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Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

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Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#111

Post by BeetleB »

dmitriid wrote: post #94
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…

You provided a “yet another list if extensions” (from literally hundreds of such lists). Nearly every single one of those extensions needs to be set up, configured or tweaked in a certain way (the ways differ from extension to extension and how to tweak/configure them can often be found only after some rigorous googling). And so, you end up with an init.el which is 1500 lines long (which is a magnitude more than some…

I would definitely say that if you're looking for an editor where everything just works to your satisfaction with minimal tweaking, then Emacs is not for you.

I do think you have cause and effect mixed up here. I have customized a lot of stuff because I can. With most other editors/IDEs, I'm stuck. Yes, their configs are much shorter, but only because there is very little to configure over there. I switched to Emacs because with every other editor I used, there was something that really annoyed me and I didn't want to live with it.

>So in my case this led to a sort of fatigue in the end, and I gave up.

You were probably trying to do too much too fast. My init.el evolved over a decade. I'm sure I spent a lot less than 1% of my overall time on Emacs tweaking it. Probably not even 0.1%. I did an initial setup, and started using it for real work. Every so many months, I'd read about a new package and decide to try it out.

>You provided a “yet another list if extensions” (from literally hundreds of such lists).

When you say that, I can tell you're not even trying, given how I explained why this is not just another list of extensions.

To give you an analogy, there are hundreds/thousands of lists out there on productivity apps for Android. Yet you're not going to get even hundreds of different apps listed there. There are hundreds of sites listing the best image editing software, yet that doesn't mean you'll find hundreds of image editing programs listed.

And really, if you feel like you're drowning in those lists, then just don't look at them. I don't read Sacha's Emacs news every week. Life gets busy, and I ignore it for months at a time. Every once in a while, when work is slow, I go to it to see if I can learn something new.

Emacs is a platform. Don't view it as "configuring". View it as installing useful apps. When I first installed Linux, it was "Holy cow! The package manager has so much software!" Saying there are too many packages out there for Emacs is like saying there are too many packages out there for Linux.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#112

Post by dmitriid »

ernst_klim wrote: post #101
lame88 wrote: post #99

So, emacs is a platform for text-based programs to do things that i already have other stable, reliable, and familiar programs to accomplish. I’m not sold. I need a better value proposition before i feel sold to spend my time climbing that learning curve.

>text-based programs Not text based, it has buttons, widgets, can embed pictures and graphics. >reliable, and familiar programs to accomplish In emacs these bits of code are integrated, so I could, for example, save an IRC chat as buffer, edit it, and send a e-mail. Or open an interactive REPL of maxima, for example, copy result to latex having embedded previews for formulas, and then compile it to pdf (and preview i…

The question is: is it worth it? Trying to figure out all those functions, setting all tose modes, and then programming them the way you described.

Especially when all you just described can be done with regular copy-paste between dedicated programs if needed.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#113

Post by overgard »

rbanffy wrote: post #15
josteink wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the situation so far, but I see this changing thanks to the language server protocol It’s really interesting how LSP shifts what I’ll call “Visual Studio only features” into all editors, while at the same time you had Microsoft being the ones who initially pushed for LSP-adoption. I wonder how many internal discussions they had on this subject before saying “Go”. It’s a fantastic initiative and I’m glad it’s…

Visual Studio-like IDEs are a dead end. There is little revenue opportunity in them and a huge downside in losing relevance in the overall developer mindshare. How many of us would be using a Microsoft IDE/text editor if it were not for VS Code?

Practically everyone that does C++ or C# development on Windows?

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#114

Post by valignatev »

boustrophedon wrote: post #109
sdegutis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar path to Emacs: became really proficient with Vim, avoided Emacs since everyone I knew hated it, saw someone doing things with incredible speed and efficiency in Emacs at Enova (hi Kyle) that I had never imagined could be done, tried Emacs myself, and spent weeks customizing it to become extremely fast with rapid development in Clojure using CIDER. But now that I do vanilla front-end dev, I have found…

What is the utility of per-pixel scrolling in a text editor?

It's just pleasant to have. I sometimes scroll text with touchpad and it's never a good experience in Emacs.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#115

Post by valignatev »

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…

That's what I like about doom-emacs. It's also Evil experience, but without bloat.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#116

Post by AlotOfReading »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #42
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.

The parent mentions notepad++, which offers similar regexp and macro functionality.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#117

Post by dan-robertson »

fao_ wrote: post #85
didibus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use CUA mode: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode I also highly recommend Spacemacs. If VI isn't your thing, it is still great to use it, just set it up in Holy mode using Ivy. What it adds (on top of a great default config), is bindings which start with M-m (that's Alt+m). For almost everything. Like saving your file is M-m f s (that's Alt+m release, f release, s release).

Sure, but with a leader key in vim set to 'f', I can save with f-s (that is, press the f key and then the s key), which after a month is next to automatic

You’re arguing about vim shortcuts in reply to a description of what one can do if one doesn’t want vim shortcuts. Note that the equivalent in vim is not really f s, but ESC f s, because in most modes where one might do M-m f s, most characters insert themselves, the equivalent of insert mode in vim.

Note also that in regular emacs one can do C-x C-s (ie holding control press x then s).

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#118

Post by dan-robertson »

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…

Regarding your first point, do you mean that you try running emacs inside a tmux inside a terminal?

If that is the case, I would recommend not doing that. The emacs gui will give you more colours, images, thinner window borders, better keyboard shortcuts (eg a difference between C-m and RET), mouse controls (if you ever want them), as well as potentially less lag.

The analog to the vim-in-tmux workflow is to instead keep emacs always open in the gui, run somewhere between none and all shell commands from emacs (depending on how you feel), and have a terminal in another window (as you might for web browsing or email) for more prolonged terminal things. One might skip this somewhat by running shell (or even term-mode) in emacs.

Similarly, for editing remote files one uses tramp to ssh from inside emacs and edit files whereas with vim one sshes into the remote box and runs vim.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#119

Post by ahanax »

BeetleB wrote: post #72
darkpuma wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mostly this article, in addition to hearing about how good emacs is from various others, I want to try emacs. On that note, what you're saying sounds really useful - my .vimrc file is organized by folds to due to it's size. However, as a ~30min old emacs user, I have no idea how do do what you said. For example, is there a way to 'org-babel-load-file' when I open my init.el? When I try it by pressing M-x org-babel-load-file then typing ~/.emacs.d/init.el, I get a message "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"

edit: would you mind posting a sample of your init.el file so I can see how you organize it?

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#120

Post by dan-robertson »

gpderetta wrote: post #69
klibertp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use tabs to switch between window configurations. Say I code in Python, with docs and shell windows on the right. Then I want to quickly take a look at git history. But, if I start magit, it will hijack the window configuration and my carefully placed/resized windows will get messy. So, I open a new tab and start magit there. Now, I can switch between the two tabs - ie. window/buffer layouts - with a single key. Th…

hum, tabs for frames, not buffers basically. That seems useful. What's your setup?

Not frames but window configurations (the things you can save with C-x r w and restore with C-x r j), although one can also save the frame configuration too.
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