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A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

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

#51

personally this article would work way better for me with a set of animated gifs instead of turning into a wall of text. And I'd love to see his workflows for what he puts in his different orgs to help with context switching. as I get more senior I'm switching tasks even more and more.

Author of blog post here. I take your point on being more accessible, and you're right about the wall of text. I didn't think anyone would care about my little paen to emacs, and this is one evening's work from a couple years ago.

Regarding organization, I don't have much of a system, other than the filesystem under ~/org with a handful of directories. Works just fine for me. It's more about not-caring than caring, regarding organization of information. We really shouldn't have to organize this stuff. Emacs + org-mode allows me to not care. I love that.

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

#52
I'm mostly a C developer that spend most of my time inside Emacs.

I use ivy-mode instead of ido-mode, and avy instead of ace-jump. My setup includes yasnippet, flycheck, company, and ggtags mostly.

I have issues using the number keys. So I use a custom vi like mode, but heavily customized: Pressing spacebar results in "_" ("-" in #include), but intelligently. Double space results in "->", ".." results in (|) (where | is the cursor or point) and ",," results in "=".

Pressing spacebar after "(" results in "&", then "*" (also "!" if just after "if" or "while"). And my capslock key is just another control key.

All the examples above are to be assumed without quotes.

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

#54

The pyramids were built with emacs. Everything else is drywall to me now. More work? Yes. Worth it though. I like to say gnu+emacs is my OS, and linux is simply my kernel. Org-mode alone would be worth it.

Emacs may need to be renamed to stEmacs, sixteen megs and constantly swapping. It's no longer 8 megs. :(

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

#55

Emacs is like Chinese to me, and truthfully to most developers I know. Is there a gentle intro somewhere? Most of what I've seen is just people throwing out package names with no real explanation.

If you try it, swap your caps lock and CTRL keys. It will make it much easier to use.

Also have a look at this blog post. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

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

#56
It took me a few years to undertand this, but Emacs is not really a text editor. It is a development and runtime environment for a programming language that is especially useful for building text editors - and more generally, text-related, interactive programs -, and it happens to come bundled with a variety of such programs. But there are many, many more to discover out there on the Internet. In fact, in recent versions, this, too has gotten easier, since Emacs now comes with a package manager. But it can also be an IRC client, an audio player, a web browser, a database frontend, ... the possibilities are practically endless.

And this is why I love Emacs. There are other editors out there that are good, too. Very good. But to me, Emacs takes the prize because it is so much more than an editor.

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

#57
post #52

I'm mostly a C developer that spend most of my time inside Emacs. I use ivy-mode instead of ido-mode, and avy instead of ace-jump. My setup includes yasnippet, flycheck, company, and ggtags mostly. I have issues using the number keys. So I use a custom vi like mode, but heavily customized: Pressing spacebar results in "_" ("-" in #include), but intelligently. Double space results in "->", ".." results in (|) (where |…

Just curious.. How do you type-in whitespace?

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

#58
post #57
post #52

I'm mostly a C developer that spend most of my time inside Emacs. I use ivy-mode instead of ido-mode, and avy instead of ace-jump. My setup includes yasnippet, flycheck, company, and ggtags mostly. I have issues using the number keys. So I use a custom vi like mode, but heavily customized: Pressing spacebar results in "_" ("-" in #include), but intelligently. Double space results in "->", ".." results in (|) (where |…

Just curious.. How do you type-in whitespace?

spacebar results in "_" only when the cursor is immediately after [a-zA-Z0-9_]. And if I really need space, I have Shift-Space. Also, pressing spacebar after a keyword (like char, int, if, else, etc) results in real space.

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

#60
post #56

It took me a few years to undertand this, but Emacs is not really a text editor. It is a development and runtime environment for a programming language that is especially useful for building text editors - and more generally, text-related, interactive programs -, and it happens to come bundled with a variety of such programs. But there are many, many more to discover out there on the Internet. In fact, in recent vers…

Always seemed to me less a text editor and more the intended user interface after rms and his gang of misfit lads finished herding up all the daemons into the eventual (past my expiration date) GNU/HURD. Turns out it was a Lisp machine all along!

That said, I too have developed a renewed appreciation for Emacs these past few years.

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