51–60 of 105 posts
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 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?
Patience, mostly. Emacs takes a very big up-front investment, but it pays off in the long run.
> I got irritated pretty soon and gave it up
Yeah, that was my first experience, too. ;-) Don't rush yourself. Come back every couple of months and give it another try. Work your way through the tutorial, and if you feel like it's just too hard, don't listen to yourself. You will be amazed at what you can achieve on determination and persistence.
Also, there are IRC channels and discussion boards waiting for your questions. Do not be afraid to ask "stupid" questions. More likely than not, people will be happy to help you.
Last but not least, emacs comes with pretty good documentation. Learning how to to use emacs' online documentation, both the texinfo manual and the online help, can get you surprisingly far.
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 now using Emacs for everything: shell, git, email, file browser, window manager, IRC, slack, as a pdf reader, ... oh, and to edit text files.
My advice is to keep using it. When you notice that something is really weird, run `M-x package-list-packages` to see if someone has already written a package to change the weird behaviour. Ask questions on emacs.stackexchange.com, but also ask Emacs; use C-h to learn about why things are the way they are.
If you don't understand why people love Emacs, consider reading this:
https://elephly.net/posts/2016-02-14-ilovefs-emacs.html
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?
It's not you. The defaults are pretty hostile, in my opinion. It took me three attempts over many years to fall in love with Emacs. I'm now using Emacs for everything: shell, git, email, file browser, window manager, IRC, slack, as a pdf reader, ... oh, and to edit text files. My advice is to keep using it. When you notice that something is really weird, run `M-x package-list-packages` to see if someone has already w…
They're mostly old. So I guess they might be hostile to the young. I actually dislike some of the newer things like transient-mark-mode. I don't want all of that highlighting just because I have a selection region, and was quick to disable it when they enabled it to make it more "modern":
http://inversethought.com/hg/dotemacs/file/f029c55c6221/dote...
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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?
Thanks!
For those more familiar with emacs; what happened with the idea of moving to guile scheme? Is it done? Abandoned?
It is not an idea that is supported by the whole Emacs community. It is an idea that is supported by the Guile community and RMS. Work has been done to make Guile Emacs work, but it is still slow (as it doesn't seem to compile elisp before running it) and somewhat experimental. It really just needs someone to make it work more reliably and then demonstrate that it is a desirable thing not just in theory but in practi…
One problem is portability, Emacs Guile means alienating Windows users. Guile does not run on Windows.
As it is now, I can use same Emacs on my home Mac system, on my work Windows 10 computer and on various Linux servers.
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.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I similarly encourage any Mac users who are serious about emacs to use Mitsuharu Yamamoto's fork, which adds several usability improvements that RMS refuses to endorse and is just generally a better experience on Mac. Mainline GNU Emacs feels clunky and obsolete by comparison.
What are the improvements?
Skimming the readme, I see that it's almost entirely mac specific and mostly UX. I can't say they are completely useless but nothing really vital, except the features inherited from Carbon, which seem useful (I really like the concept of AppleScript, i.e. all programs responding to a single programming interface; I guess DBus is supposed to do sth. similar on FreeDesktop, no?).
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 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?
A couple years later our vi friend expressed interest and did the same thing. His monitor was littered with little post-it notes until the muscle memory kicked in.
You might be thinking, is it really worth my time to learn something esoteric like Emacs, but there are many nice perks once it's been learned. It turns out the default keybindings in readline (and every program that uses readline) are Emacs keys, so it's a exciting feeling realizing you just hit C-t in some random program and it transposed the characters like you wanted. macOS also has many Emacs keybindings in the default text field (where they don't conflict with standard mac keys).