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.
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.
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)
The community is allergic to breaking backwards compatibility, which is a lesson that is sorely wanted. Emacs didn't accrue decades of extensions and user customizations by breaking things every couple months like most other software.
>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.
We can quibble about the proportion of users, as well as how well it does all these things till the heat death of the universe.
The point is that if Emacs ships with an image viewer, it makes sense for that to be the default. If KDE comes with an image viewer, you would expect it to be the default - even if it sucks. Ditto anything on a Mac/iPhone.
> Emacs is bad at lots of things and that's okay.
It's also OK to have it as the default. Emacs usage is not shrinking, and they're OK sticking to their philosophy as long as it doesn't impede future development (it doesn't, as the last 20 years have shown).
This is a pointless discussion, with a significant number of users wanting each side. It's also a silly discussion given that Emacs is perhaps the most configurable software on the planet.
Personally, on multiple occasions, I've been frustrated when upgrading some (non-Emacs) SW and have it behave differently because they suddenly decided to make using xdg the default and then having to waste time finding a way to revert that behavior.
This isn't a problem unique to Emacs.
I'm sure if Emacs seriously started losing lots of users, they'll change the defaults to attract some. Until then, the developers (and most chronic users) simply don't care.
The defaults are just fine. The thing you ask for does exist in the form of spacemacs, doom emacs, and whatever other emacs "distributions" exist nowadays (I have never used one)
The thing most n00bs should be taught first is that emacs is self documenting. Hit c-h t (ctrl-h t) to get the tutorial. Hit c-h m to get documentation on the current mode you are in. Hit c-h k followed by a key (or key combo) to see which elisp function a key calls (even just normal letters call a function). Hit c-h f and then type a function name to see documentation on a function. Oh yeah, and hit q to exit any of those help documents and get back to the file you have open
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.
wgrep-mode lets you collect matches from `grep` or `rg` into an editable buffer. Once you’ve finished editing, it propagates the changes back to the original files.
> So the filenames could be edited as usual text: with the help of isearch-query-replace-regexp, macros and other cool Emacs features.
One dired/wdired feature I use all the time is to edit filenames by using multiple cursors. Either that or, as TFA mentions, keyboard macros. It's really powerful.
The author also has a blog entry about getting rid of use-package:
It's funny because my config is a half-arsed one where it's partially use-package and partially old-school config. It's an old config and at some point I move to use-package and now I moved back to "not use-package" but I mostly kept the part that are using use-package as-is.
I've got about 3000 to 4000 elisp config lines. And counting...
Tangentially related, I wrote https://github.com/xenodium/dwim-shell-command to save all sorts of command invocations (I'm looking at you ffmpeg) and easily batch apply to dired files. Here's a demo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77NtPfgr4x0
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.
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.
Malleability is orthogonal to defaults. It's just grognards being change-averse.
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)
The community is allergic to breaking backwards compatibility, which is a lesson that is sorely wanted. Emacs didn't accrue decades of extensions and user customizations by breaking things every couple months like most other software.
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.
See this submission from a day ago:
https://en.andros.dev/blog/06bfd107/emacs-is-a-lispboard/
>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.
We can quibble about the proportion of users, as well as how well it does all these things till the heat death of the universe.
The point is that if Emacs ships with an image viewer, it makes sense for that to be the default. If KDE comes with an image viewer, you would expect it to be the default - even if it sucks. Ditto anything on a Mac/iPhone.
> Emacs is bad at lots of things and that's okay.
It's also OK to have it as the default. Emacs usage is not shrinking, and they're OK sticking to their philosophy as long as it doesn't impede future development (it doesn't, as the last 20 years have shown).
>The point is that if Emacs ships with an image viewer, it makes sense for that to be the default.
If, and only if, the user has emacs set in xdg as the preferred image viewer, then I agree.
This is a pointless discussion, with a significant number of users wanting each side. It's also a silly discussion given that Emacs is perhaps the most configurable software on the planet.
Personally, on multiple occasions, I've been frustrated when upgrading some (non-Emacs) SW and have it behave differently because they suddenly decided to make using xdg the default and then having to waste time finding a way to revert that behavior.
This isn't a problem unique to Emacs.
I'm sure if Emacs seriously started losing lots of users, they'll change the defaults to attract some. Until then, the developers (and most chronic users) simply don't care.
surely there is some published copy-paste set of sane defaults noobs can use to get started. at least i hope.
The defaults are just fine. The thing you ask for does exist in the form of spacemacs, doom emacs, and whatever other emacs "distributions" exist nowadays (I have never used one)
The thing most n00bs should be taught first is that emacs is self documenting. Hit c-h t (ctrl-h t) to get the tutorial. Hit c-h m to get documentation on the current mode you are in. Hit c-h k followed by a key (or key combo) to see which elisp function a key calls (even just normal letters call a function). Hit c-h f and then type a function name to see documentation on a function. Oh yeah, and hit q to exit any of those help documents and get back to the file you have open
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.
Also, wgrep-mode for editing files is amazing
> Also, wgrep-mode for editing files is amazing
Emacs is amazing: I'm using it since the nineties and I've got quite the custom config. I've got zero clue has to what wgrep-mode is.
wgrep-mode lets you collect matches from `grep` or `rg` into an editable buffer. Once you’ve finished editing, it propagates the changes back to the original files.
Thanks, dired-hide-details-mode is particularly neato. I also learned a few things about marking.
> So the filenames could be edited as usual text: with the help of isearch-query-replace-regexp, macros and other cool Emacs features.
One dired/wdired feature I use all the time is to edit filenames by using multiple cursors. Either that or, as TFA mentions, keyboard macros. It's really powerful.
The author also has a blog entry about getting rid of use-package:
https://eugene-andrienko.com/2025-10-10-emacs-ditch-use-pack...
It's funny because my config is a half-arsed one where it's partially use-package and partially old-school config. It's an old config and at some point I move to use-package and now I moved back to "not use-package" but I mostly kept the part that are using use-package as-is.
I've got about 3000 to 4000 elisp config lines. And counting...
I looked at the ditch use-package post and I didn't see a replacement for my favorite use-package feature: ensure. Did I miss it?