Comment by osener
10 hours ago
After a couple of years of detour I’m back to using Emacs since all the fancy lsp, debugger etc stuff in VSCode and Zed doesn’t matter as much for me anymore and I am just more productive with Emacs. But I am still using it like it is 2020. I hear people using coding agents to make crazy customizations to their emacs config and I can imagine Emacs is particularly suitable for this.
Curious what are the biggest things that have come out in the last year or two, and what emacs based personal software have others reading this made?
Native compilation is now default, so elisp is much faster than it was out of the box.
Tree-sitter support is quite smooth now, with automatic grammar installation.
Apparently very good Android support.
Canvas support is in master, people are building all kinds of crazy stuff[0] with this
Lots of nice built-in packages like modus themes, eglot, which-key. Editable grep/xref/occur results is also built-in now. New context menu things.
Load the "newcomer-presets" theme to enable stuff that newcomers tend to want enabled (tab bar, fancy completion, lots of little things).
[0] e.g. https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-e..., and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61-uNV9N154 / https://github.com/yibie/exc.el
Fantastic rundown, thank you!
Wow I missed canvas support completely. This is going to make some custom UI's way easier to make compared to the hacks I had to resort to in the past [0]
I do hope one day we'd get a new cross platform performant display engine that draws like Zed does for more UI capabilities in Emacs. Neomacs[1] promises this and has some of this but looks like its suffering from never ending scope creep and continuously moving back and forth between 80% there and 90% there due to unattended agents running wild.
[0] https://github.com/ozanvos/emacs-webkit-color-picker
[1] https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs
It looks like exc.el is built on top of a reactive UI framework, which, well, would have been incomprehensible to the first users of GNU Emacs on PDP-11 UNIX…
https://github.com/emacs-taf
Reminds me of https://github.com/emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework which I've never been able to get to work. I guess this is peak personal software.
> biggest things that have come out
Just ask Claude or whatever to hook up gptel and eca (or agent-shell). You don't even need to read anything, just literally talk to the LLM. The first step is to get to the point where agents can change Emacs from the inside out - and then, that opens the floodgates for any ideas.
Just yesterday I decided to make it possible to detach a video I'm watching (and of course controlling directly from Emacs) from my browser. The active YT video stops playing in the browser, loads mpv, and seamlessly continues, while keeping the time, speed, and volume. It's now possible with the new Canvas API to play videos directly in Emacs; at some point I may try to figure that out. Why? Well, just because I can. With Emacs, the limit is your imagination and nothing else.
Craziest thing? I never had to restart, recompile, rebuild anything. I was watching a video, thought: "hmm, a floating window would be nice..."; without missing a beat, just typed the prompt and made that happen within minutes.
not big but i'm still happy about how it allowed me to build a really expressive musical tracker with micro-tonality implemented by default. partly by Csound score paradigm but we also have an interesting macros, a scale paradigm for adding notes and real-time p-field information
[0] https://github.com/luqtas/csound-score-emacs
About two or three months ago I ditched Neovim as all the complicated modern crap wasn't working for me, and instead of reverting to Vim, I switched to Emacs and Doom + eVil, and am relieved to be back in a nice stable system again. I did ask GPT to port over my key commands and shortcuts, which it did, and things are great again!