It's crazy to me how out of the box when you edit nginx file at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/foo it creates another file foo~ there and nginx tries to load that too

When I tried to ask emacs reddit community they started attacking me for changing the default that only I need and fits everyone perfectly.

Still can't believe I'm the only one finding that default amazingly bad.

Also, with LLMs driving so much of current development it potentially makes Emacs even more competitive relative to modern IDEs. Development can be driven primarily by an agent like Claude Code from the command line, then navigating and tweaking the code, handling Git commits, etc with Emacs.

I imagine an LLM would be very good at writing Elisp to leverage EMacs’ strong core functionality to make Emacs work exactly how you want. This author managed to do it by hand, but I imagine someone starting now with an LLM could get there much faster.

This resonates with me so hard. I'm not a "no external packages" purist, but there are a number of pieces of functionality that I wrote for myself because there wasn't anything quite like what I wanted.

One example is a function to expand the region (selection) to any arbitrary set of pairing delimiters that I define in a defvar (parens, quotes, brackets, or I can can supply a custom left/right regex for matching). Then, when I execute the function, it waits for a second keypress, which is the trigger key I've defined for that matching pair, and it will expand the region to the left and the right until it meets the applicable delimiter.

Repeating the same key presses results in selecting the left and right delimiters themselves, and another repeat will extend to the next set of matching delimiters, and so on.

Even though I use a treesitter-based expand-region plug-in, my custom function is still invaluable for when I want to jump past a series of valid treesitter object expansions, or when certain text objects are just not defined in treesitter.

Some of the helpful custom expansions I have defined are:

"w" to select what Vim considers a lowercase-w word

Space to select what Vim considers an uppercase-W word

"$" to select ${...}-style expressions

"/" to select everything between forward slashes

"*" to select between asterisks (useful when editing markdown)

It's really an invaluable function for me, personally, but I always talk myself out of trying to open-source it because it has some gotchas and limitations, and I just don't want to be on the hook for trying to make everyone who uses it happy.

There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to understand them, and then copy them into your config. Doing everything from scratch is a waste of time unless you enjoy the process (in which case go nuts).

It's roughly equivalent to trying to discover all of our scientific knowledge yourself from scratch vs taking "for granted" the knowledge discovered by your forebears. There is no shame or disadvantage in doing so.

Also, a critical objection:

> Writing your own packages is the best way to learn Elisp

Absolutely not. Reading a language is crucial. If all you do is write, you will pigeonhole into weird practices and generally fail to improve. Only by reading stuff written by others can you learn, as you're exposed to what other people do right and wrong, both of which will be different from you.

Of course, writing your own packages is also necessary, but not sufficient alone.

I wish we would someday be able to edit in xref too, wgrep having landed in Emacs 30 (especially since project.el grep goes to xref by default).

By the way, anyone more informed know about any work on getting a graphical browser to work on latest Emacs, now that webkit xwidgets is dead for Emacs 30+? (Have tried EAF; extremely buggy on Mac)

I’m a GUI guy though. As soon as I try delving in, I abort when I see things like “just type c-C dingle bob to do x thing.” I’m happy these people found something that works with their brains. I just want a GUI that works like what they use.

I recently saw a Zed fork stripped of AI stuff but there’s no binaries yet (you gotta compile and get an Apple dev account and I don’t care enough). Zed and Sublime Text are the closest to my stylistic sensibilities but I’m always on the lookout for something better.

If you’re one of these EMacs freaks who also love GUIs, sign me up to your app!

I've been using Emacs since one of professors/mentors converted me over a decade ago back when I was attending university. As the years have progressed, I have found myself reaching for Emacs less and less. I still maintain my config and use it fairly often. I cannot use Emacs at my employer either, so that doesn't help.

However, I have always wanted to do what the author has demonstrated. I would love to be liberated from the all package dependencies I currently have. I just do not have the time nor self-discipline to do something like this. Even if the functionality would be less than or equal parity with 3rd-party packages, I would prefer the Devil I know over the ones I don't.

In all seriousness very impressive and cool. Great information and post.

And no - vim isn't any better either. I always felt that in the emacs-versus-vim debate there were two losing sides.

Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing? I'm skeptical because to my knowledge, Emacs is the only major text editor written in Lisp.