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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

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Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#11

Post by simias »

noelwelsh wrote: post #3

At some point I realised maintaining my own Emacs setup was just too much work. I've used a few Emacs setups (Prelude and Spacemacs are the ones I used for the longest) and now I use Doom: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs It's very fast and has a lot of built-in in niceties, and I find it easier to understand than Spacemacs. If you use Doom make sure to use the develop branch.

Oh man, your link led me to shackle[1] to make transient buffers behave and I have wanted that for... well for as long as I've been using Emacs really, and that's quite a long time now. I don't get how anybody is fine with Emacs' default "let's pop this buffer anywhere, possibly hiding a useful window".

[1] https://github.com/wasamasa/shackle

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#12

Post by catacombs »

noelwelsh wrote: post #3

At some point I realised maintaining my own Emacs setup was just too much work. I've used a few Emacs setups (Prelude and Spacemacs are the ones I used for the longest) and now I use Doom: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs It's very fast and has a lot of built-in in niceties, and I find it easier to understand than Spacemacs. If you use Doom make sure to use the develop branch.

I agree. Doom takes the best of emacs and vim and mashes them together nicely. I've been using it for more than a year and haven't looked back.

There is a challenge configuring your version of Doom, but the project's Discord channel is active, friendly and helpful.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#13

Post by simias »

thecryusofiran wrote: post #8
chimprich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is the first editor I've seen that has made me think maybe I'll move away from Emacs at some point. I think a fully tooled-up Emacs setup in the hands of an experienced user is still faster and more powerful but I do wonder if Emacs will be able to develop fast enough to keep up with the cutting edge.

As an Emacs user I'm mostly "afraid" of VSCode getting so popular that people will make cool tools targeting VSCode only. Like, it'll become the Chrome of text editors.

Emacs hasn't been really mainstream in quite a while and it's still actively maintained and improved upon. I'm not too worried. A small-ish skilled community is enough to keep the project going.

What's VSCode's market share anyway? Is it really that big? I've never used it personally and I had no idea it was so popular.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#15

Post by stilley2 »

I gave emacs another try earlier this year. First vanilla, but then I missed vim keybindings so I installed evil. Then I switched to spacemacs. Eventually I decided I was barely using any emacs-specific features and just went back to vim. Vim feels so much snappier. I do miss some of the more ide features (jump to definition, execute selected code) but it wasn't worth the overhead, imho.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#16

Post by purple_ducks »

chimprich wrote: post #6
purple_ducks wrote: post #4

I really feel VSCode is lining up to be the new goto IDE across multiple languages. Slightly less (directly) extensible than Emacs but still feels it can do pretty much everything that needs doing, plus way nicer & friendlier default UI.

VSCode is the first editor I've seen that has made me think maybe I'll move away from Emacs at some point. I think a fully tooled-up Emacs setup in the hands of an experienced user is still faster and more powerful but I do wonder if Emacs will be able to develop fast enough to keep up with the cutting edge.

Well hopefully with the advent & oncoming onslaught of Language Server Protocol, most IDEs can spend their time on UI/UX polish.

...Obligatory mention of Xi editor: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor ...

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#17

Post by purple_ducks »

stilley2 wrote: post #15

I gave emacs another try earlier this year. First vanilla, but then I missed vim keybindings so I installed evil. Then I switched to spacemacs. Eventually I decided I was barely using any emacs-specific features and just went back to vim. Vim feels so much snappier. I do miss some of the more ide features (jump to definition, execute selected code) but it wasn't worth the overhead, imho.

If there's one thing I will always be grateful to emacs for; it will be changing Caps Lock -> Ctrl

Life changing.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#18

Post by Wildgoose »

I have yet to encounter anything that can match the sheer flexibility of Emacs.

For example I am currently using Org mode to write some documentation complete with hyper-links, tables, foot notes and the option to export the results as LaTeX, HTML, Open-Office, and so on with just a few keypresses.

It's not just an editor, or an IDE, or even a windowing system - it is a cross-platform computing environment that can be fashioned to exactly suit whatever purpose you require.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#19

Post by cjohansson »

kgwxd wrote: post #10
purple_ducks wrote: post #4

I really feel VSCode is lining up to be the new goto IDE across multiple languages. Slightly less (directly) extensible than Emacs but still feels it can do pretty much everything that needs doing, plus way nicer & friendlier default UI.

RIP battery though.

Yeah Visual Studio Code drains battery, CPU and memory. Emacs is extremely resource-efficient, it's probably around thousand times more optimized than Visual Studio Code

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#20

Post by kryptiskt »

simias wrote: post #13
thecryusofiran wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Emacs user I'm mostly "afraid" of VSCode getting so popular that people will make cool tools targeting VSCode only. Like, it'll become the Chrome of text editors.

Emacs hasn't been really mainstream in quite a while and it's still actively maintained and improved upon. I'm not too worried. A small-ish skilled community is enough to keep the project going. What's VSCode's market share anyway? Is it really that big? I've never used it personally and I had no idea it was so popular.

It has become really popular: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-m...
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