I like Aquamacs on the Mac. It comes with the most popular packages pre-installed in it and enables a lot of basic customization through the GUI. Even though I do the vast majority of my code editing in IntelliJ, it seems I end up installing Aquamacs on any new machine within a couple of weeks.
Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
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Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#92First, ask yourself if you really want to invest time in learning Emacs. It probably isn't anywhere near the most important problem in your life, and won't change it much. In fact it might make things worse because it will make you aware of all the ways other editors are bad which didn't bother you before.
That might be problem as teams standardize on newer editors with good collaboration features, which don't exist or aren't as new-user friendly as in Emacs. Some languages also don't have as good integration with Emacs as they do with some IDEs.
That said, if you really want to learn Emacs, then
- go through the tutorial
- print out a good Emacs cheatsheet
- Have piece of paper or notebook to make your own supplement/complement to the cheatsheet
- use a Rosetta stone site if coming from Vim
- Force yourself to use the keybindings to move, not the arrow keys or the mouse. It will take a few weeks to get comfortable with the basic movement.
- Probably most important after the tutorial: learn all the help functions and their keybindings
- C-h ?
- info
- apropos
- where-is
- describe-key, describe-function, describe-mode, describe-variable, describe-bindings
- find-library
- understand how undo works
- package-list-packages to install packages
- Start a basic init.el:
- (fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)
- (global-font-lock-mode t)
- (transient-mark-mode -1)
- Learn keyboard macros Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#93Emacs 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:…
Was it an acoustic modem? Just adds to the joy.
Yup, a Novation Cat. I still have it, not that it's useful other than as a conversation piece.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#94Having recently adopted Emacs enthusiastically after years of fairly low-powered Vim use, this is what has worked for me.
- Do the built-in tutorial before anything else.
- Read through most of the manual. It's extraordinarily good despite containing a few small and usually obvious errors. You can skip things, e.g. calendaring if you're happy with your current calendar system.
- Get a friend's nontrivial init file (.emacs, init.el, etc.) or find a representative one online. Ideally use one from someone who uses Emacs for the same stuff you will, so more of it will be relevant to you. Read and understand every part of this file, copying and adapting into your own .emacs as you feel moved.
- Use the built-in help system aggressively. Don't be afraid to go on detours when an intriguing function or variable meets your eye.
- Spend some time browsing the descriptions of packages in the `list-packages' buffer to find interesting packages, and read their source code.
- Read the Intro to Elisp (note: I think I used a 3rd party alternative tutorial somewhere, not sure which one) and use the Elisp manual more as a reference. Take as much time as necessary to digest anything that seems confusing. A few things aren't super intuitive on first read, for example the precedence relationship among various keymaps. Make diagrams!
- Contribute some bugfixes and new features to packages you are using. Start small.
- Use the Emacs Wiki as a secondary resource.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#95Emacs 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 NUMB…
It's fun to see someone's jaw drop when you show them what you can do with a keyboard macro, some regular expressions and a little shell integration.
More than simple fun; I've saved people from hours and sometimes days of drudgery with just a few minutes of mucking about in Emacs. Teaching someone simple automation is pretty rewarding. Even if they are not technically capable of repeating your solution, at least they go away with a problem solved AND the knowledge that there are usually better options available than drudgery.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#96Emacs 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:…
My advice (and experience) is exactly the same as kabdib's (though his .emacs file is longer, and his baud rate lower, than mine). Literally the only advanced feature I use is Keyboard Macros (as dhosek mentions), but just that one feature is so useful, every other editor I've tried feels hobbled (even vi, which I used professionally for years). And no, multiple IPs doesn't do the trick at all. On the other hand, my pinky hurts.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#97I had a different experience to kabdib: customization made me able to actually use emacs productively.
I joined a company where most of the devs used emacs, so I kind of needed to adopt it too. I started with very little config and it was very hard. Because many operations were different to the GUI editors I'd used before, I had to waste 20% of my brain power to consciously do things that should be unconscious (save, cut, paste etc). This made it much harder to program!
The first step was updating the config to make emacs more similar to my old editor. For example: make it so pasting text when text is selected replaces the selection. Turn off branching undo. Install a plugin that gave me an autocomplete list of every file in my current project. Make it so that if I copy text in emacs, it appears on the OS-wide clipboard. I'm sure your list of things will be different.
Another important step was getting my emacs theme to look nice. This really made me love the program a lot more. It's silly, but there we are.
The third important step was finding things that emacs does better than other editors. For me, a big one was having a terminal inside my editor (lots of editors do this now, but back then it was rare).
Hope you end up loving emacs!
Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#98The biggest difference between Emacs and any other editor is that instead of thinking about Emacs as an editor you need to think of Emacs as a programable workflow enabler. Using Emacs without learning Elisp is like carrying a bike on your shoulders instead of riding it. Once you get to the place where you can confidently write Elisp to solve your problems, you will miss Emacs deeply when you have to use any other ap…
It's interesting to me that the top two comments (at the time of writing this) are fundamentally opposite advice. Yours, to customize Emacs, vs. the second, to basically not customize it at all.
My take on that is...
For those fundamentally interested in developing development environments, coding tools, or making your editor your hobby, diving deep into emacs customization is a reasonable thing to do. In other words, if creating things like evil-mode or spacemacs excites you, a dive deep into emacs is a good option.
For those who aren't interested in those things, try to actively avoid deep diving into emacs. It will be an unfulfilling waste of time. There's no magical developer productivity pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#99Emacs has a great interactive live tutorial integrated.
Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?
#100I'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?
Spacemacs shows you what Emacs can be, but adds a lot of complexity that most people don't need.
I am currently a spacemacs user (holy mode, ya dirty heathens) and I like a lot of the built in functionality. However, I think that I will eventually build up my own config from vanilla.