November 6, 2025
Keybinds vs Clicks: FIGHT!
How I am deeply integrating Emacs
Emacs Everywhere: Devs cheer “athlete-level” focus while others say the desktop got lost
TLDR: A developer wired their whole workflow into Emacs, using hotkeys for notes, email, passwords, and more. Fans praise the laser‑focused productivity, while critics say it’s the wrong desktop model and too complex; the debate boils down to power and speed versus practicality and sanity.
One power user just turned Emacs — a classic text editor — into their entire computer lifestyle, wiring every task to keyboard shortcuts: terminal, notes, calendar, passwords, email, and even news feeds, all inside one app. The community went full reality TV. Fans raved that this is discipline at Olympic level, citing scandox’s vibes about “sharpening the axe” for peak performance, while others warned that mixing email, music, and feeds into your “axe” is productivity cosplay. The hottest split? Whether Emacs should be your world or just your tool. sim04ful dropped a spicy take that we “took the wrong fork” on the desktop decades ago, implying the whole modern interface might be a mistake. hsbauauvhabzb called out the awkward truth: Emacs feels like a window manager living inside another window manager, and then your browser is another. It’s Russian nesting dolls, but with tabs. Meanwhile, omnicognate shrugged off the drama about Emacs being single‑threaded (one track at a time), saying it’s fine for coding and rarely blocks. And globular-toast had the wholesome moment: the low‑friction “capture everything” note system is the real productivity magic. Jokes and memes flew: “Emacs is an OS,” “Keybinds are a personality,” and yes, someone made keybind bingo. The vibe? Extreme focus vs extreme complexity — pick your fighter.
Key Points
- •Emacs is launched at Hyprland session start and controlled via global keybindings.
- •vterm is the default terminal inside Emacs, with Kitty as a graphical fallback.
- •An Emacs-based universal launcher replaces wofi/rofi and centralizes SSH, passwords, bookmarks, commands, emojis, TODOs, file navigation, and search.
- •org-capture can be triggered from outside Emacs to store notes, bookmarks, contacts, todos, and events, later organized with org-roam.
- •Additional keybindings provide quick access to agenda/calendar, password management (pass), file browsing (dirvish/dired), bookmarks, email (mu4e), and feeds (elfeed).