@ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn Like, one of the _coolest_ features I think in #Emacs is keyboard macros, with recursive editing. Combine that with registers ... and then also saving them, or viewing what functions you are calling to make it into a proper #EmacsLisp function. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Keyboard-Macro-Query.html

@ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn (And then some M-: for some extra Lisp, doing conditional cases and what not!)

@amszmidt @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn I think you misunderstand. We use the cool built in stuff. It’s just the defaults are often grating and there are great packages on melpa. I can’t imagine getting by without some of them.

@ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn Would love to hear more!

@amszmidt @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn

I'd say 50% of my configuration is adding keybindings that are easier for me to remember or type or fixing some annoying default. I guess you are ok with the defaults. Other than that, without the following packages, my emacs experience would be worse:

* which-key
* ws-butler
* magit
* git-timemachine
* eglot (now builtin, but the gnu package is more up to date)
* vertico, orderless, consult, emback, corfu and some related packages.
* avy
* evil (I used vi[m] for decades, my fingers won't learn any different), and related packages
* helpful
* project (built-in but gnu version is more up to date)
* math-preview (used with adoc-mode, etc to show latex math rendered)
* packages for text formats that are not built-in or the built-in are not great for some reason:
- toml-mode
- plantuml-mode
- js2-mode
- markdown-mode
- sphinx-mode
- adoc-mode
- rustic and rust-mode
- python-mode
- cmake-mode
- ruby-mode
- protobuf-mode
- modern-cpp-font-lock
- org (built-in but gnu version is more up to date)

I also have some small elisp functions for some things. Those are in my config. I wouldn't want to go without some of those, but they are very idiosyncratic.

@ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn 🙀

@laotang @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn I suspect it is more about how you use it, though when I started using Emacs all you had was the manual. So I ploughed through that several times... I think I spent a month just dissecting how I could use keyboard macros! I am still not friends with windows and registers (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Configuration-Registers.html). But I am an old fart, and still remember that the register commands where not so convoluted (it used to be C-x g to insert a register) 😃

@laotang @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn So old, that I mixed them up ... C-x g is to insert the content of a register, C-x x is to copy a region to a register.

@amszmidt @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn I agree, it has a lot to do with how I/we use Emacs. I use it to mange my day as a social scientist and to do analysis/writing with 1000s of small org files. The only programming I do is elisp. I tried to understand the benefits of macros but it never clicked for me. Out of the box window management of emacs is imho horrible, had to do a lot of tweaking there. And I have about a hundred lines only to fix the keyboard bindings… :)

@laotang @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn Macros come in handy when you have to manipulate text. E.g., you are creating a table of something, and want to insert data into it .. a macro can make that just a rinse and repeat sequence.

Real world example, recently I had to parse the output from git where it was spitting out a lots of warning messages .. that message contained some information that meant I could do produce a set of commands, and silence the warning.

@laotang @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn Another slightly common thing is ad-hoc data that needs to be manipulated into some specific format like CSV or whatever ... in those cases, specially the macro counter comes in handy since you can have a unique id column.

@amszmidt @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn Thanks, this sounds very useful for these cases. I just almost never have these kind of repetitive tasks or automate them with a short elisp snippet. But I’ll keep it mind.

@amszmidt @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn I’m curious, what are you using Emacs for?

@laotang @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn Literally everything. From reading and replying to email, to writing documentation and code.

@amszmidt @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn Are you using Gnus to read email? And no spell checking package for writing documentation? And everything from the command line? This is very minimalist 😉

@laotang @ambihelical @davidbraze @joonhyeok_ahn I use rmail for mail. And the builtin spell checking works good enough for me. With some abbrev on that .. makes life easy. As for command line, I prefer to avoid it. It is only annoying things like crazy stuff that warrants ClI. Using VCS is covered with vc-mode… M-x grep etc.

@amszmidt Interesting. Rmail is new to me. I’m using mu4e and really like the speed. Spellchecking: Is there something built-in? I started with this: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Spelling.html and then proceeded to install Hunspell. This was surprisingly difficult.

@laotang I just use https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Spelling.html .. the only thing I might be mission is something like flycheck to highlight words while writing. But then .. I’d find it distracting, I’d rather finish writing and then work on spell checking.