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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

jesshamrick.com

41–50 of 262 posts

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

#41

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 has very much opposing philosophy to Emacs. It's a Microsoft product and it shows, they don't have standard concept of buffers/windows, so trying to do customization is ugly. For example, you can't easily implement a shell which moves around the windows and can also sit on a side, because windows and sidebars are totally different concepts in the code. VSCode depresses the hell out of me, it's almost a summary…

Not an user of VSCode, but what you wrote applies to a lot of corporate-backed open source products. Try to replace VSCode with Chrome in your post, it will probably even more apt.

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

#42
I tried Emacs several time. The concept is cool but the execution makes it so that for me, in practice, VS Code is better.

I'd want either:

* tabs with a good UX

or

* super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX.

I'd also want a terminal at least as good as the VS Code one, on Windows, to use with Cygwin.

With Emacs I'd have to learn a big bunch of terminology no other editor uses for a bit of flexibility while losing quite a bit of functionality.

Sadly for Emacs, I think that most devs are closer to my train of thought than to that of existing Emacs users.

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

#43
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…

:tabedit % will do that in vim. :tabclose to close the tab when you're done.

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

#44
post #23

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.

doom-emacs looks very nice, but development stopped on January? There is an "development" branch, which is ~4000 commits ahead from master. The documentation suggests fetching the master branch, so whats the deal here?

Use the develop branch. It hasn't been merged into master because of long running reworking, but I don't follow Doom closely enough to know all the details.

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

#45
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> it's probably around thousand times more optimized than Visual Studio Code I am not saying that VS Code is everyone's answer and choice but VS Code is resource friendly enough. Who cares about the resource difference between EMACS and VS Code in real world practicality? I know people love to bash anything electron but it really isn't anything to worry about when programing with anything that is 6 years old or newer…

I can use Emacs and write C++ and compile often and go 15 hours on a single Mac Book pro battery charge. That’s why some people use Emacs.

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

#47

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.

There are new packages coming out that are really useful but I'm not going to find out about them on my own. For instance, I didn't know about helm until I started using Spacemacs.

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

#48
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).

[deleted]

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

#49
post #43
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…

:tabedit % will do that in vim. :tabclose to close the tab when you're done.

    :split

 is another way to do it.

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

#50
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…

In vim, I use vsplit to open the same file, make my edit, and close it. tbh, it's faster to mark my spot with m[az], make my edit, and return to my spot `[az] ([az] means any lower case letter).
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