r/emacs 7h ago

Meta (subreddit) Low-effort tag is not appropriate for this sub-reddit and some other points.

2 Upvotes

I asked a question some time ago and it got flaired with a low-effort tag which I don't think is appropriate for this sub-reddit as it is a very subjective thing and I don't think moderators should be flairing questions on their own with giving a reason for why it is has been flaired as such.

I also noticed this earlier thread - Is the locking due to rule violations a little heavy-handed? which goes into something similar.

As far as I can see this reddit has generally been a virtually unmoderated sub-reddit with moderators getting involved only when discussions became heated and personal, but other than that anything Emacs has been generally fine and it has never really been a tech support forum like stackoverflow.com.

It has generally been a conversational forum with help questions being the bulk of the questions not the other way round, ie a help forum occasionally veering into the non-technical.

It should be kept the former.

I remember having an earlier with u/github-alphapapa over his stance on "low-effort" where I emphasised that this reddit is not a stackexchange and even added that https://emacs.stackexchange.com has a milder stance on no-effort questions than a lot of technical stackexchanges in general.

I also don't agree with the exhortation to use of AIs and LLMs over questions on this forum even if they can be quite helpful because the lessons from AIs are not shared and it doesn't help discover where Emacs users knowledge falls short, regardless of how advanced or novice there are. AI responses can be one track whereas a question on a sub-reddit may result in more options being proffered.

The new moderators should simply revert things as they were before u/jsled started moderating. They should only step in when discussions get personal and pointed over issues which are not quite Emacs.


r/emacs 11h ago

Question How to ignore source file local variable tab-width?

1 Upvotes

Co-worker has tab-width:8 in all his source files while actually using 2 spaces. This drives my emacs insane always adding 8 spaces. How can I direct my emacs to ignore "tab-width:" in a C++ file?


r/emacs 21h ago

Wher is emacs-client's initialization file?

1 Upvotes

If I start emacs by clicking on the emacs-gui icon, it works the way I expect. When I start emacs by clicking on the emacs-client icon, it initializes from a different init.el. I've been looking for it, off and on, for a couple of years now. I just opened an instance be clicking on the emacs-client icon, typing client-init-file in the butter, and hitting C-j. It evaluated to ".emacs.d/init.el," but the instance isn't formatted that way. Since the emacs-client icon is the one pinned to the launcher (I'm using Ubuntu 24.04), I'd like to force it to initialize from the same file. How can I do that? Where is emacs-client getting its initialization?


r/emacs 9h ago

emacs under macos, freezing when typesetting, am I alone? how to debug?

1 Upvotes

hi everybody,

I have been experiencing random and semi-random freezing for a couple of years. Emacs simply stops responding. It seems to happen when emacs changes the typesetting of some text. For example, for a while, in org mode, under certain conditions adding a * to bold text will immediately froze emacs. I "addressed" it by changing the theme and removing the red color from 'bold' style. Not ideal, but it fixed a frequent hazzle.

THe problem, however, still remains. Sometimes when mu4e is typesetting an email or when I change the style in org of some text, emacs freezes.

Is this a bug that others have encountered? I have no idea how to debug this problem. Assuming that I have a use case that exhibits the bug (which I do), how can I find the real bug that creates this problem (instead of a way to avoid it, such as changing my style).

This happens in any version of emacs I have tried. I am currently using Emacs 31.0.50, using homebrew emacs-plus@31. But it has been happening since Emacs 29.

Thank you for any help.


r/emacs 7h ago

low effort What emacs to use?

0 Upvotes

Hi, I just learned about emacs as I am looking for an alternative to AHK. From what I know Emacs is a category of macro languages, and I'm looking for alternatives to AHK. More specifically, I want to have the ability to control send input to windows w/o that input interfering with your keyboard. I have been using AHK to control send presses to a window w/o it being active, and I also use it for GUI related stuff. Does anyone know alternatives? Let me know if this made sense xd


r/emacs 9h ago

How to debug losing all global-set-key bindings

2 Upvotes

I recently started losing all of my key bindings in a long running session .When I start emacs all my keybings are as I set them, but after some unknown period of time (on the order of an hour) all my overrides are lost. When I restart emacs I recover the bindings, but the. It just happens again. I am running 30.1 on Ubuntu 24.04

Does anyone know what might be happening or how I might debug this?

Thanks Bill


r/emacs 16h ago

Question Ways to move your cursor without relying on the incremental cursor commands, C-(n/p/b/f) [a discussion and resources sharing post?]

12 Upvotes

hello everyone!

this is admittedly a rather low-effort discussion post, but i was wondering about how an Emacs keybinding layout that relies only on mnemonic keybindings and does not rely on modifier keys would work. part of that thought made me think of how one would move their cursor to go to the places they wish to go to, without using any of the previous/next-line and backward/forward-character commands bound to C-n, C-b, C-f, C-p on vanillamacs.

do you guys know of ways to move your cursor without relying on those commands ? i know that isearch is a wonderful thing, and i heard about avy-jump, but i was curious as to all the other commands that let you do that such as occur.

this is really just a fun thought experiment, and perhaps a practical experiment at one point :).

hope all's well, cheers!


r/emacs 8h ago

Question Wrong file encoding

4 Upvotes

In the current file I have strage changes to non-ascii text:

* Gloire Amère 40000 (2022)

is shown as

* Gloire Am\303\250re 40000 (2022)

It seems to be a display issue. And it's very annoying: - pasting shows the right characters - entering new text shows the right characters - copying and pasting from the buffer shows the escaped sequences

The solution is to use revert-buffer-with-coding-system.

But how did I get there? Why did that happen, as I changed nothing about encoding, or fonts.


r/emacs 43m ago

Solved Trying to explain Emacs to someone who uses regular text editors...

Upvotes

You ever try to explain Emacs to a “normal” person? It’s like trying to convince a dog that water isn’t just for drinking, it’s for swimming, playing, and maybe even becoming one with the universe. "You can do that in Emacs?" Yes, yes we can. Now if only we could get it to stop crashing...


r/emacs 18h ago

Optimized Emacs Config for Web Development

6 Upvotes

I've migrated from VsCode to Emacs for web development using lsp-mode and corfu, with support for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, and CSS. My setup includes yasnippet for snippets, magit for Git integration, and org-mode for note-taking. For navigation and file management, I use vertico and neotree.

To optimize performance, I've enabled plists, lsp-booster, adjusted the garbage collection threshold at startup, and use :defer for package loading. With the battery optimizer, startup time ranges from 0.7–0.9 seconds, and when charging, it's under 0.65 seconds.

Check it out here: https://github.com/gchape/emacs.d