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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#161

Post by greenyouse »

massysett wrote: post #112
dorfsmay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this, but found that the issue is that most major modes use a "grammar" that make sense to native-emacs user, and ended up fighting with them.

After a day of editing on Emacs on a MacBook Pro, my hands felt like they were going to shrink and stick into a contorted state. So I tried Evil which does work fairly well for editing text. In some ways it's better than Vim--the :substitute is really nice as it shows all pending substitutions in the buffer. But as you said, some major modes work with Evil and others don't, so I'm never sure what I'm going to get. Ir…

I had this problem a few years ago when I switched from Vim to Emacs. You could try writing your own evil-leader shortcuts for common commands + major mode commands. It initially takes a day or two to set up basic commands (like buffer switching, commands for your favourite programming language, and REPL stuff) but after that there's minimal tweaking to do.

For less commonly used commands you usually can do M-x [command-name] or just memorize a random Emacs keybinding.

In the end I thought it was 100% worth it for working in LISP dialects like Clojure, Scheme, and Common LISP. The good REPL integration and the ability to control everything makes Emacs pretty fun.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#162

Post by benaiah »

gleb wrote: post #154
benaiah wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love ido's find-file, but I think that's because I've made it behave much differently than the defaults. The ability to use backspace to go up one full directory, jump to home with ~/ at any point, jump to / with // at any point, and navigate folders quickly with fuzzy matching and RET is really, really nice. To be fair, most of my file opening is done with projectile, which, when you exclude the right files and us…

Do find-file. Now I see current directory as the default suggestion. Can C-a, C-b, Backspace, etc. within it. Do ido-find-file. Now I see current directory as part of the prompt. Cannot C-a, C-b, Backspace, etc. within it.

Ah, I see. This is actually one of my favorite features of ido-find-file. I love the fact that I can treat the current path section I'm writing as independent of the path I've already navigated to. To each their own.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#163

Post by arvinsim »

Barrin92 wrote: post #149
rl3 wrote: post #125

Does anyone have an opinion on Spacemacs [0]? I haven't used it, nor Vim/Emacs. Just came across it during researching the two. Spacemacs appears to have excellent documentation though. [0] http://spacemacs.org/

I switched from vim to spacemacs a few weeks ago and I don't regret it. The fact that you can run a shell in a buffer, have on the fly syntax checking and so on makes coding much more comfortable and you feel like you're using a full blown ide instead of just a text editor. Would recommend

Funny that, I also did the same exact thing this month for org-mode. I never missed Vim.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#164

Post by pmoriarty »

dorfsmay wrote: post #83
bjackman wrote: post #8

I enjoyed this; I moved from Vim to Emacs a couple of years ago and indeed the most important thing to recognise is this: Emacs does have a great text editor, and it's Vim! With evil-mode you can use all the Vim bindings you're used to (including sed commands with ':'), but with the added benefits (and drawbacks) of Emacs! I've also found that fiddling with my .emacs is really fun, fiddling with .vimrc was usually qu…

I tried this, but found that the issue is that most major modes use a "grammar" that make sense to native-emacs user, and ended up fighting with them.

I used vim for 20 years before switching to emacs. I'd actually tried switching twice. Firt time with viper (I think), which didn't have good enough vim emulation. Second time evil-mode finally convinced me to switch completely.

Then I ran in to the same issue as you, that a lot of emacs modes had native emacs keybindings. So what I wound up doing was re-binding those to be more vim-like. I didn't rebind everything, just the things I most used, and it's worked great for me. I'm still a happy emacs user.

It did help that I already knew lisp and scheme, so getting up to speed with elisp was relatively painless. And it helped a lot that at the time I made the switch I was out of work and had a ton of free time on my hands. Don't think I would have been able to do it without that time, as it did take a ton of time to customize emacs enough to compete with the vim setup I had cobbled togather over 20 years.

It was totally worth it for me. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it to every veteran vim user, unless they have lots of time on their hands. On the other hand, I've heard that Spacemacs has a lot of sane defaults for vim users. So maybe Spacemacs+evil is the answer. I haven't tried it myself yet, since I have a ton of custom vim bindings of my own in emacs now, and very little free time to experiment these days.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#165

Post by [deleted] »

dorfsmay wrote: post #83
bjackman wrote: post #8

I enjoyed this; I moved from Vim to Emacs a couple of years ago and indeed the most important thing to recognise is this: Emacs does have a great text editor, and it's Vim! With evil-mode you can use all the Vim bindings you're used to (including sed commands with ':'), but with the added benefits (and drawbacks) of Emacs! I've also found that fiddling with my .emacs is really fun, fiddling with .vimrc was usually qu…

I tried this, but found that the issue is that most major modes use a "grammar" that make sense to native-emacs user, and ended up fighting with them.

[deleted]

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#166

Post by e40 »

lottin wrote: post #64
losvedir wrote: post #46

> Sometimes people who use computers ask me why I would use something as “bloated” as Emacs for text editing. Usually they remark that Emacs is a hold-over from a by-gone era, much too large compared to editors like “vi”, and that they are quite content using a variant of vi or some Notepad-like editor. This feels like a very out of date sentiment to me. I know a decade ago this was the perception, and well know the…

I guess bloated means compared to 'instant startup'. Vi starts always instantaneously, whereas Emacs can have a noticeable delay, even if it's only a fraction of a second. Hence the perception that is bloated. Of course compared to the others you mention is quite fast.

I start emacs once every few weeks, and that's mainly just to do a reset when I finish a project or get to a safe point and want to get a clean slate. The startup time for Emacs is never an issue for me.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#167

Post by woodruffw »

lispm wrote: post #116
infodroid wrote: post #49

Many Emacs advocates fall for the trap of apologizing for why Emacs is not Unixy, as though it were some sort of defect. They should celebrate the fact that Emacs doesn't come from the Unix tradition of small, composable tools and "doing only one thing and doing it well". It is rooted in the ambitious work of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, the LISP programming language, and the single user MIT Lisp Machine that…

Unix may have a tradition of small, composable tools. But Unix at the same time has a tradition of large, non-composable and long running tools. The X11 server is such a thing. Many GUI applications under Unix are working that way. From Framemaker to the big gui-based CAD applications. Don't let them tell you that Unix was developed to ONLY run small composable tools and that this is the only true way to use applicat…

X was designed to replace W, which ran on the V System (which is not related to System V or UNIX in general). It does not come from the UNIX tradition - it is a port.

Plenty of monolithic software runs on modern Unices, but very few can be traced back to a tradition of monoliths.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#168

Post by e40 »

What I think is funny is people making fun of me for reading email in Emacs. I use my own filtering system built on top of MH-E, which is layered on top of nmh command line tools. MH-E uses GNUS for MIME handling and I'm able to view HTML messages just fine.

Why I think it's funny: people laugh that I'm using 20-30 year old technology and new tech would serve me better. To each of them I say: I challenge you to an efficiency dual/bet. Pit your system against mine. When I show them actually what I use, they don't take the bet.

Yes, what I'm using was first written almost 30 years ago, but I've tuned the crap out of it (with my own tweaks) and so have others, improving the tools themselves.

The only thing that would make my life easier would be if nmh could use IMAP. There have been many discussions of this, but it's just not a natural fit. I don't know if it will ever be done.

EDIT: typos

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#169

Post by pmoriarty »

benaiah wrote: post #36
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of antiquated stuff in Emacs, but despite the almost total lack of a modern UI toolkit for extensions, there are also interfaces in Emacs that are better than anything available elsewhere --- reasons to launch Emacs even if you don't need its expressive power for editing. Magit is a good example, Helm is another, org-mode another, FlyCheck another. If Emacs looked as good as Sublime, I'd be marginally h…

Helm may be the most flagrant example of a terrible package that remains inexplicably popular. I haven't uninstalled it yet, because there are a few packages that use helm that don't have ido equivalents yet, but I try to minimize my usage of it as much as possible. Issues include: - Significant performance issues - Constant bugs - updates often break the package completely, especially if you're using the melpa versi…

Which plugins would you recommend to replace helm?

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#170

Post by sooheon »

MarcScott wrote: post #31
jamespo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the reason I used emacs is that it works in a terminal... nothing else with its power does.

While on the other hand, I use it because I can open a shell from within Emacs. I can also use tramp to ssh onto another machine from within emacs, and so don't have to bother installing my favourite editor on headless servers and Raspberry Pis.

Is there a true terminal inside emacs that I don't know about, because all the ones I've tried were buggy chimeras of odd behaviours.
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