EmacsConf Live Now

it's stable enough on my x250 over DSL with mpv

very nice streaming setup from the team so far

- I use Emacs every day as my primary (and only) programming text editor.

- Having nearly 20 years of experience using Emacs, it's just a totally natural fit for me.

- I program primarily in Rust. I use the built-in LSP client, eglot, to communicate with rust-analyzer and have IDE features such as jump-to-def, find-refs, find-impls, auto-import, auto-format, semantic rename, etc. It works just as well as VSCode/Codium (which I tried for about a week to make sure I wasn't missing out; I wasn't.) I also do the odd shell script, Python script, YAML config, Dockerfile, etc. for which Emacs is also well-suited.

- As far as I know, I'm the only person in the company using Emacs. There's a few vim/neovim users, but the vast majority of people are using VSCode. Having paired with many, I don't think that I'm slower for using Emacs; in fact, I think that I am in many cases faster because I am so familiar with the text operations that I don't even think about them, I just do them.

- Overall, I don't see any reason for me to switch away from Emacs at the moment, especially since LSP really blurred the distinction between "text editor" and "IDE".

- I typically don't recommend that programmers try Emacs if they're not already familiar with it. Partly because I don't want them to ask me questions, but mostly because their natural tendency is to try and reproduce their VSCode/JetBrains/Visual Studio workflow. This usually causes frustration, because the way to use Emacs effectively is different from the way to use a product like VSCode that aims to have a good out-of-the-box experience.

I use Emacs for everything -- and more when I can.

I am one of a handful that use Emacs at work, and often people are surprised at what I can do that they can't do with whatever they are doing. For example, I have all my Jira tickets in a org file and can update in bulk, create, and assign tickets all from a simple file in a few key strokes.

I am responsible for writing c++, go, python, C#. On top of that I have syntax hi lighting for all the major formats such as yaml, toml, json, but even have lesser known ones as hcl.

I mostly live in the terminal (vterm) within Emacs that allows me full control over things. For example, I have custom lisp functions that can extract a json blob that was just displayed in a log file and open it in a new buffer and have it formatted ready for me to inspect.

You asked bout work-flows, while emacs can do a lot of things it is not yet responsible for compiling code and many common system tools. In such used with Nix I can produce any dev environment on the fly.

Being sa singleton is not a problem mostly because once you get past the voodoo that other systems use its all the same stuff under the hood, and with Emacs you just so happen to have more control of those systems when something goes wrong.

Yes, it works well. I use Doom Emacs.

I write Python, PHP (Laravel), Clojure, C/C++, TypeScript, and have done Scala too. Most things work well enough (not Scala) and I make an effort to not be the "emacs guy" and use standard IDEs when pairing if the other person prefers that. Most tooling I've used is editor agnostic (pre-commit hooks for formatting/linting, LSPs, etc).

In fact, using Emacs means I'm closer to the underlying tools and so have to set them up in a way that works for multiple editors instead of just relying on everyone using the same editor to enforce things like style and formatting.

Most of my company uses VS Code or IntelliJ IDEs, which are officially supported by our developer productivity team, but many of us use Emacs and Vim (I'm an Emacs user). I spend most of my time in Go, C, Rust, and the plethora of "infrastructure"-related languages like Puppet, YAML, Starlark, Python, bash, SQL, etc. I also sometimes use more of the common languages in our company's stack like Ruby, Java, and Python.

My experience using Emacs at work for the past 15 years has been outstanding. I find that when I join a new company, there is sometimes a bit of legwork getting Emacs working with potentially bespoke SSH, tooling, or VPN configs (for remote development), but once it works I don't touch it. I touch a lot of languages at work, including more I didn't mention above, and not having to leave Emacs to learn a new tool is a huge boon to productivity. I get all the niceties of an IDE via LSP and some other Emacs packages, including autocomplete, code navigation, Github Copilot, and more.

I don't ever tell anyone they _should_ learn Emacs at work, but once in a while someone sees me use it while screen sharing and they get interested.

I lead a team of a dozen data scientists and engineers working in the financial sector and all exclusively using Emacs. Mainly a Python stack. Emacs gives us a huge edge. Every time anyone improves their workflow in Emacs, it becomes a win for the whole team.

Brews coffee... Oh yes, Emacs is my forever editor. It was created before I was born and will (hopefully) join my digitally converted consciousness on humanity's travels to the stars!

I got tired of switching editors for different languages (PyCharm was too slow for JSX code) and decided to invest in getting Emacs to behave like a decent editor. That took a while :)

I've programmed in Python, Clojure, Nim, Cython, JS, JSX, and a host of other languages. LSP support is getting REALLY good with three strong contenders: the minimal eglot that is in Emacs core, lsp-mode which is the most complete solution, and lsp-bridge that is super fast.

The single thing I love about Emacs is that everything is text. I can do a project-wide search (find-file-in-project), turn off read-only mode, use delete-non-matching-lines to remove stuff I don't want, turn on read-only mode and peruse the remaining matches. Then I can turn on wgrep-ag mode in the search results buffer, search and replace changes, and commit them to all the files. It's a powerful concept.

We are not a single-editor shop, we have Vim, PyCharm, Sublime, etc.

Extra compatibility is just a package-install away, and the ecosystem is thriving. My must-have utilities are expand-region, iedit, multiple-cursors, whole-line-or-region, pdf-tools, try, find-file-in-project, helm-ag, rg, undo-fu, and the list goes on :)

It has great workflows for compilation, buffer (file) switching, window management, tiling, and SO much more. For me, at least, every new feature requires a lot of tinkering, but the setup has been extremely stable across Emacs versions. Emacs development is very active and in recent years has been going in a great direction.

A great book to get excited about Emacs is https://www.masteringemacs.org/. Oh, let's share configs too, here's mine: https://github.com/runekaagaard/dotfiles/blob/main/.emacs.d/... :)

I am. The overall experience is very good. I write C++ and Python in emacs for work everyday. No, it’s just me using emacs in our team (or maybe even in my company). I don’t see any integration issues with others: the underlying linters and/or language servers are essentially the same (e.g. clang-tidy, clangd)

I use it daily for Python and C programming, as well as Bash and cmd.exe shell scipting (plus assorted config file types).

I also use it to write literate documentation, including glossary terms, drawings, and code. These get stored in a repo along with HTML exports.

My general experience? It's the best software I've ever used. Hands down, bar none. It has the best documentation and the best documentation system. The community is fantastic. Literal greybeards to guide and inspire you, lots of new people to share excitement with, and plenty of interesting people the world over in-between. And, most important, is Freedom. The software respects me. I'll cherish that, and the lessons it has taught me, forever. I simply would not be who I am today without having learned from Emacs and it's community. Thank you!

I'm usually a singleton at work, although occasionally you meet someone else who uses Emacs.

I used it full time with Doom in a mix of typescript, JavaScript, ruby, and golang for a while. I got frustrated with a few minor things like heredocs not highlighting the inner syntax (which isn’t a standard thing, but a nice to have) and with phoenix live components not having syntax highlighting if they are defined in an elixir file. I messed about with getting the tree sitters for that to work the way I wanted them to but ultimately I’m mostly back on neovim.

I still keep eMacs open every single day though and use org mode religiously and I am not opposed to digging through a project with eMacs because the code navigation is ever so slightly preferable. I think if it was just _slightly_ more popular and there were a few more hands on the doom eMacs project it would be no contest.

For me it's more "I've used emacs for everything for decades, and coincidentally that means I use it professionally too". (At my current company we acknowledge that it's a generational thing and encourage new hires to pick an editor and obsess over it, since they'll be "living in it" and being able to manipulate things in your editor without thinking about the editor is a huge productivity hack (up there with learning to type), but we don't actually push them towards a specific tool.)

("Languages" (in the "things you edit" sense, rather than the Turing or LLM sense) involved include python, C++, json, yaml, cmake, and arbitrary unix config files.)

I was curious about this, and I joined a dev shop few years ago, I use a very crappy handmade emacs setup doing mainstream fullstack dev, and I don't envy vscode. A good vscode setup will make some things easy but you're still so far away from helping yourself. Meanwhile I needed to change something to ease my day (parsing some file and correlated with tests) and it was a few elisp lines away. I can reuse magit transient even so I have a contextual menu. And I'm a mediocre emacs hacker... a good one will fly at mach speed. Meanwhile my colleagues are clicking and doing things manually and slowly in their pro IDE.

Yes, for C(++), Python, VHDL. Being able to run teat in a shell, work with Git (magit), have a file manager to move/delete/rename (dired), a calculator (calc), a calendar, and specially a todo list organizer, all in one app is a super thing for me. Throughout shortcuts consistent. A whole division of 20 people doing VHDL use it. Some have years of experience, I’m relatively new to it. I only use Emacs, Inkscape, and Outlook for mail in the work, all day 365 days.

I've never worked with anybody else that uses it, so my uses have settled on things that don't require much interaction with other workflows: taking my own notes in org-mode, and general text editing/viewing (config files, batch files, plain text files, logs, etc.).

I do use a Perforce minor mode to simplify checking files out and examining file history.

I have a helper function to paste image from clipboard into org document (save as timestamped png file somewhere sensible document-relative, insert link into document), so it's somewhere safe and I can add per-image notes and so on. I do this when I'm building up sets of screen grabs to later paste into Teams/Jira/Confluence/Slack and the like.

That's about it. Main remaining annoyance that I'd like to fix is a way of exporting an org section as Markdown, so I can paste anything interesting into Slack and have the formatting come out sensible.

For programming, professionally I've never used it all that much. It's much simpler all round to use whatever the rest of the team is using, which these days typically means Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code, and both are workable. I get enough value out of the zero-effort code browsing/code completion/integrated debugger/etc. that I don't mind dealing with the not-quite-as-nice editing experience and ropey UI. I can always (and often do) load a file into Emacs if I have some specific editing task I'd like to do.

(In the past I have used it a bit for working with stuff like MEL/MaxScript and proprietary/in-house stuff that's generally poorly supported by text editors. Not too hard to cobble together something workable in Emacs. I haven't had to do this recently though.)

Personally, no, but on my ~11 person team things are split for work on Rust, Go, Python, TypeScript, Java etc. IIRC the daily drivers for people are:

- Neovim (the most common)

- IntelliJ

- Emacs

- VS Code

I used to use emacs via spacemacs several years ago, but can’t be bothered trying to wrangle editor configs any more - I’m firmly in the Jetbrains tools camp now with the exception of note taking (Notes.app) and commit messages (neovim with committia).

I've been using Emacs as my editor for the last decade or so. I used it for general purpose editing for the first 6 years because I was doing C# development (Web/a bit of Xamarin) and VisualStudio (not code) was my daily driver.

For the last 4 years I've been using it full time as I changed technologies and moved to a Python/Vue shop. I initially used vanilla python-mode, then elpy, and now I'm currently using LSP for Python development. Everything is setup well, I just write code, commit using Magit, and create Github PRs using Magit/Forge. For major refactors, I do fall back on using PyCharm.

For Vue I just Web-mode because I haven't found LSP to provide me anything useful (maybe code jumping, but nothing else). Maybe it has better integration with TypeScript? I'm not too sure.

My emacs setup is pretty standardized with a dotfile. I use Projectile to jump between projects, and use Eyebrowse to assign each project its own window (I usually have anything from 2-5 open at a time). The pattern I've found useful is to have the same number assigned for Eyebrowse workspace and terminal, so `Alt+n` opens my nth project in terminal and in emacs.

For the features/tickets that I'm working on, I use an org file to note down my thoughts, subtasks, blockers, and also the status (TODO/DONE/IN-PROGRESS) etc. It's synced with my org's Google Drive, while the rest of my personal org files get synced to iCloud. Any topics for 1-1 with my peers/managers also get noted and synced.

There was a time in my previous job where I was using emails for discussions, and back then I had tight integration with Mu4e too. I've dabbled with Jira/Slack modes but they're not worth the hassle.

I'm the only one using Emacs in my org, and I feel fine doing it. Pairing works fine since the driver uses their editor of choice.

I am a professional software developer. Half of my team use Emacs to write Go. Our workflow integrates perfectly well with the non-Emacs-users: we commit our code, push it &c. It’s an editor like any other (just IMNSHO better).

I really appreciate Emacs. It’s been wonderful investing in my editor, rather than chasing trends. I’m at a point now in my career where having to use an editor other than Emacs (much like having to use an OS other than Linux or a BSD) would be grounds to refuse an offer or leave a firm.

At this point, to a certain degree Emacs is my OS. I don’t want to imagine using a computer without it.

Yep, for Python, Rust, shell, SQL, Terraform, JSON, YAML, etc.

I've usually been the lone Emacs user, but it's never been an issue. "Oh, we want the code to be Black-formatted and flake8-clean before commits. Here's the VSCode to make that happen." OK. That takes about 5 minutes to configure in Emacs, and now there's no way to tell that I'm using something different from my coworkers based on our commits alone.

I blogged about my annoyance with a boss who insisted that all programmers use 1) IDEs, and 2) his favorite one, because "productivity": https://honeypot.net/post/pianos/

Dude. I'm using Emacs on a Unix. This whole computer is my IDE.

Yes, pretty much all my professional and personal work gets done in Emacs. C code, including the full Linux kernel source w/ clangd, python, raku, go, shell, remote editing and language servers with tramp, etc. I read the kernel mailing list firehose as a newsgroup w/ Gnus. I write everything in org-mode including my blog which includes a lot of inline literate code using org-babel.

I used to work on large Java projects and I used Eclipse for that because language servers were not a thing. These days I reckon I could use Emacs as long as the language server is capable enough.

I use (Doom + some customisation) Emacs for development in Go and TypeScript. It's generally very good and sometimes frustrating – but usually fixable, and very much still worth the bother for me. I'm in a very small minority of developers using it at my work. I have quite a lot of the bells and whistles other developers have – of what I lack, I'm thinking mainly of the refactoring stuff in GoLand. Magit is the only alternative git UI I've ever liked. Evil is close enough to vim to satisfy. We have language servers and tree-sitter now.

Yes, I've been using for about 2 years. It's kinda mixed, I suppose some things are better, and some things are worse when comparing to something like VS Code/JetBrains IDEs, but I don't think it gets in my way or makes me less productive. I've been using for PHP, JavaScript/TypeScript. I'm the only one using Emacs in my team, most seem to use PHPStorm or VSCode, but a couple of guys use Neovim. Finally, I don't think the editor gets in the way of collaborating in any way, so I guess it integrates well.

I use Emacs daily (OCaml professionally), with Elixir/Haskell as my go to for personal projects. I've set it up so that all I need is to pull my dotfiles and my setup is ready to go, I'm probably part of the 20% that use emacs, while almost everyone else uses vim. No issues so far, but I'll echo some sentiments here that I don't spend as much time these last few years configuring my setup beyond what I need, I spent enough time on that already

I use it, mostly for C++, a bit for Python, a ton of configuration languages.

There are dozens of us in the company, but only me in my team. The most popular editor around is VSCode.

There's not a lot of extra friction to use Emacs, the build system is well integrated, the debugger just works, the VCS is weird but the mercurial bridge is pretty good, and I always preferred using it in the CLI anyway.

I use it for C and C++ dev. I used to use CLion but got too frustrated with it being poorly performant, and there was just too much stuff going on and things flashing around the screen. For example, moving or editing certain files triggers a CMake build. I just rather my editor try to stay a little more out of the way.

Short answer: yes, it's great even if it has its quirks, JavaScript (both Node and browser, sometimes React), I'm the only one on the team, I wrote quite a few small tools to "integrate" (big word, they are mostly very small hacks) with other stuff we use (Jira, BitBucket, Toggl).

I use Emacs exclusively in my professional work. The rest of the team does not. They use Visual Studio Pro. Until recently I used TFS extension to Explorer for version control workflows. But update to DevOps broke that and I've been using VS. Sort of sucks and I'll have to find a solution.

Yes, personal project (large! In C#) I love it, it is reliable. Also a bit clunky compared to stuff supporting LSP, but now emacs has native LSP I should spend even less time in vis studio. Emaacs ain't perfect but emacs does not suck.

Yes. Use it for Rust, Typescript, a little Python, Deno, bash, terraform, etc. Three of us (out of like 12) use emacs. We’ve also got vimmers. Most people use vscode. We check in shared editor configs, including .dir-locals.el for emacs.

Yes. I use it for main development, project management, and information tracking. One thing good about Emacs is the skills you’ve learned stay with you for life, and can be used for new languages and new textual editing needs.

I tried for a while but things weren’t working the way I wanted and I didn’t feel justified hacking my config all day instead of doing actual work. Thinking of trying again now my personal setup is a lot smoother…

I use it, currently React / Typescript.

Just because I'm completely used to it though, I don't use much of what makes Emacs Emacs. It's just the editor I've always used.

All but one of our engineers at my company use Emacs. We work in Elixir, Clojure, and Typescript. Varying configurations for sure, but mostly Doom Emacs and Spacemacs.

Yes I use Emacs for my daily work (OCaml, C++), and for Clojure personally. Team is like 40% Emacs, 40% vim, rest various IDEs / editors I'd guess.

Yes. Most of my development time is in Java, js, or Rust, and I use eMacs with lsp mode every day.

yes, i write python with emacs. eglot dape treesitter and magit.

i don’t compel a specific editor for my team; we’re a motley mix of whatever people work well in.

Most of our team uses Emacs for Clojure using CIDER.

Make sure to also watch this guy's Rust "interview". It's really good.

What speed issues are you seeing with Emacs?

The only problem I had was opening very large C++ files with the built-in C++ mode. Using tree-sitter has fixed that problem.