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Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

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Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#41

Post by aussiesnack »

xcambar wrote: post #39
tylerchurch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reinforcing #1: It's amazing how productive you can be if you're creating things instead of endlessly trying, configuring, and comparing editors.

Whether you call it over-engineering or procrastination, customizing an editor is a delicious waste of time.

I'm certainly not knocking it. I have enjoyed it in the past, particularly with emacs. But it's an activity which some enjoy for its own sake and some don't. It's just not a necessary condition for becoming a 'productive' developer. Those who do enjoy it to the point of writing some of the great open source plugins available, do the rest of us a terrific service.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#42

Post by nequo »

stevebmark wrote: post #26
Thursday24 wrote: post #20

VSCode/IDEs and Vim need not be mutually exclusive. I tend to rely on vim emulation within my vscode, chrome and in other applications. Usually, all I need are the basic vim modalities with the nicer amenities provided by modern editors.

The well known “Vim mode paradox”: if you like the Vim mode provided by another editor, it means you don’t know Vim well enough to justify using Vim nor Vim mode. Vim modes don’t approach even 10% of the Vim features you need to reach the bare minimum of efficient editing.

What is the 90% that is missing in Evil?

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#43

Post by peterbecich »

dottedmag wrote: post #31

Emacs suggestions in no particular order: Emacs manual is great, at least skim it to see what's out there in stock Emacs. Look at what Spacemacs provides in packages: these are most likely the most popular extensions. You don't need to use Spacemacs, but this is the closest to the curated list of useful packages Emacs has (would be glad to be proven wrong - is there a better list?), so at least reading through it wil…

Yes, LSP Mode for Emacs is great: https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/ LSP has saved a lot of redundant effort in supporting IDE features on many editors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#44

Post by beefield »

onion2k wrote: post #37

when I watch proficient people using these editors I'm always amazed at what they can do, and they appear more productive than I am with VSCode Editing text efficiently is not the same as being a productive developer. The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code. When you watch a prerecorded video most of the time all the thinking has already happened, a…

> The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code.

That's the reason why I have been not learning to touch type for the last decade or so. I just have this strong feeling that it's my brain, not my fingers that is the bottleneck. At the same time, I somehow acknowledge that being able to touch type could in some still undefined way to me increase my productivity.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#45

Post by saurik »

onion2k wrote: post #37

when I watch proficient people using these editors I'm always amazed at what they can do, and they appear more productive than I am with VSCode Editing text efficiently is not the same as being a productive developer. The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code. When you watch a prerecorded video most of the time all the thinking has already happened, a…

> The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code.

This is sometimes true... and then sometimes it simply isn't. When I'm working on building something truly great and unique--and yes, I do try to spend my time building things that are truly great and unique as much as I can--I'm not spending most my time typing; but, we don't have the luxury of building things that are truly great and unique a lot of the time.

Sometimes, you need to write a debugger for some new architecture or a compiler for some new language or hell you just need to build some silly content management system for the billing backend of the new business you're putting together for the new mobile application video streaming pay-by-the-voice project you're working on, and suddenly you can see ahead of you days if not weeks of just having to type a bunch of stuff, because it isn't like we don't know how to write all of these things off the top of our head: they just don't exist off-the-shelf.

There have been multiple times in my life that I've managed to build something pretty amazing that got used--and even cherished--by millions of people that I only was willing to build because I was so sick that I couldn't bring myself to do anything "intelligent" and so dequeued a "spend a full week doing nothing but typing" project off the stack ("you win wars with lead bullets, not silver ones", yadda yadda etc. etc.).

(And hell: even when you are doing something hard, it isn't like you are able to fully pipeline your brain to be thinking of the hard things constantly while your hands are typing... I know I often find myself thinking for a while, figuring out what I need to do, and then having to rapidly type a bunch of stuff to build a new interface or refactor a project--during which time the language center of my brain is pretty actively engaged doing symbol manipulation--and only when I'm done with that burst can I go back to thinking. Or hell: I might have needed to finish typing that to run an experiment to learn something new so I could use the result of that typing in the next segment of thinking.)

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#46

Post by aussiesnack »

saurik wrote: post #40
tylerchurch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reinforcing #1: It's amazing how productive you can be if you're creating things instead of endlessly trying, configuring, and comparing editors.

I mean, you're going to be programming for the rest of your life, right? I put a bunch of time into customizing vim... god, I think it was 15 years ago? Whenever this comes up, people make it sound like you are somehow going to be doing that every single day for the rest of your life or something... and then, awkwardly, I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantl…

> I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantly and slows them down at every turn gloating about how they "saved time" by not spending a small amount of time forever ago to figure out what the hell they actually wanted

This is just as much a caricature as the one you're objecting to. People do good work using all of the available tools. Some use more than one! There are people who like both emacs and IntelliJ! We really don't have to tribalize over every little choice people make.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#47

Post by omnicognate »

Ignoring the question of whether you should (because you didn't ask it), if you really want to learn emacs approach it like learning a new programming language. Because that's what it is.

And not just any programming language, but one that contains significant new concepts that you will not have encountered in other languages/systems, even if you already know some form of lisp.

1-2 weeks is nowhere near enough. When I learned it ~20 years ago it was a couple of months before I was reasonably proficient, and I've been learning ever since.

Also, read "Mastering Emacs", whose author has commented on this post.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#48

Post by BossingAround »

saurik wrote: post #40
tylerchurch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reinforcing #1: It's amazing how productive you can be if you're creating things instead of endlessly trying, configuring, and comparing editors.

I mean, you're going to be programming for the rest of your life, right? I put a bunch of time into customizing vim... god, I think it was 15 years ago? Whenever this comes up, people make it sound like you are somehow going to be doing that every single day for the rest of your life or something... and then, awkwardly, I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantl…

And then there's the majority of devs, like me, who did not spend months forcing themselves to actually make vim/emacs into an IDE and, at the same time, who suffer from no negative effects with one of those "IDE-of-the-week" (JFYI, that's not a thing). Intellij, Pycharm, and VSCode are all stable and fast. I don't think I've had neither of those crash on me in the past three years.

You're laying out a false dichotomy.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#49

Post by remote_phone »

~30 years programming. I use vim the same way I use Notepad on windows: for basic editing. I can move around, insert, delete words, etc but nothing more complex than that. And it’s fine.

I’m the most productive on IDEs like Sublime or IntelliJ so I mainly use those and jump into vim when I need to on Linux.

It’s been more than good enough for my entire career. I used Ultraedit and Visual Studio whenever I could as well, and always used vim when I needed to.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#50

Post by cranium »

You need to improve along two axes: proficiency and knowledge.

Proficiency is simply training your muscle memory when editing code and trying to use the sharpest tool at your disposal (eg. forcing yourself to use the "right" text object).

Knowledge comes from exploring the tool shed to see what's there and try to find how it can be useful to you. (Or try to solve a problem). Emacs is very good at that ! You can search for callable commands with M-x, show the next key (in a keybinding) + its effect with which-key, explore the documentation with describe-function/describe-variable/describe-key/...

Cycle between the two and after a while you'll feel at home.

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