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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

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

#81

Post by xte »

dmitriid wrote: post #28
Wildgoose wrote: post #18

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).

Well... For me it also have a decent text editor... The bad point is that it lack a bootloader+kernel+userland that let me ditch basic Linux kernel...

GuixSD is nicely integrated but Emacs Guile port is not "official" and "mature" enough to have it really as a sole OS, also GuixSD use bash by default, not Emacs at login...

For now I'm happy enough with NixOS+EXWM despite few annoyance not directly caused by Emacs :-)

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

#82

Post by badpun »

xte wrote: post #79
tiborsaas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much time have you invested?

I second to have choose Emacs as a main computing environment and since I often here the question "how much time ..." well... I'd like to add a note: time can't be only measured in hours, days, etc. To learn Emacs enough to decide that's the way I'd like to interact and use my desktop it take a very little time, in around three month I start using Emacs as WM (EXWM), MUA (notmuch-emacs) in around two months with a "f…

> With commercial software you need to invest time (and money) before start, and after having reached a certain amount of knowledge you can't go further, you have to keep yourself up to date following upstream changes and you new knowledge have a very little value in the long run.

How's that different from learning to how use FOSS? Except the money investment part.

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

#83

Post by ken »

oblio wrote: post #26
zimablue wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Design choices are not always bad. And Open Source != not being opinionated. Regarding the spyware thing, agreed, but at the end of the day, the makers choose how they distribute the thing. It's just like Chrome and many other products. I, for one, am thankful that they're making available a high quality tool for free.

> It's just like Chrome and many other products.

Exactly. That's another program whose "open source" status frustrates and saddens me.

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

#84

Post by oblio »

gnuvince wrote: post #80
oblio wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M-x ansi-term ask for [...]/emacs/libexec/emacs/26.1/x86_64-w64-mingw32/cmdproxy.exe and then throws "Spawning child process: Invalid argument". M-x term does the same. Those lead down this rabbit hole: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4535432/terminal-in-emac... M-x shell seems kind of dumb. M-x eshell is not a usable shell. Anyway, everything feels and is very stitched together. (I also don't understand why decl…

> M-x ansi-term ask for [...]/emacs/libexec/emacs/26.1/x86_64-w64-mingw32/cmdproxy.exe and then throws "Spawning child process: Invalid argument". Ah, that's too bad.

I guess that's what I get for being a Vim user :o)

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

#85

Post by oblio »

Yftgggfff wrote: post #78
oblio wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Tabs are not present in Emacs, but C-x C-b will list all open buffers I want a passive, not an active interface. I want to be able to visually scan the tabs. I want to be able to click them when I'm not in the mood for keyboarding. I want the tabs and the tab bar to not be ugly as sin :) Etc, etc. Heck, if Vim has them built-in (and Vim also has the same concept of buffers as Emacs), surely Emacs could (should?)…

>I want a passive, not an active interface. I want to be able to visually scan the tabs. I want to be able to click them when I'm not in the mood for keyboarding Ibuffer is included in the gnu Emacs distro and does all of this.

It looks nothing like a CUA tabbed interface...

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

#86

Post by na85 »

tiborsaas wrote: post #30
Wildgoose wrote: post #18

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?

I used emacs for years to write code and latex documents only knowing the commands to open and close files, copy/paste, and quit. I started with emacs in lieu of vim because I think modal editing is an insane and clunky solution to a problem that no longer exists.

The documentation isn't really very good due to the arcane terminology that often contradicts modern de facto standards in naming things (frames, buffers, windows) so that's a real barrier.

Plus the ecosystem is full of half-baked treatises on the One True Way to set up your init file that don't really explain why they made their choices.

But you can easily get by in emacs with just the basics. Then you just add commands to your repertoire when you're ready.

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

#87

Post by xte »

sn41 wrote: 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…

Emacs can do far more nice things, for instance meaningful text navigation so you can move not only between lines and columns but also between functions/method/class definitions, scope/context/namespaces, paragraphs, ...

You can edit multiple files at once (for instance if you change a string, like a variable name, in multiple files), you can edit with multiple cursors, record&execute text macro on the fly and with a prefix to transform code/data in a snap...

You can edit file/dirs like text in dired, receive a patch via mail and have it highlighted, applied and committed in a snap... List is long to a point that anything you think if useful probably already exists in Emacs, otherwise you can create it in very few lines of elisp at runtime.

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

#88

Post by brandonmenc »

losthobbies wrote: post #61

Watching Jonathan Blow flying around Emacs on his Twitch streams is always very impressive.

So I just pulled up this video of him coding with emacs:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/343721241

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the first two minutes is him trying to find an instance of like, a variable or something, and he individually goes into a bunch of files one by one and does a text search, then eventually pulls up a third-party file search tool outside of emacs to do it.

On Jetbrains IDEs I would just hit "shift-shift" and get a project-wide search dialog that searches across all of my files and even tells me what kind each instance of the text string is - variable, class, etc - as I'm typing.

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

#89

Post by gpderetta »

oblio wrote: post #67
sn41 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can consider these points: - Tabs are not present in Emacs, but C-x C-b will list all open buffers + Fuzzy file search : you can take a look at the popular Ido-mode + eshell is pretty powerful, if you think about it, you have all the emacs search functionality etc. available in a shell inside the editor itself. I am not trying to popularise emacs, but "inflexible" is not something that you associate with emacs. I…

> - Tabs are not present in Emacs, but C-x C-b will list all open buffers I want a passive, not an active interface. I want to be able to visually scan the tabs. I want to be able to click them when I'm not in the mood for keyboarding. I want the tabs and the tab bar to not be ugly as sin :) Etc, etc. Heck, if Vim has them built-in (and Vim also has the same concept of buffers as Emacs), surely Emacs could (should?)…

I have the feeling that most emacs users will have hundreds or even thousands of buffers open at any time. A tab bar is not going to be very useful.

Ido or its siblings are very powerful for fast buffer switching.

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

#90

Post by black-tea »

noelwelsh wrote: post #44
fu86 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Master is almost 4000 commits behind but zero commits ahead after almost a year so simply shouldn't exist.

Multiple eternal branches are pointless and need to stop.

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