apheleia VS popper

For black, I can recommend apheleia. It handles not only black but also all the other common formatters (not only for Python), with custom ones being relatively easy to add.

1.projectile-kill-buffers or the built-in project-kill-buffers will do that for the current project. You could run that before switching projects.

2. https://github.com/radian-software/apheleia

3. There might be a way to do this but I'm not sure. Emacs being inherently single threaded probably makes this difficult. But yes, I use M-x (re)compile.

4. libvterm is the best still imo. You can definitely do multiple instances and there's even different tab modes in Emacs now.

I forgot to mention a third option namely lassik/emacs-format-all-the-code and there are efforts to combine/consolidate the three into a single package which would be great.

raxid502/apheleia

I use formatters in order to automatically format source code on save. Personally I use apheleia for this. It requires clang-tools installed as it uses clang formatter.

Generally speaking, emacs does only so much for indenting those mixed mode files, so you might want to use a dedicated JS(X)-formatter (default one would be prettier). I can recommend integrating it using apheleia. It automatically prettifies buffers on save, but without having your cursor jump around like prettier-mode does. It also relies on having the prettier script available (from npm i -g prettier or its likes).

popper: Summon, dismiss or cycle through "popup" buffers. Like drop-down terminals (guake, yakuake etc) but in Emacs and for any buffer, not just shells.

Karthink's config, good integration with the popper package

I love emacs, but agree with many of your criticisms.

Emacs can be slow. I don't use LSP, so can't comment on that, but it's definitely slow on long lines with syntax highlighting.

I don't use TRAMP for exactly one of the reasons you mentioned: it can hang Emacs. I want to avoid that at all costs, because I pretty much live in Emacs.

Handling buffers is tedious, but you can improve that through various packages, like popper[1]

Depending on what problems you run in to and your skill level, it could be tricky to debug elisp programs. However, compare that to when you run in to some bug in VSCode... how are you going to debug that? You'll probably have to submit a bug report and wait for the developers to get to it (if they ever do)... how is that better than emacs?

Also, remember that you don't have to go it alone in troubleshooting the issues you run in to with emacs. There's a whole community ready and willing to help.

Despite the downsides of emacs, I still use and love it. Every editor has downsides, and emacs is no exception. Its positives far, far outweigh the negatives for me. There's just so much more that it can do than other editors, and it's far more customizable. I very much doubt I'll ever seriously consider switching to another.

[1] - https://github.com/karthink/popper

Thanks for these tips! I'll explore tabspaces, apheleia, async-shell-command (and the Go lib) — all of those are new to me.

> Can you give a specific example of something you had trouble with?

I hoped to recreate multiple long-running terminal sessions in splits and tabs, similar to functionality I now use from:

Neovim (plugin): https://github.com/akinsho/toggleterm.nvim

VS Code (built-in): https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/basics#_managing...

I just found “popper”, which didn't exist the last time I looked. It seems like a pretty close substitute:

https://github.com/karthink/popper

I find it pretty unintuitive how magit, vterm, rg, and other commands that want to open a new window will interact with a multi-window setup. Sometimes they'll use an existing window, sometimes they'll make a new one. I prefer having things be predictable: terminals always go here, search results go there, and so on. I was looking for ways to tame this, and I found purpose, popper, shackle, and of course, directly hacking on display-buffer-alist.

I use popper for buffers I only need to see briefly.

I haven't used popper but its description sounds promising: https://github.com/karthink/popper

Maybe this can help: https://github.com/karthink/popper

Consider Popper