Having a Lisp system to control your WM/compositor is amazingly empowering, being able to just write some expressions in a buffer and evaluate them on the fly to command windows, apps, keybindings, various settings from sound and display (e.g., color temp) to bluetooth, etc. is crazy awesome.
Once you have that taste of freedom - there's no going back. The traditional way of "write, save, reload/restart" would feel so clunky, annoying and stupid.
And you can absolutely do this as long your WM supports some kind of IPC. I'm slowly building my Hyprland config in Clojure using babashka. I wish I could share it publicly, but it's still in early experimental stage - too messy, too opinionated, there are some bugs, and I still may decide to switch to Janet, CL, nbb or some other Lisp option, I'm glad we have numerous options to choose from.
Thanks to EXWM (not mentioned here), emacs has been my literal X window manager for several years. I installed it as a lark, thinking there's no way this will work properly, and just never stopped using it. It's brilliant.
EXWM is great, having the same flow to manage X applications as for emacs buffers is a huge benefit. My only concern is if X11 will be maintained sufficiently into the future to keep using it, currently there is no Wayland support in EXWM.
I once read a comment here or reddit explaining that the X11 developers moved to Wayland because the X11 code has turned into an unmaintainable mess that can't be worked with anymore. So the reasons are not drama, but just plain old tech debt.
This pre-packaged talking point is often repeated without evidence. The vast majority of X.org developers, including all of the original ones, simply moved to other venues at one point or another. Only a few, like Daniel Stone, have made contributions to both. And it shows in how many lessons had to be re-learned.
The drama was mostly over whether or not Wayland should have been the replacement. AFAIU, everyone agreed X11 development was effectively unsustainable or at least at a dead end.
You can also use EXWM in Xephyr, so you can have an emacs window with its own controlled windows instead of replacing the whole DE/window-manager. I suppose this doesn't work with multiple frames though.
I have been experimenting with xdotool windowmap/windowunmap and override_redirect (and maybe LD_PRELOAD?) to try get something like EXWM to work without creating another X server, by capturing windows. I'm doing this in vim though.
Nowadays there's eat as excellent terminal emulator for emacs, which should replace the need to run external terminals.
I've been using it for a w while, and recently finally got fed up about terminals on my macbook not behaving as nicely as the ones on my linux box with proper tiling window managers, so spent some effort to make SSH into a terminal with completion easy from emacs, and now mostly handle terminals in emacs.
Also check out the pull requests on that repo if there's something useful - in my case I've been using eat as single terminal instance for a while now - but for replacing stand alone terminals just opening multiple instances via multi-sh or similar isn't really helping for finding the terminals again. My solution was patching eat to allow buffer renames to the terminal title, and for ssh sessions, initially set the terminal title to the host I'm connecting to. Now I can easily find the terminals when switching buffers.
On top of that I'm using eyebrowse to have multiple workspaces, and some hooks around buffer switching that switch to the workspace a buffer is on instead modifying the current workspace.
Active exwm user here: I've been using EXWM for one ~1,5-2 years now, and I've configured it pretty much the same way I would love to have the ideal desktop to look like. Minimal, clean, mostly 1 app to focus on, and only 6 virtual desktops I really use.
I struggled quite a bit with the xinit ath the start, and I had to switch to other terminals to get back to any UI. But now I have a pretty consistently well-running EXWM, only from time to time (once a month) it freezes. Most of the time, because I quickly want to do sth. Mess up pressing multiple wrong key combinations and am stuck with a frozen ui :D
For login I use lightdm, that will then load emacs.
What my key pain points still are:
- char and line mode
Switching between them is easy, but having different modes, in different buffers can still sometimes mess up with my keys. Esp. when pressing Ctrl-q for escaping, just to realize that this is in line mode, and closing the window, instead of staring a actual sequence, like C-q C-y.
Also, when coing through my buffer list, while having the preview active. So in buffer list, use C-n, and when the preview then shows a buffer, that is in line mode, that will capture the focus, and the next C-n will be send to the buffer, instead of the buffer list. Leaving me with a open buffer list in the minibuffer, that I have to manually close.
- some webpages e.g. payment providers open up a popup for confirming. From time to time, this popup is
- in the background somehwhere
- or floating
- or not findable at all, even in my buffer list
This is rare, but it happens. And when it happens, it's very annoying to interact with it
- when altering my emacs init config, and rebooting, and I messed things up. Then there is no way other than switching to tty1 and roll back the changes. Though I guess I could change that, through having some kind of check before saving.
- Not a pain point, but I still haven't gotten to the part of using it with multiple monitors. Looking at the config I always say that "I'll do it soon" >D
But overall happy!
And thanks to howardism.org for all the wonderfull great emacs write-ups he has.
My all time fav. is still the Literate DevOps article, to which I came back often in the past. And now that I think about it, I should re-read it! Thanks Howard!
I'm not trying to call you out personally as I've said and thought similarly in the past but truly what an indictment on the state of software that your whole desktop freezing once a month is considered ok and running consistently
There is a third option besides replacing your window manager with EXWM or a simpler tiling window manager: to manage desktop windows from within Emacs using your existing X11 window manager or Wayland compositor. This means
- you can position and resize all desktop windows,
- you can switch between Emacs and desktop windows by moving to the left, right, up, down window and
- you can switch back and forth between a named desktop app like Firefox, okular etc. and Emacs.
You need to install just the Emacs package Emacs Desktop Window Manager (dwin) https://github.com/lsth/dwin, for example from MELPA. Currently it works with X11 window managers as well as with KDE/KWin on Wayland or X11 (using xdotool and kdotool, resp.). I am using it all day myself on KDE/KWin Wayland in my standard setup and there it works fine.
I knew someone who ran it with inittab about 3 decades ago, and I very much doubt they were the only one. Emacs could be used as a full-blown OS long ago. It just depends on your needs.
Also, the psychotherapist was one of a kind ;)
Personally, I could live with tmux or zellij as PID 1. Because from there I can do everything, except GUI. Might as well use Sway then to achieve virtually the same.
I think the most straightforward way to a solid Emacs config is to use emacs-bedrock [1]. It's a very well curated set of packages that enhance the basic experience. It does leave you with plenty of room to fiddle, which is the beauty of Emacs to my mind. I personally use doom because I built my config on it for years, and am happy with my current setup, but if I started again I would go with emacs-bedrock to keep it more minimal.
Everything in Emacs exists under the “M-x” keybind (M stands for Meta which is usually Alt on linux and Option on macOS). Because everything you can do is a command (which are just normal functions that have been annotated). Then you have bindings to directly execute those functions instead of going through a prompt.
There’s some terminology to learn to make sense of the commands. And the default keybindings are also useful to learn (and you can find them in anything that uses the readline library and equivalent: Bash, zsh, psql,…. You can also find them in macOS text widgets).
But the thing is that Emacs have a lot of commands. They are assembled into packages and due to the nature of Elisp, can be edited and patched live. While it easy to get started (videos on youtube, the emacs documentation, the “Mastering Emacs” book), After a while, you config can become alien to anyone else. But it will stay discoverable as Emacs have a great help system.
I felt like that when I started using Emacs, about 25 years ago. It turned out to be worth it, though.
Emacs has its own tutorial (Help -> tutorial from the menus), which is a pretty good introduction. Learning to get help from Emacs itself is a bit of a learning curve, but really beneficial.
Learning to the use the help tools properly was something I didn't get around to for years, but I wish I had sooner.
Years ago it was remarkable for software to have docs built-in as Emacs does.
Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting.
Now in the Web and LLM age, much software doesn’t even try to have built-in help or even much documentation, and it’s again remarkable that Emacs is self-documenting, especially the part of Emacs that users can program.
> Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting.
Emacs' notion of self documentation refers to something slightly different than the fact it has online help files. The help facilities can query the Lisp runtime for things like functions and keybindings. These update dynamically as the system is reconfigured. The result is something that isn't quite as cleanly presented as an online help document, but has the benefit of being deeply integrated into how the system is actually configured to behave at the moment. Very cool, and very much dependent on the open source nature of emacs.
The key bindings are sort of the least impactful idea behind the editor. The defaults are indeed ancient and opinionated, and don't match well with what other environments ended up adopting. They do work well for the most part if you want to take the time to learn them, though. But everyone has their own set of customizations[1], usually going along with a preferred set of physical key remappings[2]. Lots of folks use modes like Evil to get vi bindings, etc...
The point is to think hard about how you use the editor and start working on making the editor work the way you need it to. Binding fluency will fall out naturally.
[1] For myself, I'm mostly default. But for example I dislike the defaults for C-t and C-z which IMHO are footguns, and remap those to "top/end of buffer", functions I do use a lot and whose defaults are clumsy.
[2] Ctrl to the left of A, obviously. But also the key below '/' really wants to be Meta and not whatever else the manufacturer put there.
A VM is displayed as a window on the host OS and Emacs is the window manager within that VM window. What's the difference from running emacs directly as an application on the host?
Was just looking at this article yesterday and it inspired me to try it myself. Trying it out today, my fingers became really sore from trying to navigate. Can't imagine using this for a modern development workflow where there's a lot of jumping around. To make it more ergonomic, I'd just be recreating configuration other window managers give me out of the box.
The author mentions in the footnotes he mostly uses this setup for note taking. That makes sense as he probably remains in one window for extended periods of time.
"However, I also don’t like to carry two computers just to jot down personal notes. My remedy is to install a virtualization system and create a “personal” virtual machine."
I have the same problem, but I'm not sure if a VM is a good solution. The work OS has full access to the VM and I don't trust putting my personal things even in the VM. (I consider the work laptop backdoored and full with spyware.)
Why bother with a VM? When I'm in that situation, I just run my stuff in the cloud and ssh to my machine, alternatively, ssh to my machine at home. Much more minimalist and light weight than a VM as long as your customer allows outgoing ssh and/or connections to a tor/i2p hidden service.
If I'm just jotting down personal notes, I use a pen and a notepad. If I need to transcribe anything into my long-term notes, then I can do that at the end of the day/week/whatever, when I review what I wrote down.
With Debian as VM this would probably much leaner. Was shocked about current Ubuntu image sizes. E.g. no need to have to download about 500MB of firmware packages with each new kernel.
Ratpoison was always my favourite tiling window manager. There's also a fork called sdorfehs[0] which seems to still be maintained and has a bunch of minor improvements here and there.
A quick google search reveals a lot of (4 years old) youtube videos about it. And although not very meaningful, it's archwiki page was updated a lot in the past 4 years, which means there are still people visiting that page and potentially using it. I've also seen some recent ratpoison rices on the internet.
For support, I'm sure the users in the past has generated enough forum threads for you.
It was released 25 years and four days ago, and is still around. Simple enough to still work I'd bet, though the last official release was in 2017 or so.
The only issue I have had installing VMs on work machines in 20 years of corporate jobs, is licensing questions. Once you prove your licensing is fine then they don't care anynore.
Well, if by "operating system" you mean "the layer of the computer that runs my applications" then I'm already there. ;) EXWM + Gnus + misc. other Emacs-based apps FTW.
In all seriousness though, I've used two different machines and three different distros with my current setup on top and it all feels the same. I didn't even notice in my daily interactions with the system.
It looked good at the beginning, but then I found out about its creator - DHH. Not someone I want to support. There are better distros out there (Omarchy isn't a distro btw).
Just effing stop. This shit sounds like Y2K jokes - you're only making a fool of yourself. Lazy setup, zero insight - these jokes void of humor, irony, or even a pinch of truth. Anyone who opens their mouth about Emacs not having decent editing simply has no idea what modern Emacs can offer there. Emacs has hands-down the best plain text editing features unmatched by anything else. Don't even think of challenging me on this sentence; as someone who used a bunch of different editors, I will chew you up and spit you out like a pistachio even before the actual debate.
You might try taking the shells off before chewing them up, then you don't have to spit out crushed shells all over the place (a real turn-off in my book), and can swallow the nuts without lacerating your digestive system.
Once you have that taste of freedom - there's no going back. The traditional way of "write, save, reload/restart" would feel so clunky, annoying and stupid.
And you can absolutely do this as long your WM supports some kind of IPC. I'm slowly building my Hyprland config in Clojure using babashka. I wish I could share it publicly, but it's still in early experimental stage - too messy, too opinionated, there are some bugs, and I still may decide to switch to Janet, CL, nbb or some other Lisp option, I'm glad we have numerous options to choose from.
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