Thanks, dired-hide-details-mode is particularly neato. I also learned a few things about marking.
stackghost•Jul 24, 2026
I use emacs almost every day, and it's a continual source of frustration that the community seems allergic to sane defaults.
If the editor ships a built in file manager, that file manager should not require explicit configuration to open e.g. a jpeg in an image viewer by default. We've had `xdg-open` for years now, it's kind of absurd how far behind emacs is in so many ways.
BeetleB•Jul 24, 2026
Unsure what you mean. When I press Enter on an image, it does load it (in Emacs).
I believe opening within Emacs should be the default - as many Emacs users aim to do everything within Emacs.
>I believe opening within Emacs should be the default - as many Emacs users aim to do everything within Emacs.
I believe it's actually only a very vocal, very misguided minority that tries to do everything in emacs. Emacs is objectively inferior to existing alternatives for:
- IMAP
- viewing and especially annotating PDFs
- Browsing the web
- working with LLM agents
- multiplayer text editing (crdt.el is trash)
- working with rich text documents like .docx
- working with spreadsheets
- notebook rendering (org vs md and jupyter are definitely a "worse is better" situation)
etc.
It is not sane to assume the user wants to do everything in emacs. Emacs is bad at lots of things and that's okay.
scoops_•Jul 24, 2026
Pressing “X” with your point at the file should essentially do this, no? Well, at least give you the option to open said file in an external program. Otherwise, yes, pressing “RET” will assume you want to open it in emacs, I think that is sane. But like BeetleB says, I have no issue opening an image in emacs (unless I’m on windows)
That said, lack of sane defaults elsewhere is indeed a bit frustrating, (see: littering backup and auto save files everywhere. It would be much nicer to throw it in a ‘temp’ directory within .emacs.d or similar)
mimischi•Jul 24, 2026
I think that’s what many enjoy—and probably why many other steer away from—Emacs: its malleability. It has some defaults that are grounded in some usecase that have persisted for decades, and to change them would take hours of arguing on the mailing list.. or you could just change the defaults yourself to your liking.
stackghost•Jul 24, 2026
Malleability is orthogonal to defaults. It's just grognards being change-averse.
krupan•Jul 24, 2026
Just FYI, dired without any configuring or customizing is pretty rad, especially with wdired-mode for editing filenames. You don't need to read this blog post to benefit from it.
3 Comments
If the editor ships a built in file manager, that file manager should not require explicit configuration to open e.g. a jpeg in an image viewer by default. We've had `xdg-open` for years now, it's kind of absurd how far behind emacs is in so many ways.
I believe opening within Emacs should be the default - as many Emacs users aim to do everything within Emacs.
See this submission from a day ago:
https://en.andros.dev/blog/06bfd107/emacs-is-a-lispboard/
I believe it's actually only a very vocal, very misguided minority that tries to do everything in emacs. Emacs is objectively inferior to existing alternatives for:
- IMAP
- viewing and especially annotating PDFs
- Browsing the web
- working with LLM agents
- multiplayer text editing (crdt.el is trash)
- working with rich text documents like .docx
- working with spreadsheets
- notebook rendering (org vs md and jupyter are definitely a "worse is better" situation)
etc.
It is not sane to assume the user wants to do everything in emacs. Emacs is bad at lots of things and that's okay.
That said, lack of sane defaults elsewhere is indeed a bit frustrating, (see: littering backup and auto save files everywhere. It would be much nicer to throw it in a ‘temp’ directory within .emacs.d or similar)
Also, wgrep-mode for editing files is amazing