"Is anyone still using emacs?"

Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch.

Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves.

Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CLI much much convenient and faster than moving hand to reach cursor keys.

My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more. Long time ago it did work. And I have no idea why feature was dropped some rewrite.

e: s/deadline/readline/g

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geoka9 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too

Yes, even in Codex and Claude Code.

> Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari... My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more

Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite: I had to finally bite the bullet and migrate to Firefox because Chrome/ium switched to GTK4 which removed key themes support.

(That's OK though, I should've moved off Chrome a long time ago.)

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drob518 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nearly 40 years for me. Wow! I’d note that MacOS input fields also have basic Emacs bindings for cursor movement, not just shells and browsers. Works in MacOS Mail, Evernote, etc.

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intrasight 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

43 years for me. Started in 1983 using Gosmacs on a black-and-white CRT terminal. Gosling too was frequently in the terminal room.

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mesrik 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, emacs keystrokes became kind of cli lingua franca, which apparently many do not know. I don't remember my self ever read about those supported explicitly anywhere, but accidentally I found out long time ago and then whenever I try new systems, programs and whatever I try which keystrokes do work. Quite often at least some work.

	▲	mftb an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's GNU Readline[0] or similar. It's all over the place, on Linux at least. Being GNU it defaults to emacs, but the vi support is also excellent. The first thing I type in any foreign bash is 'set -o vi'. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline

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jordigh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow, so you used the earliest public versions. Ever written a retrospective of what 40 years of Emacs has been like?

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sph an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It annoys me so much to have learned that GTK text fields used to have an Emacs editing mode, which they've hidden behind an unaccessible configuration option, and now it's hopelessly broken in modern GTK version.

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spudlyo 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define[1] keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the GTK equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc. I preserve my macOS CMD-not-control-key muscle memory this way too.

The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. I wrote a small python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch to the appropriate layer.

[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[1]: https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/dotfiles/-/blob/master/kanata/.co...

	▲	geoka9 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is so cool. Thank you!

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jmmv an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm curious... why are people (this thread, but there are several independent others) replying to "Is anyone still using emacs?" ? I don't see that sentence anywhere in the article!

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aag 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why is anyone using anything else?

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dismalaf 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I use Lem. It's an "emacs" but not a clone of GNU Emacs. It's written in Common Lisp, extensible in Common Lisp and it's way more performant than GNU Emacs. Obviously less features and plugins but for my needs (writing Lisp code mostly) it's great.

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sph an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Likely because they haven't seen the light just yet. Or they are lost to the evil forces.

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francoisdevlin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I use vi because I'm not a savage

	▲	bbkane 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		NeoVim because it's fun!! So many plugins and colorschemes! So customizable- these days Claude will just change it for you, no need to learn the APIs if you're just interested in the result. Yes you're AI-slopping your config, but the drawbacks to that are super low (it's a personal editor, not something I'm inflicting on others)
	▲	mesrik 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Vi is fine. It's superior and to bare ed - The Standard Editor, when you don't have anything else available. I made much of my living coding vi 7 years in -80's. And I still use vi, when emacs is not there or system has so little memory that emacs is too much. Which is usually with a embedded systems or some old Unix on single mode fixing unbootable system. ) https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard...
	▲	zhxhhshshs 44 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You will be downvoted into oblivion. For speaking the truth. Vi-lets, engage!

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v9v an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For Firefox I've switched to Glide (Firefox fork?) and configured it to implement Emacs keybindings. There is a config on the project's Github discussions page that I started off of.

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ot 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> GNU deadline

I think you mean readline?

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mesrik 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure. Browser autocorrect there just tried to be helpful :/

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mindcrime an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That said, I'm kinda hoping somebody does create a "GNU deadline" project now. I'm curious to see what kind of project it would be.

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sph an hour ago | parent [-]

A weird, inscrutable project management tool for the shell written in Perl 4 and Guile Scheme, that the ten people in the world who learned to operate it swear it is the greatest piece of productivity software ever invented.

	▲	bch 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Notable users: GNU HURD Project (Shipping any day now).

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layer8 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought you were using emacs?

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infinet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "Is anyone still using emacs?"

I have never used emacs seriously as an editor, however, I couldn't work without magit. I even manually build emacs 28 so I can re-use the same set of magit configure files.

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jb1991 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Firefox emacs bindings still work on Mac since everywhere on macOS supports emacs bindings, nearly.

	▲	mesrik 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I just tried, and my macOS up todateFirefox (still Sonoma few weeks), doesn't work. Nor does Waterfox (Firefox derivativ) that I've been using more lately. Could it be some setting I need to set before it works?