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Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

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Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#41

Post by smg »

The biggest difference between Emacs and any other editor is that instead of thinking about Emacs as an editor you need to think of Emacs as a programable workflow enabler. Using Emacs without learning Elisp is like carrying a bike on your shoulders instead of riding it. Once you get to the place where you can confidently write Elisp to solve your problems, you will miss Emacs deeply when you have to use any other application. You don't need to write extensions and open source them for other people. All you need is the ability to create Elisp code that does what you want exactly how you want it.

The best way of learning Elisp is reading the source code that is distributed with Emacs. Do a git checkout of Emacs and read Elisp code written by Stefan Monnier. Stay away from org-mode elisp - the quality of that code base is highly suspect.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#42

Post by ashtonkem »

Spacemacs[0] is probably the best Emacs configuration for discoverability. Not only do the maintainers rearrange key combinations to be thematically grouped and mnemonically sane, they added/configured a really nice discoverability layer into Emacs.

Even after close to a decade of Emacs usage, I learned more about Emacs using Spacemacs for a month than I thought possible.

[0] https://www.spacemacs.org/

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#43

Post by japhyr »

Does anyone have any recommendations for configuring emacs so it's easy to use with a standard MacBook keyboard and a full external keyboard?

I used emacs for a couple years on a linux laptop with a full keyboard, and I loved it. Then I got into more teaching than programming, so I moved to some beginner-friendly editors; I wanted to use the same tools I was recommending for my students.

Now I'm doing more dev work again, and I really miss emacs. But I'm a little lost about how to map keys so I can jump between my laptop in standalone mode, my laptop when I have an external keyboard connected, and non-mac linux machines.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#44

Post by pdxpatzer »

start with using graphical Emacs on your platform of choice. Avoid using Emacs through a text terminal, to begin with ...

then start with

Absolute Beginners Guide to Emacs http://www.jesshamrick.com/2012/09/10/absolute-beginners-gui...

follow up with Emacs' tutorial and online help

follow up with Mike Zamansky videos on YouTube https://cestlaz.github.io/stories/emacs/

finally check out the blog entries (and the book !) at https://www.masteringemacs.org/

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#46

Post by kalium_xyz »

smitty1e wrote: post #32
kabdib wrote: post #17

Emacs user here, it's been my go-to editor for about 40 years. I have a few customizations, not many. My .emacs file is 63 lines long, doesn't include any other files, and mostly just tweaks some key bindings and turns off features that I don't like. The only modes I use are built-in ones (e.g., C-mode, auto-wrapping text mode, etc.). I can't write elisp without a reference manual, and I think that's okay. I suggest:…

I had to go to Spacemacs[1] for a few reasons: - Using the spacebar to invoke functionality is a massive physical boon to usage. Stock emacs wrecks me from fingers to neck for an real amounts of usage. This is a purely subjective weakness. - Spacemacs vi emulation. I drank the modal Kook-aid. Especially if one has to SSH into headless instances in the cloud. vi is part of the POSIX standard, so you know it's there an…

You can also just run evil mode for the vi emulation (its what spacemacs does), spacemacs is the best emacs IDE though IMHO.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#47

Post by alexhutcheson »

zozbot234 wrote: post #37
h91wka wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another positive side effect of limiting customization to reasonable levels. Default Emacs shortcuts are hidden everywhere. Most importantly, bash understands them, as well as many other REPLs (erlang, ghci, julia, ...). Developing muscle memory for the default Emacs allows one to use many tools much more efficiently.

Default Emacs shortcuts are bad for RSI. Even the original author of Emacs has had to cut down pretty dramatically on their coding activity, due to getting "Emacs pinky" and other RSI problems.

Mapping Caps Lock to be "Control" helps a lot with this. Reaching down to the bottom row for Control all the time is terrible and should definitely be avoided. Using Alt as Meta has been less of an issue for me since I can easily hit it with my thumb without moving too much.

evil is also great, and it might actually be the most popular option for new users at this point, thanks to Spacemacs and Doom.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#48

Post by weaksauce »

personally i'd use something like spacemacs. it combines the power of vim with the power of emacs. it's not perfect and you should use the develop branch of it because the master one is woefully out of date. the idea of spacemacs is that they have layers that you can enable or disable that seek to customize the defaults of emacs to 1. work well with vim in all modes, 2. collect and configure sane defaults for packages packages(akin to vim plugins) relevant to the feature. some say to use emacs with a blank canvas and to learn it from scratch but, frankly, the emacs defaults are absolute rubbish. it's a good way to get a reasonable emacs out of the gate and you can always cut the cord if you really want to later.

magit is a fantastic git UI. helm is a great ui for searching lists of things(used very often)

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#49

Post by downerending »

philsnow wrote: post #35
downerending wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also seconding. Vanilla emacs is already extremely powerful, and if you're doing real work, you'll end up having to use hosts that don't have all of your wonderful enhancements installed. It's good to know vanilla emacs. Beyond that, add language modes for anything you need that's not already included. If you use 'git', 'magit' is very nice. Beyond that, helm is interesting, though very large and kind of mind-blowing…

> if you're doing real work, you'll end up having to use hosts that don't have all of your wonderful enhancements installed. It's good to know vanilla emacs. If you're talking about production hosts, they shouldn't really have vanilla emacs installed either. Not having your creature comforts present on production machines is a feature, like the red shell prompt / terminal background some people use, a reminder to get…

I'm fine with not installing emacs, as long as no one ever asks me to fix their crap on those hosts. In practice, their stuff will always break, and they always will ask me to fix it. Production hosts should never be neutered. At a bare minimum, emacs-nox, strace, nmap, tcpdump, lsof. No exceptions.

Tramp is great, but not all such hosts are reachable that way.

> I prefer not to even touch other peoples' laptops/keyboards.

Me too, but that's why they call it work.

Re: Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?

#50

Post by weaksauce »

kalium_xyz wrote: post #46
smitty1e wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to go to Spacemacs[1] for a few reasons: - Using the spacebar to invoke functionality is a massive physical boon to usage. Stock emacs wrecks me from fingers to neck for an real amounts of usage. This is a purely subjective weakness. - Spacemacs vi emulation. I drank the modal Kook-aid. Especially if one has to SSH into headless instances in the cloud. vi is part of the POSIX standard, so you know it's there an…

You can also just run evil mode for the vi emulation (its what spacemacs does), spacemacs is the best emacs IDE though IMHO.

you definitely can use evil mode but you will find a lot of edge cases where you have to configure something in some modes to behave sanely whereas with spacemacs they have usually done all that legwork of anything you want to use.
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