111–120 of 262 posts
Is Emacs worth learning well if you're not primarily a software developer? For a DBA or data engineer, for example (as I am)?
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 "shif…
In any case, "M-x helm-projectile-find-file" is the Emacs equivalent of IntelliJ's shift-shift. It's nicely bound to "SPC p f" if you use Spacemacs. You can also search tags (variables, symbols, classes, etc) with "SPC p g". Plus, going for a 3rd party search tool is personal preference, Emacs can also do that.
I'm a heavy user of both Spacemacs and IntelliJ, and while the quick search interface of IntelliJ is awesome, Emacs also has this functionality. I assume Jonathan's problem in that video is due to poor language tooling, plus his personal workflow preferences.
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…
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 "shif…
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…
Most of what you mentioned already exists in most IDEs.
The different between Emacs and Vim tutorials nowadays is that, while both of them have a section about how to open it, only vim has a section about how to exit it
Ok, that's all I had...
That said, I still think that both vim and emacs are going to lose the battle against those fancy-new-shinny-atom-sublime like editors eventually. Which is sad (I'm a vim user), but no one wants to memorize lots of short cuts anymore.
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?
Every three months I spend a couple of hours thinking about what works and doesn't and going through my .emacs.d to make it better.
Basically, constant attention with heavy upfront costs.
CTRL-X CTRL-F then => /ssh:username@example.com:~/somefile.txt
and you get a local buffer with the contents of the remote file (via scp). All your editing is the same as if it is local. When you save it does a scp back to the remote machine. You can even edit in docker containers:
/docker:root@03f5f926f1ca:/etc/environment
as if they are local. Merges/diffs all just work its really great.
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?
The way I see it, most time invested is not lost because emacs will probably be a part of my workflow for most of my life. I just got tired of getting proficient in yet another tool/editor, setting up various plugins and configs, only to have to do it all over again a few years later.
That said, I can see myself using other tools like VSCode when they're more appropriate.