Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#81

Post by AnonC » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:23 AM UTC

dizzystar wrote: post #40

I've been using emacs for several years. If you saw my init file, you'd think it was kind of funny. It's mostly to change the look from default to a black box. I do have some functions for connecting to databases, but for the most part, there are no deep customizations. I also have avy (think that's jump mode in vim), ldo for file browsing, yasnippet (for snippets), multiple-cursors, and some language-specific major…

Thanks a lot for the simple explanation of the keyboard combinations (and the underlying logic) as well as the part about yanking. As a vi user, that might’ve tripped me up the first few times. But now I know better.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#82

Post by AnonC » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #4

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=learn+emacs&ia=web Pretty good resources right at the top.

Thank you for pointing that out. I should’ve checked that out first, but I thought the collective mind here may be a lot more helpful (so far all the comments here have been very helpful to me, including yours).

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#83

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:30 AM UTC

smitty1e wrote: post #33

NateEag wrote: post #23

I'm a moderately experienced Emacser - been using it heavily since 2009 (first encountered it in 2003). I have written a few small extensions and contributed features and bug fixes to bigger ones. Credentials established, I cannot recommend this tutorial enough: https://david.rothlis.net/emacs/tutorial.html He walks you through most of the core of what makes Emacs great by showing you how to make a change to a projec…

Spacemacs is getting decent press here. How recently have you tried it?

I’ve used spacemacs before and have coworkers that uses it and, I’ve never found it pleasant to use. Unlike plain-evil-mode, it changes too many of the default emacs keybindings and it’s easier to build up a nice config (I.e. I ported my vimrc to emacs in a couple afternoons just by porting the keybindings and finding packages to replace my vim customizations) than it is to pare away unwanted features from spacemacs

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#84

Post by AnonC » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:32 AM UTC

petr_tik wrote: post #27

I am keen to crowdsource a study of emacs workflow practices, where we can collect, compare and analyse different development practices among emacs users. This should help other emacs users to borrow modes/keybindings/specific techniques/tricks. * Motivation This is inspired by an ongoing conversation about emacs with a friend and a debugging interview that I really enjoyed. * Exchanging emacs tips with a friend A fr…

OP here, so I’m completely useless for this. It sounds wonderful. Whenever you get this done, please do a Show HN or Tell HN on this.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#85

Post by allarm » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:34 AM UTC

Start using org-mode and learn as you go. It will help you to keep interest - org-mode is full of amazing features.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#86

Post by agentultra » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:41 AM UTC

https://emacsforosx.com/

https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/

http://emacsrocks.com/

https://sachachua.com/blog/category/emacs-news/

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#87

Post by User23 » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:45 AM UTC

downerending wrote: post #25

jimhefferon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive the noise, but I second this. I haven't committed a hundred key combinations to memory. I find that knowing the twenty things I need to know (which are different for everyone), and having another twenty in my back pocket for once or twice a year has lasted me since 1992, and left me very satisfied indeed with emacs.

Also seconding. Vanilla emacs is already extremely powerful, and if you're doing real work, you'll end up having to use hosts that don't have all of your wonderful enhancements installed. It's good to know vanilla emacs. Beyond that, add language modes for anything you need that's not already included. If you use 'git', 'magit' is very nice. Beyond that, helm is interesting, though very large and kind of mind-blowing…

> Also seconding. Vanilla emacs is already extremely powerful, and if you're doing real work, you'll end up having to use hosts that don't have all of your wonderful enhancements installed. It's good to know vanilla emacs.

I wonder if I'm weird, but I use a highly customized Emacs on my dev machine, but if I have to ssh into a host and edit something I just use vi there. The correct answer to vi or emacs has always been "both" for me.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#88

Post by __d » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:50 AM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #47

zozbot234 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Default Emacs shortcuts are bad for RSI. Even the original author of Emacs has had to cut down pretty dramatically on their coding activity, due to getting "Emacs pinky" and other RSI problems.

Mapping Caps Lock to be "Control" helps a lot with this. Reaching down to the bottom row for Control all the time is terrible and should definitely be avoided. Using Alt as Meta has been less of an issue for me since I can easily hit it with my thumb without moving too much. evil is also great, and it might actually be the most popular option for new users at this point, thanks to Spacemacs and Doom.

Second this: the key to the left of 'A' (for QWERTY) should be control for regular Emacs use.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#89

Post by gtpedrosa » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

I have started using emacs in 2016 because of org-mode. It was powerful enough to make me use emacs on a daily basis since them. However, I have been using RStudio/Sublime as IDE/editor, not emacs.

Curiously last weekend I have found a video about org-roam and the presenter mentioned he was using Doom emacs. I was curious enough to try it. It uses vim key bindings by default. To get started I highly recommend this series by Zaiste [0], he explains how to set up the environment and digs into org-mode which were my main concerns. I found the sections on projectile, magit, dired and avy very helpful. Now I am tempted to give it a try in one of my projects. The downfall so far is I didnt find an in depth explanation on how to grok it with python.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCMh7srOqvw&list=PLhXZp00uXB...

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#90

Post by dhosek » Thu, Apr 16, 2020, 2:59 AM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #17

Emacs user here, it's been my go-to editor for about 40 years. I have a few customizations, not many. My .emacs file is 63 lines long, doesn't include any other files, and mostly just tweaks some key bindings and turns off features that I don't like. The only modes I use are built-in ones (e.g., C-mode, auto-wrapping text mode, etc.). I can't write elisp without a reference manual, and I think that's okay. I suggest:…

I'm in this school of emacs usage. I use Aquamacs on my Mac and while I've been using Emacs for almost as long as kabdib, I've barely scratched the surface of what Emacs can do. For me, the biggest thing that'll get me to drop out of IntelliJ (I was so happy to learn that there were Emacs keybindings hidden in one of IntelliJ's Mac keymaps) and into Emacs is to do ctrl-x(...ctrl-x) to record a macro, then ctrl-x NUMBER ctrl-x e (I'm hoping I'm translating muscle memory correctly) to do a repeated complex edit on a block of text. It's always fun to see junior devs (and occasional seniors) watch me do this and ask, How did you DO that?