c/linuxmemes · by provectus@lemmy.ml · 2d

Just running emacs you know.

This is emacs running inside emacs inside emacs inside emacs.

Emacs vs vim? Why not both?

Edit: removed the top image from this body. This is my first post in this community.

95 points · 14 comments · view on lemmy.world

14 Comments

bulwark@lemmy.world · 30 pts · 2d (3 replies)

You said "I use vim," and I tremble.

It's not "vim." It's vi—no, wait, it's Neovim, technically, because the original vim is a closed-source fork of vim, which is a non-GPL free license, which means it's not even properly FOSS, which means your entire identity as a "vim user" rests on a legal technicality that most vim users have never read and would stop using if Bram Moolenaar actually enforced it, which he can't because of the way the vim project split in 2001, but you'd never know that because you peaked at :h i in third-grade sysadmin college.

Meanwhile, a mere coincidence of shared history lets you claim "modality" as a feature when it's a limitation inherited from 1976 line-buffered editing constraints on a PDP-11. You haven't "mastered the modal workflow," you've spent ten years cargo-culting a workflow that existed because there were no multi-key strokes. Ctrl-X Ctrl-S isn't "hard to learn," it exists because GNU Emacs was built for a different input model in 1978, and you keep reading the fact that Emacs is a fully extensible Lisp environment where the UI itself is a reconfigurable application as "bloat" because your entire editorial philosophy is "my editor should do one thing or I will file a bug report with the universe."

And you say "but vim starts faster," and I weep. You measure 40ms of saved execve and call it productivity while GNU Emacs sits in daemon mode since boot, already loaded, already aware, waiting for your emacsclient invocation, and you're stuck in a ssh session on a server you don't have root on, and of course vim is there, because vi is on every POSIX system, which is exactly the point of POSIX, which is exactly why GNU Emacs added ess, org-mode, treemacs, magit, and a working calendar to the same binary you called "IDE-adjacent bloat" while I was, what, organizing my life?

You know what? Fine. Use your vim. Save your file. :wq. Walk away clean. I'll be here, in a major I haven't switched out of since 1994, with C-x C-f on :w q, because the point was never the file.

…

Anyway. It's GNU Emacs, not "that one editor."

tal@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 2d

I'll be here, in a major I haven't switched out of since 1994, with C-x C-f on :w q, because the point was never the file.

I don't think that emacs has a way to serialize the Lisp VM to disk or live-migrate it across machines, but there is desktop-save-mode.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Saving-Emacs-Sessions.html

You can use the desktop library to save the state of Emacs from one session to another. The saved Emacs desktop configuration includes the buffers, their file names, major modes, buffer positions, window and frame configuration, and some important global variables.

I've never done it, but I suppose that if one migrated an emacs desktop file, it might be restorable on another host. So...technically, upgrading to a new computer would involve closing emacs, but it'd be sorta like hibernating and restoring a Linux system or something.

NotSteve_@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 1d

Hah, fair play but have you considered that I may actually be using Helix. What say you now, then?

boob_warbler@fedinsfw.app · 2 pts · 2d

This is something Stallman would say...

tal@lemmy.today · 19 pts · 2d (1 reply)

Note that you can also use emacs as your window manager, if this is running in Xorg, so your emacs window can be in emacs too.

https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm

EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) is a full-featured tiling X window manager for Emacs built on top of XELB.

There's some work on a Wayland compositor, but that's not as mature.

https://codeberg.org/ezemtsov/ewm

EWM is a modern, fast Linux desktop environment based on Emacs. It is written in Rust, built on Smithay, and runs as a dynamic module inside an Emacs session. Wayland applications appear as Emacs buffers, which means graphical windows can be managed with the same commands, keybindings, and workflows as the rest of Emacs.

The ultimate goal of EWM is to let power users be bottlenecked by their own thinking, not by the tools they use. Computers should never stand in our way. EWM is built around the idea that window management, application launching, navigation, text input, and system control should be fast, deterministic, programmable, and composable.

EDIT: I guess technically you could use Wayland, EWM making emacs the compositor, then use xwayland in that, with EXWM making emacs the window manager in that, in which you have an instance of X11 emacs running which itself is running...

EDIT2: No, wait. I don't know if you can run a window manager directly in xwayland.

considers

You could run it in Xephyr in xwayland, though, and you can run a window manager in that. So Wayland->emacs(EWM)->xwayland->Xephyr->emacs(EXWM)->emacs(X11)->emacs(terminal)->emacs(terminal)...

EDIT3: There have been people who have run emacs on the Linux kernel on bare metal, as the kernel's initd, but it's not very functional like that. Someone would have to go out and reimplement systemd in emacs, and that isn't a thing.

EDIT4: Oh wait, apparently I am out of date.

https://github.com/emacs-os/el-init

el-init

A statically compiled Emacs init (PID 1) patchset, Emacs Lisp-based service supervisor and core component of Emacs-OS.

el-init is an Emacs Lisp-based, systemd-inspired init and service-management solution. Whether you are building a full-send Emacs-OS, or simply want to orchestrate your desktop session services from within EXWM, or keep project daemons running while you work, el-init has you covered. Use M-x elinit for the interactive dashboard, or elinitctl from the terminal.

EDIT5: I think the real test is whether one can play this video in mpv using the libcaca target in terminal emacs using one of emacs' virtual terminal software packages in terminal emacs in X11 emacs in an emacs-window-managed Xephyr X11 display server in a Wayland environment with an emacs-driven compositor managed by emacs via el-init running directly on the Linux kernel.

EDIT6: Oh, wait. Apparently someone also added KiTTY Graphics Protocol and Sixel support to terminal emacs in the last two months.

https://github.com/cashmeredev/kitty-graphics.el

Beyond inline images it also does inline mpv video playback...

So theoretically, I suppose you might be able to avoid the libcaca target and having to go through text even in the terminal emacs instances, and have the video playing graphically. You could potentially play that video in mpv (KiTTY Graphics Protocol target, $ mpv -vo kitty) running in terminal emacs itself running in terminal emacs using KiTTY Graphics Protocol running in X11 emacs being window-managed by emacs (EXWM) running in Xephyr running in xwayland being composited by emacs (EWM) running in Wayland on a system with emacs as initd (el-init) on the Linux kernel on bare metal.

EDIT7: Bonus points for controlling the mpv instance via emms.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/

Emms is the Emacs Multimedia System. Emms displays and plays multimedia from within GNU/Emacs using a variety of external players and from different sources.

Emms can run as a minimalist player and controlled with a handful of M-x Emacs commands, or a fully-fledged, interactive media browser. Emms can display album art, play streaming audio, tag music files, search for lyrics, provide MPD connectivity, control the volume, and more.

tal@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 2d

There should totally be an emacs package to generate a Kickstart file to feed an Debian or Fedora or something ISO that would automate setting all this up in one go on a machine so that people don't have to go outside emacs to get this sort of thing set up.

tal@lemmy.today · 12 pts · 2d (1 reply)