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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?

#111

Post by 29athrowaway »

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…

Is there a way to make Spacemacs more performant? It felt slower than an IDE.

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

#112

Post by asiachick »

I'll probably be the nay sayer around here but I don't find emacs all that special. I've used for maybe 18 months at various points in my life, entire projects in emacs. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing. I've written extensions in elisp. Used keyboard macros. Split windows, etc. etc. etc. What am I missing? Those features exist in every editor I've used since about 1988. They're all scriptable and customizable, at least the ones I've used.

Please name some features that I'm missing.

People talk about adding their own tweaks. Any programmable editor lets you add your own tweaks. I've added my own to several. Including emacs. Emacs wasn't special here

I'm happy to use emacs when I have to (it's the only thing installed). But otherwise not feeling it.

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

#113

Post by mkesper »

29athrowaway wrote: post #111
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…

Is there a way to make Spacemacs more performant? It felt slower than an IDE.

Use its client-server capabilities (http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Emacs_server). Most slowness I felt was startup time (except on Windows, there everything felt slooow).

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

#114

Post by ben509 »

I'll add one small point towards grokking it: Emacs keybindings aren't just in Emacs. It really helps to feel fluid in Emacs if you're used to using the standard navigation all the time, and it's baked in to so many applications it takes almost no configuration.

All readline apps support[1] them, including bash[2] and many others emulate them.

On MacOS, support for emacs keybindings is standard in Cocoa text views[3] and you can improve it quite easily[4].

[1]: https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC1

[2]: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-...

[3]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

[4]: https://github.com/fkchang/emacs-keybindings-in-osx

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

#116

Post by scns »

dhosek wrote: post #90
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'm in this school of emacs usage. I use Aquamacs on my Mac and while I've been using Emacs for almost as long as kabdib, I've barely scratched the surface of what Emacs can do. For me, the biggest thing that'll get me to drop out of IntelliJ (I was so happy to learn that there were Emacs keybindings hidden in one of IntelliJ's Mac keymaps) and into Emacs is to do ctrl-x(...ctrl-x) to record a macro, then ctrl-x NUMB…

You can use Vim style macros in Intellij with the Vim plugin

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

#117

Post by plafl »

asiachick wrote: post #112

I'll probably be the nay sayer around here but I don't find emacs all that special. I've used for maybe 18 months at various points in my life, entire projects in emacs. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing. I've written extensions in elisp. Used keyboard macros. Split windows, etc. etc. etc. What am I missing? Those features exist in every editor I've used since about 1988. They're all scriptable and customizable, at…

I will talk about features I do use. My emacs is not very customized for that matter, some keybindings for moving frames and buffers and a few packages:

I have not seen something similar to undo-tree in other editors: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UndoTree

I sometimes keep different frames for different machines through ssh (TRAMP), and rename the frames. I'm not sure how good is multi-window support in other editors or remote editing of files for that matter.

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

#118

Post by banachtarski »

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.

My experience with Spacemacs was the complete opposite. There's a ton of inconsistency with the quality of the provided layers which is why YMMV when using it. The C++ layers up till last year was an utter disaster and I don't know if it's been fixed since.

The WORST thing about spacemacs though is their absolutely broken release process. The master branch rarely upgrades with fixes applied to the develop branch, and the tacit recommendation is just to run "on the bleeding edge." I have no idea why spacemacs users tolerate this, but my productivity has since improved after ditching it.

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

#119

Post by jwr »

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:…

This advice is fine for the first year or so, but afterwards I would start trying out various packages and customizations. There are packages that can make your experience much better (projectile, swiper, ace-window, ace-jump, move-border, eyebrowse, winner, color-identifier-mode, off the top of my init.el).

And, of course, if you do any programming at all, you should install magit immediately. It is the best git experience anywhere, on any platform, period. It is an unbelievable productivity booster, and people who haven't used it do not even appreciate what it can do (ever wanted to quickly apply a single diff from one of your stashes to your current code tree? it's two keystrokes).

Approach emacs like you would a musical instrument: you are not expected to play the piano on your first day, and the first year will require some patience and training, but eventually you'll start playing those sonatas.

[context: my Emacs init file has lines that are 27 years old]

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

#120

Post by beshrkayali »

Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596006488.do

I've been using Emacs for ~5 years now, and I switched from Sublime Text. I used Vim here and there but I wasn't a huge fan, and I always heard that Emacs is _the editor_ that can solve anything. Org mode is what got me really interested so I read through that book and switched to Emacs fully after a couple of weeks of light usage and reading.

Now I only use Emacs, and I've never been happier programming. It's truly a remarkable piece of software.

Edit: just want to say that you should use vanilla emacs and try not to install any plugins at first. Resist the temptation to go willy-nilly on some awesome-xyz list.

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