Using well thought out interfaces is a joy wherever we find them.
Something in your comment made me remember a DOS based file "explorer". Screen split down the middle with a folder-tree and file list on both sides. I remember hardly ever turning on the computer without starting that for one task or another. That was some serious UI pleasure, at least for the time. Ha, found it:
https://handwiki.org/wiki/Software:File_Commander
Ah, the nostalgia!
Re:Emacs as your video-trimming tool
by kickingvegas on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @05:52PM
(#44956613)
Nostalgia no more! Midnight Commander/4DOS style file management can be achieved with Emacs Dired today and then some.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Di...
For your consideration, I built a keyboard-driven menu interface for Dired called Casual to help with discovery. https://kickingvegas.github.io/casual/Dired.html
In my opinion Dired is the best way to rename files bar none (wdired-mode)...
I'd say this ain't an opinion - it's a fact. Where else can you rename a bunch of items in your directory tree, recursively, using all the features of your editor - multiple cursors, keyboard macros, spellchecking, etc.?
There just doesn't exist another piece of software (go ahead, prove me wrong) where you can edit your filesystem like a wiki page.
Oh, you know what? I stand corrected - turns out, yazi and oil in neovim actually can do something similar. TIL.
Re:Emacs as your video-trimming tool
by shadowgovt on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @04:10PM
(#44955763)
Getting deep enough into it, it basically becomes your shell, complete with the ability shells have to orchestrate multiple programs into a meta-program.
For example, I use the Verb package for making HTTP requests. So with Emacs as my HTTP client, I can do bulk HTTP request calls with keyboard macros. The HTTP requests can be stored in org-mode. I can write custom Elisp for special authentication scenarios. I can create new commands if I need them.
For this example, I can imagine (haven't used this myself) scenarios like creating a keyboard macro to shave off the first X seconds of a video usable with dired.
Some non-text-editing things in Emacs that are actually extremely useful:
Using a well thought-out Emacs interface for anything is one of the biggest sources of joy in my technical life.