Emacs as your video-trimming tool
42 points by xenodium
42 points by xenodium
Uh, wow. Colour me impressed. Does it run smoothly? I vaguely remember video in the terminal being inefficient. Or… most people use Emacs through a GUI these days don’t they?
There are lots of Emacs feature which are only available when running under a GUI.
I’m still stubborn and use it only on the terminal, because besides trying to avoid learning Lisp, I don’t want to do everything from Emacs. Then, as I’d like Emacs to be another tab in my terminal, I run it in text mode. This has some disadvantages, like many terminals having a restricted set of keys that applications can use.
I’m kinda curious if any of the new modern terminals enable graphics in Emacs and improve the keyboard shortcut situation. Every day my itch to be able to copy from scrollback easily grows- AFAIK my terminal (Gnome Terminal) does not support this and I’m jealous of my coworkers who seem to be quite fast at selections without using the mouse.
kkp.el and a kkp (kitty keyboard protocol) capable terminal is a way to get full keyboard access in terminal mode.
To be complete, I use the Spanish keyboard layout and due to dead key usage, some shortcuts are not available anyway, so I never bother to research terminal keyboard limitations.
What image protocols does emacs terminal support? Sixel, Kitty image protocol?
I do not think that tty emacs supports any terminal image protocol, nor the Kitty keyboard protocol. There’s probably not much motivation to change that, since if you’re running one of those fancy terminals, you’re already on a graphical display and can run a GUI Emacs.
Have you tried M-x shell?
No, not really. I suffer quite a bit from Emacs paralysis. Honestly, I’m using Emacs mostly because I was too content in VS Code and I felt bad about that. But I use it mostly to edit. I’m already handling multiple tabs in a terminal, juggling Git instead of using Magit, etc. Maybe if I had started earlier it would be different, but nowadays I have to pick carefully where I invest time and energy.
But editing is good! undo-tree
is awesome. I decided to invest some time with Eglot and it paid off very well! I also do some basic org-mode; unlike Magit where I can pretty much do anything I need with the command line, I never found anything that compares to org-mode.
I’m running this on an M1 Macbook and it runs smoothly enough for me to likely move away from using QuickTime Player for quick trims. Emacs UI vs Terminal is a personal choice. I’ve been very happy with GUI for quite some time. I particularly enjoy image capabilities, which enable this trimming flow.
edit: typos
I found it very usable when I tried it this morning, but emacs being emacs I was unpleasantly surprised when I went to save the results and had to go do other stuff while it locked up the GUI during rendering (to my NAS, so extra-slowly)