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I used Emacs around 2010-2012 or so as a journalist, and I remember asking help on Stackoverflow regarding this exact same thing. I've lost my elisp multi-column-mode snippet; thanks for sharing yours. It was a really good way to edit a longer story; it's actually quite surprising that using something like this in a text editor is not that common. I later moved over to Plan9 Acme editor and IIRC implemented a similar solution there as well.

If you want to put the multi-column mode on massive steroids, check out an old Vim add-on called microViche for inspiration -- "text editing on an infinite pane": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YNiPUTGO28 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkED6Mv_4bc

The addon itself, FWIW (no idea if it works on a current Vim): https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4835

I remember trying to use this one as well, because the paradigm/concept is really cool and IMO unusual. I couldn't really get used to it, but it was a fun and inspirational way to make one's brain explode.

I use Firefox and cannot remember the last time I had to switch to Chrome. Most site work with JS off too (especially if you use reader view).

Quite a lot of sites work well with other browser engines too. I have tried PaleMoon, Netsurf. Users of Apple mobile devices seem to be fine with Safari.

Really light or unusual browsers might be a problem. Dillo, for example (its very fast though).

my distro didn't compile emacs with xwidget support so i can't try this :(.

I think that's absolutely right: whether this works or not depends on what you do.

I tried xwidget-webkit as main browser briefly, but very quickly gave up. When a collaborator sends me a Google Doc, for example, I really still need a browser to work on it. I still use xwidget-webkit daily -- it's a great PDF viewer, and really nice to be able to have Jupyter notebooks open side by side with code buffers -- but for most tasks involving the web I'll switch to a browser.

> Reddit and most anything commercial no.

Not long ago reddit killed old.reddit.com effectively by forcing log ins to it. That totally defeated the point of it so I stopped using reddit. I also no longer read it since the platform is so censorship-heavy.

iroh-blobs is in progress: https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs

I believe some of the old IPFS folks moved to Iroh

Love him or hate him, but I shudder to think of a world without him. The Tech Trinity is: Thompson, Stallman and Torvalds.

This almost seems like satire to me

Seems like the end game is forcing all ad-financed and tracking-financed content behind login walls.

Feels like we were already almost there because of ad blocking, without even considering AI agents and summaries. And I take no offense in ad blockers, I use them myself.

Sad thing about current public web "content" apps (be it newspapers or other formats) is that the paid versions often share all tracking features with the ad-financed version of the same service, when both are behind a login wall. Only fewer ads, at least hopefully no ads from other vendors / no intrusive brokered ads.

Self-advertisement going through the roof when accepting an offer for a paid subscription is another frequent annoyance though.

the idea is to open a webpage in a headless browser, run all the javascript and whatnot, and then ai-generate a program to translate the page as-displayed into a textonly format.

not great for everything, and it does, unfortunately need an LLM call to generate the translation program, but if you truly want to live in emacs, I've found it as a good stop-gap for certain pages that EWW cannot effectively render.

I like to give my AI assistant a URL and ask it to tell me what the page says — and my preferred way to talk to the assistant is in Emacs.

> you learn that the benefit in question is actually that the method is less useful than conventional means. … hope for … an actually useful feature of the unconventional method in question.

People write these things, and use these methods, specifically because they don't conceive of usefulness the same way you do.

In this case, the justification offered doesn't mention all the various keybinds that have been pushed down to the "how" section. But clearly the simplicity is a feature:

> D will download images locally, b goes back a page, a will save bookmarks. All of this makes browsing in eww truly enjoyable.

The point is the same as usual for TUIs: you don't have to switch over to the mouse and hunt out a button, as the necessary key is always literally at hand.

People who find this sort of thing "truly enjoyable" (what clearer statement is there of featurefulness!) commonly take it for granted and don't explain the virtues of it very well. That sort of explanation is found in think pieces about TUI design more generally.

TFA describes a goal of avoiding distraction. That is not at all the same thing as "inconvenience and impracticality". Clearly the author finds these keybinds quite convenient and practical. It's just that they don't cover a bunch of web interactions that you perhaps value, but the author doesn't.

> I really dislike the great number of blog posts, videos, and articles that have a title which says "Why I do X in <some unconventional way>" where upon reading the blog post hoping to learn some useful feature that say, browsing the web in Emacs affords you (like closer integration between research and writing for example), you learn that the benefit in question is actually that the method is less useful than conventional means.

It wouldn't be unconventional if most found it useful. That doesn't mean the author themself doesn't find it useful:

>> I have seen in my own use of the modern browser (chromium/firefox) that it is far too easy to get distracted

They find EWW useful to cut distractions.

>> In addition to this, my belief is that we should make strides toward leaving behind Layer 8 of the internet - the limiting frontends of social platforms and locked away corners of the net that limit actual discourse (Discord, I’m looking at you). [...] The internet is just a delivery mechanism.

They also find it a useful way to stick to their ideals which I understand to be that they should be in control of the front-end and the internet is only to be treated as a delivery mechanism of information.

I'll go through some personal upsides to using eww.

The main utility I see in browsing the web through emacs is the potential to integrate it into your workflow. You can have your code/notes open in one buffer and have the website in another, which is useful for documentation, or an article you're following along, etc.

With gptel, it's easy to highlight part of a blogpost and ask an llm a question about it, or get it to rewrite or annotate the whole page.

With macros you can do basic automation, like this webscraping example here: https://nickdrozd.github.io/2018/10/17/web-scraping.html

An added bonus is that your keybindings for the rest of emacs are also valid here. (Though for that I've recently started using Glide, a firefox fork, and set all of its keymap to match my emacs bindings)

Less distraction is a feature

"I use emacs to brush my teeth" or whatever is like catnip for hacker news.

> it really works best and fastest on proper *nix machines

Last I heard, Apple has each version of macOS certified for POSIX/SUS compliance. Did they stop doing that?

I use Emacs For Mac OS X. Up to date and installs via a .dmg. Great experience.

https://emacsformacosx.com

I've bound CTRL to Capslock and don't have much problems with it. Given that in emacs you have dired, magit, org, org-babel and now ghostel (and many more) I can't think of any more ergonomic way in using my computer. I have all my plugins like flash-jump or gptel available everywhere, it's amazing.

Easy fix, and better than Caps-Ctrl in my opinion: swap Lalt and Lctrl. That way ctrl is under your left thumb, alt under your right. No need for pinkies at all.

You can use software like Kanata to accomplish this if you don't have a programmable keyboard.

You can use "evil mode" for Vi-like bindings if you prefer. There are a number of Emacs "distributions" like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs which come preconfigured for Vi-like editing.

Funnily enough, I am the opposite: I tried Vim, but I preferred the "pinky shenanigans" of Emacs to reduce trying to figure out what mode I was in to just edit files.

many people use homerow mods, but I haven't tried them personally.

if you happen to use a thinkpad and don't use the trackpoint, you can remap the two mouse buttons above the trackpad to ctrl and alt using keyd on linux. this completely solved RSI on my laptop.

> but the emacs pinky shenanigans are such a turn-off

I've never had this. I'm either lucky, or I know to use both Ctrl keys on the keyboard.

If you're typing C-x, you should use the right control key. The standard ergonomics advice is to use both hands when doing multiple key combinations.

Also, just use the usual cursor keys for navigation!

> but the emacs pinky shenanigans are such a turn-off

Do you touch type? You’re meant to use the modifier keys on the opposite side (so use both hands) rather than stretching your pinky to press them. Also there are packages such as god-mode which help.

But the most helpful thing is doing navigation by page instead of line which reduce the use of keybindings.

Maybe I am not up to date on my browser threats, but exactly how much damage can a website without JavaScript do? The most I can think of is cross-site form requests and cookie shenanigans, but that is a problem primarily solved by web hosts, not browser providers.

Can you be more specific about this?

1 line? Did you try C-q RET?

> ends in either weird hacks or uncomfortable pauses

Not true in practice. It is absolutely useful in real, battle-tested scenarios. If this were a deal-breaking problem, we'd keep seeing it discussed and eventually fixed. Like the issue with long lines, which was a problem in Emacs for decades and is now mitigated. Nobody complains about it anymore.

Lem is very cool, yet too young to be pragmatically compared with the 40-year package ecosystem of Emacs. Let's be honest, with all the "better" stuff, we're not witnessing herds of Lispers switching to it. Another decade may pass before we see it make more than a blip on the radar. Aside from a number of devoted Common Lispers, there's not much usage of it in the real world.

Meanwhile, Emacs is seeing another uptick. First it was Spacemacs, then Doom, now LLMs are making it very appealing, and we see HN submissions every other week. Don't get me wrong, I'm betting on both of these horses, even on Neomacs, and whichever wins, I'd be happy to see it. Emacs for now remains the uncontested king of Lisp-based text editors.

Emacs has asynchronous IO support which is more than sufficient for networking. It is up to the relevant mode or application that runs on top of Emacs to take advantage of it and not all of them do (for example, Gnus).

There are also various multi-processing configurations for even more flexibility: multiple Emacs processes that can coordinate, Emacs modules over a C API which can create native threads outside of Emacs and so on. What Emacs lacks is parallelism inside a single Emacs process, which is arguably not needed and would be a net negative from a safety, ease of development and debugging point of view.

Look at the recently introduced canvas API (https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-e...) for some examples of what's possible via that flexibility.

Lem is nice but nowhere near as nice as modern Emacs (and probably never will be). Emacs Lisp isn't Common Lisp but has evolved significantly and the remaining differences don't really matter in practice because Emacs momentum, massive user base and ecosystem are a tremendous advantage.