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'Using Emacs' Series

cestlaz.github.io

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Re: 'Using Emacs' Series

#41

Post by jahnu »

girishso wrote: post #40
lottin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, although it's also true that vanilla Emacs is quite spartan and has many questionable defaults. In my opinion it would be much better if plain Emacs provided a nicer user experience out of the box, thus reducing the need for customisation and external packages which is a big barrier to entry for new users.

http://spacemacs.org/ solves this exact problem. It's a set of packages, with consistent UX.

The problem I have with Spacemacs is that it's almost too fancy. Even as a moderately experienced Emacs user I found the defaults overwhelming. As an example, it displays lots of incomprehensible to the new user information on the bottom that changes with file type. Compare that with ye olde Emacs starter kit, which just fixed up some basic key bindings and gave it a more modern colour scheme.

Personally I find that a better starting point.

Re: 'Using Emacs' Series

#42

Post by azangru »

Hey, has any of you guys been using emacs for modern front-end development? I’ve been looking for video tutorials (or at least for demos) on this subject, but could not find anything useful and practical. How is emacs’ support of JSX? Of typescript and TSX? Of flow? Of CSS in JS? Of eslint? Does it keep up with the crazy speed frontend development is changing, or has it remained far behind (being used mostly for the basic tasks that are shown in the video on web-mode in the 'Using Emacs' series)? What's your experience?

Re: 'Using Emacs' Series

#43

Post by gumby »

S4M wrote: post #9
gumby wrote: post #7

I am a little concerned you start with package repository and then org mode. Emacs is at heart a simple, modeless editor. With c-[fbpns] and c-x c-[fa] you can immediately, if laboriously, do anything. Every new thing you learn incrementally speeds you up.

> c-x c-[fa] You mean c-x c-[fs], right? I'm by no mean an emacs expert although I've been using it for 6 years now, and when I read your comment I thought "Wow, c-x c-a is a functionality? How comes I have never used that?", so I tried that in emacs but it's not mapped to anything. Apart from that, I fully agree with your comment.

Yes, it's a typo (but I can't edit my post anymore). c-x c-f and c-x c-s

Re: 'Using Emacs' Series

#44

Post by gumby »

omaranto wrote: post #14
gumby wrote: post #7

I am a little concerned you start with package repository and then org mode. Emacs is at heart a simple, modeless editor. With c-[fbpns] and c-x c-[fa] you can immediately, if laboriously, do anything. Every new thing you learn incrementally speeds you up.

I don't think Emacs has been modeless in many, many years. I read that already in 1978 Emacs buffers could be used to edit files, of course, but also read email, run a shell, show a list of compilation errors linked to source locations, etc. Each of those is a completely different mode of operation with different keybindings (and different meaning for keybindings that happened to be shared).

"Modeless" is used as a term of art here: when entering text there is no difference between entering and editing (as opposed to, say, vi which separates editing and navigation from entry). Word and TextEdit are modeless editors.

What Emacs calls "modes" have indeed been around for a long time; I started using Emacs in 1978 as it happens and did use it to read my mail. However ITS didn't have the concept of "shell" (the command entry system was also the debugger!) nor of "inferior" processes so you would exit EMACS to compile or run other programs.

Re: 'Using Emacs' Series

#45

Post by luck_fenovo »

jahnu wrote: post #41
girishso wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://spacemacs.org/ solves this exact problem. It's a set of packages, with consistent UX.

The problem I have with Spacemacs is that it's almost too fancy. Even as a moderately experienced Emacs user I found the defaults overwhelming. As an example, it displays lots of incomprehensible to the new user information on the bottom that changes with file type. Compare that with ye olde Emacs starter kit, which just fixed up some basic key bindings and gave it a more modern colour scheme. Personally I find that…

> Even as a moderately experienced Emacs user I found the defaults overwhelming.

I agree. There is a lot of "magic" going on, and it doesn't help that Spacemacs is a lot slower and less stable than my less-intensive personal customization.

Of course, that's the problem with any significant starter kit. As a new user, now you don't just have to learn emacs, you have to learn emacs + whatever heavy modifications they've done to emacs.

Re: 'Using Emacs' Series

#46

Post by gumby »

lottin wrote: post #15
gumby wrote: post #7

I am a little concerned you start with package repository and then org mode. Emacs is at heart a simple, modeless editor. With c-[fbpns] and c-x c-[fa] you can immediately, if laboriously, do anything. Every new thing you learn incrementally speeds you up.

Agreed, although it's also true that vanilla Emacs is quite spartan and has many questionable defaults. In my opinion it would be much better if plain Emacs provided a nicer user experience out of the box, thus reducing the need for customisation and external packages which is a big barrier to entry for new users.

FWIW my .emacs file is less than two dozen lines long and I spend most of my day in it. The only external package it loads is magit

Re: 'Using Emacs' Series

#48

Post by frumiousirc »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #10
rafiei wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You shouldn't be updating your `.gitignore` continuously. You need to ignore everything and explicitly define exceptions e.g. * !.gitignore !init.el 2. The reason I prefer ~/.emacs.d/ is that I have it in a git repo and on every system, I'll just clone the repo and soft link it in the home directory. This way, I have only one directory inside home about emacs within which my files are explicitly separated and trac…

I solve this issue by using my own config directory; this way I soft-link two things from my dotfiles repo: - .emacs - which defines my config dir and loads everything in there - my own config dir (called .emacs.conf), in which I have lots of .el files with specific configurations Emacs packages still write by default to .emacs.d, and this way I don't have to care about any of that when moving between machines, becau…

I used to do it that way. I've switched to `vcsh` to let me keep various files directly in my ~/ directory in various different git repos without needing a ~/.git/ marking the whole thing as a working directory.

Re: 'Using Emacs' Series

#50

Post by wlkr »

azangru wrote: post #42

Hey, has any of you guys been using emacs for modern front-end development? I’ve been looking for video tutorials (or at least for demos) on this subject, but could not find anything useful and practical. How is emacs’ support of JSX? Of typescript and TSX? Of flow? Of CSS in JS? Of eslint? Does it keep up with the crazy speed frontend development is changing, or has it remained far behind (being used mostly for the…

I'm not a professional front end developer but recently completed some projects in TypeScript. I found it very painless to get set up on Emacs with Tide [0] and it was a pleasure to use. I also use web-mode [1] for templates which adds some bonus features over the existing HMTL editing mode.

[0]: https://github.com/ananthakumaran/tide

[1]: https://github.com/fxbois/web-mode

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