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A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

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Re: A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

#3

Post by nextos »

The first time I got introduced to Emacs, I hated it. Who would like to read email inside a text editor with non-standard keybindings?

I got it all wrong. It's not an editor, it's a text-mode virtual Lisp machine.

The Emacs ecosystem has matured a lot lately. It has two applications I adore. Org, something impossible to describe in a few words, and Magit, the perfect Git porcelain.

Plus it has 3 pretty darn good email clients (Notmuch, Gnus and Mu4e). And some great extras: Dired, Calc, Eshell, Erc, PDF Tools...

Everything is really well integrated. And if something doesn't suit your needs, changing it is a few ELisp lines away.

My computer setup has become very simple: a tiling WM (XMonad), Emacs, Firefox, and a terminal (Urxvt).

Re: A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

#7

Post by xfer »

_m8fo wrote: post #4

When I tried emacs a few years ago I found the learning curve to be far more steep than vim at the time. After trying out https://vim-adventures.com/ (no affiliation, just thought it was useful) I learned it in about 15 minutes. Is there any equivalent for emacs? I'd love to get it another shot.

If you know vim keybindings you can already use emacs with evil. Just install spacemacs and off you go.

Re: A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

#8

Post by pmoriarty »

xfer wrote: post #7
_m8fo wrote: post #4

When I tried emacs a few years ago I found the learning curve to be far more steep than vim at the time. After trying out https://vim-adventures.com/ (no affiliation, just thought it was useful) I learned it in about 15 minutes. Is there any equivalent for emacs? I'd love to get it another shot.

If you know vim keybindings you can already use emacs with evil. Just install spacemacs and off you go.

To be fair, evil and spacemacs will only get you vim-like keybindings (which is all that vim-adventures gives you too), but there's a lot more to both editors than just keybindings.

There's even more to emacs than to vim, if you start using emacs for more than just editing, doing things that have no equivalent in vim (like reading email, browsing the web, using IRC, or reading RSS news feeds, etc). For every one of these extra things, there's new stuff to learn, and more time to spend configuring emacs first to just work with those things and then to customize it the way you like.

For me the time investment is well worth it, but there's no denying that it takes a lot of time. A lot of time.

Re: A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

#10

Post by dizzystar »

nextos wrote: post #3

The first time I got introduced to Emacs, I hated it. Who would like to read email inside a text editor with non-standard keybindings? I got it all wrong. It's not an editor, it's a text-mode virtual Lisp machine. The Emacs ecosystem has matured a lot lately. It has two applications I adore. Org, something impossible to describe in a few words, and Magit, the perfect Git porcelain. Plus it has 3 pretty darn good emai…

I also hated emacs when I first tried it, but once I started moving past my first programming language, I found myself sifting 30 IDEs and decided to give it an honest shot.

I don't use it for much else than programming, so my must-haves are for that purpose. Just the various built-in interpreters make it worth the price of learning.

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