Is anyone still using Emacs?

I'm witnessing how highly-positioned people (at work) are "discovering" command line tools now that they are "forced" to interact with CLI-based coding agents

This does feel like the one silver lining of the slop bubble, plain text is once again becoming a viable and important medium, both in terms of CLI becoming more common and a lot of newly written down oral knowledge (as long as it's human-sourced, of course). I hope once we're through the current predicament, we can keep these good parts.

I think most Emacs users are using the GUI. I don't have the numbers, but I would bet it's the vast majority.

I think the push to cli thing is maybe one additional reason, but I wouldn't bet on it being a major driver.

I've seen a lot of people - actually only a few if we're talking relative numbers - look at my terminal and say "oh that's cool can I try" and dig into the cli tools. A lot of people need to mess with this - e.g. get the docker thing built properly or authorisation of cloud tools or similar. But they do it in a terminal in Vs code and just jump back into the gui mode as soon as they're done.

I'm not saying this is wrong or anything, that's a perfectly good way to work. But to paraphrase your own post, the real power of cli isn't that one tool, it's all of them. The "Unix is my IDE" makes a lot more sense when you connect many unrelated tools and can do so with ease because they're built that way.

And even then, since it's all text, it's very easy to bind a complex workflow to a single green mouse target called "build" or something.

Again, not calling you out. My point is that I think that having to use the cli agents isn't that much of a reason for people to get into the command line, command line is.

Not fully disagreeing, just think it's not that big of an impulse.

42 years, and I'm still customizing and learning Emacs. The only thing I can't figure out how to do in GNU Emacs is WYSIWYG HTML editing, so I'm working on an Emacs subset specifically for that purpose.

If you're coming from Helix, maybe check out meow. It provides functionality out of the box that is like Kakoune and Helix (though I haven't personally used either so this is just from what I have heard) and tries to stay more out of your way.

I think the evil package which you have been recommended has the problem of taking over too many key-bindings and not playing nice with a lot of external packages (therefore needing lots of "adapter" packages). I find that meow for me has been very hands-off since I configured it once.

I need to figure out some coherent set of keybindings that don't make my brain melt.

So it turns out that things that make you feel like your brain is melting are actually quite good for maintaining cognitive capacity as you get older. The old “use it or lose it” aphorism applies.

We have to pick and choose when we spend our cycles so to speak, but our brain isn’t a bank, and not spending cycles at all leads to atrophy.

So don’t completely shun the brain melt. It’s a sign you are exercising your brain in a novel way and building more neuronal connections.

If you're having issues with the keybindings and you're a bit more familiar with vim, it might be worth having a look at evil. You'll probably hear admonitions that evil is for Vim refugees who don't want to learn the true Gospel of Emacs, but the True Gospel of Emacs® is that you use it the way that works best for you.

As a bit more to back up that point, I've been using Emacs since 1998 and was never a Vim aficionado. Around 2011, I started having some minor RSI issues and I decided to try different packages to help with that. I spent a few years heavily engaged in god mode, but it still felt clumsy. Then, just to prove that it wouldn't work, I tried evil, having never used vim before in my life. In a week, I was just as proficient with evil as I was with god mode. In a month, I was faster with evil than I had ever been with even the official Emacs bindings.

Now, coming back around to the True Gospel of Emacs®, that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with using the default bindings. My wrists don't work, so my experience with them will not exactly match your own. You might also find joy in boon or meow. However, if evil does work for you, then don't feel one drop of guilt, because, while Emacs will change you, that will pale in comparison to the ways that Emacs will change for you.

It really depends on how you configure Doom. It’s also been improving overtime in that regard. The best is obviously rolling your own but it is a lot of work and projects like doom do ease the ingress of new users

The fact that the built-in keybindings are...odd.

That's what I've liked about Doom Emacs though!

I used to know the native Emacs key bindings well-enough but never found them very natural, and they were not particularly discoverable. The way Doom Emacs works, with SPC as the prefix for almost all operations and with transient menus explaining possible completions when you pause, is pretty great. I've been able to discover functionality I didn't know existed, and these don't interfere at all with the Vim modal modes. So I'm finding the mixture of Vim modes for text editing + SPC combinations for Emacs operations to be a good balance.

One plus for Emacs-native keybindings, however, is that all the basic text-manipulation ones are shared with readline and even macOS. (Mind you, I found VSCode on macOS pretty nice because macOS propagated its native Emacs-like keybindings for text management and these didn't collide with the standard clipboard management ones. When I moved to Windows and now Linux, I could just not stand VSCode without the Vim plugin.)

I've been looking at split keyboards for a while now. Recently I started thinking about a custom one. What do people use in this area that is vim friendly?

I think starting out on vanilla Emacs is the right call, to learn where its rough edges are and where it ends. But when you feel comfortable, I can warmly recommand installing Evil as one of the first things you try from the package ecosystem. It gets you sane bindings in most places.

Honestly, I'm mostly in the same boat. I know a little bit of elisp via osmosis from updating/editing my configuration, but it's actually a bit embarrassing how little of the language I know.

M-x high-five

This is me, very few packages and orig key bindings. (and there isn't actually a high-five func, maybe I'll finally dig into elisp:)

Beyond writing your config file, knowing how to write a little elisp can be amazing with regexp search-and-replace. In a replacement, you can write \, and then an elisp expression. So for example:

• Increment all the integers: [0-9]+ → \,(1+ \#0)
• Round all decimal numbers to two places: [0-9]+\.[0-9]* → \,(format "%.2f" \#0)
• Capitalize all words immediately preceded by foo: foo \([a-z]+\) → foo \,(capitalize \1))

Within the elisp expression in the replacement, \1 etc. evaluate to the numbered capture group, interpreted as a string, while #1 etc. evaluates to the the capture group interpreted as a number.

You can do some crazy stuff, especially if you define a small function for more complex processing and then call it from the replacement expression like this. It can let you do search and replace with some smarts.

It's one of those cool Emacs tricks that I've never seen anywhere else, but comes in quite handy every now and then.

Key issues for me while using emacs - and it is somehow hilarious to say - is pain to maintain.

I've tried doom's "update" feature sometimes and always had trouble.

Nowadays I just rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/ and set up doom from scratch (I keep ~/.doom.d/ under version control) every time I feel like upgrading or have to upgrade because Emacs gets upgraded. Never had issues with this flow.