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

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#71

Post by outworlder » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 4:52 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…

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

There is no such thing as "vanilla" Emacs. Treat the scripts installed out of the box as a suggestion only.

> Everyone ends up with rather huge init.el setups with increasingly bizarre and arcane settings.

That's called customization. Those little warts are small tweaks done over time to tailor the editor to your liking.

The other warts can be removed by using something such as spacemacs. You can install a whole lot of packages nicely configured by adding a single line.

I threw away double digit megabytes of scripts (because I was vendoring everything before ELPA) for Spacemacs and haven't looked back.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#72

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

darkpuma wrote: post #57

BeetleB wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Yes. You execute the org-babel-load-file function in your real init.el, while keeping almost all of your config in that org file.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#73

Post by yaantc » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

module0000 wrote: post #53

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.

True, but the workflow you describe is not the natural one for Emacs.

Emacs has a built-in package called TRAMP [1] for remote work. You don't log into a distant server and open Emacs there, you use Emacs on your local PC and open the remote file naturally, using a syntax like /method:user@host:/path/to/file, but most often /-:host:/path/to/file (when using SSH access set as default, with your local user name). Except for the special file path it's just like for a local file.

Then when launching a shell command, or a full shell, or a grep or compile or whatnot from a buffer editing a remote file, Emacs will automatically launch the command remote machine too. That makes the experience rather transparent. It's possible to have multiple buffers editing files on different machines at the same time.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Quick-Start-Guide

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#74

Post by neilv » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 4:58 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…

For email in Emacs, I've previously used VM, and also Gnus for a while, paired with BBDB addressbook and some of my own add-ons.

VM mostly worked very well (and Gnus was probably more powerful than any forum software/site you've ever seen), but there were a few pros&cons of preferences, including being tired of having so much in one Emacs process, so I moved.

One of the biggest downsides of moving email out of Emacs is that I lost the utility of BBDB. Which is doubly a shame because it was written by JWZ, yet Netscape Communicator and later Mozilla things that should've been influenced by JWZ have much-much less useful addressbooks.

(I made this when I moved: https://www.neilvandyke.org/bbdb2tbird/ )

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#75

Post by pmoriarty » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #68

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. Do you know VI? You can use viper-mode and use it as VI. And it's not a handful of keystrokes as the likes of Eclipse implement, it's a full blown VI mode. Your comment about "apropos" tells me you have never ever tried Emacs help system. There is a ni…

I'm not sure why you're recommending viper mode when evil exists.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#76

Post by chestervonwinch » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

WilliamEdward wrote: post #66

Bekwnn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It only took me like a week to get used to vim. I obviously still don't use it to its full capabilities but i can use it like a normal text editor now. Emacs by comparison makes no sense to me.

The vim operation+movement paradigm is pretty intuitive once you grok it. I’m not really sure if I ever “got” emacs.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#77

Post by JohnAtCC » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

Real men use vi

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#78

Post by bloopernova » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:26 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…

The Android client Orgzly is a good introduction to the scheduling/to-do side of org-mode.

There's also the compact org-mode manual at https://orgmode.org/guide/

I use org-mode for to-do lists, nested lists with to-dos scattered among them, scheduling stuff, and habits (repeatable variable schedule tasks). Orgzly does a lot for me already, and spacemacs+org-mode lets me edit however I want. I also use spacemacs+deft for quick notes, and org-capture for quickly entering new to-do items.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#79

Post by dmortin » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:33 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…

I don't know notepad++, so I don't know if you can open any file in it from any directory just by typing the file name. I never navigate directory structures when opening files, because emacs completes files for me from any directory on my computer, and it saves me a lot of time, because I can open any file literally in seconds.

It would set back my productivity a lot if I had to use the open file dialog for this.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#80

Post by egypturnash » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #67

“I don’t care what editor you use for source code – you can use Quick basic for all I care – but look, you have to know that Magit exists. Even if you don’t use Emacs in any other capacity, you may want to use it for Magit.” There are exactly two instances of “Magit” in this web page and I just quoted both of them.

A quick web search brings me to Magit’s page, which tells me that Magit is “A Git Porcelain inside Emacs” which just creates further questions. How does one make delicate pottery out of a version control system? In what circles is “a porcelain” a synonym for “user interface”?