Where I collect notes. Sometimes you have to write to be able to think.
Visit karthinks.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Nov 2021 – Jun 2026
Emacs has a reputation for being borderline unusable out of the box, of being bloated but somehow surprisingly bare. This is largely a discoverability problem1. The solution the Internet has settled on seems to be “Emacs distributions” like Doom, Spacemacs or Prelude that glue together dozens (sometimes hundreds) of…
Emacs features have a discoverability problem, and we’re chipping away at it one demo at a time. The years since I wrote the last one of these have yielded more surprising and useful finds, so it’s time again for a “batteries included” report. Note This is the third in a series of articles highlighting useful but…
Window management in Emacs gets a bad rap. Some of this is deserved, but mostly this is a consequence of combining a very flexible and granular layout system with rather coarse controls. This leaves the door open to creating and using tools for handling windows that employ and provide better metaphors and affordances…
Update (2024-09-08): Read this article in Japanese at Qiita or at Emacs-JP. You’re using Avy wrong. Too harsh? Let me rephrase: you’re barely using Avy. Still too broad? Okay, the noninflammatory version: Avy, the Emacs package to jump around the screen, lends itself to efficient composable usage that’s obscured by…
A modest defense of the rodent So, Emacs and the mouse. This is an unexpectedly contentious topic, with discussions that end, at best, with careless dismissal. More often they turn into arguments with folks talking past one another. The advantages of using the mouse for common actions in Emacs are immediate and…