131–140 of 262 posts
Emacs is habit forming. I started using emacs as an undergrad in the late 80s, as it was the only way I knew of at the time to have multiple windows open on a standard DEC VT-220 terminal. ( I did not know about screen; it was quite new at the time ). I switched to using my UNIX account daily from VMS mainly to get access to this feature that I saw my friends and upperclassmen using. After I got access to an X11 base…
Watching Jonathan Blow flying around Emacs on his Twitch streams is always very impressive.
I'm not sure I would. I'll certainly never stop using it, because I've got 15+ years in it now and the key bindings and my config are as automatic as breathing. But I wonder if the investment is worth the cost for a new user, who could just use another excellent editor that's maybe a bit less full-featured but with a drastically shallower learning curve?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How much time do you need to spend setting up all those possibilities? And figuring out all the little incompatibilities be tween all the plugins and modes, and lisp extensions? Most of what you mentioned already exists in most IDEs.
Is Emacs worth learning well if you're not primarily a software developer? For a DBA or data engineer, for example (as I am)?
You should check out tramp-mode too. Its a killer feature that lets you edit files remotely (AWS, Azure, even docker containers!) as if they are local. All the stuff work, so you can do diffs between a local file and an a AWS file and it all appears to be local. If you are editing a remote file and do a git action (through magit) it knows to work on the remote file. You can open up remote shells also. You just go: CT…
https://github.com/dustinfreeman/dustinfreeman.emacs.d/blob/...
Format is C-x C-f /gcssh:compute-instance-name:/path/on/remote/machine/filename.txt
OK, question from a fellow Emacs user: If a student asked you which text editor / IDE they should learn _ab initio_, would you recommend Emacs without reservation? I'm not sure I would. I'll certainly never stop using it, because I've got 15+ years in it now and the key bindings and my config are as automatic as breathing. But I wonder if the investment is worth the cost for a new user, who could just use another exc…
You should check out tramp-mode too. Its a killer feature that lets you edit files remotely (AWS, Azure, even docker containers!) as if they are local. All the stuff work, so you can do diffs between a local file and an a AWS file and it all appears to be local. If you are editing a remote file and do a git action (through magit) it knows to work on the remote file. You can open up remote shells also. You just go: CT…
Though if I'm exploring a server problem, it's useful to know how to use vim. If Emacs IS installed, it's probably with default settings and it's easy to forget that it'll scatter auto saves everywhere by default. Especially (and usually only) when I'm behind a machine that doesn't have by Emacs set up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much time do you need to spend setting up all those possibilities? And figuring out all the little incompatibilities be tween all the plugins and modes, and lisp extensions? Most of what you mentioned already exists in most IDEs.
The long-time Emacs user has heard this same argument repeatedly for decades, with regard to historic IDEs that no longer exist. How much time do you spend switching to new IDEs every couple of years.
Meanwhile I've had emacs configs fail in subtle and not-so-subtle unpredictable ways with every system or emacs, or mode, or... update
You should check out tramp-mode too. Its a killer feature that lets you edit files remotely (AWS, Azure, even docker containers!) as if they are local. All the stuff work, so you can do diffs between a local file and an a AWS file and it all appears to be local. If you are editing a remote file and do a git action (through magit) it knows to work on the remote file. You can open up remote shells also. You just go: CT…
A common selling point for VIM is "its installed everywhere you just ssh in and it's available". To that, I usually bring up tramp and say, who cares you just ssh in from emacs.
I've never understood this argument unless you're coming at it from a sysadmin perspective. Sure if its available everywhere that helps when I'm sshing in to random systems to sysadmin stuff.
But I don't do my development by logging in to random new systems all the time. I do my development in an environment that I have set up to be productive with.