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A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

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101–110 of 180 posts

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

#101

It is difficult to even describe a productive hand tuned to fit the individual Emails setup compared to standard. Here are some of my favorite Emacs things: Helm + Projectile. Helm will fuzzy complete almost anything in Emacs. Projectile is project management. Together get to any Git repo and file there in very quick. Helm is an option to compare to IDO. I rarely use IDO due to Helm. Magit, widely regarded as a good…

Magit is really amazing. Recently learned that it optionally supports saving changes to git when saving a file or doing some destructive git operation, by using the magit-wip modes. Makes git much safer. https://magit.vc/manual/magit/Wip-Modes.html

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

#102

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, r…

In case you did not know about this tool: https://asciinema.org/ is a very pretty way to create gif-like presentations from terminal sessions.

No affiliation, I just think it's really neat.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the definition that I learned: a white elephant is an unnecessary luxury with limited utility that you can't obtain and maintain unless you're pretty far from being in need. That's what I meant here.

The alleged origin is a king who gave them as gifts, knowing they had no practical use and hoping the cost of feeding and caring for them would bankrupt the recipients.

From Thailand. Elephants are sacred there, especially white elephants. So if someone gave you a white elephant you could not refuse or get rid of it without causing offense.

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

#105
post #89
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magit is the only thing that allows me to make enough sense of git to use it.

Have you tried tig? http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/ Could not use git without it anymore.

tig supports only a small subset of the magit functionality.

It's useful if you don't have an emacs at hand and quickly want to explore a git repository, but that's about it.

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

However nowadays IDE like Intellij Ultimate give good to best in class support for basically all mainstream languages. I'm an emacs user (in case it matters).

Some IDEs may offer better language-specific features than the community-supported emacs modes, however I haven't found an IDE that actually does the editing (and displaying) of text as well as emacs.

In particular all the little modes that try to emulate emacs functionality (simple things like rainbow-delimiters or slightly more complex things like undo-tree-mode) are always broken in subtle ways in the "modern" applications. Not to mention all the text navigation features: ace-jump & friends, helm-swoop, etc...!

I guess a large part of this is that emacs has had 40 years to mature and that it was originally written at a time where software was judged on different criteria than it is today.

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

#107
post #70

I only really enjoyed Emacs once I learned some ELisp (I think I had tried is 2 or 3 times before that). Honestly I find these guides pretty useless b/c you can copy configs and hack together something without really understanding what you're doing but you'll eventually end up extremely frustrated and unable to work around the quirks and conflicts between configurations. I know the people behind Emacs like to think t…

It's true that you MUST learn Elisp to use Emacs effectively. That said, the thing with Lisp is it's a pretty simple language, and once you know one Lisp dialect learning another one isn't a big deal. As far as Elisp is concerned, you don't need to learn a vast library either. Most of the time you'll be setting variables, hooks and occasionally writing some small function.

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

#108
post #77

> ... I also set Emacs to full screen. I'd like to do this on Windows as well, but Windows and Emacs don't really love each other and it always ends up in some wonky state when I try this (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(fullscreen . maximized)) Seems to work fine for me https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/3008

I use a nice plugin called maxframe, which apart from resizing the frame after a while and not when it's first displayed is not "wonky". I have yet to try multiple frames on multiple screens.

Salient code:

(defun w32-maximize-frame () "Maximize the current frame (windows only)" (interactive) (w32-send-sys-command 61488))

(defun w32-restore-frame () "Restore a minimized/maximized frame (windows only)" (interactive) (w32-send-sys-command 61728))

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

#109

If you write a small pre-processor (simple to do) you can store your emacs configuration file in a markdown file - allowing you to document all the settings neatly. As I was reading this piece I was imagining that is what the author had done, as it is what I did too: https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md

Author here. I didn't, but I might now. Dig this.

"Obviously" the code is in init.el in the same directory.

But I'm sure there are similar implementations out there you could copy from too.

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