The author of the emacs pgtk code says that no one who has X installed should use pgtk – he’s stated on several occasions that if you have X at all then you should use a supported X toolkit in Emacs for best results.

I’ve seen counter-arguments that pgtk is still beneficial if you happen to have a “high DPI display”, but I believe that’s the only argument I’ve ever seen for using pgtk under X.

I always build --with-x-toolkit=lucid myself, and can happily vouch for that one. I don’t use Wayland, though.

Looks like a bug (whether documentation or code) as read-kbd-macro still claims to return a string if possible, but nowadays it forcibly returns a vector. Please M-x report-emacs-bug to get that clarified.

You could extract a string of characters from the vector:

(mapconcat (lambda (event)
             (and (characterp event)
                  (char-to-string event)))
           (read-kbd-macro "C-c"))

But if you look at the code for read-kbd-macro you’ll see that it calls this:

(defun edmacro-parse-keys (string &optional _need-vector)
  (let ((result (kbd string)))
    (if (stringp result)
        (seq-into result 'vector)
      result)))

Hence the string value you wanted is coming from kbd:

(kbd "C-c") => "^C"

There are of course arguments you can pass to kbd which won’t return a string, but that would always have been the case for your code, and presumably you’re not attempting to use any of those.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtSu3ydxKJ4&t=20s

Is there a question here?

Are you asking about configure --prefix=... when building?

A couple of simple config suggestions:

(winner-mode 1) ;; Get familiar with `winner-undo'.
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x !") 'delete-other-windows-vertically)

I get a lot of mileage out of those two.

Also consider adding bindings for these, to tell the following command where to display its buffer:

• windmove-display-left
• windmove-display-right
• windmove-display-up
• windmove-display-down
• windmove-display-same-window

And the regular windmove commands are very convenient for moving between buffers.

The transpose-frame package available in MELPA is useful. Note that with only two windows, rotate-frame is “exchange the positions of the windows”, and transpose-frame is “switch between vertical and horizontal split”. I have those bound to C-c | and C-c \ respectively, and use them regularly.

You don’t have to declare a new variable each time you want to remember an old value. You could, e.g., put a custom symbol property on the variable symbol with the old value (or list of old values) you wanted to store. Or maintain a single variable mapping all your variable symbols to their old values.

Ok. Mine doesn’t, but I’ll believe yours does. Why is that making it hard to for you to share it between machines?

the configuration contains a lot of junk

What do you mean? What is the specific problem?

I don’t know, but the initial denote release for Emacs was barely 16 months ago, so it would be fairly surprising if anyone had written support for another editor so quickly.

Maybe if you define a minimum set of features which would be adequate for collaboration purposes, you could ask in vim forums how you might go about implementing those.

You’re matching the literal text :init|config|custom

Tip: Use M-x re-builder to test.

C-h f message to add to the *Messages* buffer (C-h e to jump to that).

If Emacs will start a long-running process and react whenever there’s new output, then you’ll want to see C-h i g (elisp)Asynchronous Processes and C-h i g (elisp)Output from Processes. (n.b. I’ve added a couple of other notes to my initial reply, too.)

Tell us how you run that external program outside of Emacs, and we can show you how to run it inside Emacs.

Then it’s just a matter of timers and a variable in your mode-line-format. Note that your variable will need the risky-local-variable in order to show text properties (for the colour). See C-h i g (elisp)Mode Line Data and/or C-h i g (elisp)Properties in Mode.

In general, if the alternative tools use the same CLI options (at least for Emacs’ purposes) and produce the same output format as the original tools, there would be no reason why you couldn’t swap out one for the other in the elisp code (or, quite likely, set a variable for the location of that original program to instead point to the alternative).

If those things are not true, it may be necessary to support them explicitly in the lisp code.

Everyone can contribute to the documentation to make it better. Consider doing so.

Remember, no one gets paid to maintain or document Emacs, so the quality of the documentation is really pretty remarkable for how good it is.

It can always be made better, though.

I read reddit in Firefox and I make use of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/edit-with-emacs1/ , but you can also just copy/paste between the markdown editor and emacs.

M-a undefined
M-ā is undefined

which is it?

If it’s the latter, it sounds like your Ctrl key is acting like a Compose key of some kind, such that C-a produces ā. That sounds super-weird to me (I wouldn’t expect any OS to take over the Ctrl modifier in this way), but it would be happening outside of Emacs and anything is possible.

If it’s the former then it seems that the Ctrl key hasn’t registered, which would also be a problem which is external to Emacs.

The display-buffer-reuse-mode-window action may be convenient for this use-case.

Many of your modes-of-interest will be derivatives of special-mode so you may (or may not) find that specifying that as a catch-all is particularly useful.

Could you fix the formatting?

The only code block formatting method which works for all users of reddit is to switch the reddit editor to markdown mode* and indent the code by 4 spaces (you can use M-4 C-x C-i on a region followed by M-x untabify to achieve this in Emacs); and you need to use empty lines to separate the indented lines from the other text. Otherwise for lots of readers your message looks like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/17etbx8/saveexcursion_wrong_type_argument/k685ohy/

Be sure to remove any different syntax intended for formatting (such as triple backticks) at the same time.

(*) Switching to the markdown editor may or may not still be necessary. At one time it prevented problems.

M-x toggle-debug-on-error should get you a stack trace which will explain what’s going on.