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There are many things you can say about Emacs...

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Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#21

Post by mechanical_fish »

marvin wrote: post #20
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you might guess I have heard similar argument a lot already. I don't doubt that switching to emacs can be worth it, that's why I am asking about making it easier for me to start with it. I just don't see why I have to learn a new keymapping when nearly every new application out there uses a keymapping which is rather similar to the one which I am used to. I'm not looking for emacs to simulate VS. I'm really only i…

Long post ahead. It's not really that hard...maybe Emacs isn't for you, but I was in your place just six months ago, when I started my CS studies and heard that Emacs could make your life easier. I am still a newbie, but I have started loving the editor. Here's how to learn. You need a good cheat sheet, printed and preferably taped to your monitor. You don't need the most arcane keymappings, but you'll need document…

O'Reilly's Learning Emacs.

I should just make a shortcut that recommends this book.

And one secret to emacs is to learn the hell out of the control-H commands. C-h k, C-h a, C-h f, C-h v, C-h m -- the results of those commands, and the docs that you can get to from there, really can help you figure out which key you're looking for and what a particular wierd key-combo does.

Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#22

Post by JesseAldridge »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #17
jraines wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will give it a try tonight!

If you try it and find yourself tearing your hair out in enormous handfuls, do get somebody to give you a demo before you give up. Emacs is my favorite piece of software ever, but it does take some getting used to, and some practice. My inner emacs evangelist will haunt me for saying this, but there's a supposed TextMate clone, which I believe is called "E", that the local Ruby guys were talking about. I don't know i…

The website is http://www.e-texteditor.com/. I haven't tried it.

Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#23

Post by danprager »

coffeeaddicted wrote: post #18
mechanical_fish wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can accomplish this if you want to, but please let us try to convince you that you don't want to. Learn emacs. If you do you will never need to "miss" your editor again, in your entire life. Emacs is open source, it's cross-platform, and it will never die... unless it is replaced by something so great that you will never miss it. Which may never happen. (TextMate is the best alternative I've seen in the last deca…

As you might guess I have heard similar argument a lot already. I don't doubt that switching to emacs can be worth it, that's why I am asking about making it easier for me to start with it. I just don't see why I have to learn a new keymapping when nearly every new application out there uses a keymapping which is rather similar to the one which I am used to. I'm not looking for emacs to simulate VS. I'm really only i…

cua-mode (Common User Access) gives you Ctrl+X / C / V as per Windows, and mouse highlighting, apparently without interfering with standard emacs key-bindings too much:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CUA...

Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#24

Post by fendale »

johnrob wrote: post #10
ardit33 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and what's wrong with eclipse? It does it's job well. It is an IDE not just a editor, and so far has been pretty popular for good reasons. I know it is trendy to bash java, but really what's wrong with eclipse?

For many folks, myself included, the spirit of emacs is to avoid the mouse. That particular screen looks like it was designed to be used with a mouse. I agree that eclipse is a useful tool, but I don't think it has much in common with emacs. It feels strange saying this about editors, but they embody completely different notions of how programming is done. For example, when I pull up a file in emacs, I intend to read…

You can use the ECB (emacs code browser, which is what's displayed in the left column of the first image) quite happily without the mouse - I use it quite a lot in a terminal.

Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#25

Post by fendale »

ardit33 wrote: post #6
1gor wrote: post #2

I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the mindshare in Rails developer community. 'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-specific navigation, snippet-expansion etc. features two years ago and has improved greatly since then. (See screencast: http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net for example) I've tried to follow the crowd initially and to learn TextMate, but then... why learning new set…

"I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. " -- mainly b/c most of them are noobs. (seriously). A huge amount of Rails dev. are young, and just started programming, and to them emacs is just arcane old stuff, while textmate is much more accessible, and I actually agree with that. Just trying to download emacs is a pain, hidden in between ugly pages, while look textmate's webpag…

The main reason I avoided Textmate is because its Mac specific - in my day job a Mac is not an option ... If I was going to invest the time in learning more advanced features of an editor, I wanted to be able to use it everywhere!

Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#26

Post by yters »

ardit33 wrote: post #6
1gor wrote: post #2

I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the mindshare in Rails developer community. 'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-specific navigation, snippet-expansion etc. features two years ago and has improved greatly since then. (See screencast: http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net for example) I've tried to follow the crowd initially and to learn TextMate, but then... why learning new set…

"I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support TextMate. " -- mainly b/c most of them are noobs. (seriously). A huge amount of Rails dev. are young, and just started programming, and to them emacs is just arcane old stuff, while textmate is much more accessible, and I actually agree with that. Just trying to download emacs is a pain, hidden in between ugly pages, while look textmate's webpag…

It is possible to make emacs newbie friendly. For instance, theres CUA mode, which uses standard Windows hotkeys. Maybe there should be a newbie emacs which starts out with Windows/Mac emulation variables set.

Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#28

Post by coffeeaddicted »

marvin wrote: post #20
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you might guess I have heard similar argument a lot already. I don't doubt that switching to emacs can be worth it, that's why I am asking about making it easier for me to start with it. I just don't see why I have to learn a new keymapping when nearly every new application out there uses a keymapping which is rather similar to the one which I am used to. I'm not looking for emacs to simulate VS. I'm really only i…

Long post ahead. It's not really that hard...maybe Emacs isn't for you, but I was in your place just six months ago, when I started my CS studies and heard that Emacs could make your life easier. I am still a newbie, but I have started loving the editor. Here's how to learn. You need a good cheat sheet, printed and preferably taped to your monitor. You don't need the most arcane keymappings, but you'll need document…

Well, thanks it's sort of nice to get all those advice. Just... I'm not exactly a newbie. Like mentioned above I already have worked a decade with VS (and started programming more than 20 years ago). And I'm used to those keybindings very much by now and not only have no problem with them, but I actually do like them. Really. Not the least because nearly identical bindings work in nearly every single modern application on Windows, Linux and even on most Applications on the Web.

The reason I had to leave VS behind is that it's not available for other systems and I also I didn't like VS so much anyway beside it's editor and it's debugger. I can live with smaller changes - so I have for example no problem working with kate and CodeBlocks. But they are still not as powerful as the VS editor had been. Emacs probably is - from all I heard it's even way beyond all of them.

But for all the power it might offer, for a start I would already be glad with simple familiar keymappings :-) I think people who had to work with VS and come from emacs (that stuff happens sometimes) know the feeling and therefore emacs keybindings exist for VS. I'm just looking for something the other way round. Though by now I guess that it's not yet available.

If I like the editor afterwards, well maybe I learn the original keymappings then also someday. But for a start I would just prefer it to work with the keys I like and know.

And I'm not afraid of Lisp - not the least bit ;-)

Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#29

Post by lojic »

I recently switched from vim to emacs. It's so easy to extend with elisp functions, and the buffer handling & directory editing is great. Not to mention ecb, etc. I still like vim, emacs just works better for me presently.

I did have to put in some effort to get nice fonts, but as the article states, if you use emacs 23, you can get it to look beautiful. I wrote a post about how to get it running with nice fonts:

http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on...

Re: There are many things you can say about Emacs...

#30

Post by lojic »

jrsims wrote: post #27

Can someone give me a reason to try emacs and leave my trusty vim?

Hard to say what would be a good reason for you, but I had used vim for a couple of years and really liked it. I still like its conciseness.

I became interested in emacs because of the good support for Lisp w/ slime, etc. Plus, I thought I'd prefer extending my editor with Lisp vs. vim script - I was right. I hadn't written any vim scripts while using vim, but I've quickly written many little elisp functions and bound them to convenient keys.

The dired (directory editing) feature is great. I like the way it handles buffers & bookmarks better than vim. I actually use the calendar feature.

I like how the functions you right get integrated into the help facility automatically.

The "Learning GNU Emacs" book is great.

The architecture seems better than vim.

I wasn't thrilled with all the "chording", but I'm writing new functions and making the keybindings comfortable for me.

The help facility seems superior to me. Dynamic abbreviations, window/frame control.

I'm sure there's more, but I only switched about 10 days ago :)

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