Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Emacs 26.1 released

lists.gnu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 105 posts

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#41

Post by pmoriarty »

mayankkaizen wrote: post #32

I am not a programmer but have been learning programming since last 2 years. Only yesterday, I installed emacs and spent half an hour on it. Even opened a tutorial to learn the basics. But I got irritated pretty soon and gave it up. Now I am thinking about people who use it like a pro. How the hell did they master this beast?

"How the hell did they master this beast?"

I came to Emacs from decades of using vim. I installed evil-mode, and then spent about 10 hours a day for about 3 months learning more, installing packages, and tweaking my config until it matched and exceeded what I had in vim.

This is a never-ending process.. and now, about 5 years later, I'm still learning and still tweaking (though my config has been mostly stable for a long time).

I wouldn't necessarily recommend Emacs to someone who's not willing to put in the time and effort to make it in to the editor they need... though they don't necessarily have to spend as much time or effort on it as I have. Everybody has different needs.

Fortunately we live in an age of plentiful, easy to get information, so if you are interested then learning more is just a few clicks away. I'd recommend joining #emacs on the FreeNode IRC network, r/emacs on Reddit, and the Emacs StackExchange. The people there can give you lots of pointers and detailed help when you need it.

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#42

Post by TeMPOraL »

nanna wrote: post #36
mayankkaizen wrote: post #32

I am not a programmer but have been learning programming since last 2 years. Only yesterday, I installed emacs and spent half an hour on it. Even opened a tutorial to learn the basics. But I got irritated pretty soon and gave it up. Now I am thinking about people who use it like a pro. How the hell did they master this beast?

I'm not a programmer but I have dabbled in code for a while. Emacs honestly made me love using my computer again. Give yourself a full day for the tutorial and then try to stick to it even though for a while you will be slower and clumsier at everything. This will pay off massively.[0] Make it part of your routine. Apart from coding in it, use it for email (mu4e/offlineimap), for git (magit), as a local and remote fi…

I'd skip e-mail at the beginning, because it can be a real pain to set up (not necessarily on Emacs end - but the whole offlineimap thing, credentials, etc.). But I very much recommend magit - if you're using git, it'll blow your mind.

https://magit.vc/

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#43

Post by kurlberg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #31
krylon wrote: post #30

Completely OT, but I remember when building Emacs was like "there goes my afternoon". On my current desktop (which is kind of snazzy, I admit), it takes less than 30 seconds wall clock time. This is one aspect of The Future(tm) I definitely appreciate. ;-)

You have one mother of a desktop there. Or, you're not doing a clean build :). For me, full clean make takes AFAIR something like 10 to 20 minutes. i5-2400, 12GB RAM, SSD drive. Still, totally worth it :). I've been running Emacs 26 for 2 months now.

You are compiling it with "make -j 8" (or -j 4), right?

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#44

Post by TeMPOraL »

reitanqild wrote: post #37
jlouis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steeep learning curve. Baby steps and don't give up. Make judgement after a month or two. Key point is you can program it to do what you prefer.

Also: not for everyone. I keep hearing people mentioning vim and emacs but I have a strong suspicion that if people spent the same time that they now spend learning and customizing vim and emacs learning a more modern IDE or advanced editor they'd be even more effective (except when they need to edit over ssh). Personally I use Visual Studio Code all day now. But I've also been happy with Netbeans, IntelliJ, eclipse…

> if people spent the same time that they now spend learning and customizing vim and emacs learning a more modern IDE or advanced editor they'd be even more effective (except when they need to edit over ssh)

Or except if they need to blog. Or manage repositories. Or manage tasks. Or read e-mail. Or...

The thing with Emacs is that it offers you an universal, consistent interface for everything text. That includes code, but also prose, notes, tasks, repositories, file systems, etc. The interface itself is also hugely extensible (with lots of packages readily available through built-in package manager), and all that extensibility works for everything.

IMO, spending more time in a typical IDE will make you a more effective programmer. But it doesn't extend beyond programming. When you do something else, you have to switch tools. In this way, spending time on Emacs has a better payoff, because the scope is both deeper and broader.

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#45

Post by dmortin »

mayankkaizen wrote: post #32

I am not a programmer but have been learning programming since last 2 years. Only yesterday, I installed emacs and spent half an hour on it. Even opened a tutorial to learn the basics. But I got irritated pretty soon and gave it up. Now I am thinking about people who use it like a pro. How the hell did they master this beast?

Emacs and other editors are like cars. Some like small cars, some others like fast cars or foreign cars, etc.

Use what you like the best.

I use Emacs for some tasks, but for example, for Android development I use Android Studio, because that is more suitable for the task.

(BTW, default Emacs is very foreign. I wouldn't use that. It takes a while until one configures Emacs to one's own taste.)

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#46

Post by da4c30ff »

cactuseater wrote: post #22
da4c30ff wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also better look and feel[1] for Mac (including dark mode) users with (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-transparent-titlebar . t)) (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-appearance . dark)) [1]: https://imgur.com/aRdxPk0

Wow, just tried it out and it looks really good. What theme are you using? (ref. screenshot)

It's doom-nord from the doom-themes package.

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#49

Post by avar »

LukeShu wrote: post #9
avar wrote: post #4

For those unfamiliar with GNU Emacs version numbers, they always start at X.1, not X.0, so this is the first major release after 25.1 released in September 2016.

Lest someone misread this and think that Emacs hasn't had an update in 2 years: That says "major release". The previous release was the 25.3 minor release in September 2017.

And least anyone misunderstand your comment and misses the big picture, those are all in principle minor bugfix (although with some new features).

The release you're referring to has maybe 20 lines of non-autogenerated code changed, and was "an emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in Emacs".

By and large new Emacs features only get released every 2-4 years. If you write any non-trivial Emacs code you're only targeting the major releases, and if you're contributing to Emacs you can expect other users to have your feature in the in their hands by the time your newborn is old enough to walk around and argue with you.

It's one of the remaining free software projects that really takes its time with releases.

1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/history.html

Re: Emacs 26.1 released

#50

Post by harrygeez »

da4c30ff wrote: post #19
deng wrote: post #7

A few more (personal) highlights from the release: * New minor mode 'pixel-scroll-mode' provides smooth pixel-level scrolling. * The networking code has been reworked so that it's more asynchronous than it was (DNS resolution and TLS negotiation do not block Emacs main thread). * Emacs no longer prompts about editing a changed file when the file's content is unchanged. Instead of only checking the modification time,…

Also better look and feel[1] for Mac (including dark mode) users with (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-transparent-titlebar . t)) (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-appearance . dark)) [1]: https://imgur.com/aRdxPk0

Did you do anything to increase your modeline's height?
Post reply on HN