• 16 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 21st, 2025

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  • UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’d like to reflect on the last couple of days.

    First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

    Secondly, I’ve taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I’ve either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn’t install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I’ve only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

    KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I’ve landed on Kate.

    But, perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.


  • UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’d like to reflect on the last couple of days.

    First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

    Secondly, I’ve taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I’ve either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn’t install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I’ve only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

    KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I’ve landed on Kate.

    But, perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.


  • UPDATE: For posterity’s sake, I’d like to reflect on the last couple of days.

    First of all, I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to the discussion! Were it not for your recommendations/suggestions/endorsements, then I might not have found a valid alternative.

    Secondly, I’ve taken every single recommendation pretty seriously. As such, I’ve either installed them to see for myself if I was able to reproduce the functionality found in the gif found above. Or, didn’t install them to begin with due to the suggested installation methods not passing through my (rather) strict policy on software. Regardless, in the end, I’ve only found two pieces of software that satisfied the bill: Kate and KDevelop.

    KDevelop is pretty cool, but is more of an IDE rather than a text editor. As such, I’ve landed on Kate.

    But, perhaps more than anything, I’ve come to really appreciate Emacs (and Neovim). And, perhaps more than ever, I feel ready to take them on 💪. Wish me luck 😊.


  • Thank you for the raving endorsement and otherwise very informative reply!

    Also I have migrated from Emacs to Nvim, the reasons are purely ergonomical (pinky fatigue is a real issue) but after switching I found a jump in the way to think about an editor. Emacs is great, don’t get me wrong, and if you decide to learn Emacs I can assure you it will be the best editor you’ve used, but it still edits things at a character level, while there are concepts for matching brackets or quotes changing the text inside quotes in Emacs is very character oriented, I.e. go to start of quote, start marking, move to matching quote, delete, whereas in vim is sort of a higher level language where you say Change Inside Next Quote using cin", and expanded with some plugins you can even do srnq' to Surround Replace Next Quote with ’ (which will change the quotations on the next text from whatever to '). And that’s a lot closer to the way I think so it skips a mental step (plus it’s a lot less keystrokes and no Ctrl for my pinky).

    Hmm…, interesting. I’m still pretty new to evil-mode, but doesn’t that bridge the gap here? Btw, I don’t know why, but I wasn’t able to see for myself how cin" worked within Vim*.


  • Thank you so much for this! Hopefully I’m not bothering you with this*.

    Did you scale the source with ffmpeg?

    I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I did. The invoked command was the following:

    ❯ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.gif

    Do you have a visual pattern in your console background?

    I don’t think I do. It doesn’t look like it at least. To be clear, even on my laptop I notice the visual pattern visible in the gif. But that’s totally absent when I’m working within Emacs. Or at least, it looks as if it’s just a singular solid color.

    The second best to render a small enough size that it does not get resized in the browser.

    Hmm…, makes sense. Not a huge fan, though 😅. Hopefully I can solve it through other means instead.

    I assume you scaled it up

    Yup. For the sake of readability*. But the upscaling (or rather zooming in*) was done natively within Emacs.


    Alright, so I went to do some digging and the pattern only starts to show up in the gif. Perhaps as a result of the smaller color palette*. Regardless, I tried to see if it is solved by simply generating a ‘better’ palette and using it as a filter of sorts. Furthermore, in case that wasn’t enough, I also tried playing with different dither algorithms:


    Does any one of the above gifs do better?





  • I think you’ve done an excellent job at capturing my initial thoughts. It basically felt as if using Emacs was bound to be overkill as my (relatively simple) use case didn’t seem to warrant its usage.

    But, even if it is (possibly) overkill, I do prefer[1] how Emacs handles the folding. So, while there’s the very real possibility that I’ll not even utilize 1% of Emacs’ potential, I feel most excited and (somehow) comfort while working with it 😅.

    As for setting things up, I immediately started using Emacs through Spacemacs until the input lag became very noticeable on larger files. Then, I pivoted to Doom Emacs and I’ve been enjoying it so far. Perhaps I’ll create my own config at some point in the future, But for now, Doom Emacs is all I need.


    1. Granted, I haven’t tried out Neovim for this yet. ↩︎


  • Interesting insights. Much appreciated!

    I DO like to code via ED because the design and workflow of ED (or even better: Sam) makes folding unnecessary because you only put on the screen what is needed right at that moment. Want to see two functions 1000 lines apart? No problem, just print them right below each other on the screen.

    Hmm…, I suppose this is a workflow I’d have to try out for myself before drawing any conclusions. Though, I got some questions:

    • Why ed? Isn’t any other TUI/CLI text editor fit for the job? Apologies if I sound obtuse/obnoxious*. I’m probably just very ignorant of how ed fares compared to the others.
    • Is there any currently maintained version of Sam? A quick search suggests that everyone packaged/grabbed it from this github repo. But, unfortunately, that one has been archived since earlier this year. I suppose I could look into the many forks it has, but I’d rather be picky 😅. Got any pointers for me?

  • LEO definitely looks like a cool project. It has made me curious and I would like to try it out. Thanks (again)!

    However, before I do, I would like to verify if folding[1] a section/heading in Markdown -as demonstrated in the gif- is possible with LEO. Could you please confirm this for me?

    Also, good support for literate programming, which is Don Knuth’s perhaps greatest idea.

    Very interesting concept. I believe I stumbled upon this video about a week ago. Together with two other videos, It has been at the very top of “Watch Later”-list since. But I haven’t gotten around to watch it yet 😅. I believe the topics are related. Am I right? Regardless, I’ll definitely take a deeper look into literate programming. Thank you for mentioning it!


    1. Also known as collapse/expand ↩︎


  • You can pretty easily export Org mode files to markdown (and LaTeX)!

    Oh wow, thank you for offering me this learning experience!

    There may be a setting you need to turn on (I forget and I’m not at my PC), but it works well and is very easy to use.

    I’m on Doom Emacs, so perhaps this is enabled by default. But, at least for me, it was as easy as pressing SPC m e. This opens up the export menu. From there; one may select LaTeX, Markdown or any of the many other options to export to. The fuzzy search from M-x also allowed me to find it by typing out the functionality I was seeking.

    Granted, I am not entirely content on how Emacs handled the export to Markdown. But I wouldn’t bat an eye if Emacs enables me to configure it exactly as I’d want to.

    Also, I haven’t really done it, but from what I understand you can also setup emacs to be a really good LaTeX editor.

    Again, I wouldn’t be surprised. It seems Emacs lends itself extremely well to whatever you throw at it 😂. No doubt; this is dndgame-material for sure*.