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Frontmacs

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Re: Frontmacs

#41

Post by gilmi »

andanotherthing wrote: post #5
forvelin wrote: post #2

Some screenshots could be nice, probably most people are not tend to try it out until they see a screenshot. Anyway, I am a simple man. I see people using Emacs and I become happy.

Agree! I am not a developer or an overly technical person and I recently started using Emacs because of an article here (using ido and org mode). I like it but I'm not fluent enough, or know enough of what it does to switch to it for everyday tasks - but there's a beauty in navigating file systems, creating files, switching windows all with your keyboard. Does anyone know if you can actually write code on Emacs, like…

> Does anyone know if you can ... on Emacs?

Yes.

Re: Frontmacs

#42

Post by pksadiq »

pdkl95 wrote: post #12

(edit: reposted this comment in their bug tracker) You might want to warn people that this enables auto-saving buffers on many buffer/frame events that are usually considered safe. https://github.com/thefrontside/frontmacs/blob/master/frontm... (defadvice switch-to-buffer (before save-buffer-now activate) (when buffer-file-name (save-buffer))) ; the same defadvice is applied to: ; other-window ; windmove-{up,down,lef…

> (defadvice ...

For your information, defadvice is deprecated[0]. Alternatives like advice-add can be used instead.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Po...

Re: Frontmacs

#43

Post by cup-of-tea »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #37
cup-of-tea wrote: post #21

I have mixed feelings about emacs starter kits. On the one hand I'm always happy that more people might discover emacs. It's quite simply the most powerful text editor out there. Hands down. I could not imagine using a computer seriously without emacs. On the other hand, the power of emacs comes from the fact that it's essentially a lisp interpreter which is good at doing text editor stuff. If you abstract this away…

I use Spacemacs but it isn't always perfect and if Spacemacs doesn't wind up working I end up just using vanilla emacs because MELPA is a dice roll whether it will work or not every single time for me, usually regardless of OS. I just know enough basics of emacs to edit code, but I wish adding packages didn't involve so many hoops such as having to add a repository that everyone already goes out of their way to add t…

I put melpa in my init file and never thought about it again. You don't need to keep adding it every time.

For me, my emacs config is my text editor, and it works out of the box on any system I install it to. Emacs is often very easy to install, but if I'm going to spend significant time on a machine I'll build it myself, and then my config is a simple git clone away and that's it. I'm working in an exact copy of my own personal text editor that I've built up over many years.

My instances of emacs also stay running for weeks at a time. I'll edit the config while it's running. If it's useful I'll commit it and pull it to other instances and run the modifications on them while they're running. It's a completely different way to work than most people are used to and it's liberating.

Re: Frontmacs

#44

Post by ajarmst »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #21

I have mixed feelings about emacs starter kits. On the one hand I'm always happy that more people might discover emacs. It's quite simply the most powerful text editor out there. Hands down. I could not imagine using a computer seriously without emacs. On the other hand, the power of emacs comes from the fact that it's essentially a lisp interpreter which is good at doing text editor stuff. If you abstract this away…

I had similar feelings, but I've actually been using (an admittedly, somwhat tweaked version of) Batsov's Prelude for a couple of years now. It pulls in a lot of exceptional packages with sensible defaults (without trying to make it stop being Emacs, a common fault of such kits) and has very good facilities for customization and managing things like package loading order.

Re: Frontmacs

#45

Post by dkersten »

jeremyjh wrote: post #34
maaaats wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a general fileditor, it may be scary, yes. But I have this in IntelliJ and love it. Saving is just a useless keystroke for most of my development time. Things are in VCS, and if not, I can also use local history to roll back.

Local history is the feature that makes this practical. Without it, there will be blood spilled.

I don’t agree. I used IntelliJ for work for the past two years and I’ve never had any problems with auto saving (in fact, I find it quite convenient, although muscle memory means I still do :w with my vim bindings) and I’ve never seen ever used the local history feature.

Re: Frontmacs

#46

Post by emidln »

fergie wrote: post #16
andrewem wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what they mean is it's fully set up, so that if you've never used Emacs and you start using it, you won't encounter the situation where something stinks and your friend who's an experienced Emacs user says "oh, you need to customize such and such." So, "awesome by default" rather than "awesome after many hours of learning about and applying configuration changes." (I have no idea whether what they've done wou…

I think (and I say this with love) that any sane person who starts using emacs will find it infuriating- its part of the appeal.

That wasn't my experience with Spacemacs. If it was infuriating to use, I would have immediately gone back to my well-oiled .vimrc.

Re: Frontmacs

#47

Post by mroll »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #21

I have mixed feelings about emacs starter kits. On the one hand I'm always happy that more people might discover emacs. It's quite simply the most powerful text editor out there. Hands down. I could not imagine using a computer seriously without emacs. On the other hand, the power of emacs comes from the fact that it's essentially a lisp interpreter which is good at doing text editor stuff. If you abstract this away…

are your configs anywhere online? I'd love to read them.

Re: Frontmacs

#48

Post by wyuenho »

This is very similar to what I have configured in my .emacs[1] and custom.el[2]. I like that this project is minimalist. If I were to start using emacs 2 years ago, I'd probably start with this.

A slight gripe I have with Frontmacs is everything is loaded eagerly on startup. I'd imagine this massively increases start up time given how heavy weight some of the packages are (yasnippet, magit, tide). I also find issues with it calling itself awesome without integrating with any emacs window management package.

Most config in emacs these days is just installing a couple of packages and toggling on and off a couple customizable variables, and occasionally a couple of `add-hook` calls. These are all low hanging fruits since packages became an official thing in Emacs. The most annoying and non-obvious part of Emacs is how it manages windows. To tame the totally insane default window management system, you pretty much have to shop for a layout manager of some sort, and in order to do that, you have to know what Emacs is doing under the hood. That's hard and I wish more of these Emacs distros would come integrated with some sane window management package.

I used to just rely on popwin and desktop mode mainly, and used golden-ratio and centered-window-mode for a while. Recently I've completely ripped them out of my config and replaced them with [purpose](https://github.com/bmag/emacs-purpose) and [perspective](https://github.com/nex3/perspective-el). I'm loving them so far, others seem to like e2wm, tile, rotate and others.

[1]: https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs [2]: https://github.com/wyuenho/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/cus...

Re: Frontmacs

#49

Post by saltycraig »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #21

I have mixed feelings about emacs starter kits. On the one hand I'm always happy that more people might discover emacs. It's quite simply the most powerful text editor out there. Hands down. I could not imagine using a computer seriously without emacs. On the other hand, the power of emacs comes from the fact that it's essentially a lisp interpreter which is good at doing text editor stuff. If you abstract this away…

I feel the same way, but I feel like once you start learning Emacs, you reach a point (see 'emacs bankruptcy') where you just want to know what every single line of elisp is doing and start from vanilla.

I've been down the path of package managers, starter kits, etc., which can be good learning tools, but ultimately after a few years of using Emacs, you tend to abandon them for simpler solutions. I used to have thousands on lines in multiple org-files, but now I'm down to a single init.el file and keep it fairly simple.

I code in python mainly so I pull down elpy and tune it to my needs. Check it out: https://github.com/saltycraig/emacs.d

Re: Frontmacs

#50

Post by jimyl »

bhrgunatha wrote: post #15
forvelin wrote: post #2

Some screenshots could be nice, probably most people are not tend to try it out until they see a screenshot. Anyway, I am a simple man. I see people using Emacs and I become happy.

I will (almost certainly) never switch from my current configuration to use any of these all-in-one package bundles, but I do like looking through them for ideas.

Yes, me too. I can always learn something new by reading others' configs.
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