
A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015) - prakashk
https://blog.fugue.co/2015-11-11-guide-to-emacs.html
======
bitexploder
It is difficult to even describe a productive hand tuned to fit the individual
Emails setup compared to standard.

Here are some of my favorite Emacs things:

Helm + Projectile. Helm will fuzzy complete almost anything in Emacs.
Projectile is project management. Together get to any Git repo and file there
in very quick. Helm is an option to compare to IDO. I rarely use IDO due to
Helm.

Magit, widely regarded as a good Git UI. Using is believing. Better than
command line or most GUIs for me.

Various editing nodes are good enough (Python, Lisp of course, Markdown).

Org mode is it's own beast, but if you like outlines and productivity tools
Org is very nice. I use it, not extensively. It holds my todos and meeting
notes and makes it easy to ha e very complex notes in one doc.

Basic text editing. I think Vi has some things it does better than Emacs here,
but it is still very powerful and rewards learning the finer details.

Realizing you are in a Lisp machine. A calculator is no further than your
Emacs window. Learning to hack Lisp and elisp is its own reward.

I think the time spent learning it is worth it. I think the math checks out in
terms of efficiency. I also know Emacs is not going anywhere. Same with Vi.

There is much more to it all, but these are things off the top of my head.
There are many smaller things that connect up how I work via Emacs... But
there is a lot to it.

~~~
arkh
I love Emacs. But there were no good multimodes 3 years ago. And
autocompletion and hints are often a bitch to get working on things which are
not C or C++.

The moment you start editing files containing more than one language you're
pushed to use a dedicated IDE. And then you discover the joy of "good enough".
No need to tinker with config files to get the perfect setup: it works good
enough to give you a productivity boost out of the box.

~~~
nerdponx
I came to the same realization about Vim about a year ago. I've used Sublime
and Vim/Nvim extensively, and I've spent at least a few hours in Textmate,
Emacs, Spacemacs, Notepad++, VS Code, and Atom as well.

All of those text editors above have some excellent and unique redeeming
qualities. But at the end of the day their actual language support tends to be
weak.

Now I do Python work in Pycharm, R work in Rstudio, and SQL work in whatever
IDE goes with my database engine. I use Nvim as my system $EDITOR but at work
I'm using it less and less often. I love it and I'll never give it up, but
it's becoming more of a hobby tool than something that helps me get things
done.

~~~
joshstella
I'm hopeful that [https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-
protocol](https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol) will decouple
some of these concerns. We've built support for it for our DSL, and it's
pretty great so far (esp in VSCode). Emacs LSP support is still pretty slow,
so I don't use it when in emacs at present, but it feels like the right
direction for getting good language support into editors.

~~~
Zyst
LSP seriously gives me hope for the future. It is an awesome project, and I'm
looking forward to seeing more widespread editor support for it.

It's still fairly new so most solutions I've seen that use it still have some
sharp edges.

------
nextos
The first time I got introduced to Emacs, I hated it. Who would like to read
email inside a text editor with non-standard keybindings?

I got it all wrong. It's not an editor, it's a text-mode virtual Lisp machine.

The Emacs ecosystem has matured a lot lately. It has two applications I adore.
Org, something impossible to describe in a few words, and Magit, the perfect
Git porcelain.

Plus it has 3 pretty darn good email clients (Notmuch, Gnus and Mu4e). And
some great extras: Dired, Calc, Eshell, Erc, PDF Tools...

Everything is really well integrated. And if something doesn't suit your
needs, changing it is a few ELisp lines away.

My computer setup has become very simple: a tiling WM (XMonad), Emacs,
Firefox, and a terminal (Urxvt).

~~~
dizzystar
I also hated emacs when I first tried it, but once I started moving past my
first programming language, I found myself sifting 30 IDEs and decided to give
it an honest shot.

I don't use it for much else than programming, so my must-haves are for that
purpose. Just the various built-in interpreters make it worth the price of
learning.

~~~
monsieurbanana
However nowadays IDE like Intellij Ultimate give good to best in class support
for basically all mainstream languages.

I'm an emacs user (in case it matters).

~~~
tazjin
Some IDEs may offer better language-specific features than the community-
supported emacs modes, however I haven't found an IDE that actually does the
editing (and displaying) of text as well as emacs.

In particular all the little modes that try to emulate emacs functionality
(simple things like rainbow-delimiters or slightly more complex things like
undo-tree-mode) are always broken in subtle ways in the "modern" applications.
Not to mention all the text navigation features: ace-jump & friends, helm-
swoop, etc...!

I guess a large part of this is that emacs has had 40 years to mature and that
it was originally written at a time where software was judged on different
criteria than it is today.

~~~
SmirkingRevenge
I find that on balance, most of those language-specific features are the ones
that matter most to me, and provide the best value wrt. my time (and finished
product).

Comparatively, the text editing power of vim/emacs, while nice, just doesn't
provide that much value to me anymore, *most of the time.

That being said, it varies by language. If I were working in C, I'd probably
use emacs. Working in Go, I still do use emacs (the side effect of the
language's simplicity is that solid tooling is a snap to integrate in both vim
and emacs). Java or scala? Not a chance in hell I'm going to do anything
serious with those two in vim/emacs.

------
geokon
I only really enjoyed Emacs once I learned some ELisp (I think I had tried is
2 or 3 times before that). Honestly I find these guides pretty useless b/c you
can copy configs and hack together something without really understanding what
you're doing but you'll eventually end up extremely frustrated and unable to
work around the quirks and conflicts between configurations.

I know the people behind Emacs like to think the system as usable out-of-the-
box but I think selling it like that is ultimately a disservice b/c people end
up underwhelmed and frustrated - never taking the time to learn ELisp. (the
Emacs intro/tutorial is just a "welcome to this nano with annoying
keybindings") I actually would challenge anyone to find someone who loves
emacs and doesn't know a bit of ELisp :)

Ultimately ELisp is really not _that_ much work to learn - but the root issue
seems to me that ELisp isn't really a general purpose programming language and
who wants to invest in learning a language you can't use outside of your
editor? It's basically a DSL for a managing text and buffers.. It'd be way
sexier to learn if it was a Racket or something

I also wrote a little annotated config intro (these are kinda more personal
notes for my org/git/C++ workflow). It's a little terse and to the point and
isn't trying to sell Emacs, but unlike most guides I tried to document what
each lines in the config really means and help the reader learn how Emacs
helps you discover more of Elisp as you go. [https://geokon-
gh.github.io/.emacs.d/](https://geokon-gh.github.io/.emacs.d/) Maybe someone
will find it useful! (I'm by no means an emacs expert or Lisp guru.. so if
there are problems, let me know please :) )

~~~
pjmlp
Back in the day our teaching assistance got pissed off that most people were
using Emacs as if it was Notepad, and spent the rest of the programming
lecture teaching how to use Emacs instead (about 1h).

Which then became my to go editor in UNIX systems, until IDEs finally became a
thing on UNIX.

~~~
agumonkey
I'm especially saddened when I see a lisp/clojure talk where the user navigate
through emacs using arrows and the likes.

A lisper not leveraging sexp ala paredit/parinfer is odd.

~~~
aerique
Common Lisp is my main language outside work (and I manage to use it for work
now and then as well) and I use it with Emacs + Slime. I've been trying to get
into Paredit and similar modes but they just annoy the fsck out of me.

Mind, I do use Evil so I'm getting some 'structured editing'-lite from that
already.

------
joshstella
Author here. In reading this thread, I'm struck that most of the objections to
emacs are both legitimate (as are the arguments for it) and focused on
programmer-specific issues. Back when I wrote the original post, I was
experimenting with using emacs as a CEO who writes little code these days, but
was dealing with a maelstrom of disparate information and interruption. It's
been a very successful experiment, which I'll document in a follow up post
soon. Glad that it got some good conversations going!

------
pksadiq
I'm mostly a C developer that spend most of my time inside Emacs.

I use ivy-mode instead of ido-mode, and avy instead of ace-jump. My setup
includes yasnippet, flycheck, company, and ggtags mostly.

I have issues using the number keys. So I use a custom vi like mode, but
heavily customized: Pressing spacebar results in "_" ("-" in #include), but
intelligently. Double space results in "->", ".." results in (|) (where | is
the cursor or point) and ",," results in "=".

Pressing spacebar after "(" results in "&", then "*" (also "!" if just after
"if" or "while"). And my capslock key is just another control key.

All the examples above are to be assumed without quotes.

~~~
j0e1
Just curious.. How do you type-in whitespace?

~~~
pksadiq
spacebar results in "_" only when the cursor is immediately after
[a-zA-Z0-9_]. And if I really need space, I have Shift-Space. Also, pressing
spacebar after a keyword (like char, int, if, else, etc) results in real
space.

------
krylon
It took me a few years to undertand this, but Emacs is not really a text
editor. It is a development and runtime environment for a programming language
that is especially useful for building text editors - and more generally,
text-related, interactive programs -, and it happens to come bundled with a
variety of such programs. But there are many, many more to discover out there
on the Internet. In fact, in recent versions, this, too has gotten easier,
since Emacs now comes with a package manager. But it can also be an IRC
client, an audio player, a web browser, a database frontend, ... the
possibilities are practically endless.

And this is why I love Emacs. There are other editors out there that are good,
too. Very good. But to me, Emacs takes the prize because it is so much more
than an editor.

~~~
SllX
Always seemed to me less a text editor and more the intended user interface
after rms and his gang of misfit lads finished herding up all the daemons into
the eventual (past my expiration date) GNU/HURD. Turns out it was a Lisp
machine all along!

That said, I too have developed a renewed appreciation for Emacs these past
few years.

~~~
krylon
> Turns out it was a Lisp machine all along!

Hehe, in retrospect it is so obvious, but I really did not see that coming.

------
philsnow
The tripping block that always gets me out of the emacs flow is integrating
org-mode with things my co-workers use to communicate (lately that's and
Asana, Jira, and Quip, tomorrow who knows, it's hard for me to dictate choice
of issue trackers or wiki based on what integrates with my admittedly nutso
setup).

Even if I were to get everything working, then if I were to ever switch jobs
suddenly I'm back at square one again.

Emacs and org-mode are perfect, _if_ you don't have to collaborate with
anybody.

~~~
ams6110
For about two years I was the lone emacs user in a .NET shop where all the
other developers used Visual Studio.

------
0xFFFE
I started off with Emacs and a month a later tried Vi. I found Vi to be a
better fit for me than Emacs and haven't looked back since. I have huge
respect for both editors, they both are much older than me :) I wish I could
write something that people would find useful for years to come. Having said
that, I love to jab(friendly) at Emacs users in my circle of friends and
colleagues. Makes the conversation even more colourful with a bit of booze
inside ;)

~~~
pmoriarty
Are you using vi or vim? Have you tried emacs with evil?

~~~
0xFFFE
Now, Vim. But I would definitely like to give Emacs another try, just for
kicks. Do you think emacs with evil is the path with least resistance for a
long term Vi/Vim user?

~~~
mtalantikite
I’ve been a daily vim user for the past 10 or so years and used it casually
before that. Anytime I tried to use emacs I missed the modal aspects of vim
and my wrists didn’t like the focus around ctrl in emacs.

I recently gave spacemacs a try and it’s been my daily editor for the past few
months. There is a lot to learn, but spacemacs solves the main pain points I
had with off the shelf emacs and I’ve found it to be very productive for me.

~~~
joshstella
Author of post here. I have no agenda to convert anyone, but mapping caps lock
to control is a good move when trying emacs IMO. If you love vi(m), more power
to you!

~~~
mtalantikite
Oh, yeah I use that mapping (caps to ctrl), but emacs would still always hurt
my wrists! I prefer having visual/insert/normal modes and spacebar for
modifiers in spacemacs. It’s the best of both worlds for me.

------
meta_AU
In addition to all the other things mentioned (helm, projectile, magit, org),
I've found org-ref and interleave great for managing my notes when I read
papers or articles. Roughly, I save the PDF to disk and create an org node for
it, then add the metadata like file location and bibtex info. Then I have
emacs open the PDF and as I'm reading it I can press 'i' to open a note on
that page, and then close the note and keep reading.

~~~
leethargo
Very nice. I don't read PDF in Emacs, but I also use an org file for notes,
with references to the file and a bibtex file. When I use org-mode to author
articles, the references used are multi-purpose: from Emacs, they link to my
notes, but when translated to LaTeX, they become citations. See:

[https://github.com/leethargo/etc/blob/master/emacs/.emacs.d/...](https://github.com/leethargo/etc/blob/master/emacs/.emacs.d/lisp/init_literature.el)

------
s17n
"You can recognize emacs by the 'mode line' near the bottom of the screen. If
you see anybody using it, fire them immediately - they may be a good
programmer but they're going to cause more trouble than they are worth."

~~~
patrickmay
Funny. Where's it from?

~~~
s17n
I made it up

------
bluenose69
This is a great article, not least because of the tangential comments (e.g.
that impact test of bicycle-style tubing was weirdly fascinating). All that's
said about Emacs is true. I loved it for decades. And then my hand started
cramping up because of the key chords. So I tried vim, and hated it for a few
days, disliked it for a few more, and then started to like it. I'd never go
back, now. Vim is certainly not as powerful as Emacs, and its macro language
is disgusting, but for everyday work it's fine. And I really like Vim's
"grammar" approach to describing complex actions, which makes semi-complex
tasks into puzzles and not memory exercises. (For really complex tasks,
though, there's nothing quite so wonderful as Emacs with elisp ... so this
comment may say more about the work I'm doing lately than these two editors.)

~~~
muraiki
Check out spacemacs, which is a distribution of emacs that adapts the entire
interface to use vim's approach. It's incredible.
[http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)

------
stevekemp
If you write a small pre-processor (simple to do) you can store your emacs
configuration file in a markdown file - allowing you to document all the
settings neatly.

As I was reading this piece I was imagining that is what the author had done,
as it is what I did too:

[https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md](https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md)

~~~
joshstella
Author here. I didn't, but I might now. Dig this.

~~~
rockmananoff
Hi there. Thanks for the article. I'm a newbie when it comes to emacs config
files. You said, that we will put (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/")
in the .emacs file, but that was before we had created it. Then a few
paragraphs later, when we finally do create it, you tell us to just put in

;; set up ido mode (require `ido) (setq ido-enable-flex-matching t) (setq ido-
everywhere t) (ido-mode 1)

Where do we put in (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/") ?

~~~
joshstella
Disclaimer: I spend very little time configuring emacs these days, as it's
working well for me, and there are others around who are much better at emacs
than I am. There are likely better ways to do everything than I have, but I
shared what works for me.

I've got the `(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/")` pretty early in the
file. You can put the `(require `ido) (setq ido-enable-flex-matching t) (setq
ido-everywhere t) (ido-mode 1)` where you like. Basically, you just need the
lines in your .emacs file - if you add the reference prior to creating the
directory and populating it, you'll get an error, but nothing will break. Add
the directory and do a `M-x eval-buffer` and it'll pick it up without
restarting emacs. Or just restart emacs. Hope this helps. Someone will tell
you a better way.

------
huntie
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642088)

------
arca_vorago
The pyramids were built with emacs. Everything else is drywall to me now. More
work? Yes. Worth it though.

I like to say gnu+emacs is my OS, and linux is simply my kernel.

Org-mode alone would be worth it.

~~~
IncRnd
Emacs may need to be renamed to stEmacs, sixteen megs and constantly swapping.
It's no longer 8 megs. :(

~~~
arca_vorago
If you want tiny gnu editor, just use nano. They fixed the file corruption bug
right?

~~~
pksadiq
There is also GNU zile and zemacs[0].

[0] [https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/](https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/)

------
kovek
Seems like lots of people here are sharing their experience with #emacs. I
like it a lot, and think that it would be part of the ideal #workingset for
me. However, I have never found a nice 'jump-to-definition that worked for
most languages I edit on emacs. I tried ggtags, ctags, pygments. I think I had
trouble setting all of these up, and they would not work for many languages I
was using. I have not found a good resource on how to get a nice 'jump-to-
definition set-up, and did look within the last 6 months. Maybe something new
popped up?

Edit: I think I had trouble with Javascript, React and/or Ruby.

~~~
cgdub
You could give Dumb Jump a shot: [https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-
jump](https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump)

~~~
clircle
I have been using dumb-jump with some R packages recently and I'm happy to
report that it works very well!

------
scrumper
Has anyone got any experience using Emacs with one of those mail tools and
gmail with 2FA? I started playing with notmuch half-heartedly but it seemed to
expect a local mail store, which is fine but I found myself bouncing between
setup instructions for several different tools and I quickly gave up.

I would like to get it working; Apple Mail client is a bit slow on my laptop
with a high volume, and I'm all about plaintext and keyboards. I'd happily use
Emacs.

~~~
Buttes
I gave up on notmuch for the same reason, it won't just fetch mail over imap.
I use gnus now.

------
j7ake
Has anybody quantified the efficiency gains from using emacs to do work rather
than conventional means? Are there certain areas (e.g. Mail, todo,
notes,calendar,scheduling) that gains more efficiency than others?

~~~
bachmeier
I don't think it would be easy to quantify the gains from Emacs because it's
too specific to the user. For me, it's all about automation. If I notice
myself doing something that can be automated multiple times, I write a
function. If I find myself calling that function frequently, I turn it into a
keyboard shortcut. That's a huge win, because it eliminates a lot of work I
hate to do, but it's very specific to the user.

------
tabeth
When I tried emacs a few years ago I found the learning curve to be far more
steep than vim at the time. After trying out [https://vim-
adventures.com/](https://vim-adventures.com/) (no affiliation, just thought it
was useful) I learned it in about 15 minutes.

Is there any equivalent for emacs? I'd love to get it another shot.

~~~
xfer
If you know vim keybindings you can already use emacs with evil. Just install
spacemacs and off you go.

~~~
pmoriarty
To be fair, evil and spacemacs will only get you vim-like keybindings (which
is all that vim-adventures gives you too), but there's a lot more to both
editors than just keybindings.

There's even more to emacs than to vim, if you start using emacs for more than
just editing, doing things that have no equivalent in vim (like reading email,
browsing the web, using IRC, or reading RSS news feeds, etc). For every one of
these extra things, there's new stuff to learn, and more time to spend
configuring emacs first to just work with those things and then to customize
it the way you like.

For me the time investment is well worth it, but there's no denying that it
takes a lot of time. A lot of time.

~~~
xfer
The parent question was 15min quick start to emacs, not learn niche usage like
reading email, irc etc. You can use spacemacs for a lot of languages with good
support, if you are only familiar with vim keybindings.

------
insulanian
> A 1933 steel bicycle that I still ride.

That's an old bike.

------
bribri
I use org-mode and emacs (spacemacs) extensively at my job. I start my day by
creating org-mode headers as todos, breaking down the tasks that I think will
take longer than an hour, and later taking notes in outline mode as I do the
tasks. I like planning a few days and checking in with my manager that I'm
focusing my energy on the right things. I also use it to take excellent
meeting notes and turn those notes into actionable tasks. People are impressed
with my nicely formatted word docs that are just org files exported using
pandoc.

------
delta1
> ... I also set Emacs to full screen. I'd like to do this on Windows as well,
> but Windows and Emacs don't really love each other and it always ends up in
> some wonky state when I try this
    
    
      (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(fullscreen . maximized)) 
    

Seems to work fine for me

[https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/3008](https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/3008)

~~~
HelloNurse
I use a nice plugin called maxframe, which apart from resizing the frame after
a while and not when it's first displayed is not "wonky". I have yet to try
multiple frames on multiple screens.

Salient code:

(defun w32-maximize-frame () "Maximize the current frame (windows only)"
(interactive) (w32-send-sys-command 61488))

(defun w32-restore-frame () "Restore a minimized/maximized frame (windows
only)" (interactive) (w32-send-sys-command 61728))

------
lkhz
I use ivy instead of helm and ido (tried both of them). Swiper and counsel are
awesome for text search. company, rtags, anaconda are awesome for
autocompletion and code navigation in C++ and Python. I use projectile for
project management. gud is not very useful for running a debugger, so I use
realgud which is much nicer.

Viva Emacs!

~~~
lkhz
rtags works with CMake and is the only working intelligent completion system
in Emacs I found over the years.

------
grogenaut
personally this article would work way better for me with a set of animated
gifs instead of turning into a wall of text. And I'd love to see his workflows
for what he puts in his different orgs to help with context switching. as I
get more senior I'm switching tasks even more and more.

~~~
joshstella
Author of blog post here. I take your point on being more accessible, and
you're right about the wall of text. I didn't think anyone would care about my
little paen to emacs, and this is one evening's work from a couple years ago.

Regarding organization, I don't have much of a system, other than the
filesystem under ~/org with a handful of directories. Works just fine for me.
It's more about not-caring than caring, regarding organization of information.
We really shouldn't have to organize this stuff. Emacs + org-mode allows me to
not care. I love that.

~~~
yosamino
In case you did not know about this tool:
[https://asciinema.org/](https://asciinema.org/) is a very pretty way to
create gif-like presentations from terminal sessions.

No affiliation, I just think it's really neat.

------
esseti
Would you advise me to get a try to EMACS? i mostly program in python
(django), using docker, kubernetes and so on. I'm using an IDE.

On server i use vim (took me a while to understand the commands, but now i
found it insanely clever on some comands)

~~~
bitexploder
Maybe. But if you are using PyCharm it will be hard to get used to Emacs. It
takes a while to get to a place where Emacs makes more sense than a good IDE.
PyCharm is very good at what it does.

------
garfieldnate
Does anyone use it to type in languages that require an IME or specialized
keyboard usage? I tried Emacs a while ago, but I was disappointed I couldn't
use my normal OS functionality for typing Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.

------
likelynew
I primarily use vim for writing code. While I use a lot of standard plugins, I
find many things that is not correct with them. I know it's kind of a
subjective question, but is moving to spacemacs worth it? Any experiences?

------
frabbit
> I keep my calendar, email, etc., on > another desktop in OS X, which is
> hidden > while I'm in Emacs,

Meh. To use his bicycle analogy, this is like someone putting Campagnolo
components on a Trek CF frame.

------
RobertDeNiro
Emacs is like Chinese to me, and truthfully to most developers I know. Is
there a gentle intro somewhere? Most of what I've seen is just people throwing
out package names with no real explanation.

~~~
damontal
If you try it, swap your caps lock and CTRL keys. It will make it much easier
to use.

Also have a look at this blog post.
[https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-
emacs](https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs)

~~~
suprfnk
If you don't try it, consider swapping control and caps lock too. Most people
use control way more, but caps lock has the superior position on the keyboard.
That is, the home row, where your pinky is naturally while resting your index
fingers on F and J.

------
kuharich
Prior discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642088)

------
antoineMoPa
I did not know about ido-mode, it always surprises me how much I can find new
stuff in emacs every week!

~~~
_sdegutis
ido-mode is pretty well known. ido-vertical-mode is less well known but very
useful.

~~~
rekado
My only complaint about ido-vertical-mode is that it seems to be _very_ slow
for long lists. This is why I'm looking for an alternative. I tried helm and
ivy, but both of them behave frustratingly differently compared to ido.

~~~
rekado
I'm now using ivy-mode again. It's much faster and the annoying differences in
behaviour (e.g. only "g l" will match "guile" but "gl" will not; double TAB in
find-files opens dired; etc) are actually acceptable.

------
megaman22
I've never been able to get into graphical emacs, but emacs-nox has been my
terminal editor of choice since college. Coming from a Windows background,
vi(m) was too weird to get used to.

~~~
franklin_cobb
I currently use Sublime Text 3, but I used to use Vim and NeoVim. One
complaint I have with Sublime Text 3 is that many of the keybindings are
"chords," and I seem to be developing pains in my wrists and elbows from
frequently typing the more awkward ones. I've heard Emacs uses similar,
chorded keybindings, only to the extreme. I think the problem with ST3 is that
many of the chords are awkward to type. How is Emacs? Are the chords more
natural, or would I be facing similar issues with chording?

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_sdegutis
Emacs and the Atreus keyboard and xmonad etc. are white elephants.

~~~
franklin_cobb
My experience with an Atreus was quite different. The hand positions were
comfortable with the tilted, split sides of the keyboard. Using my thumbs for
both Space and Enter was also nice. I especially liked the straight, vertical
columns of the keyboard. They made touch typing much easier and faster than on
a regular keyboard with offset rows. Overall, the Atreus was beneficial to my
typing speed and also to my wrists, elbows, and back, since it helped align my
body in a more natural typing position. What aspect of the Atreus keyboard do
you feel renders it a white elephant?

~~~
_sdegutis
Wow I'm an idiot. I completely forgot about the other (mainstream) definition
of White Elephant. I was only thinking of the one that I learned in college.
Total brain fart, and now my comment above looks like an insult when it was
never meant to be one. I meant they're luxuries that I appreciate having but
could easily live without.

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Areading314
Emacs is great, but is nearing its end. The package ecosystem is too fragile
and lack of any kind of support leads to constant breaking and having to dig
through elisp code/config at inopportune times.

Core tools like a text editor need to be rock solid and depending on volunteer
packages is generally not going to cut it vs. paying a small amount towards a
supported product.

Full disclosure I recently gave up on Emacs/Spacemacs after several years of
using it for Python development (use Pycharm now), Org-mode (Use taskwarrior),
and Magit (just use git + some aliases).

