Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#41

Post by michaelmrose » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:30 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #9

No thanks. I've had several bouts of trying to learn emacs throughout my life. It isn't necessary to list all the benefits, sure, there's a lot. Yes, I get it's "extensible" and you can write little elisp programs to do just what you want. Here's the obstacle: Motor skills. It just takes way to long to first memorize reams of commands and then to train your fingers to issue those commands effortlessly. In the meantim…

Personally I like to bind virtually everything to a sequence of keys starting with a leader key instead of control this alt that coltrol the other thing.

Hydras further provide an attractive discoverable menu to remind you of what options are available.

Major mode hydra let's you define a hydra per mode and pops up the correct one based on the mode you are in.

https://github.com/jerrypnz/major-mode-hydra.el/blob/master/...

A useful thing is that it's possible on all major platforms to bind modifier keys like for example shift to produce a different symbol when pressed and released instead of held in combination with another key.

https://gist.github.com/tanyuan/55bca522bf50363ae4573d4bdcf0...

This means that for example you could use left shift to start global sequences and right shift for mode specific operations preferring short sequences for common operations.

Example lshift -> b switch buffers lshift -> f r find recent files

Because these can be bound to unused global keys example f13 if your keyboard lacks such they can be bound globally and work everywhere regardless of mode or with or without evil.

Because of the friendly visual indication see the pictures of major mode hydra even if you don't recall a binding you don't need apropos to find it.

For functionality that you haven't bound fuzzy matching makes it easy to find said functionality and call it in one step.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#42

Post by alexhutcheson » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

Once or twice a quarter I'll end up with a relatively mechanical task that I can do with a keyboard macro, query-replace-regexp/dired-do-find-regexp-and-replace. That normally saves me at least 30-45 minutes compared to either doing it manually or writing a script.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#43

Post by betenoire » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

As a former Vim addict of over 12 years: to those who would like to try to move to Emacs, and Spacemacs doesn't cut it, try Doom!

https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

It is a much thinner configuration, and you will learn Emacs instead of layers and Spacemacs conventions.

It only took me about a week of deliberate use to adapt my work flow and get used to it, and it has been my primary editor for nearly a year now.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#44

Post by dmitriid » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #9

No thanks. I've had several bouts of trying to learn emacs throughout my life. It isn't necessary to list all the benefits, sure, there's a lot. Yes, I get it's "extensible" and you can write little elisp programs to do just what you want. Here's the obstacle: Motor skills. It just takes way to long to first memorize reams of commands and then to train your fingers to issue those commands effortlessly. In the meantim…

To me the serious obstacle that vanilla emacs is not that powerful at all.

The article lists over 20 extensions you need to install to "feel the power". And every emacs user will have their own set of extensions, carefully curated. Everyone ends up with rather huge init.el setups with increasingly bizarre and arcane settings.

After over two years of using emacs and a 437-line init.el[1] of my own I gave up when one day it stopped properly displaying cyrllic text in jabber.el and some extension minor update broke something major.

[1] https://gist.github.com/dmitriid/4078311

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#45

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

betenoire wrote: post #43

As a former Vim addict of over 12 years: to those who would like to try to move to Emacs, and Spacemacs doesn't cut it, try Doom! https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs It is a much thinner configuration, and you will learn Emacs instead of layers and Spacemacs conventions. It only took me about a week of deliberate use to adapt my work flow and get used to it, and it has been my primary editor for nearly a year now.

At first glance, I thought this would be an Emacs tutorial superimposed on top of the Doom engine, ala DOOM as a Tool for System Administration.[0]

[0]https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#46

Post by michaericalribo » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

raphinou wrote: post #10

I recently tried to switch from vim to Emacs with spacemacs. I enjoyed it until I discovered Emacs has no support for tabs (ui tabs, not the character ;). I went back to vim mainly due to that, but still miss magit....

My solution is eyebrowse-mode, which lets you switch quickly between window setups...I never need to recreate an exact layout in the long term, so it’s more than enough to save and switch on the fly

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#47

Post by harrygeez » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #9

No thanks. I've had several bouts of trying to learn emacs throughout my life. It isn't necessary to list all the benefits, sure, there's a lot. Yes, I get it's "extensible" and you can write little elisp programs to do just what you want. Here's the obstacle: Motor skills. It just takes way to long to first memorize reams of commands and then to train your fingers to issue those commands effortlessly. In the meantim…

The time investment is worth it. Once you ease into the keybindings you rarely think about it, well at least for the most common things you do.

The single greatest thing about Emacs is the robust basic modes, which most other modes extend from. So far I haven't used anything as good, although I feel the gap is lessening with VSCode.

I really dislike switching between mouse and keyboard. Emacs's consistency and mouse-free operation speaks to my heart the same way Mark Zuckerberg wears the same shirt every day, it's one less thing to think about, and that's why I love it.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#48

Post by burtonator » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 3:20 PM UTC

I used Emacs for 15 years. I've been off of Emacs for about 5-6 years now and I won't ever go back.

Here's why:

1. Refactoring. The refactorings in IntelliJ are amazing. Amazing. The ability to say (yeah, this class is now called Foo instead of Bar) and have everything automatically changed is outstanding. This is a basic example of course but you can also do things like remove a function parameter, and also do things like lookup reverse symbols.

2. Stable. IntelliJ is just amazingly stable. Part of this is that I had to write elisp to get Emacs to do stuff that IntellJ just already provides for me. Everytime Emacs would upgrade I would have to upgrade Emacs.

3. Pair programming. I could NEVER work with other engineers on their code and vice versa. We just didn't speak the same language.

Now mind you I also created a lot of the code you use in Emacs. I co-created EDE for example.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#49

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #44

crispyambulance wrote: post #9

No thanks. I've had several bouts of trying to learn emacs throughout my life. It isn't necessary to list all the benefits, sure, there's a lot. Yes, I get it's "extensible" and you can write little elisp programs to do just what you want. Here's the obstacle: Motor skills. It just takes way to long to first memorize reams of commands and then to train your fingers to issue those commands effortlessly. In the meantim…

To me the serious obstacle that vanilla emacs is not that powerful at all. The article lists over 20 extensions you need to install to "feel the power". And every emacs user will have their own set of extensions, carefully curated. Everyone ends up with rather huge init.el setups with increasingly bizarre and arcane settings. After over two years of using emacs and a 437-line init.el[1] of my own I gave up when one d…

>And every emacs user will have their own set of extensions, carefully curated.

You'll find a lot of common extensions amongst power users. If you browse Emacs blog posts often, you'll see the same names popping up. For an overall view, I recommend Sacha Chua's weekly Emacs news:

https://sachachua.com/blog/2019/06/2019-06-03-emacs-news/

And BTW, a number of the extensions listed on this submission (Org mode, calc, dired, etc) come packaged with Emacs - although for Org mode I really would recommend installing a more up to date version.

To keep your init.el sane, I strongly recommend you keep your init file as an org mode file and use org-babel-load-file to load it. My init file is probably 1500 lines long, but it's very well organized as an org mode file.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#50

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

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…

If your emails are in anything other than mbox format, then notmuch will not modify your email files - it merely builds an index for them so you can query. That should take care of your search needs.

As for HTML email, if you mean HTML converted to text, then notmuch will do it. If you mean show it as proper HTML, it won't. It can also show images inline (although my setup stopped years ago and I haven't debugged why). To be frank, I don't like how it converts an HTML email to text - it doesn't even preserve links (i.e. it shows the text only, and not the URL it links to). I need to look into how I can improve it.

But despite these headaches, I still use it. It's good.