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by iLemming 41 days ago
> "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?"

3 comments

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.

> - I consume HN and Reddit in Emacs.

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

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.
I wish I could reach this level! maybe one day... except in neovim ;p
I use Neovim too, but it never can fully replace Emacs for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589770