Best Emacs interfaces

Table of Contents

Part of the power of emacs is the navigation and paradigm: cursors zipping around, sophisticated kill-ring and undo support, interactive searching, frames and windows, etc. And all of this within a keyboard-driven interface. So when done right there are some exceptional wrappers/interfaces. Let’s focus on things that are actually just an emacs interface over facilitiers provided by other programs/apis – not just emacs replacements. Below are some superb examples that I find superb:

  • Telega1. Utilizes the Telegram API to provide ALL of the Telegram functionality combined with various extras
  • Magit. Git doesn’t get any better.
  • GPG. More of a non-interface, but easily make org or other files GPG encrypted so a password is requested before emacs unencrypts the files.
  • Notmuch. Great interfaces for use of the Notmuch email indexing program.
  • Shell. Unlike eshell, this is a true wrapper: you are literally using a shell process on the system.
  • Dired. Essentially a wrapper around your system’s “ls” command, it is truly magnificent.

There is already an abundance of stuff about its features elsewhere. What are some of the Emacs wrappers/interfaces that you recommend? Any you wish for?

Footnotes

1 You can start with Telega at https://zevlg.github.io/telega.el/#introduction

Tory Anderson avatar
Tory Anderson
Full-time Web App Engineer, Digital Humanist, Researcher, Computer Psychologist