alt Hacker NewsEmacs is my new window manager
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Thanks to EXWM (not mentioned here), emacs has been my literal X window manager for several years. I installed it as a lark, thinking there's no way this will work properly, and just never stopped using it. It's brilliant.
Nowadays there's eat as excellent terminal emulator for emacs, which should replace the need to run external terminals.
I've been using it for a w while, and recently finally got fed up about terminals on my macbook not behaving as nicely as the ones on my linux box with proper tiling window managers, so spent some effort to make SSH into a terminal with completion easy from emacs, and now mostly handle terminals in emacs.
There is a third option besides replacing your window manager with EXWM or a simpler tiling window manager: to manage desktop windows from within Emacs using your existing X11 window manager or Wayland compositor. This means - you can position and resize all desktop windows, - you can switch between Emacs and desktop windows by moving to the left, right, up, down window and - you can switch back and forth between a named desktop app like Firefox, okular etc. and Emacs.
You need to install just the Emacs package Emacs Desktop Window Manager (dwin) https://github.com/lsth/dwin, for example from MELPA. Currently it works with X11 window managers as well as with KDE/KWin on Wayland or X11 (using xdotool and kdotool, resp.). I am using it all day myself on KDE/KWin Wayland in my standard setup and there it works fine.
(I am the author.)
This reminds me of "Emacs as PID 1" from a decade ago, to which I sadly cannot find a link anymore
A VM is displayed as a window on the host OS and Emacs is the window manager within that VM window. What's the difference from running emacs directly as an application on the host?
"However, I also don’t like to carry two computers just to jot down personal notes. My remedy is to install a virtualization system and create a “personal” virtual machine."
I have the same problem, but I'm not sure if a VM is a good solution. The work OS has full access to the VM and I don't trust putting my personal things even in the VM. (I consider the work laptop backdoored and full with spyware.)
Was just looking at this article yesterday and it inspired me to try it myself. Trying it out today, my fingers became really sore from trying to navigate. Can't imagine using this for a modern development workflow where there's a lot of jumping around. To make it more ergonomic, I'd just be recreating configuration other window managers give me out of the box.
The author mentions in the footnotes he mostly uses this setup for note taking. That makes sense as he probably remains in one window for extended periods of time.
Last time I tried I felt like an old fart using emacs. None of the keys felt natural
That said, i did not give it a fair shot. Does anyone have any good resources to get started? E.g lazygit has a good 15min vid to get u up to speed
cool, now, when will emacs get a good text editor?
With Debian as VM this would probably much leaner. Was shocked about current Ubuntu image sizes. E.g. no need to have to download about 500MB of firmware packages with each new kernel.
Been a happy EXWM user for a few years now. Really impressed that it comes as a desktop option for GUIX.
GUIX, EXWM, and Emacs are home for now :)
> I do not install personal software
To the eyes of his employer installing a personal VM is probably exactly the same.
Hmm ... I used ratpoison 25 years ago ... is it current/maintained ?
Is there a live release/support/discussion ecosystem for ratpoison in 2025 ?
Me: Open browser full screen, vscode selfhosted, termix, tacticalrmm/guacamole. Nowadays I only need a browser.
Sometimes you just enjoy hard mode.
Active exwm user here: I've been using EXWM for one ~1,5-2 years now, and I've configured it pretty much the same way I would love to have the ideal desktop to look like. Minimal, clean, mostly 1 app to focus on, and only 6 virtual desktops I really use.
I struggled quite a bit with the xinit ath the start, and I had to switch to other terminals to get back to any UI. But now I have a pretty consistently well-running EXWM, only from time to time (once a month) it freezes. Most of the time, because I quickly want to do sth. Mess up pressing multiple wrong key combinations and am stuck with a frozen ui :D For login I use lightdm, that will then load emacs.
What my key pain points still are:
- char and line mode Switching between them is easy, but having different modes, in different buffers can still sometimes mess up with my keys. Esp. when pressing Ctrl-q for escaping, just to realize that this is in line mode, and closing the window, instead of staring a actual sequence, like C-q C-y. Also, when coing through my buffer list, while having the preview active. So in buffer list, use C-n, and when the preview then shows a buffer, that is in line mode, that will capture the focus, and the next C-n will be send to the buffer, instead of the buffer list. Leaving me with a open buffer list in the minibuffer, that I have to manually close.
- some webpages e.g. payment providers open up a popup for confirming. From time to time, this popup is - in the background somehwhere - or floating - or not findable at all, even in my buffer list This is rare, but it happens. And when it happens, it's very annoying to interact with it
- when altering my emacs init config, and rebooting, and I messed things up. Then there is no way other than switching to tty1 and roll back the changes. Though I guess I could change that, through having some kind of check before saving.
- Not a pain point, but I still haven't gotten to the part of using it with multiple monitors. Looking at the config I always say that "I'll do it soon" >D
But overall happy! And thanks to howardism.org for all the wonderfull great emacs write-ups he has. My all time fav. is still the Literate DevOps article, to which I came back often in the past. And now that I think about it, I should re-read it! Thanks Howard!