karthink (u/karthink)

karthink commented on Emacs as your video-trimming tool xenodium.com/emacs-as-you... · Posted by u/xenodium

jlg23 · 5 days ago

I did not "get it" from the post itself, but it linked to a post that mentioned "subed", subtitle editing for emacs with syncing with/control of video playback in mpv. I could see myself doing that and then would be happy if I could also trim the video while I am at it.

karthink · 5 days ago

> would be happy if I could also trim the video while I am at it.

You can, see the command subed-crop-media-file.

https://github.com/sachac/subed/blob/main/subed/subed-common...

karthink commented on Emacs: The macOS Bug xlii.space/eng/emacs-the-... · Posted by u/xlii

cobbal · a month ago

Specific example: for a while, color emoji worked on macOS emacs perfectly. Then it was decided that since linux couldn't support it, it needed to be disabled on macOS, or else people might want to use a non-free system. It was removed for many years.

http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/emacs_macos_emoji.html

karthink · 25 days ago

Is there _any_ other example? For years now, this is the only one I've ever seen brought up to support this point.

On the other side, there are many MacOS-specific features supported by Emacs, with the recently added dictation support being one of them. If a MacOS feature is missing, it's much more likely to be due to a lack of manpower than a desire to maintain feature parity with Linux.

karthink commented on Cursor 1.0 cursor.com/en/changelog/1... · Posted by u/ecz

fhd2 · 3 months ago

Ha, same. How do you use it? I tried all the fancy context management stuff multiple times, but I mostly just have a chat buffer open and copy paste stuff manually. Text wrangling is so damn efficient in Emacs. I pay around 10$ to Anthropic per month in API tokens for pretty heavy usage. With deliberate context management (I found keeping it small and focused vastly improves responses), cost is really not an issue.

Didn't try anything agentic within Emacs yet, don't find that helpful enough so far.

karthink · 3 months ago

> tried all the fancy context management stuff multiple times, but I mostly just have a chat buffer open and copy paste stuff manually.

As of last week you can insert a link to a plain-text file in a chat buffer to include its contents in the prompt. It must be on a line by itself. In Markdown it looks

[like this](/path/to/file)

with Org links in Org chat buffers.

This feature is disabled by default to minimize confusion. To enable it you can flip the header line button that says "ignoring media" to "sending media". This works for sending images and other media too, if the model supports it.

karthink commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry

tho23j4o3j4324 · 3 months ago

It's great when it works, but half the time IME it's so stupid that it can't even use the edit/path tools properly even when given line numbers prepended inputs.

(I should know since I've created half-a-dozen tools for this with gptel. Cline hasn't been any better on my codebase.)

karthink · 3 months ago

Do Cursor and co have better tools than the ones we write ourselves for lower-level interfaces like gptel? Or do they work better because they add post-processing layers that verify the state of the repo after the tool call?

karthink commented on MCP explained without hype or fluff blog.nilenso.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/captn3m0

throwanem · 3 months ago

Do you maintain a newsletter or take subscriptions in some other fashion? This is a refreshingly low-BS take and those are hard to come by, and I would be interested especially in Emacs integrations.

karthink · 3 months ago

> I would be interested especially in Emacs integrations.

gptel can use MCP server tools in Emacs by integrating with the mcp.el package, here's a demo: https://i.imgur.com/WTuhPuk.mp4.

mcp.el: https://github.com/lizqwerscott/mcp.el

Relevant gptel README section (you'll have to unfold the details block): https://github.com/karthink/gptel?tab=readme-ov-file#model-c...

karthink commented on Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft theregister.com/2025/04/1... · Posted by u/rntn

mschuster91 · 4 months ago

> Do you have a reference for this?

Look for underlined single letters in menus. With apps that use the "classic" style menus instead of ribbons or plain Electron crap, the single letters are the key.

karthink · 4 months ago

I'm curious to know if this is what lproven meant in their comment above. Alt + a-z to access menu items is available in every OS and all "native" apps, but you can't "drive the OS and all apps" this way.

For example, I would like to set options that are a few menus/button clicks deep in the Windows control panel (either the "classic" or new variant) using keyboard shortcuts/navigation. Or navigate the Windows registry editor. I'm not aware of a way to do this.

karthink commented on Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft theregister.com/2025/04/1... · Posted by u/rntn

lproven · 4 months ago

100% true.

The sad thing is that Windows has a great keyboard UI and it's superbly accessible for people with visual and motor disabilities.

Who have reduced earning opportunities because they are disabled, so FOSS should be great for them, but it isn't, because the nerds don't know CUA and don't know the keyboard UI. They spend their time mastering a couple of ancient apps like Vi and Emacs and ignore the fiery furnace of UI R&D that followed for the next 20Y after those early efforts.

Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user with 20 years' practice. It makes Emacs look like a wet paper pad and a burned stick compared to a Moleskine notebook and a top quality fountain pen.

Xfce comes close and implements maybe 75% of the UI but once you are in an app all bets are off.

karthink · 4 months ago

> Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user

Do you have a reference for this? I've often needed to control Windows using only a keyboard and failed to do so. I'm aware of most shortcuts in this list[1] but these are for a few very specific things. (As an aside, I also remember controlling the mouse with the numpad using the Mouse Keys accessibility setting but this is worse than both keyboard shortcuts and the mouse.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts

karthink commented on The State of Vim lwn.net/Articles/1002342/... · Posted by u/signa11

ykonstant · 7 months ago

Emacs seems to be a local maximum that is difficult to overcome. An entire Lisp Machine environment would be better, but it would be a tremendous undertaking and the specialists, i.e. emacs devs, don't seem to be interested in such a thing.

A multithreaded version of emacs would also be an interesting addition; I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them.

karthink · 7 months ago

> I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them.

Everyone including the maintainers would like this to happen. The arguments against it are technical hurdles. Emacs is a large ball of global state and the lisp evaluator hooks into everything, including the display engine, so it's not clear to anyone how to disentangle things to the point where the interpreter lock can be released.

karthink commented on Ask HN: How do you maintain personal annotations for code you don't control? · Posted by u/weinzierl

BeetleB · 8 months ago

I came here to post this.

To expand: With Leo editor, you convert the document/file into a tree of nodes (one way to do this is to make each function a node - they have plugins to do it automatically for well known languages like C++). Let's say you make a particular function a node. You can then make a new document in your own filesystem which has your notes, but you can make a "live" copy of the node linking to that function.

You now can see your notes along side that function. If you modify the "live" node, it will actually modify the original source file. Similarly, if the code changes (e.g. with a git pull), then Leo tends to do a good job of updating the references so that your node still points to the correct function.

The editor is a bit weird to learn, but once you get the hang of it, it's extremely powerful. I used this technique often while debugging messy bugs. I'd have my own document with live nodes to the test case, the test collateral, relevant source code, etc. Each node was simply a view to a portion of some corresponding file. This way, even though everything related to the test was scattered across several files, I could see everything related to the bug (test + source code) all in one document.

It's the one powerful feature that has yet to be replicated in Emacs.

karthink · 8 months ago

> It's the one powerful feature that has yet to be replicated in Emacs.

Emacs cannot do this. There are many Emacs libraries or packages that need this feature (Org babel is a big one, transclusion is another), and have to work around its absence in hacky ways.

karthink commented on Do you have any suggestions on RSS readers? · Posted by u/Yawrehto

karthink · 9 months ago

You didn't mention a mobile app or cloud sync as one of your priorities, so any offline, desktop RSS feeder should provide most of these features.

I use Elfeed in Emacs, which satisfies all your requirements -- except bypassing paywalls -- and is the best RSS reader I've ever used. For context, I've used at least ten RSS readers since 2005 before finding Elfeed in 2018.