Side note: I am really enjoying HN today with the set of stories with personal hacks like this i3-emacs integration, someone's desk setup, someone's writer-deck laptop install, the kinda hilarious but also hecka geeky thermal ttrpg thingamabob, and the 16 byte wake up demo. Fun geeky stuff that isn't AI,and I love AI, but it ain't everything.
In case you don't understand the problem here, an emacs instance can be split into multiple "windows" and there are emacs key bindings to create and destroy these windows, move the "focus" from one window to another, resize the windows, etc. For many of us, this was our introduction to a tiling window manager experience before we'd ever heard of tiling window managers.
When we switched to using a tiling window manager for all our windows, we ran into a muscle memory problem. We were used to jumping between emacs windows/buffers using C-x o and C-x b and then without thinking about it we'd try and use the same keys to jump between i3/sway windows and of course it doesn't work. Or vice versa, trying to use i3/sway shortcuts to switch emacs windows/buffers.
To try and solve this problem I've been using less emacs windows and more i3/sway windows, so I can just use i3/sway keybindings everywhere, but emacs puts up some resistance to that. I like this approach
Yep, I still find emacs' window management bindings more intuitive than any tiling window manager I've used. So much so that I thought naively that things like exwm would "solve" this problem for me. But in fact -- beyond being janky / single-threaded -- they don't really because you still end up with competing bindings.
I think the more elegant model would be for the window manager to own all the window management keybindings and then for there to be a background emacs-like process that owns the buffers (and the remaining keybindings) and can present them in standalone windows which the window manager presents. With some kind of IPC between the two for coordination, I guess.
I don't think GNU Emacs itself works well with this model tho. Its "server" mode is something else entirely.
Ooo this is nice. I may have to try to get this working with my personal setup using Emacs and Sway.
My long term vision is to make an Emacs implementation that is compatible only in philosophy. It would use Guile instead of Elisp, default to bindings that are more familiar to people coming from more modern systems, and would be built from the beginning with concurrency and graphics in mind. For now it remains a dream though.
I did the same integration with an Erlang daemon. All relevant key presses are sent to it and based on the current focused application the daemon does different things. I built an Erlang library i3_IPC to listen for events and send commands to Sway.
"Writing a Wayland compositor from scratch is a staggering amount of work..."
I switched to Wayland and sway about 2 years ago and it hasn't been bad, but this is the thing that makes me most sad about Wayland. X has so many different window manager options, it's like, an embarrassment of wealth. Wayland has like, 3 "finished" ones (if sway even counts).
I keep trying it (coming from EXWM) but I get lots of lag, stutters, and poor fractional scaling. I'm not sure how much of that is "GTK under wayland", Emacs's PGTK build (known to have lag/rendering issues), AMD kernel drivers (?), or EWM itself; but it's not yet a replacement for EXWM in my experience.
The problem some of us have is we get used to jumping between emacs windows/buffers using C-x o and C-x b and then without thinking about it try and use the same keys to jump between i3 windows and of course it doesn't work. Or vice versa, trying to use i3 shortcuts to switch emacs windows/buffers.
That's fine as far as it goes, but I don't think that gets you what this article is for, which is things like using the same binding context-dependently to navigate between emacs splits and regular window manager windows, context-dependently. Which is a fun bit of overengineering.
A dedicated key for all window-manager things is what people that have thought about it do (I use the "windows" key). But keyboard manufacturers haven't thought about it, so sometimes reasonable things aren't possible. I don't know.
Side note: I am really enjoying HN today with the set of stories with personal hacks like this i3-emacs integration, someone's desk setup, someone's writer-deck laptop install, the kinda hilarious but also hecka geeky thermal ttrpg thingamabob, and the 16 byte wake up demo. Fun geeky stuff that isn't AI,and I love AI, but it ain't everything.
I set up a crude set of Ublock Origin filters to nuke AI off the frontpage of HN a while ago.
It's been great, much more like HN used to be.
Can you pls link to them?
They are still on the front page, but here you go:
Two-part desk setup : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214311
Writerdeck: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48250144
Wake-up demo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253060
In case you don't understand the problem here, an emacs instance can be split into multiple "windows" and there are emacs key bindings to create and destroy these windows, move the "focus" from one window to another, resize the windows, etc. For many of us, this was our introduction to a tiling window manager experience before we'd ever heard of tiling window managers.
When we switched to using a tiling window manager for all our windows, we ran into a muscle memory problem. We were used to jumping between emacs windows/buffers using C-x o and C-x b and then without thinking about it we'd try and use the same keys to jump between i3/sway windows and of course it doesn't work. Or vice versa, trying to use i3/sway shortcuts to switch emacs windows/buffers.
To try and solve this problem I've been using less emacs windows and more i3/sway windows, so I can just use i3/sway keybindings everywhere, but emacs puts up some resistance to that. I like this approach
Yep, I still find emacs' window management bindings more intuitive than any tiling window manager I've used. So much so that I thought naively that things like exwm would "solve" this problem for me. But in fact -- beyond being janky / single-threaded -- they don't really because you still end up with competing bindings.
I think the more elegant model would be for the window manager to own all the window management keybindings and then for there to be a background emacs-like process that owns the buffers (and the remaining keybindings) and can present them in standalone windows which the window manager presents. With some kind of IPC between the two for coordination, I guess.
I don't think GNU Emacs itself works well with this model tho. Its "server" mode is something else entirely.
Unrelated, but me and Gemini just invented "C-x 4" for multiscreens.
You should use emacsclient, so file will be actually shared. Or better yet - use GUI emacs with its ability to have multiple frames.
No Thank You
export EDITOR="emacsclient -nw"
It really speeds things up
Incredibly splendid. I just tested it myself.
Try C-x 2, C-x 3 and C-x 4
Ooo this is nice. I may have to try to get this working with my personal setup using Emacs and Sway.
My long term vision is to make an Emacs implementation that is compatible only in philosophy. It would use Guile instead of Elisp, default to bindings that are more familiar to people coming from more modern systems, and would be built from the beginning with concurrency and graphics in mind. For now it remains a dream though.
https://guile-emacs.org/
I know, right? However, one of the strongest points of Emacs is the huge amount of existing packages.
VSCode is pretty much this. But with typescript instead of Guile. After 30 years of Emacs, I switched .
Heresy! ;)
I would guess you hadn't done as much emacs yak shaving as some of us other emacs users if the switch to VSCode was a simple one
after 30 years you say this? this cannot be serious.
Sounds like you want Lem. Though it's common lisp instead of guile.
https://github.com/lem-project/lem
I did the same integration with an Erlang daemon. All relevant key presses are sent to it and based on the current focused application the daemon does different things. I built an Erlang library i3_IPC to listen for events and send commands to Sway.
Care to share?
I've started using ewm to get this kind of unification between emacs window management and non-emacs window management.
https://codeberg.org/ezemtsov/ewm
"Writing a Wayland compositor from scratch is a staggering amount of work..."
I switched to Wayland and sway about 2 years ago and it hasn't been bad, but this is the thing that makes me most sad about Wayland. X has so many different window manager options, it's like, an embarrassment of wealth. Wayland has like, 3 "finished" ones (if sway even counts).
I keep trying it (coming from EXWM) but I get lots of lag, stutters, and poor fractional scaling. I'm not sure how much of that is "GTK under wayland", Emacs's PGTK build (known to have lag/rendering issues), AMD kernel drivers (?), or EWM itself; but it's not yet a replacement for EXWM in my experience.
I just use super(win key)/hyper (bound to capslock) for i3-related commands and leave emacs to its own devices with normal binds
The problem some of us have is we get used to jumping between emacs windows/buffers using C-x o and C-x b and then without thinking about it try and use the same keys to jump between i3 windows and of course it doesn't work. Or vice versa, trying to use i3 shortcuts to switch emacs windows/buffers.
There can never be too many modifier keys:
https://xcancel.com/octonion/status/1341113219142828039
That's fine as far as it goes, but I don't think that gets you what this article is for, which is things like using the same binding context-dependently to navigate between emacs splits and regular window manager windows, context-dependently. Which is a fun bit of overengineering.
Yes, I am misunderstanding the problem. The windows/mac command key leave shift, control and alt free for i3.
Yeah this is what I do. This article feels like crazy overengineering for something that's not really a problem
A dedicated key for all window-manager things is what people that have thought about it do (I use the "windows" key). But keyboard manufacturers haven't thought about it, so sometimes reasonable things aren't possible. I don't know.
Unless you have RSI. Then it might be worth it. Depends on what hurts.
Ah no video it action??
Very interesting though. I don’t always read entire posts on blogs but this one I did. Lisp looks really interesting.