Comment by tptacek
15 hours ago
The point of the article is that the whole gestalt of what you do on a computer is now one big programmable surface, and in that regard everything feels a lot more like Emacs.
It's not "about" Emacs, it's more about the vibe of personalized software in 2026 to someone who does a lot of Emacs stuff.
> whole gestalt of what you do on a computer is now one big programmable surface
Emacs-effect. Use it long enough and everything becomes "one big programmable surface". I've been in that modus operandi for years. Emacs is my "control room", I don't necessarily do everything in Emacs, but for sure it converges all into it - everything flows through Emacs. I control my WM directly from the REPL inside Emacs. I can grab a content from a tab in my browser - I have access to my browser history, and all the tabs, I can switch to any tab, close and re-order them. I can grab a text selection on the page, I can extract entire readable corpus of an article while ignoring all the irrelevant fluff - banners, ads, buttons, etc. It works even for js-rendered content (React, et al.). I play all videos controlling them directly from Emacs - even though the video itself is playing outside, in mpv. I still can pause, change volume, fast forward, speed-up, extract transcript, etc. All without leaving Emacs. That's pretty useful when taking notes. I can grab any text I see on the screen. Even if it's in Slack.app. Why, If I can read it, there's no reason why Emacs shouldn't be able to. I can grab any region on my screen with Flameshot, it goes through Emacs, runs tesseract and OCRs the text out of it. Useful when someone's screen sharing in Zoom. This was all possible before LLMs. Now, LLMs running in Emacs can do some crazy, wild stuff.
Wild!! Would love to look at your .emacs.d configs
mpvi [1] is the video control part. I have only used it a little bit but it is incredibly good. Control the playback completely from Emacs and quickly make timestamped org notes.
I don't know what the other parts are. Curious to learn!
[1]: https://github.com/lorniu/mpvi
Sure, but it misses interoperability, which is the point of Emacs for me. That's my point.
Not really the same. Emacs focus a lot on compatibility and common modules (even if there may be some different takes on those common things). So you got big systems like helm, consul, ivy, company,… and the. everyone building on top.
Another thing is configuration (which also ties to the previous statement). You have to be able to split the idea of the program (what it aims to do) and your personal preferences. Emacs make that easy by having a framework for user preferences. That makes for an extendable program.
The closest, but not as user friendly is unix and suckless philosophy combined. Small programs, easy to understand, configure, and extend.
OP is trying to say Home Depot let normies do their own small repairs, and you're protesting saying "No, no, that's not how we pros do it."
Normies can do their own repairs when they want and how they want. But I was just pointing out a difference in behavior, not the true way of doing.