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Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

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Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#31

Post by alpaca128 »

aldanor wrote: post #13

Being a vim guy myself, I only use Emacs (Spacemacs, to be precise, so as to get rid of all those a-x a-y a-z a-m-s-x type shortcuts and replace them with something ergonomic) as a git client - because Magit is the best git client out there. I’ve tried using Spacemacs as a main editor for a while, but it’s too much of a mess, and if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks, th…

Have you looked at Vimagit? I haven't used it but it's supposed to imitate magit in Vim.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#32

Post by xenophonf »

aldanor wrote: post #13

Being a vim guy myself, I only use Emacs (Spacemacs, to be precise, so as to get rid of all those a-x a-y a-z a-m-s-x type shortcuts and replace them with something ergonomic) as a git client - because Magit is the best git client out there. I’ve tried using Spacemacs as a main editor for a while, but it’s too much of a mess, and if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks, th…

if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks

Is Spacemacs really that broken? I use the same GNU Emacs configuration across Windows, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, and macOS, along with packages like tramp, magit, slime, and python-mode, and the worst thing that's happened in recent memory is that either jinja2-mode or salt-mode (I forget which) doesn't indent things the way I like.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#33

Post by mullikine »

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #20

I'm using Emacs for my daily tasks, both writing and programming. One question I have to more experienced Emacs users: Can you recommend an email client? It needs to be able to display html mails. Currently, I use claws-mail and am fairly happy with it, except for the search. I've got about 30,000 mails in the inbox and full-text searching them takes too long. Is there a way to transition my claws-mail folders to Ema…

Google this. You'll get a lot of good results. site:news.ycombinator.com intitle:"email client"

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#34

Post by roland35 »

aldanor wrote: post #13

Being a vim guy myself, I only use Emacs (Spacemacs, to be precise, so as to get rid of all those a-x a-y a-z a-m-s-x type shortcuts and replace them with something ergonomic) as a git client - because Magit is the best git client out there. I’ve tried using Spacemacs as a main editor for a while, but it’s too much of a mess, and if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks, th…

I also have had issues getting Spacemacs up and running (with Windows), what has worked better for me as a Vim user is to just use vanilla emacs and install the evil vim mode plugin only.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#35

Post by roland35 »

I am currently only using Emacs for org mode, and overall it works great for taking notes, keeping track of tasks, and outputting documentation.

However... I would _love_ to see a GUI version of just org mode which would combine a few features of OneNote, well I would be happy if it only made adding pictures better!

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#36

Post by sprash »

I used emacs for years and had accumulated about 10000 loc init.el over that time.

With my new employer I'm forced to use notepad++ on Windows. The difference in actual productivity: zero!

Emacs is a nice hobby but when you want do get shit done it won't help you being more productive except for some rare corner cases.

So don't buy into the Emacs Plattform. Maybe just learn the basics because sometimes it is the only editor installed. If you spend more than two hours on it you are wasting your time.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#37

Post by icen »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #27
klibertp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just feel it's "my" editor more than any other editor I've ever used. So true! When I first tried to get into Emacs it was as a somewhat seasoned programmer who wanted to play with a Lisp other than Scheme. I've read the built-in tutorial and almost ran away in horror. I get it - for non-programmer users, yes, it makes sense to try to teach them the usage of an editor. I lost quite a lot of time trying to remembe…

This is excellent advice. I may make another go at it. Like you, I've tried before. After a day or two of trying to remember alt-command-blah-blah-blah every time I wanted to do something simple, I gave up. Then I started mousing around which totally defeated the purpose of trying to pick it up. I also found (at least 7-8 years ago) the windows Emacs to be terribly slow. Hopefully that's not still true. That also eff…

> alt-command-blah-blah-blah

C-h f

And then I type sort of what I want (with helm or ivy, it's a fuzzy match) and select it from the list, which brings up it's documentation and what keystrokes call it.

There is also `where-is` if you remember the name, or `M-x` (or `M-:`) if you don't mind typing it out.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#38

Post by jerf »

sprash wrote: post #36

I used emacs for years and had accumulated about 10000 loc init.el over that time. With my new employer I'm forced to use notepad++ on Windows. The difference in actual productivity: zero! Emacs is a nice hobby but when you want do get shit done it won't help you being more productive except for some rare corner cases. So don't buy into the Emacs Plattform. Maybe just learn the basics because sometimes it is the only…

I've used emacs for 25 years, and I kinda agree, actually.

What keeps me using it is precisely that it's been stable that long. Given that I don't really need that many features, it's been nice to not have to change editors, what, 5 or 6 times in that period of time?

I've got some very light customization to expose the macro features more conveniently, and like three or four keybindings for my major languages I work in.

Other than that, part of what keeps me in emacs is that it supports SSH'ing to remote systems to edit things very well, so I can use my desktop editor in all kinds of environments with everything I'm used to, no matter where I'm having to edit something, as long as SSH can get to it. While there are other editors that can do this to some extent, I find that when it's nominally "time" to switch to New Editor of the Half-Decade it's often a missing or poorly-implemented feature.

Also, as strange as it may seem, a lot of editors aren't all that great at editing 5 files at a time. They certainly can, but they're not that great at it. Emacs is pretty good. I don't even use any funky extensions for it.

I still don't really know elisp. I've seen emacs wizards, and I'm not one, despite 25 years with it. Given that editor features aren't really that important, why not pick one decent tool and stick with it? At least then I'm not surprised when I have to pick up a new tool and, oh, crap, it doesn't do networks, and, tabs, seriously, tabs for multiple buffers with no keyboard access based on names? No.

(I do also know enough vi to get around in it when I have to use it on some system for some reason.)

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#39

Post by tonyarkles »

triska wrote: post #2

Very nice list, thank you for the writeup and for sharing this! One interesting thing about the Emacs modes listed here is that many one of them are by themselves already enough to justify the use of Emacs for at least someone in specific application domains. For example, there are statisticians who do not use much of the breadth of Emacs, except for the listed ESS mode, and who do a lot of their work in that mode. T…

And with org-mode you can start to weave them together using the source blocks! I’ve been doing a fair bit of numerical code lately, and being able to have a Maxima repl, org, and my C source all in the same place has been amazing.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#40

Post by fourier_mode »

I've been a vim guy for 5 years now. And last month I tried to switch to emacs. But it just didn't feel natural for the following reasons:

1. My usual coding session would involve Vim+Tmux, on trying the same with emacs. I was seeing some lag(although small, but noticeable).

2. I am very used to the key strokes "g-d, g-D" in vim to quickly move around calls/declarations of functions. For that emacs makes use of Ctags, which is more versatile but not great for a quick lookup.

3. I have had better luck with Vim's linting plugins like ALE and haven't found similar plugins for Emacs which was eventually a major game changer to switch back to Vim.

On the other set of tools:

- Org-mode and latex-preview-pane-mode are the 2 set of tools which I have integrated into my workflow and they are very suitable to me.

- ERC is also pretty neat.

- I have tried Magit and although seems useful, for my use case of Emacs currently doesn't hold a lot of promise.

- Switch to Gnus, mu4e as mail clients replacements is too painful, at least to a Thunderbird user.

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