by komali2 | 2025-08-07 04:59:13+00:00
I envy your level of emacs knowledge! I did a lot of things in it, but not as many as you: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/my-emacs-environment/ I really wish I had finished my blog post I'm working on right now about my new life stack that no longer involves emacs, it'd contain all the info I'd like to convey here.

Looking at your list, I guess what it came to for me is that getting an excellent UX for any one of those given tasks is only possible by using a tool made for that job. Probably, I can get a very good experience using Emacs, or maybe even excellent, but it would take a lot of time for me to tweak a plugin or write my won.

Video playback: Are you playing your youtube or jellyfin videos in Emacs? Well, that's pretty cool, I just have a firefox tab open for one or the other, on a second screen. If I want to pause or skip, I `META-l` to that window on my second screen (i3wm) and use vimium bindings or the native player bindings to interact with it.

Annotate PDFs: I don't do this anymore. I used to hand-annotate in various tablets as an experiment, but in the end all my notes got digitized to a note taking application anyway (org mode, previously) so I just highlight things, handwrite notes when needed in a notebook, and then summarize them in a note taking application (or write them there directly).

Anki cards: I used to do this in emacs as well. Now I don't use anki at all anymore. I didn't find any improvement in my life, conversations, or blog posts from memorizing all these facts (and this includes memorizing words in my Mandarin learning journey). Instead all I seemed to be doing was exhausting what little learning energy I had on "the dreaded flashcards." Plus it was tedious to write and maintain them, even though it was happening right there in the same org file I used to take these notes.

I'd be curious to learn more about your API testing setup, that sounds very cool! At work, our API is served via FastAPI and there's swagger docs automatically available that I can browse in a web browser if I want, or I just in nvim `SPC f f` to open a fuzzy file finder and find the model definition I want and look at the endpoint directly, or I can do the same to find the kubb-generated react hook, or typescript model, for the endpoint. For other projects, I guess I browse the API docs in a web browser.

I've never heard of using org-babel for managing dotfiles, that's a cool idea! I just have them in `~/.configs/` which is a git repo that I mirror to a private github repo.

Re: file management: I do the same but just using either `mini-files` in nvim, or, just some combination of gnu tools in a terminal. If I need a script I usually write one in python or bash. Being able to do so in lisp sounds pretty cool, though.

Text under cursor - what modes is that? That's pretty cool. I just browse jira tickets and pull requests in a web browser. I've never found desktop apps, terminal wrappers, etc, to be as good as just whatever a given company is shipping for their webapp (e.g. I tried managing github PRs in magit using that magit-forge thing but didn't find the experience that great compared to github's webapp).

That is a very cool mode you have for searching, I think I saw something like that on reddit once, but my thought on it is the same now as it was then - why wouldn't I do that but on google.com or search.brave.com, both of which already search wikipedia, google, youtube, github, and hacker news? I can type the same into the address bar of my browser and it'll do the same but also search my web history.

Piping shell commands into a buffer is indeed very cool. You know much more about the terminal than me, I can tell. However naively I could just do this `whatever | nvim`, right?

I saw your comment about the color theme change, that's so sick and I admire you for setting that up. For me, just `vscode-default-high-contrast` was fine 100% of the time I had emacs open, or in nvim `kanagawa-dragon` is fine as well. I don't knock you for having a changing color theme, I just don't really see the point for me.

I used to manage my emails in mu4e and it was fine, but after getting fed up with html emails not rendering correctly, or send email failing silently occasionally and not realizing it, or missing emails for some weird reason, I let go and just switched to thunderbird. I miss having 100% keyboard interaction with email, but thunderbird gets it all done reliably: reply-all, CC, BCC, archive, whatever. I may try out mutt one day though.

I used to track time very well in org mode and that is an extremely useful feature. I thought it was very cool to send to-the-minute invoices to my clients. I would generate time reports and have them added to my `org-roam-daily` entries. So much interesting data! Then I realized, for my own journal, it was an overwhelming amount of data that was basically useless to me, and for my clients, they didn't give a shit, they'd pay me either way, so I started just roughly estimating my hours based on start/end times and that was good enough, got me paid basically the same amount, and took me less time and effort. I do keep a hobonichi techo journal where I annotate the week-view with a general overview of what I get up to hour to hour which is nice to keep me on task and make me quickly realize if I am addicted to a new book and spending too much time reading it.

As for searching reddit, I am a recovering reddit addict and don't use it anymore, though I used to just use it in firefox with ad blocker and using reddit's "old" mode. Hacker news I'm also addicted to and try to avoid using it too much, but again, I just use it in a web browser. Increased friction for my addictions is good: I stay logged out of these sites and only log in when I really need to interact for some reason. This is especially great for twitter which I can't even interact with in any way if I'm logged out.

I always thought it was cool that people were creating presentations in org mode, so I tried it once and then went to give a talk on job hunting at a local university. They didn't have a way to plug an arbitrary device into their projector, so they asked me to email them the microsoft slides files, or send them a link to the google drive presentation, and they obviously had no idea how to install emacs. I didn't have that so had to quickly copy my presentation to google. Google slides works 100% of the time at all the talks and presentations I give so I just use that now. My presentations are quite simple so it's not too much trouble.

As for testing database queries, again, what mode are you using? That's very cool. I test them in dbeaver or in psql directly.

Same question for your docker containers. I just use some combination of `docker ps` or editing docker-compose files, alongside netstat, cloudflare, and portainer's web ui.

I read man pages using `man {whatever}`. Out of all the things you've mentioned, this is the one where I'm actually not curious how you do it in emacs, I just want to know why lol. Come on, opening a terminal and typing `man` isn't that big of a deal, surely!

I translate text using the google translate web UI, which easily lets me switch languages, upload images, etc. I didn't know emacs had a mode for this, that's interesting but I can't imagine it to be quite as smooth as the webUI is...

LLM integration in emacs looks very interesting, I'd like to try it. I like that it can actually use claude's ide mode. As far as I know, no nvim plugin can do that yet. However, right now I don't think any IDE integration works as well as the tab-completion proprietary model cursor uses, that lets me just TAB TAB TAB TAB get something done really quickly. I think their agentic mode is ok, I liked the git-style accept/reject changes thing, but I can do the same by doing claude code in a terminal and then just checking the changes in magit, or, now I use lazygit. Or just `git` commands directly. Personally I'm still chasing the dragon from that first Cursor hit. I really don't want to use Cursor but I want to have something with as-good tab completion and nothing in emacs (before) or nvim (now) has come close, but I will be trying the modes mentioned in this thread!

Regarding org mode in general, I now use a combination of a handwritten daily journal, as well as Trilium-next note taking, which I found to just be a more feature-rich and portable experience in the ways I need it to be, whereas org-mode was feature rich in a way that didn't matter to me. Turns out a super-powerful tagging and organization method for my tasks didn't actually help me stay organized or get more tasks done, but a simple yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily task list supported by a handwritten piece of paper work much better for me. No need to know if a task is for work or pleasure or what the GTD context for it is, I can just check my notebook (or trilium daily entry) to see what needs to get done.

I'm not trying to convince you to "switch." I'm envious of how well you've tailored your emacs to yourself - you're the destination I thought I was headed for when I wrote that blog post linked above. I never arrived, which perhaps is sad, but on the other hand, I spent a lot of time doing a lot of other things, which is just life, I guess!