That doesn’t fit all use cases though. For example, how to fill passwords in mobile apps on the go, or how to share a subset of your passwords with your family (including syncing password changes with them).

I got a pretty bad case of RSI with that setup, since it encourages one-handed chording (e.g. pressing C-x C-s by holding down your pinkie on Caps Lock while twisting your wrist to tap X then S using other fingers on the same hand). It’s far more ergonomic to do two-handed chording, where you press one key at a time with each hand to the extent possible. For me, that meant using Karabiner Element (Mac) and Keyd (Linux) to map Return to another Ctrl key when held down (in addition to the Caps as Ctrl mapping). Then I can simply hold down Return with my right hand and tap X then S with whatever fingers feel natural on the left hand, without twisting my wrist at all.

Indeed. I had RSI issues very early in my career, and the standard advice by ergonomists was "Use both hands when doing any multi-key sequence". If you're doing Ctrl-C, use the right Ctrl button, and so on.

I think I've just been lucky that I never had issues with that.

For C-x C-s specifically, my hand hardly moves and definitely does not twist, it's very natural for me to type.

Me to, but to be fair, I think this is no longer unique to Emacs. See for example the "command palette" in VSCode; it isn’t "tab completion" per se but similar to e.g. M-x with Vertico.

Probably he's referring to "fuzzy find"?

Yes, VSCode has something similar, I believe. But Emacs had it before VSCode existed ;-)

I tried Emacs a bit after using Sublime Text for a while. I'm still using Sublime Text to this day because muscle memory, but the experience got me a deeper understanding of the capabilities of Sublime. While Emacs is profoundly hackable it feels a little bit "rough" on the edges. Sublime feels less hackable but more "clean".

I did not get IDEmacs ( https://codeberg.org/IDEmacs/IDEmacs ) to work but it basically it's an editor I would use.

For now fresh ( https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh/tree/master ) seems to be very promising.

Anyway I traded very happily the command palette Ctrl-Shift-P in Sublime for M-x and few other cool things.

Emacs will always have all my respect because of the concepts it introduced.

I was thinking I was crazy...I use command completion in lots of different applications...

There's a fun thing regarding Emacs, lots of stuff came first in Emacs and trickled down to other editors or IDEs sometimes in a better form but often times in an inferior or lowest common denominator form. For example while command palettes are a thing in lots of places nowadays Emacs' M-x can be customized in lots of ways i.e. Orderless and prescient.el matching, sorting alphabetically, by recently used or most frequently used and so on.

Stuff like terminal panes in code editors again have been a thing for a long time in Emacs though now they're better out of the box in VS Code or Zed.

There's lots of LLM and recently agentic stuff in Emacs but it's not as good unless you spend time to configure it for your own workflow. Think mass-market versus artisanal.

I don't mention these to simply draw parallels but to contextualize the fact that lots of people using Emacs will go "Yeah, we have had that for a long time!" while also having a blindspot regarding how well the "new stuff" is integrated together for mass-appeal in something like a Jetbrains IDE. See magit which is amazing for advanced stuff that's complicated to do through the git CLI yet the most common git operations are usually better presented in something like Zed for example.

Though this sounds like a rant, it's not really meant as one. I'm a happy Emacs user but sometimes I like to branch out and see the UX improvements I'm sometimes missing out on. On that note I'd love Obsidian but with org-mode instead of markdown (though these days I'd settle for djot too).

Purchased. Love the app.

A few requests:

- In Secure Shellfish, I love that if iOS suspends it and I reopen it, it just does `tmux attach` on the last host automatically. Echo has the "startup command", but seems I still have to manually click on the last host I used to resume. Perhaps we can get an option to auto-reconnect to the last host? (My work firewall blocks Mosh so I need to do the ssh-and-attach dance when iOS kills the app.)

- When using Emacs on iOS, it would be great to be able to save keychords like `C-x C-s` or `M-x` somewhere, for example on the virtual keyboard top row. (I would be ecstatic if I could use the volume buttons as Ctrl and Meta, but I guess that’s more complicated to do.)

thanks that's great feedback. currently thinking and working right now on the best way to handle customisability of the keyboard (without making it a chore to configure or a horrendous ui). hadn't considered "chords" yet but it's one we'll consider as we approach this

Cool! Looking forward to see how this evolves going forward :)

You can just do `git diff --word-diff` and then the diffs look great even with one paragraph per line.

I used to do one sentence per line, but after getting used to how Emacs handles soft-wrapping, I now do one paragraph per line—also when I use Vim. This also makes collaboration with other authors easier, since most non-vim collaborators do that.

I somewhat regularly use the almost embarrassing key sequence Ctrl-C Ctrl-L Ctrl-V Ctrl-A Ctrl-X to sanitize text I’ve copied from a browser, using the address field to remove any formatting.

I explicitly stopped this habit so that I don't accidentally do it with sensitive data I don't want to go to my search engine provider's auto complete API.

Disabling remote search autocomplete is one of the first things I do when I setup a new browser instance. It's a privacy and security nightmare I don't want.

Same here. And I just noticed yesterday that Firefox had added and enabled a "Suggestions from sponsors" feature. Which I've now disabled, but presumably it's been sending anything I type into the address bar to Mozilla since 2021. I am tired of Mozilla but Chrome is very much worse.

ETA: I only noticed yesterday because a "sponsored suggestion" popped up when I was typing, which I've not seen before. So either they actually enabled it recently, or advertisers don't bid on the kinds of things I usually type.

> Disabling remote search autocomplete

I've always have a suspicion that even with auto complete off, some sort of telemetry or obscure feature is still leaking browser address bar text.

ctrl-k is for the search box

ctrl-l is for the address box

At most I want the address box to do is look up a dns name. Which can still be a risk if I were to hit "enter" with sensitive information which could in some cases get pushed out to my DNS provider (which is me, but then it's possible the address would be pushed out to another resolver, and will also be logged in an unexpected place)

I do a similar thing but use the start menu search, Ctrl-C, WIN, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X. You can do it all in one hand and can get really fast, assuming the start menu doesn't lag behind. There's also the downside that it publishes all of your clipboard content to Bing search so maintain vigilance for confidential data...

Have you tired using the run action instead to clean the data? Win+r

I've been using Win+R to paste it in the windows run box.

Amazingly still works on Win 11 and still seems to keep it local (bypassing the windows search), so I'm pleased to report consistent results for 30 ish years.

Of course, now I've mentioned it out loud, it'll be the next thing to go...

I don't know if it's just me being old and grumpy, but everything windows 8 and later (server 2003) seems like half-baked, unfinished enshittification. Trying to do something even vaguely "advanced" to a network adapter puts me back in windows 95 land along with the run box. The "manage" pane with device & disk manager and logs is from a totally bygone era yet it seems to still be the only way of getting that information. The worst bit is, I'm not complaining. All the bits that look and feel like they've been forgotten since Windows 2000 are the easiest, least infuriating bits of the system I interact with.

I use Edge’s address bar to de-wrap long URLs that have line wrapping and indentation in a proprietary packaging system’s SBOM. I paste in, then copy out the unwrapped URL to another application.

This reminds me of the 'spacebar heating' xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Why?

I’m currently trying to decide between Borg and Restic myself. Borg has worked very well for me in the past, and I’m a bit excited by the new Vorta GUI frontend. But I already have a BackBlaze B2 setup for backing up my Mac, and Restic would let me continue to use that as a backup store. I’m interested in hearing about differentiating points between them.

Primarily it's the reason you already know: restic and borg are the same model, but restic doesn't need it to be an ssh-accessible filesystem on the remote end. Restic can send backups almost anywhere, including object storage like your Backblaze B2 (that's what I use with restic, too). I agree with OP: restic is strictly better. There's no reason to use borg today; restic is a superset of its functionality.

Thanks! Then I’ll look more at Restic :)

Does restic work well with truenas?

I don't know specifically, but it's a self-contained single file Go executable. It doesn't need much from a Linux system beyond its kernel. Chances are good that it'll work.

If you have Bitlocker on on windows you might have to disable it for dual boot installation to work (you can re-enable it later).

I don't have Bitlocker enabled.

> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.

For me it is. I was already considering going back to Linux for a while, and MacOS Tahoe pushed me over the fence. Got a Thinkpad with Linux as a replacement for my MacBook some months ago and don’t regret it yet.

I guess the people you quote also missed that not all of us work in Silicon Valley and can afford those expensive coffees every day. I’d like an estimate of how many Nescafé powder coffee cups I’d have to skip per month to use their subscription.