[mesrik]

"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

[iLemming]

> "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?"

[melasadra]

You really should upload a long video i.e. at least an hour long, in which you do all those things.

It sounds inconceivable for non-TUI users such as myself.

[iLemming]

https://www.youtube.com/@emacspropaganda

[nemoniac]

> - I consume HN and Reddit in Emacs.

What are you using for Reddit now that they have closed access to their API?

[iLemming]

I'm currently using my custom fork of thanhvg/emacs-reddigg. It isn't ideal, I've been itching to rebuild it into something more robust. Well, one day I may get annoyed enough and just do it.

[qiine]

I wish I could reach this level! maybe one day... except in neovim ;p

[iLemming]

I use Neovim too, but it never can fully replace Emacs for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589770

[drob518]

Nearly 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.

[intrasight]

43 years for me. Started in 1983 using Gosmacs on a black-and-white CRT terminal. Gosling too was frequently in the terminal room.

[sph]

It annoys me so much to have learned that GTK text fields used to have an Emacs editing mode, which they've hidden behind an unaccessible configuration option, and now it's hopelessly broken in modern GTK version.

[spudlyo]

I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define[1] keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the GTK equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc. I preserve my macOS CMD-not-control-key muscle memory this way too.

The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. I wrote a small python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch to the appropriate layer.

[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[1]: https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/dotfiles/-/blob/master/kanata/.co...

[geoka9]

This is so cool. Thank you!

[mesrik]

Yes, 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]

It'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

[TacticalCoder]

Yes 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]

Well, it is called `set -o emacs` in all shells of note (except POSIX; even pdksh).

[jordigh]

Wow, so you used the earliest public versions. Ever written a retrospective of what 40 years of Emacs has been like?

[drob518]

Nope. And I’m probably not a great person to write it. I’m hardly an Emacs power user. I had friends who would do everything in Emacs to the point where I would joke with them that Linux was just their Emacs boot loader. I keep lots of other apps and term windows open. My init.el file is pretty simple. I’m often aware of a vague capability that Emacs has, but I’ll brute-force my way through an editing task with keystrokes and some keyboard macros rather than add a new fancy library, at least until I’ve been forced to do the same thing a couple times per month. That said, I do remember trying to use Emacs on a 300 baud dial-up link. That was painful, though truthfully everything beyond ed would be painful at that speed.

[anamax]

Similar usage pattern (no init.el), but I started with TECO Emacs in the late 70s.

[jmmv]

I'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]

It's an article about emacs so I guess people were curious enough to ask that question.

[jmmv]

Sure, 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]

I believe it's a response to something posted recently, but I don't know what.

[rdtsc]

> 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]

It'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).

[jjav]

> 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?

[parl_match]

vi recently received an update. C23 compliance and some unicode fixes. it's a feature complete editor!

[ralphc]

One 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.

[wpm]

mg is installed on macOS by default and is basically diet vanilla emacs. Works fine for quick edits.

[Ferret7446]

vi isn't even in the same neighborhood in this regard. You can and should learn vi (and ed!) in one afternoon even if you never use them. Whereas Emacs isn't something you just learn in an afternoon. (And vim is not the same as vi)

That is a separate discussion from whether you should use ed or vi normally. You learn the "fallback" with the hope of never being forced to used them.

[aag]

Why is anyone using anything else?

[dismalaf]

I use Lem. It's an "emacs" but not a clone of GNU Emacs. It's written in Common Lisp, extensible in Common Lisp and it's way more performant than GNU Emacs. Obviously less features and plugins but for my needs (writing Lisp code mostly) it's great.

[sl_convertible]

How is it now compared to 6 months ago? I tried it back then, and just... I don't know, couldn't get into it.

[dismalaf]

Dunno, I've been trying it off and on since it was first released in like 2018. I don't theres any particularly noticeable changes from 6 months ago specifically.

I also used Emacs way back in the day but have been Vim/Neovim for the last 5 years or so. But I recently started a new Lisp project so revisited Lem, actually set it up the way I want (with LazyVim-like bindings), and found with my changes and comfort hacking on it (it's all Common Lisp top to bottom so it's easy to change) that it can replace LazyVim for me now. Just using the ncurses front end BTW.

[ux266478]

I don't like keyboard-centric text editing. Yes GNU Emacs supports the mouse, but just like Vim the experience is miserable. You can spend a lot of time configuring it, but at some point you're just writing extensions of extensions just to get a basic GUI flow that isn't painful, and no matter what it'll never feel quite "right". The program just wasn't built with the idea of a mouse in mind, and bolting it on really wasn't sufficient.

Add onto that pretty nasty performance issues, internals that aren't exactly well thought-out, and the experience in general having a high background noise of jank, where it's not uncommon for simple things like rainbow parens to randomly break.

I understand why other people like it, but it's really just not for me. I'll stick with Lite-XL.

[jjav]

> I don't like keyboard-centric text editing.

Interesting? Unless you're using voice dictation, isn't text editing 100% keyboard based input?

[ux266478]

No. Even most keyboard-centric text editors implement mouse inputs, with only a few exceptions coming to mind, almost none of which anybody uses today, for example ed. In fact, most editors don't even restrict text insertion and deletion to keyboard input, which is what you might be confusing with "text editing", which might be more clearly expanded to "operating a text editor".

[sph]

Likely because they haven't seen the light just yet. Or they are lost to the evil forces.

[shimman]

The only reason why I was taught vim is that a coworker wanted someone to know it so they can explain why emacs is better. It didn't work and I've transitioned to neovim.

[francoisdevlin]

I use vi because I'm not a savage

[iLemming]

I'm a die-hard vimmer. I use vim-motions everywhere - they permeate my editors/IDEs, browsers, terminal, I use them system wide (e.g. to change volume or control media or my WM). One day I woke up with the realization of the fundamental truth - Emacs simply vims better. Much better than even Neovim. I just had to master Vim and grok some Lisp to arrive to that conclusion.

People fighting Vim vs. Emacs are materially wrong - they focus on superficial (albeit substantial) angle, instead of considering the core ideas behind them. Vim's augmentation of modality is an incredible, beautiful, practical concept. Lisp - yet another grandest idea in all history of computer science. And these ideas are not overlapping. Lisp-powered vimming grants you genuinely joyful experience - surprisingly empowering and enormously liberating.

Emacs' Lisp interpreter is so capable - accurately simulating vim in it is not impossible, while pretty much every other editor/IDE has failed - not a single VSCode plugin, not Sublime, not IntelliJ with IdeaVim have ever fully implemented vim motions to the degree where it doesn't feel foreign, while Evil-mode in Emacs feels like a built-in feature. Until recently, bolting Lisp into Vim seemed impossible, today you can get a pseudo-Lisp engine with Fennel. Even though it unlikely ever feel like Emacs.

If you're sticking to one thing only due to some muscle memory, sure you're not a savage, you're just a bit ignorant.

[dotancohen]

Almost all my vimming is in Emacs now. I started with Org mode - now I can't find any feature of any TODO application that Org mode doesn't do better.

[human305893]

I'm heading towards that point. org-mode is just too good as a todo & notetaking app. Just not vimming in my emacs yet.

[fladd]

Functional and comfortable syncing with your mobile?

[dotancohen]

I suppose that you mean via some third party cloud. I personally sync my Org mode notes via adb when I backup the phone occasionally. I read on the phone using Orgro.

You might be able to sync with Dropbox.

[koiueo]

Timezones?

Org timestamps infamously do not support them.

I can't imagine using a todo application which lies to me half a year and every time I travel.

[iLemming]

> Org timestamps infamously do not support them.

So? Emacs has built-in solar and lunar calendars, has world-clock command, format-time-string accepts ZONE argument. Why don't you build a minor mode that calculates the offsets and shows you stuff in different timezones? This can be done in less than 15 minutes. With AI maybe in 20.

You're not dealing with an app you paid for, and your complaint not even an accurate one: Org's timestamp format doesn't encode timezone by default. Emacs absolutely supports the feature you want, you just didn't know about it.

[wafflemaker]

If emacs is not installed on a system, I use sed. In addition to not getting stuck inside it when you don't remember the magic exit incantation, you can immediately reuse the command on a different file. And it doesn't play sounds while you do it. Plus when you're typing the sed command, you can use emacs key bindings to move around!

[bananamogul]

"If emacs is not installed on a system, I use sed."

Bill Joy (creator of vi) once said that if he sits down on a foreign system, he reaches for ed [1].

To be fair, both emacs and vi have "magic exit incantations", though if you have emacs perhaps you have a menu in GUI mode. If not, C-x C-c is really not any more memorable than :wq! The vi one at least has an obvious mnemonic ("write quit") but either way, you need to know an arbitrary sequence of keystrokes.

[1] http://xahlee.info/comp/interview_with_bill_joy.html

[bbkane]

NeoVim 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_]

AI 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.

[mesrik]

Vi 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...

[zhxhhshshs]

You will be downvoted into oblivion.

For speaking the truth.

Vi-lets, engage!

[em-bee]

why do we run from the police dad? they use emacs, we use vi, son.

[TacticalCoder]

> "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]

Yeah, 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-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.

[v9v]

For 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]

> 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.)

[narrator]

There 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.

[ot]

> GNU deadline

I think you mean readline?

[mesrik]

Sure. Browser autocorrect there just tried to be helpful :/

[mindcrime]

That 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]

A 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]

Notable users: GNU HURD Project (Shipping any day now).

[layer8]

I thought you were using emacs?

[mesrik]

Well, 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]

There’s https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader, but it doesn’t appear to support commenting.

[polyamid23]

Why not use eww?

[hollerith]

Emacs 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]

Those 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]

"On MacOS" is not specific enough. Do they work in a textarea in Google Chrome on MacOS?

In vscode on MacOS?

[innocentoldguy]

Yes. 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]

And you've tested this in a textarea in Chrome or in vscode?

[setopt]

I 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

[tom_]

I am typing this in a textarea in Chrome, and the basic Emacs navigation commands all work: C-a, C-b, C-e, C-f, C-n and C-p. (The M- equivalents don't, though. You just get some special chars: å, ∫, ´, ƒ, ñ (dead char for the accent), π.)

Chrome Version 149.0.7827.155 (Official Build) (arm64)

Very similar in Visual Studio Code.

(I started using macOS in 2010, I think, and the Emacs-style shortcuts have felt pretty well supported the whole time. I can't promise that applies to Chrome as well though, as I'm not a regular user.)

[innocentoldguy]

Yes. They work fine in Chrome. Mellel is the only app I can think of where they don’t work.

[setopt]

Yes. For me, on all MacOS versions from Catalina to Sequoia, the basic Emacs keybindings listed here work almost* throughout the operating system: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650

I don’t daily drive VSCode but I use it for teaching, and then basic Emacs keybindings like C-n and C-a and C-k work pretty much everywhere, from the command palette to the code editor, without any plugins.

I also don’t use Chrome as my daily driver, but keybindings like C-a/C-e certainly work in both text areas and address field, or I would have remembered it as one of the annoying exceptions. I do regularly use a few Electron apps, which are based on Chrome, and it does work fine there.

*: There are a few apps that deliberately break the Emacs keybindings. Microsoft Office is one of them, since they insist that Ctrl keybindings on Mac should do the same as it does on Windows, which is extremely jarring if you rely on the Emacs keybindings everywhere else.

[lenkite]

I wish Emacs LISP gained ergonomic static typing. I always find working in un-typed languages very hard.

[internet_points]

Weell, 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 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.

[jb1991]

Firefox emacs bindings still work on Mac since everywhere on macOS supports emacs bindings, nearly.

[mesrik]

I 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]

Unless 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]

Idk, 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]

Bit 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.

[xtajv]

Regarding 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).

[infinet]

> "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.

[e40]

I 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.

[jpmattia]

45 years for me. I don't even think about keystrokes anymore.