Why I left Emacs

[@mattymerr701]

I enjoy how decently produced, but still personal chat-like your videos are. I appreciate how easy you make it look and how simple the videos are

[@JoshuaBlais]

Cheers man, means a lot! God bless!

[@neilclay5835]

Elisp was my first religion. No switching now. I'm no fanaticist though, use what feels right. For me there's an additional romance in using something that's been around for so long and was so incredibly influential. It's like driving a classic car (that runs single-threaded on a multi-core highway, ho hum, loving the seating).

[@JoshuaBlais]

I think there is a nostalgia about emacs. That is not to say I won't go back to it at some point, it is becoming apparent that I didn't use emacs to the fullest potential as a LISP machine

[@code8986]

As a Linux user who isn't religious about text editors, I wish you luck in your new workflow! (But can we all agree that Nano users should be thrown overboard? 😜)

[@vaisakh_km]

either Nano users are the people managing their php sites, and goes for vacations in their lambo with their middle aged wife and kids... or the people who doesn't fully understand whats the difference between Linux and Ubuntu yet..

[@JoshuaBlais]

Agreed! 😋I still respect emacs a ton, just for me it was in simplifying my life that I switched to a bit more streamlined (one program does one thing) workflow

[@eng3d]

​@@vaisakh_kmhey, where is my lambo?

[@vaisakh_km]

@@eng3d You will get there...

[@JessicaFEREM]

Nano is the windows notepad of the terminal. It's expected and common, but not an IDE.

[@itrtr]

I've used Emacs since 2019 as well. I mainly use it for org-mode. I use it mainly for writing. I've learned a bit of emacs-lisp to edit others code to get what I want. I started with spacemacs. Went to Doom. Then back and forth to Vanilla Emacs and Doom till I was able to get Vanilla where I wanted it. I looked into neovim a few times, because yes, the zeitgeist for neovim is strong. But I use org-publish, org-re-reveal, and I am comfortable editing emacs-lisp, I haven't found a solid benefit to switching to neovim. But I may. Emacs' quirks haven't bothered me enough to make any drastic changes. I'll be watching how you live without org-mode, but I know there are plenty of org-mode like packages for neovim.

[@JoshuaBlais]

I will be watching how I get on without org mode too, so far it has been a little less organized, so we will have to see if I can get the system to a place that replicates the functionality! Cheers

[@yarrakobama3417]

Welcome on the good side, brother.

[@zhdi]

i actually use emacs only for note taking, email and some pdf view stuff, works great, other programming stuff all done by neovim by years ago but i'm really happy about how emacs integrate everything well, org-roam, gnus, pdf viewing, very unify experience

[@JoshuaBlais]

I am starting to use emacs once more for everything - the fact that you can integrate your computer so well is not wasted on me, I will make a video in the future rescinding my comments on this video haha

[@zhdi]

@ I’ve sub you haha! Waiting for that!

[@FekuEntertainmentLtd]

The taskwarrior extension project looks cool, And the name given to the project is cool too. Waiting for it's release, whenever it is.

[@danielcarroll8889]

Looking forward to the tmux video

[@MWLaboratories]

Just started out and I love my quick and easy nixvim config, I only use emacs for org-mode too. You did convince me to look for alternatives already :')

[@JoshuaBlais]

Glad I could help!

[@tokisuno]

i'm not really about fedora > arch but i respect the switch. fedora is still one of my favourite distros! super interesting to see you switching over the neovim. welcome to the dark side >:) edit: size -> side (oops)

[@JoshuaBlais]

Haha, I respect Arch, I just had the bluetooth go out too many times. Fedora is a bit more stable for my use case! Thank you for the warm welcome!

[@tokisuno]

@@JoshuaBlais yeah i don't use bluetooth at all, so i wouldn't know. no problem :)

[@vimmy1729]

@@JoshuaBlaishey , My Bluetooth misbehaves too in arch(disconnects, reconnects randomly), but wouldn’t the package(bluez utils)stay same in Fedora? So how does that solve the problem ??

[@JoshuaBlais]

@@vimmy1729 Fedora's update system doesn't push breaking changes as much as Arch does and bluetooth seems to be one of those things that has been historically finnicky with those breaking updates.

[@Illya9999]

Fedora also has selinux

[@LunaKitpi]

I love using neovim for code editing but org mode is just so usefull to me I can't swap away,,, things like inline latex rendering or beinbg able to export to an html file with custom css or to a latex pdf is just something I can't leave behind but for code editing I always use neovim it just feels,,, correct to my brain I gues?

[@fabioviolino]

1) Remind me again why one “has” to choose what is “best”? Don’t compare apples to bananas. Especially when you can choose both. 2) Emacs is not a text editor. It’s a lisp interpreter. And a very good one at that. Everything else spawns from that. Don’t see the contradiction in the Unix philosophy.

[@charleschiang6583]

I use both.:) Emacs is for research paper with bibliography since org mode is great. Neovim is faster for smaller development projects. It's okay to live both worlds and cherry-pick the best part of them.:)

[@r2-p2]

I love tmux but have always trouble coping from it. It is easier to have a pain terminal and use the mouse.

[@JoshuaBlais]

I think the learning curve is fairly worth it to go down for tmux as the surface level benefits of splitting terminals is really only the beginning

[@umka7536]

Never used Emacs. Started with VSCodium and moved to NVIM.

[@caddr]

I also left Emacs, switching from Vim to Emacs and then to Acme. No need to configure, just go editing. Acme is a good integrating development environment

[@JoshuaBlais]

I have put too much time into configuring my editors, that is the truth! Never heard of Acme, I'll check it out

[@AndersJackson]

@@JoshuaBlais You could also look at wily editor.

[@joshuarowe8410]

Agree on the lazygit. Makes more sense to me. I actually end up using a gui called Fork on windows and mac when I can because it is just so simple but always use lazygit on linux

[@JoshuaBlais]

It's a pretty sweet interface! magit was cool, but lazygit is even quicker for most of my needs

[@comproprasad6438]

I too was facing different types of slowness specially when using multiple extensions. So, I had to nuke my config almost 3 or more times and started from scratch. And the last time I started super slow by disabling most things. Now my Emacs is very responsive with the drawback being that its not as shiny as before.

[@JoshuaBlais]

I am a shiny guy! Kidding - I have some other comments about how I didn't really get the core emacs experience because I used evil from day one, and I think that the first point I make about being a vim user is probably where I fell off the train the most.

[@samwdp]

I loved emacs for many years. I agree many small annoyances build up. My final nail in the coffin was the inbuilt implementation of tree sitter as of 29.

[@JoshuaBlais]

You swapped over to neovim as well? I love emacs but I agree, there are things that were nagging for me and if it was only one or two I would have stayed, but the weight of it all forced my hand.

[@samwdp]

@JoshuaBlais yes, I moved to neovim. Things are actually cohesive and consistent especially with package maintainers. I keep my emacs config around but never touch it nowadays

[@artemsmushkov766]

What's exactly wrong with tree sitter in emacs?

[@samwdp]

@@artemsmushkov766 [just my opinion] The fact that they made the decision to have separate -ts-mode implementations of major modes is just confusing and not a good experience. There is a tree-sitter-mode package that is now deprecated because they built it in was a much better implementation in theory to me. That had a global mode that you could turn on and every major mode could use it. So if you installed a grammar, it would pick that up and syntax highlighting would be consistent. The whole point of treesitter is to have consistency in syntax highlighting. So having to implement a second mode for tree sitter is counter productive. Also, because updates to emacs is so slow, the current version of tree sitter that is implemented is old. So if you want to add in a grammar that is not in the predefined list you need to make sure you have, I think, v 0.22 of treesistter to compile the grammar. In neovim, treesitter is something that you can just turn on and every file that has a known filetype/grammar will just work. You can also change your colours in the themes, so 1 place and your whole tree sitter highlighting is consistent. For emacs you are down the the maintainer of the -ts-mode to define what symbol matches to a typeface, so between 2 modes you can get inconsistent syntax highlighting. As I say, this is just my opinion but its something that was the last straw for me. On the flipside I have had to find packages for neovim to emulate some things I took for granted in emacs. Compiler mode for example is just something I never realised I missed until I did

[@julians.2597]

Yeah i also switched, emacs became too heavy both in resource usage and configuration length, so I switched to helix and I'm perfectly happy. My config is like 40 lloc, no plugins needed, etc. I like vim, but my nvim config when i tried it for a few weeks started pushing 1000lloc and had pike 20 to 30 plugins etc. I can't be bothered anymore

[@RenderingUser]

Try using different configs for different use cases

[@JoshuaBlais]

I have the (unhealthy) mind that if I put the time in once to configure something, it will always be there for posterity's sake, haha

[@node547]

Around the 5 minute mark, you briefly show how you handle notes. Would be nice to zoom in on that if pissible. Like many (vim 😉) users, I’m also a WoT adept and it’s always good to see how people deal with all the information coming at us every day.

[@JoshuaBlais]

I will make a video about my note taking in the future! Thanks for the idea, God bless!

[@node547]

Cool. Looking forward to that.

[@mg-bm1js]

I stopped playing once I heard about Evil mode. You just got back home and you were just visiting Emacs.

[@JoshuaBlais]

Totally fair opinion and something I knew I would hear from the emacs diehards! What would you say are the benefits of using the emacs keybinds over the vim editing style?

[@mg-bm1js]

@@JoshuaBlais Oh.. No benefit at all. It's just Apple and Orange - Also nothing wrong with you get back to Vim. Probably the problem you had is also problem I am having now. Recently I use Zed a lot with my Emacs. Occasionally I use Vim binding in Zed (but mostly Emacs binding).

[@mayhoth]

I once thought UNIX (and therefore, Linux) and the UNIX philosophy were great. But then I learned Emacs (primarily for the productivity), and discovered the LISP machine at its heart. Now I wish Linux were more like Emacs and less like UNIX. Quitting Emacs? Only for another LISP machine (preferably written in Common Lisp)...

[@JoshuaBlais]

I probably never got there with the LISP machine. Do you have any resources I could study about the philosophy? The meme of emacs being a machine ontop of the underlying machine seems to be true

[@extenos]

3:36 how do you hide the command area like that? i want my lualine to be on the bottom but i cant get it that way

[@JoshuaBlais]

I use NVChad as a base config for Neovim and I believe that is a default

[@itztlacoliuhqui]

Not sure about nvchad, but a popular way to do it is using folke's noice plugin

[@softwaresirppi]

what do you think about zellij?

[@JoshuaBlais]

I have only used it in the curl trial command, so I don't have enough use to really comment - tmux does everything I need it to do, and I am not sure if I could quickly start up pre-defined sessions for projects and save them in a project specific config al la tmuxp in zellij. If this functionality exists please let me know!

[@BestSeoSolution]

Your thumbnail is very good. Do you make the thumbnails yourself?

[@JoshuaBlais]

yessir, in GIMP

[@BestSeoSolution]

@@JoshuaBlais Your channel has (1.59k) subscribers but views is completely down. Do you know what it is for?

[@artemsmushkov766]

Emacs does not really violate UNIX philosophy. "Make one thing and make it good" is not the core principle, AFAIK this one wasn't even included. The core of UNIX philosophy is programs communicating with each other with human readable text and emacs does exactly that. And even with "do one thing" emacs is there: it only executes Lisp code.

[@JoshuaBlais]

Fair statement, and in another comment the LISP machine was mentioned - I probably never got far enough down the rabbit hole to "get it" - if you have resources I could study about how to truly use emacs, I would love them!

[@artemsmushkov766]

@@JoshuaBlais I don't think there is such a thing like "how to truly use emacs". And for you I think it made total sense to switch to neovim. If you didn't use TRAMP, org-mode usage was limited enough so you could easily switch to markdown, etc, you probably were not get enough benefits from emacs to still deal with some annoyances it has. I recently ditched my terminal emulator for eshell+eat-eshell-mode and just cannot be happier. Just cd-ing to any environment and having everything with my config feels like magic and I much prefer navigation/search/etc that emacs buffers provide to terminal emulators. Delay on command execution over network is noticable though.

[@JoshuaBlais]

I'd be super interested in a video of that workflow! I agree - I think the fact I never was a "purist" in emacs is why it was easy for me to consider the jump back to vim (always an evil user etc). Vterm for me wasn't capable of replacing a terminal emulator, never tried eshell!

[@SFDestiny]

"It's how it will always be." Sure

[@JoshuaBlais]

haha - hilariously I am back full in on emacs, will make a video about it, but it is the comments on this video that set me straight and showed me some of what I was missing.

[@AndersJackson]

I been given vim a serious try, and I do go back to Emacs any time I need. And no, vi keybindings is bad, I hate the modes. Emacs with emacsclien are as fast as vim. Who need to shut down the Emacs. And you can even start Emacs when you log in, so you have the fast emacsclien from the beginner. Just because you can use it for all, you can pick and choose what part of Emacs you want to use.

[@JoshuaBlais]

I may give a vanilla emacs config a try, people are saying my issues stem from doom and the plethora of packages it introduces!

[@JonasThente-ji5xx]

God bless, good video. subbed now

[@JoshuaBlais]

Cheers bro, God bless!

[@FlameForgedSoul]

A text editor that (along with its users) mistakes itself for an OS and as such ends up being a terrible text editor and a mediocre OS. Never got it, to each their own.

[@T1Oracle]

I like Helix Editor. So easy and so powerful.

[@JoshuaBlais]

I have heard of it, never tried it! Where would you say it improves on Neovim?

[@T1Oracle]

@@JoshuaBlais It does all of the Vim like stuff, but with a simpler interface. I was able to learn it in three days. The UI focuses on selection, it has the Vim cursor movement stuff, but then selecting text is much easier. If you press v to enter select mode, instead of search/replace, you can just duplicate the cursor to search matches and edit it all at once, you can search within your searches. It's really convenient. When you press space you get a menu, when you go into match mode, you get a menu, when you go to window split mode you get a menu, when you type colon you get an autocomplete menu with the typical Vim commands and Helix stuff. You don't need to memory much because there's usually a menu to help you learn it. Once you know the menu, you can just type the keys at full speed and treat it like another shortcut. Helix Editor is really fast. Also to get to the tutorial, just type ":tutor" and it will teach you right there.

[@kemaruproduction]

You haven't run emacs server. If you run emacs server, you can then just run it instantly. If you configure it so that it has lots of additional things, then it can quickly get bloated and slow. But if you keep it plain and simple, it launches pretty much instantly.

[@kemaruproduction]

This comment is for comments section, newcomers of emacs, not an answer to the video

[@JoshuaBlais]

I will say - I am actually returning to emacs after this experiment because of the comments section on this video has opened my eyes to much of the possibility and purpose of emacs. I will make a video in the future - but know that I am running emacs full time as my "everything OS" for the last few weeks and I think I get it now.

[@kemaruproduction]

​​@@JoshuaBlaisgreat to hear that. I am just another linux and emacs enthusiast, I hope I didn't offend you, I was just lettjng people know there is a way to launch emacs faster. By the way, conversely, I use neovim everyday, but for Fortran, nothing beats Emacs, and I use it for Fortran for my engineering and academic work.

[@4ohf]

Vi motions are so ingrained in my that I even use a browser extension that adds them to firefox lol everytime I tried emacs I just ended up recreating vim. Imo if your gonna use emacs use emacs for what it is. so i just gave up on it. nvim does what i want it to do and I don't have to mess with it so much. As for orgmode and task and all that you emacs users do, what's wrong with a nice pen and some paper? 😂

[@nodupe]

I will keep using emacs. Too old to move.

[@mattymattffs]

I used to use Emacs religiously, even back when it was hard to use on Windows and i regularly had to dual boot. Now i work as part of a team and everyone uses vs code so i use vs code. It's too hard otherwise to teach and onboard new devs. Wastes time in pointless bullshit. Ultimately I think much faster than I will ever be able to input information. Maybe emacs made things fractionally faster in those situations. Maybe them could be even faster. Ultimately most of my time is lost to sitting in the chair and thinking about the solution or the approach. Or in a document coming up with the discovery the design the implementation. It is never the speed of code holding me back. It is always everything else. So being faster at those other things just doesn't have a worthwhile time saving for the investment I have to make

[@JoshuaBlais]

Totally fair! I was moreso stating getting ideas down specifically when writing (I write everyday, released a book last year) and for that the limitation was always my input. I love that for both of there editors that you can build a config and use it forevermore, so the time it takes in configuring either is a small investment in the long run (if you're using it 30 years down the road). The beauty of open source!

[@billeterk]

@@JoshuaBlais30 years sounded like a long time but on checking there are some settings in my vimrc that are 28 years old :-)

[@JoshuaBlais]

See, this is what I'm talking about!

[@RukopisyNarnie]

Slow if you dont run server...

[@RukopisyNarnie]

About that directory thoing. Dired exists + you can run it on terminal.

[@RukopisyNarnie]

Issues with v-term whatever it is. There is default "term" that works well for me.

[@RukopisyNarnie]

Ssh problem: tramp

[@RukopisyNarnie]

I feel like you didn't learn emacs, you use some weird plugins instead of using emacs itself.

[@RukopisyNarnie]

Why would you write org and convert it into markdown if you can use markdown-mode?

[@PratikChatse]

Slow living , fast app load times 😅

[@JoshuaBlais]

Counter-intuitive, hey? Perhaps I want the apps to load faster so I have more time to live slowly 😉

[@VioletJewel1729]

welcome. welcome.

[@JoshuaBlais]

God bless!

[@VioletJewel1729]

@@JoshuaBlais I've used emacs somewhat extensively, too. I started in vim a decade ago, thought "am I missing something?" and thus tried emacs for a while, and then finally switched back to vim and then neovim. Neovim is the way. Periodt.

[@gempf]

cbum como programador

[@JoshuaBlais]

Haha, if only!

[@kolezz]

comparing starting time of bare terminal editor and gui version loaded with startup scripts (evil, ...) - that's just fair, yeah. saying about love to terminal but not even trying 'emacs -nw' - that's hilarious. those reasons aren't real reasons. you're just a vim user. there's nothing bad about it, but no need to make a pointless video with wrong points.

[@JoshuaBlais]

Hilariously since this video I have entirely returned to emacs and will make a video about why I was wrong - and the comments on this video helped to lead me home! God bless

[@MantasJurkuvenas]

tmux so last year zellij is the way to go!! JK both are great

[@JoshuaBlais]

I do keep hearing about zellij, but I have a sunk cost fallacy with tmux - I also don't know if you can start up pre-defined sessions for a project in zellij, if you can let me know!

[@MantasJurkuvenas]

@@JoshuaBlais yes zellij attach session name-of-session

[@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb]

I'm not using tmux because I use zellij.

[@JoshuaBlais]

I haven't used zellij enough to have an opinion, it appears to solve the same problems as tmux, no?

[@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb]

@@JoshuaBlais Correct.