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"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch. Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU r
by mesrik 3mo ago
"Is anyone still using emacs?"
Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch.
Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves.
Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CLI much much convenient and faster than moving hand to reach cursor keys.
My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more. Long time ago it did work. And I have no idea why feature was dropped some rewrite.
e: s/deadline/readline/g
- jpmattia 3mo ago45 years for me. I don't even think about keystrokes anymore.
- ot 3mo ago> GNU deadline I think you mean readline?
- mesrik 3mo agoSure. Browser autocorrect there just tried to be helpful :/
- mindcrime 3mo agoThat said, I'm kinda hoping somebody does create a "GNU deadline" project now. I'm curious to see what kind of project it would be.
- sph 3mo agoA weird, inscrutable project management tool for the shell written in Perl 4 and Guile Scheme, that the ten people in the world who learned to operate it swear it is the greatest piece of productivity software ever invented.
- bch 3mo agoNotable users: GNU HURD Project (Shipping any day now).
- layer8 3mo agoI thought you were using emacs?
- mesrik 3mo agoWell, I've got to admit I've haven't read HN using emacs. Is there such a .el thing avalabnle somewhere? It would be great to read HN as it was with usenet news. Not joking, that would be excellent tools I'd like to have !
- layer8 3mo agoThere’s https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader, but it doesn’t appear to support commenting.
- polyamid23 3mo agoWhy not use eww?
- infinet 3mo ago> "Is anyone still using emacs?" I have never used emacs seriously as an editor, however, I couldn't work without magit. I even manually build emacs 28 so I can re-use the same set of magit configure files.
- drob518 3mo agoNearly 40 years for me. Wow! I’d note that MacOS input fields also have basic Emacs bindings for cursor movement, not just shells and browsers. Works in MacOS Mail, Evernote, etc.
- mesrik 3mo agoYes, emacs keystrokes became kind of cli lingua franca, which apparently many do not know. I don't remember my self ever read about those supported explicitly anywhere, but accidentally I found out long time ago and then whenever I try new systems, programs and whatever I try which keystrokes do work. Quite often at least some work.
- mftb 3mo agoIt's GNU Readline[0] or similar. It's all over the place, on Linux at least. Being GNU it defaults to emacs, but the vi support is also excellent. The first thing I type in any foreign bash is 'set -o vi'. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline
- TacticalCoder 3mo agoYes it's GNU readline, but note that the very Wikipedia link you gave explains that it's GNU readline that re-used those shortcuts from Emacs, not the other way round. So it's not wrong to call these "Emacs" shortcuts.
- BoingBoomTschak 3mo agoWell, it is called `set -o emacs` in all shells of note (except POSIX; even pdksh).
- jordigh 3mo agoWow, so you used the earliest public versions. Ever written a retrospective of what 40 years of Emacs has been like?
- aag 3mo agoWhy is anyone using anything else?
- francoisdevlin 3mo agoI use vi because I'm not a savage
- mesrik 3mo agoVi is fine. It's superior and to bare ed - The Standard Editor*, when you don't have anything else available. I made much of my living coding vi 7 years in -80's. And I still use vi, when emacs is not there or system has so little memory that emacs is too much. Which is usually with a embedded systems or some old Unix on single mode fixing unbootable system. *) https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard_text_editor.html* https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard...
- bbkane 3mo agoNeoVim because it's fun!! So many plugins and colorschemes! So customizable- these days Claude will just change it for you, no need to learn the APIs if you're just interested in the result. Yes you're AI-slopping your config, but the drawbacks to that are super low (it's a personal editor, not something I'm inflicting on others)
- prinny_ 3mo agoAI slopping my config is what allowed me to learn vim without going through the pain of setting it up. I can ask AI to teach me about some motions or set up some configs for m in lua without ever know lua. This is the biggest impact of AI in my professional life.
- zhxhhshshs 3mo agoYou will be downvoted into oblivion. For speaking the truth. Vi-lets, engage!
- 3mo ago
- jb1991 3mo agoFirefox emacs bindings still work on Mac since everywhere on macOS supports emacs bindings, nearly.
- mesrik 3mo agoI just tried, and my macOS up todateFirefox (still Sonoma few weeks), doesn't work. Nor does Waterfox (Firefox derivativ) that I've been using more lately. Could it be some setting I need to set before it works?
- jb1991 3mo agoUnless I misunderstood your question, are you simply trying to use emacs bindings in all text areas of the browser like the URL bar, any text fields on webpages, being able to move to the beginning or the end of a line, backspace, etc., go to the next or previous line, all with emacs bindings? That has worked for decades on Mac and it works for me now in all browsers.
- sswezey 3mo agoIdk, its never stopped working for me for the past 10+ years. And Firefox has additionally always supported ctrl-n and ctrl-p working in the address bar for suggestions while Chrome has never supported this
- mesrik 3mo agoBit late to reply, but seems ^A and ^E (jumping line begin and end) at least do work in Firefox. But for example ^T (letter transpose) do not work on macOS Firefox, which I'm quite accustomed to use also. But ^T works fine same macOS Safari and Chromium. Firefox apparently has its own input method which do not implement all what macOS supports.
- jmmv 3mo agoI'm curious... why are people (this thread, but there are several independent others) replying to "Is anyone still using emacs?" ? I don't see that sentence anywhere in the article!
- sigzero 3mo agoIt's an article about emacs so I guess people were curious enough to ask that question.
- jmmv 3mo agoSure, and I'm not arguing that the answers are uninteresting, but I found it odd that this is being double-quoted several times as if it was taken out of the article.
- Semiapies 3mo agoI believe it's a response to something posted recently, but I don't know what.
- v9v 3mo agoFor Firefox I've switched to Glide (Firefox fork?) and configured it to implement Emacs keybindings. There is a config on the project's Github discussions page that I started off of.
- geoka9 3mo ago> Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too Yes, even in Codex and Claude Code. > Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari... My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite: I had to finally bite the bullet and migrate to Firefox because Chrome/ium switched to GTK4 which removed key themes support. (That's OK though, I should've moved off Chrome a long time ago.)
- hollerith 3mo agoEmacs keystrokes don't work in the textarea I'm using to write this comment in Google Chrome. Specifically none of these do anything like what they do in Emacs: C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-f and C-b. This is on Linux, but ISTR finding the same state of affairs on MacOS many years ago during some previous iteration of this conversation. They also don't work in VSCode.
- setopt 3mo agoThose keybindings work on MacOS for me, but not on Linux (by default). There is a way to enable Emacs keybindings in all GTK apps on Linux, but it’s quite buggy in practice (many apps define keybindings that override or conflict with these), and I believe the feature is officially deprecated.
- hollerith 3mo ago"On MacOS" is not specific enough. Do they work in a textarea in Google Chrome on MacOS? In vscode on MacOS?
- innocentoldguy 3mo agoYes. Basic emacs keybindings work pretty much everywhere in macOS. I have run into a couple of apps that don’t behave correctly, but 99% of the time they work.
- hollerith 3mo agoAnd you've tested this in a textarea in Chrome or in vscode?
- setopt 3mo agoI have been using VSCode for teaching the last few years, and routinely use a VSCode without plugins for that purpose, and Emacs keybindings work fine in its text area (the code editor itself). If it doesn’t work for you, then apparently something is broken on your computer. Not all keybindings work but the ones listed under Text Editing here certainly works for everyone else: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650
- narrator 3mo agoThere are so many fad technologies out there, but vim/emacs and unix command line in general are skills you can invest in that stay relevant for 40+ years.
- rdtsc 3mo ago> Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch. It's 26 years for me. Emacs is I believe the oldest software I still use. I started on an SGI Irix in 2000. I used it also on HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, and of course all varieties of Linux > Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves. And many keystrokes work on MacOS, too. That was a pleasant surprise when I got a Mac laptop for work.
- Ferret7446 3mo agoIt's quite difficult to find software older than Emacs in widespread use. Emacs is one of the "original" software, the first GNU software for which the GPL was created. It competes with vi, whose direct lineage has been broken (nvi and vim are reimplementations).
- parl_match 3mo agovi recently received an update. C23 compliance and some unicode fixes. it's a feature complete editor!
- jjav 3mo ago> It's quite difficult to find software older than Emacs in widespread use. Agredd! Aside from the basic Unix commands (ls, cat, etc), the only substantial program that I use today that I also used in 1991, is emacs. Well, and perl. I don't write much perl these days, but I have tons of perl scripts accumulated over the decades that I use daily so that counts as using it. Third oldest for me would be mutt, which is still my primary email client. But I only switched from elm to mutt in.. not sure maybe 1996?
- ralphc 3mo agoOne advantage of vi is that even though emacs is available on all those systems, vi is actually installed on all of those, setting aside windows. If you know rudimentary vi you can walk up to any of those machines and edit a configuration file well enough to work.
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago> "Is anyone still using emacs?" Answering to preemptively asked question that doesn't appear in TFA: yup I sure still do. If anything compared to the 486 days, back when Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping was a joke that made sense, my computer now instead of 8 MB or RAM has 32 GB or RAM (so 4096x more RAM, or 2 exp 12 more RAM: something something about transistors doubling every 18 months and all that)... Who's laughing now? ; ) Seriously though: Emacs with native-compilation, tree-sitter and LSP support (and stuff like Magit and ripgrep integration too) makes it really amazing.
- jcgrillo 3mo agoYeah, emacs is very competitive with "modern" IDEs. Even in JVM languages, which for a long time wasn't true. And I don't know of anything, anywhere that can rival magit. I've been using it for far less time than you have, began ca. 2011 or 2012 here[0], but over that time it has been my constant benchmark for what an editor should feel like, and every other IDE I've used has fallen short. With LSP especially, in the past 6-7yr I have actually been predominantly using emacs. Part of that was being fortunate enough to no longer have to work on much JVM stuff since ca. 2019, but it's also due largely to large advancements in emacs' capabilities. [0] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/mechanics-system-installation/native-code/installation.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/mechanics-sy... EDIT: In particular, this is exactly where I fell down the rabbit hole: > If you are not familiar with Emacs you SHOULD run the tutorial, which can be accessed in edwin by holding down the control key and typing h, then, releasing the control key, type t. (C-h t) I don't know if there's anything else on the entire internet I can specifically point to that has had a greater impact on my professional life... strange.
- iLemming 3mo ago> "Is anyone still using emacs?" Nothing else is capable of handling the variety of text-related things I want from my text editor. - I consume HN and Reddit in Emacs. Allows me for example to quickly search through all the links shared in a thread. - I read Jira and Slack in Emacs - in org-mode. It is far better for finding relevant things, extract them for my notes, etc. - All my writing done in Emacs. Because I have: spellchecking, thesaurus, etymology and definition lookup, translations, LLM integration, etc. All my notes are in Org (Zettelkasten style). - All my spaced repetition cards are in Org-mode (they are parts of my notes, I don't need a separate system to manage them). I can generate number of cards to study a topic, from selected notes. - All my AI sessions are in Emacs. It's amazing that I can send just about any text to an LLM, anytime, anywhere. I can do it in the middle of typing a message, like this very comment. - I watch YT vids controlling the playback directly. I can pause, rewind, speed-up, mute, extract transcript, etc. - this is indispensable while watching and taking notes. - my email client is in Emacs (of course, why not) - my Telegram client is in Emacs. I can easily retrieve a video from any web page and send it directly (without linking the page). - I can extract any part of my screen and OCR the text out - it pops up in an Emacs buffer. - I perform all searches from Emacs - I can google, duckduckgo, brave, HN (algolia), wikipedia, etc. I search through my browser history in Emacs. - I can control my browser tabs, switch between them, find matching lines on the page, jump to links, etc. - I read and annotate PDFs in Emacs. - And I haven't even touched anything programming-related (tons of things) Why, oh why would I ever feel unsatisfied, hoping that there's anything else that can help me do things better? Honestly, there just doesn't exist a piece of software that could help me do even a subset of things I can easily achieve with Emacs. You'd ask me that question in 20 years, if I'm alive and still using a computer - the answer would be - "Yes, what else would I use?"
- lenkite 3mo agoI wish Emacs LISP gained ergonomic static typing. I always find working in un-typed languages very hard.
- internet_points 3mo agoWeell, it's not completely untyped, but it is runtime type-checked. There's stuff like `(if (integerp foo)` and `(defcustom ... :type '(choice (const tag "abs" abs) 'integer))` And then there are more ambitious projects like the static analyzer and language server https://github.com/emacs-elsa/Elsa https://github.com/emacs-elsa/Elsa I haven't tried Elsa yet since it seems to require setting up a package manager like Eask (I don't really understand why I have to install a package manager to run a language server, especially when they support four emacs-specific package managers?) and the docs were very light on whether eglot is supported or just lsp-mode.
- e40 3mo agoI started with gosmacs then switched to gnu emacs in 1985ish. So about 40 years. The renaissance of emacs development in the last decade has been very nice to see.
- xtajv 3mo agoRegarding emacs-style kbds in firefox -- I use vimium to remap most actions, and occasionally resort to an additional global keybinding helper app (e.g. BetterTouchTool on macOS).