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Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

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Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#51

Post by bitcrusher »

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…

I understand that your experience is yours but I also believe that you might be going about it the wrong way.

First, you don't REALLY need to know anything but Meta-X and Control-XS, Control-XF, Control-XC to get going. Those aren't really that hard to remember or make muscle memory for, IMO. It IS hard to have to go back a bit to re-integrate how to do things in a new way if you're already happy with your existing workflow, so if there's no value for you, then... don't use it. Use whatever works for you.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#52

Post by admax88q »

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…

> isn't an attractive thing to do when you have _actual_ work to do.

Leaning any new tool when you have work to do is never an attractive thing. Whether that's an editor, a language, an issue tracker, or any tool. There is always a period of learning that is less productive, but the hope is that after learning the new tool your overall productivity is higher, resulting is more gains in the long run.

Emacs out of box comes with menus and toolbars (underrated features) to accomplish most basic commands, so you shouldn't have to memorize a whole bunch of stuff to start being modestly productive. I think it's way ahead of vim in these regards, you don't have to learn a whole new paradigm of "modal editing" to get even the basics done.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#53

Post by module0000 »

Logging into "work" systems and typing "emacs" == "command not found". Typing "vi" opens a useful editor.

It's not that I hate emacs or have some aversion to anything except vi/vim. The problem is that vi is everywhere, and by mastering the always-available editor, I always have my tools at hand. On foreign systems, or highly regulated systems that I can't add software to, this is a huge advantage.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#54

Post by antisemiotic »

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…

Spacemacs is better about this, it shows possible continuations while you issue the command. Not to mention that vim keybindings are much saner.

This being said, I've abandoned Spacemacs for VSCode (with amVim). I feel really diety about this, but at least "jump to definition/declaration" in C++ works like it should.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#55

Post by bitwize »

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…

That's how I feel about Visual Studio Code. I've tried it several times, and it's fine for what it is, but I don't see how it's worth it to relearn to do the Visual Studio Code way all the things I currently do the Emacs way.

Furthermore, there's little to no chance of me being able to type up a little program in Visual Studio Code, eval it on the fly, and add it to my config instantly. You have to write a plugin, because of the model the editor uses for extensions. And that's the difference between an extensible editor and an editor for which extension is an integral part of the workflow.

And virtually no other editor or IDE I know of has the equivalent of M-.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#56

Post by zeveb »

fourier_mode wrote: post #40

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…

> I have had better luck with Vim's linting plugins like ALE and haven't found similar plugins for Emacs …

Did you try flycheck?

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#57

Post by darkpuma »

BeetleB wrote: post #49
dmitriid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, di…

In that configuration, would your "real" init.el file still exist? Is the org-mode init invoked from the 'real' init.el?

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#58

Post by dmortin »

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…

> 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.

You don't have to use the builtin keys. I don't. There is Spacemacs, evil mode, etc. so you can use VI keys if it works better for you.

Emacs is about making it work like you want. Emacs adapts to you, not the other way around.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#59

Post by Bekwnn »

admax88q wrote: post #52
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…

> isn't an attractive thing to do when you have _actual_ work to do. Leaning any new tool when you have work to do is never an attractive thing. Whether that's an editor, a language, an issue tracker, or any tool. There is always a period of learning that is less productive, but the hope is that after learning the new tool your overall productivity is higher, resulting is more gains in the long run. Emacs out of box…

In my experience it was about 3-4 weeks of forcing 100% use before vim became more effective than regular text editing, but a lot of the pain was gone after ~1.5 weeks.

Then you know it for life. Unquestionably worth it.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#60

Post by dmortin »

burtonator wrote: post #48

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 thing…

Even if you don't use emacs for coding Java, etc. it can be still useful, e.g note taking, task management with org mode.
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