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stackghosttoday at 5:00 PM3 repliesview on HN

I use emacs almost every day, and it's a continual source of frustration that the community seems allergic to sane defaults.

If the editor ships a built in file manager, that file manager should not require explicit configuration to open e.g. a jpeg in an image viewer by default. We've had `xdg-open` for years now, it's kind of absurd how far behind emacs is in so many ways.


Replies

mimischitoday at 5:43 PM

I think that’s what many enjoy—and probably why many other steer away from—Emacs: its malleability. It has some defaults that are grounded in some usecase that have persisted for decades, and to change them would take hours of arguing on the mailing list.. or you could just change the defaults yourself to your liking.

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scoops_today at 5:30 PM

Pressing “X” with your point at the file should essentially do this, no? Well, at least give you the option to open said file in an external program. Otherwise, yes, pressing “RET” will assume you want to open it in emacs, I think that is sane. But like BeetleB says, I have no issue opening an image in emacs (unless I’m on windows)

That said, lack of sane defaults elsewhere is indeed a bit frustrating, (see: littering backup and auto save files everywhere. It would be much nicer to throw it in a ‘temp’ directory within .emacs.d or similar)

BeetleBtoday at 5:16 PM

Unsure what you mean. When I press Enter on an image, it does load it (in Emacs).

I believe opening within Emacs should be the default - as many Emacs users aim to do everything within Emacs.

See this submission from a day ago:

https://en.andros.dev/blog/06bfd107/emacs-is-a-lispboard/

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