could be embedded in other runtimes instead. So the without touching buffer is a premise/constraint I don't quite understand to begin with.
skydhash
Elisp is pretty good at what it allows for: quickly hacking code.
Buffers are quite good as a primitive: almost every kind of information snapshot can fit in a buffer. It’s kind of a blackboard in a math room.
iLemming
> elisp is a pretty suboptimal programming language for general-purpose programming.
Well, because it ain't. it isn't a general-purpose language. It serves a single, specific purpose and excels at that function remarkably well.
> if you want to do anything complicated
Then you'd delegate the task to more specialized tools, possibly written in general-purpose PLs. Which Elisp is not.
Karrot_Kream
I'm not really the type of person to do video editing or web browsing in Emacs, but I can still see the appeal.
A well-tuned emacs install is comfortable. I have my keybindings that do what I want them to do. I can visually organize my emacs frame (what is now called a GUI window) exactly how I want, with files taking up the parts of the screen that I want. I can be reading the README of some project I checked out and be curious about some terms, then just select it and send it off to my LLM. It's trivial to switch between Claude, OpenAI/ChatGPT, and Gemini depending on how much context I need to give.
It's like having personal space organized to your tastes. For some, their personal space can seem on the outside as a warzone of stuff, for others it's meticulously organized and labelled, but the key commonality is that it's personal space and that the owner of the space is comfortable in it. That's what emacs is. I don't need to learn a new set of keybindings or mouse clicks to unlock new functionality, I can just bring it into emacs.
layer8
To me the point is that Emacs is a customizable environment that allows you to whip up stuff like that fairly easily, and have it integrate with arbitrary other Emacs stuff. Standalone desktop programs are each their own separate little worlds. Emacs is a more integrated environment in that sense, compared to mainstream operating systems.
yashasolutions
Pretty neat. I use Emacs a lot, and also do quite a bit of video trimming. For people wondering "why Emacs?", here’s the use case: trimming video is mostly about writing down start/end times, sometimes with a note. That’s all text.
If you can turn that text directly into clips without switching to a separate video editor, it’s surprisingly efficient. Of course, this only makes sense if you already live in Emacs, then it reduces context switching, helps to keep the flow. If you don’t, it just looks odd. But it’s not about making a meme out of "doing everything in Emacs" - it is just a small tool that fits the workflow of people who are already in that environment.
layer8
This supports the meme of Emacs as an operating system. It would actually be nice if graphical integrations like that could be implemented as easily on our actual OSs.
JohnKemeny
Emacs is an elisp interpreter.
dfltr
I love that (and I say this with zero shade intended) you can never really tell which "Use Emacs for x" posts are goofs and which ones are serious.
tombert
This is pretty interesting; I had never thought of using Emacs as a video trimming thing, but why not? I've trimmed videos manually with FFmpeg and I've thought about building my own GUI to do it, so Emacs is as good a choice as any.
I don't really use Emacs but I love that people use it for everything; next step is a non-linear video editor.
ks2048
Other responses were getting at the same ideas, but to put in concisely, an Emacs-based solution is:
1. keyboard driven
2. programmable
3. within an ecosystem they are already within (lightweight, cross-platform, etc).
precompute
Great tool! I'm always impressed by how versatile a tool Transient is. I use it extensively as well and there's nothing like it anywhere else.
iLemming
Transient is indeed very nice, even though I wish its programmable API was simpler and made more sense, sometimes it feels annoyingly quirky and unreasonably complex.
Shameless plug for further ideation and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44025635 - it's a long video - ~1hr, it's unscripted and unedited. I guess I just couldn't fit all my Transient use cases in a smaller one. I have a lot of these bad boys in my Emacs.
taeric
Massive kudos on this! Could see elevating this to a full blown "ffmpeg-mode" that allows other forms of editing that is common from that tool.
AdieuToLogic
Years ago, a friend of mine said to me:
Given enough time, any actively maintained application will
become an operating system.
Honorable mentions for AutoCAD, Blender, and Eclipse too.
:-)
shadowgovt
And the browser, which is functionally now a virtual machine with sandboxing that also happens to have native support for HTML rendering and a couple natively-interpreted languages.
kookamamie
> The solution relies on ffmpeg to do the heavy lifting and is roughly 300 lines of code
Checked the source and it seems to make a lot of assumptions on the output format, codec and quality.
__mharrison__
Having been an Emacs user for 25+ years, I have a bunch of muscle memory.
So I created Emacs shortcuts for Davinci Resolve. (I create a lot of videos, and every time I've attempted to outsource editing, it has always been more work to review and give feedback than to just do it myself. I have a routine using the AI transcription features of Resolve that lets me edit video very fast. Editing a one-hour video might take 2-3 hours).
prawn
I'm also interested in hearing more about your process. I get bogged down going through my footage either comparing similar options, or trimming to the best action (best focus, least shake). I find the default Resolve keyboard shortcuts to be fast, and trim in the Edit mode (whatever #4 is called), but I'd love an AI augment that colour-coded clips based on which segments might be best (e.g., eyes/face in focus, or require least stabilisation, etc).
I have a Resolve Speed Editor panel but just found that to be far slower than the keyboard.
3shv
Could you explain your workflow in a video?
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This is impressive, but (and probably because I'm not the intended audience for this post) I don't get it, I kind of want to get it though. With "it" I mean making Emacs do X, where X is something far from editing text files. It always seems to me like playing Doom on a pregnancy test. Sure you can do it, sure it's impressive, but should you?
n.b. I'm a C# developer that has accepted my fate and use Visual Studio to earn a living, though I've made sure I know my tool, flaws and merits, better than most developers I've met/worked with. My first job as a programmer was writing C++ code in Emacs and can't remember anything negative about that experience (other than getting used to ctrl+x, ctrl+s for saving and, by reflex, doing the same in Excel, and losing a big part of the document that I had just selected to move, because Excel couldn't undo past last save).
Reading the (at the time I'm writing this) 13 comments on this post I see mentions of at least three lightweight programs that does this. What other than "the mountain is there" makes someone think Emacs would be the tool for this? As a Resolve user I know what tool I'd reach for even if using a multi GB, Hollywood grade, non linear editor, compositor and color grader for trimming a short video clip is about as ridiculously overpowered as using a sledge hammer to press a key (and I did exactly that just a few days ago).
Like I said, I'm most likely not "getting it", on multiple levels. Please educate me, why would I use Emacs for this or any of the page upon page of "strange" use cases you find if you search for "Emacs" here on HN. I know Emacs is a powerful editor but I can't for the life of me understand why I would use it to trim video clips.