Top all-time · #3980
Murilo Pereira
Personal blog · murilopereira.comprogrammingwriting
Murilo Pereira's personal blog at murilopereira.com covers programming and writing. Since 2014, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 36 times, most often “How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Murilo Pereira's Emacs essays, mainly a guide to profiling why opening a remote file in Emacs is slow and an essay on the values of Emacs, Neovim and VSCode.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Writings about software, technology, and life.
Most-linked posts?
- How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-01-03
- The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-01-17
- Cathedrals, Bazaars, and Fusion Reactors3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-01-24
- How to Open a File in Emacs3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-24
- The “Why” of Technology2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-02-07
- From catching up to getting ahead: an Emacs wishlist2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-31
- A rabbit hole full of Lisp2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-13
What Hacker News says?
If you are interested in continuing to use emacs, I'd suggest using the profiler to investigate. There's a good demo/depiction of doing that here: https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/ (posted recently to HN). I think it's most likely to be something pretty specific/small in the config you're using. I am using emacs on a Mac, often with a 4K screen, and generally have no problems. I did have a s…
Comment linking /how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/
on “Magit 3.0”Submitted The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla as a story · 429 points
HN discussion> being steeped in Emacs Lisp traditions is hardly an advantage. I used to think this, but sometimes this determines how deeply your package integrates into emacs. The obvious example here being seamless tramp support. IIRC this is demonstrated in this very interesting blog post[0] about debugging why opening a remote file is slow in the projectile package, likely didn't exist in the project.el alternative that is m…
Comment linking /how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/
on “Building an Intelligent Emacs”Submitted How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress as a story · 262 points
HN discussionHey Thiago! You are mentioned in the essay that contains the article in this HN post btw :) Check out the Neovim section in https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/#t...
Comment linking /how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/
on “A rabbit hole full of Lisp”Submitted A rabbit hole full of Lisp as a story · 218 points
HN discussion> and using string concatenation React.js uses a "virtual DOM" made up of JavaScript objects, so there isn't any concatenation of HTML strings, just generation of virtual DOM objects. The next step up from that is their JavaScript variant, JSX, which has HTML-like syntax for instantiating those virtual DOM objects. JSX looks quite like HTML templates, except the programming logic (which in a templating language migh…
Comment linking /the-case-for-reactjs-and-clojurescript/
on “The Case for React.js and ClojureScript”Submitted The Case for React.js and ClojureScript as a story · 200 points
HN discussionIt's funny you mention that. https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/ The summary is that the author tried to open a remote file and Emacs froze for several seconds. He dived deep into finding out why that was and how to fix it, pointing out how great Emacs's introspection is that one can find solutions to problems like these. And then two thirds of the way into his essay, he has this: > More recen…
Comment linking /how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/
on “From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)”Submitted Cathedrals, Bazaars, and Fusion Reactors as a story · 14 points
HN discussionYou might find "The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla" article interesting reading https://www.murilopereira.com/the-values-of-emacs-the-neovim...
Comment linking /the-values-of-emacs-the-neovim-revolution-and-the-vscode-gorilla/
on “Vim-gh-line: Vim plugin to open the current line on GitHub”Submitted From catching up to getting ahead: an Emacs wishlist as a story · 11 points
HN discussion> But are there any other reasons, technical or otherwise, why people don't seem to use VSCode for things beyond editing code? The best answer I've seen to this question is https://www.murilopereira.com/the-values-of-emacs-the-neovim... Amongst other things, it lists different values that each tool prioritizes, and how "Core values are self-reinforcing. They attract like-minded people, who will then defend them." Em…
Comment linking /the-values-of-emacs-the-neovim-revolution-and-the-vscode-gorilla/
on “Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?”Submitted A rabbit hole full of Lisp as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI disagree. The Emacs community has, at least historically, strongly valued backward compatibility. Breaking existing users is just about the worst thing you could do in Emacs. If we aren't strongly considering reverting a breaking change immediately, that signals that the Emacs devs no longer value backward compatibility as highly, which means Emacs is abandoning many of its existing users. https://www.murilopereir…
Comment linking /the-values-of-emacs-the-neovim-revolution-and-the-vscode-gorilla/
on “Bad News, Emacs”Submitted What's good about staying inside Emacs? as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI’ve found this article useful for understanding how to debug performance issues in Emacs: https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/
Comment linking /how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/
on “Fuzzy Finding with Emacs Instead of Fzf”Submitted Cathedrals, Bazaars, and Fusion Reactors as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted The “Why” of Technology as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Why of Technology as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emacs: From catching up to getting ahead as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Open a File in Emacs as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Open a File in Emacs as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Why of Technology as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Why of Technology as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Why of Technology as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted I just made my first $1 on the internet! as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emacs: From catching up to getting ahead as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Why of Technology as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
