Live data from Hacker News

Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

jesshamrick.com

31–40 of 262 posts

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

#32

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 b…

Emacs is an OS that lacks a decent text editor (the joke is as old as Emacs).

Not funny. Evil mode was released in 2013.

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

#33
There is a strange editing mode that I stumbled on by myself, which I can do in Emacs.

Suppose I am editing a huge file, and need to make change in some other part without necessarily forgetting where I am. I just open a new buffer for the same file, edit the desired area, and close the new buffer. I have the old position restored automatically in the old buffer. Of course, this can be done to arbitrary number of levels.

This is because Emacs separates the concept of buffer and the file it visits. This is a basic concept, but its use in the above manner is not something I have explicitly seen mentioned.

Do other editors (vi, eclipse, sublime) have similar features?

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

#34

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 b…

How much time have you invested?

Not OP. But if you are asking whether it is not possible for a person to just sit down and start typing, surely time spent to get such great results is an investment.

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

#35

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.

What part of your setup was taking a lot of time to maintain ? I find that once I configured something I rarely need to change it. There are some packages that tend to break existing configurations when updated, but that is not something that I do regularly.

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

#36

About four months ago I moved from VS Code to Spacemacs and it has been an extremely rewarding experience. Anyone who is afraid of Emacs or Vim should give it a try. I've heard good things about Doom and Prelude as well.

Could you give us a few pointer on how you prefer working with Spacemacs rather than with VS Code?

I've tried Vim a few times but got turned off by the slow process of learning the multiple keyboard shortcuts to do a simple task.

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

#37
post #33

There is a strange editing mode that I stumbled on by myself, which I can do in Emacs. Suppose I am editing a huge file, and need to make change in some other part without necessarily forgetting where I am. I just open a new buffer for the same file, edit the desired area, and close the new buffer. I have the old position restored automatically in the old buffer. Of course, this can be done to arbitrary number of lev…

Sublime definitely does, you can open a new "view" into the same file.

I imagine the vi solution (if it doesn't support that) would be marks.

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

#38
post #33

There is a strange editing mode that I stumbled on by myself, which I can do in Emacs. Suppose I am editing a huge file, and need to make change in some other part without necessarily forgetting where I am. I just open a new buffer for the same file, edit the desired area, and close the new buffer. I have the old position restored automatically in the old buffer. Of course, this can be done to arbitrary number of lev…

Exact same thing works in vi/vim. I often use ctrl-o to do the same thing (jump back to previous cursor position).

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

#40
post #33

There is a strange editing mode that I stumbled on by myself, which I can do in Emacs. Suppose I am editing a huge file, and need to make change in some other part without necessarily forgetting where I am. I just open a new buffer for the same file, edit the desired area, and close the new buffer. I have the old position restored automatically in the old buffer. Of course, this can be done to arbitrary number of lev…

You can do the same thing in vim by opening the same buffer in another split. Very useful for editing in multiple places without having to keep jumping around.
Post reply on HN