gptel-agent ships with an elisp-eval tool out of the box, BTW.

Also, mpv supports lua scripts for a variety of actions on YouTube (or other streaming) videos, such as showing you YouTube's recommended videos in the video player, clipping and downloading videos, sponsorblock and submitting sponsorblock segments, and so on.

I've been doing this for almost a decade, and I do recommend it. In my experience, just importing my YouTube subscriptions into a feed reader was a positive experience. I've had a daily digest of mostly interesting videos and rarely (if ever) the urge to browse YouTube.

But with YouTube's recommendation algorithm out of the picture, it does mean that you'll have to find some other way of discovering new channels.

> ...

> One of the truths preached in the Gospel of Mac is that ALL programs need to be consistent with one another, and use the same visual look, menu hierarchy, and keybindings for corresponding commands.

I started using Emacs on a Mac recently and was pleased to discover that it is, in fact, consistent with other programs.

- Cmd-C/X/V work as expected (copy/cut/paste from system clipboard)

- Cmd-Z undoes,

- Cmd-O brings up the open-file dialog, Cmd-T opens a new tab,

- Cmd-F invokes search and Cmd-L goes to line, and so on.

It uses the same global menu bar as other programs, and setting the font from the menu works. The only thing that didn't work is using Cmd-Shift-? to search through menu bar options. This is GNU's official MacOS build, not the custom-built emacs-mac or emacs-plus packages.

Last year I helped a non-programmer get started with Emacs (for the first time) on a Mac. After a couple of weeks their only remarks were that the customize interface looks a little dated and the config/custom file has a weird format. They never brought up the keybindings or other UI as an issue. Now I understand why -- Emacs is a reasonably good citizen on MacOS.

I use Elpaca instead of the built-in package manager, which is better designed (declarative package specification) and fully asynchronous. The UI is also more thoughtful, with more granular search-as-you-type capability and easy git commit reviews of pending package updates.

package.el is catching up to Elpaca in features, but async installs/updates is not one of them.

https://github.com/progfolio/elpaca

> How does eat detect a visual command in eshell?

eat-eshell-mode doesn't detect visual commands and launch a separate eat buffer, like eshell-visual-commands do. It filters all process output in eshell and handles term codes. It turns the eshell buffer itself into a terminal, so that vim or whatever runs in eshell.

> It sounds from your description like vterm is faster than eat.

vterm is faster than eat, but a dedicated eat buffer is fast enough for most common TUIs. An eshell buffer with eat-eshell-mode is slower.

It runs full-fledged TUIs like vim and ncmpcpp in Eshell slowly, but is good enough for quick fzf uses. It's perfectly fine for "small" dynamic elements like the spinners and progress bars used by package managers.

Just remember to use system pipes (with "*|") instead of Elisp pipes (with "|") if you're piping data into an interactive TUI application like fzf in Eshell.

I use gptel-agent[1] when I want agentic capabilities. It includes tools and supports sub-agents, but I haven't added support for Claude skills folders yet. Rolling back the chat is trivial (just move up or modify the chat buffer), rolling back changes to files needs some work.

[1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel-agent

Emacs is single threaded and can't offload any elisp code. Even the stuff it can offload as background OS processes report in to the main loop and share time with editing, so a chatty background process can and does frequently lock up Emacs. So I'm surprised that VSCode, whose runtime is better suited to async jobs, ever feels slower than Emacs.

pdf-tools is quite slow and a memory hog. emacs-reader is a replacement for it (still in development) that already blows every PDF reader I've ever used out of the water in performance:

https://tv.dyne.org/w/wcedffVATJGwLSCqta6pk1

Not an error on your end. Live previews for _new_ fragments are only supported when entering \[..\] and \(..\) delimiters, and not $..$ and $$..$$. With the latter you'll have to preview it manually once, and live previews will update from then on.

Fixed the typo, thank you for reporting it.

There is, but we haven't managed to merge it into Org mode yet because we (the feature authors) and the Org maintainer have been busy with other things.

Here are some screencasts:

- https://share.karthinks.com/olp-auto-mode-env-1.mp4

- https://share.karthinks.com/olp-auto-mode-inline-1.mp4

Here's a longer explainer (this is part 2/2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u44X_th6_oY

Here are instructions if you want to try the fork of Org mode that provides this feature: https://abode.karthinks.com/org-latex-preview/

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.