Even more batteries included with Emacs
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Article surveys lesser-known built-in Emacs features like dictionary tooltips, wildcard file operations, and comparison commands.
Third installment in a series highlighting underutilized stock Emacs features usable in under five minutes. Covered features include dictionary-tooltip-mode for hover definitions, wildcard support in find-file and dired, ffap-menu for scanning buffers for file paths and URLs, compare-windows for lightweight text comparison, dired-compare-directories for file-level directory comparison, highlight-changes-mode for tracking unsaved edits, and vc-diff variants extended to work with backup files. All examples use Emacs 28.1+ with no external packages, emphasizing built-in functionality with practical demonstrations.
The author argues Emacs suffers from discoverability issues rather than feature gaps. Examples progress from simple (dictionary tooltips) to compound use cases (wildcard-based bulk file operations). Code snippets show how to extend built-in commands like vc-diff to unify backup inspection and version-control diffing under a single interface.
What commenters are saying
Thread centers on Dired usability friction and broader package stability concerns. Long-time Emacs users report confusion with Dired's keybinding-heavy interface despite its power; suggestions include sunrise-commander (dual-pane) and Casual/Anju packages adding transient menus. Separate concern: Doom/Spacemacs configurations break on updates, though vanilla Emacs remains stable. Commenters split between configuration-framework users (who encounter package conflicts) and vanilla users (who rarely see breakage). One user notes Org export logic changed over years; LLM assistance for Elisp code fixes receives mixed reports—some success with Claude, others report generated code needs heavy massaging.