doom VS magit

Otherwise, please try out Doom Emacs :) https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/

Doom Emacs is a fantastic distribution of Emacs which makes performance improvements on vanilla emacs, probably making it faster than your own configuration. The installation process and migrating your config would be simple IMO, so you may want to give it a try... https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/

I prefer https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus which works nicely with https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Doom emacs and Spacemacs are "emacs distributions": when installed you get an entirely pre-configured emacs with all of the nice bells and whistles already there for you. I personally started with spacemacs and then moved to my own emacs config later. One massive caveat for spacemacs is that it is highly intergrated with the "evil" package, which means it uses vim keybindings. While you can disable "evil-mode", the configuration will be greatly hindered without it.

I haven’t used Emacs in about 5 years. Had to look up Doom Emacs.

It looks nice.

https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

It may or may not be your long-term environment but for someone looking for Vim keybinds and an easy on-ramp, you can dip your toes via doom-emacs and enable the relevant modules. I'd start with :lang javascript[1] and web with +lsp and :tools lsp[2].

I just had a very odd thing happen to me on GitHub.

I accidentally closed my browser so I reopened it with Undo Tab Close, and GitHub's tab title was labeled "Your account recovery is unable to load" for a very brief moment. Then a GitHub error site with a pink unicorn loaded. The URL which was supposed to load was https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs which I had tried to load about 15 minutes or so.

Maybe something like https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs can be a good idea if you don't want to start from scratch.

Then the slowness that you're seeing is probably Windows-specific, and that's why everyone else is telling you that Magit is actually fast.

WSL might make things faster.[1] IIUC, the problem is that starting new processes is much slower on Windows than on Linux/Unix and Magit relies heavily on that. This seems to have plagued Git tooling more generally but maybe this got fixed since then.[2]

[1] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/58444

[2] https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/2395#issuecomment-1710...

You'll want to invest the time in learning Magit, which will change your life once you get the hang of it (and I was a heavy user of Fugitive in Vim previously!), and it's unlikely you'll find a better integration with GDB anywhere else on the planet than with Emacs, though I can't say that empirically. You just need to take the plunge and start learning it, then cut over and take the hit in productivity one day when you're feeling adventurous. You'll ultimately become far more powerful than you've ever been. Especially if you delve into elisp over time. I use Spacemacs, which is bloated and has bugs, but it has so many features that I haven't undertaken the massive endeavor to replace it from scratch yet.

> Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".

Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster.

There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites:

- Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in!

- SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years.

- Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick.

- Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback.

- ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route.

- Magit (https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.

This can be done most comfortably with org-mode in emacs. It offers a lot of features, and they all operate on plain text. There are also nice integrations for git and languagetool, but I guess those are less exclusive.

How does this differ from https://magit.vc/ ?

I would rather see innovative tools that lessen our dependency on 50+ year old tech. This is still a glorified teletype. It uses AI to autosuggest git commands? Contrast with Magit[1], which (while it has a tiny bit of a learning curve, but also nowhere near 23M in funding) actually makes interacting with git a pleasure.

[1]: https://magit.vc

Also was using Emacs (org-mode)[https://orgmode.org] for years with (Magit)[https://magit.vc] package for git. I feel org-mod is a precursor to Roam Research, Obsidian, et al. Hit the spot for years but I wanted editing on mobile so that’s why I’m here. :)