>You can have your code/notes open in one buffer and have the website in another, which is useful for documentation, or an article you're following along, etc.

I’m curious what the difference is between that and having pinned windows in Ubuntu

For example I’ll have sublime text, one terminal, a notepad, and a firefox window with multiple tabs, pinned to the four corners of my desktop

Everything You describe is possible without emacs so I’m genuinely trying to understand the appeal

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iLemming 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I’m curious what the difference is between that and having pinned windows in Ubuntu

The difference is the text consumption. Can you easily retrieve any text you're seeing on the screen into your editor?

Inserting any piece of text I see on the screen into my notes? A couple of keystrokes. I can grab text in any form, even if it's a frame in a YT video - I'd just select the area, snapshot it - Emacs OCRs the text out of it, which takes milliseconds. I fully control the playback of said video directly from my editor - rewind, pause, mute, speed up, extract transcript, etc. It is enormously liberating and empowering.

I have complete and utter control over text - I can send a query to an LLM in the middle of typing this very comment, without ever missing a beat. I can ask for anything - fact-check it, spell check it, reword it, explain it, give me different variations of the same sentence. I can replace part of it with diffing in-place. I can even start changing the behavior of Emacs itself, right there on the spot.

I can directly grab any part of the log of a process running in the terminal. Grep through it, semantically search through it with an LLM, whatever. Similarly, I can directly grab a piece of any text in Emacs and send it over to another app, e.g., as a command to run in the terminal.

> Everything You describe is possible without emacs

Everything is possible with Turing-complete languages, but Turing-completeness is a trap. It's all about affordability. What Emacs grants as a Lisp-REPL loop with a built-in text editor is lowering that affordability bar to the lowest imaginable minimum.

Have you ever thought: "What if I could change the 'Open File' dialog in Sublime so I can browse GitHub repos directly instead of folders and files?" This kind of thinking has probably never occurred to you - for an Emacs user, that is some prosaic, just-another-Wednesday kind of thought.¹

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¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDn8ak-8yIs

By the way fishing that url out of my browser history took a keystroke - of course Emacs can search through my browser history too - https://github.com/agzam/browser-hist.el

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skydhash 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Everything You describe is possible without emacs so I’m genuinely trying to understand the appeal

The advantage is that it’s a single program with multiple windows with a shared list of buffers. So you can save transform your layout and save it, manipulate the content without any real boundary, unified bookmarks,…

Your WM can’t access sublime and firefox internals. And the last two can’t talk with each other.

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AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Your WM can’t access sublime and firefox internals. And the last two can’t talk with each other.

But why would I want them to as the default interaction?

I can ctrl-c > ctrl-v from one to the other trivially and ffx has console and inspector internals visible with one Function key press

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BeetleB 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you don't want to, then you don't want to. Understand you may want things others don't, and vice versa.

Although I don't browse the web with Emacs, I see the utility.

Tell me: How would you select some text, and with a keystroke, send the selected text to yourself via email, with the URL included and the title of the page in the subject line?

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AndrewKemendo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Tell me: How would you select some text, and with a keystroke, send the selected text to yourself via email, with the URL included and the title of the page in the subject line?

I think the takeaway for me is that emacs is for people who get enjoyment out of building their own custom computing environment

The example you describe is something I would rarely do so building a process around it would be inefficient for me but if that’s where people want to spend time then great

	▲	iLemming an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The example you describe is something I would rarely do There is some tacit knowledge in here that is nearly impossible to convey in words. Your "rarely do" is the thought that subconsciously ignores the principle of least effort; there's an affordability gap, e.g., I am more likely to use a thesaurus simply because I have it built into my text editor, versus someone who has to reach for it in the browser/separate app. > building a process around it would be inefficient for me That's what you're missing. Emacs makes it incredibly cheap. It's a Lisp REPL. When you understand what it means in practice, it opens up incredible opportunities for exploratory computing. You're not "building processes around", you're essentially living in one mega-process, a simulation, a digital universe where you are a god, commanding change at will. Right now, as I'm typing this very comment, I noticed a tiny gap in the way how I'm using LLMs, so I'm changing this stuff on the fly, with the agent running things in the adjacent buffer while I'm finishing this comment. The crazy thing is that it doesn't have to compile, restart, ask me to pause typing, etc. It's applying changes to my editor live. By the time I finish typing the comment, it will probably have already built this feature, tested it out, and it will be ready for me to use, instantly.
	▲	BeetleB 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I think the takeaway for me is that emacs is for people who get enjoyment out of building their own custom computing environment For long time users, that's the whole point of Emacs. > The example you describe is something I would rarely do I used to do it at work all the time (not with Emacs, but with AutoHotKey). Find a long article I'd really like to read, but don't want to waste time at work. With a keystroke, I'd quickly send the email to me with the URL etc.

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skydhash 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But why would I want them to as the default interaction?

Some find it useful. One can write code in vim or sublime, the only differences are the specific actions to get it done and the user experience. People will lean towards one another, not for the capability to write code, but for how it’s done.

So what I’m trying to showcase is not the capability, but the Emacs ways of getting it done. You can also implement something with a WM setup or tmux (with w3m). But it’s a different feel and effort, so people like ones and dislike the others.

	▲	AndrewKemendo 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Makes sense!