Live data from Hacker News

Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

karthinks.com

51–60 of 228 posts

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#51
post #44

Honestly, I never really had that much love for Emacs until relatively recently. I've always dabbled due to it generally having good support for most languages (including esoteric ones) but recently I got into it a lot more due to the fact that many of the new-ish OSS editors but Emacs has always been there and likely will always be there. A few years back I got into Atom quite a bit since it checked all the boxes: e…

And thanks to recent developments in cross-editor infrastructure projects like tree-sitter and LSP, editors like VSCode, Emacs, Sublime Tex, and even public nuisances like vim can all advance at the same time and benefit from each other's development work in areas where the editors aren't differentiated.

We're very close to a world in which we don't have N implementations of finding the start of a C function or figuring out what parts of a Python buffer are keywords.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#52
Some cool stuff I had no idea exists! But I can't see anything I feel like picking up, I do like to keep it simple. I switched to Emacs after something like six years as a vim user, primarily for the more beginner friendly key bindings so my coworkers wouldn't get _too_ freaked out. Many of the navigation shortcuts work in most shells and even all text fields in macOS out of the box too!

I did implement all kinds of funky customisations at first, but in the last years I stuck mostly to what comes with Emacs, and customize over writing Elisp. I do some work in IntelliJ and Xcode out of necessity, but there's nothing quite as productive for me as vanilla Emacs and ansi-term. It's all just text - and mastering how to deal with text doesn't take that long, and is fairly universal.

One of my favourite and most trivial habits is to use forward/backward search extensively for navigating around a file.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#53
post #47

Amazing that I have not used emacs in years but I wanted to see this artist mode with my own eyes, so I opened it and was surprised I could still remember how to get all around with the m-x commands... my muscle memory even remembered the combo to exit emacs correctly, and even as I type this, I couldn't tell you what that key combo is! It's all in my finger muscles' memory. Incredible.

This is what Emacs does to your brain. Dont know if that's a good or a bad thing, mind you.

My first serious Emacs engagement happened in 1996, with XEmacs. Then it became my editor of choice for basically two decades. I can confidently say that I can open your Emacs setup and manage my way around it (unless you happen to be an evil-mode infidel, that is).

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#54
post #47

Amazing that I have not used emacs in years but I wanted to see this artist mode with my own eyes, so I opened it and was surprised I could still remember how to get all around with the m-x commands... my muscle memory even remembered the combo to exit emacs correctly, and even as I type this, I couldn't tell you what that key combo is! It's all in my finger muscles' memory. Incredible.

This is what Emacs does to your brain. Dont know if that's a good or a bad thing, mind you. My first serious Emacs engagement happened in 1996, with XEmacs. Then it became my editor of choice for basically two decades. I can confidently say that I can open your Emacs setup and manage my way around it (unless you happen to be an evil-mode infidel, that is).

[deleted]

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#55
post #49
post #45

For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…

I find it amazing how common it is for programmers to not be touch typists (I mean typing without looking at the keys). Like, isn't that something you pick up by the sheer amount of keyboard time?

I literally trained the correct technique as a child because I was so into computers. I'd argue children today are far less exposed to keyboards than people (well, nerds) my age were.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#56
post #47

Amazing that I have not used emacs in years but I wanted to see this artist mode with my own eyes, so I opened it and was surprised I could still remember how to get all around with the m-x commands... my muscle memory even remembered the combo to exit emacs correctly, and even as I type this, I couldn't tell you what that key combo is! It's all in my finger muscles' memory. Incredible.

This is what Emacs does to your brain. Dont know if that's a good or a bad thing, mind you. My first serious Emacs engagement happened in 1996, with XEmacs. Then it became my editor of choice for basically two decades. I can confidently say that I can open your Emacs setup and manage my way around it (unless you happen to be an evil-mode infidel, that is).

[deleted]

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#57
This is what I like about emacs see a few nifty things, easily add shortcuts and integrate, (selective-mode is useful for an outline of a file).

Power comes from being able to customize - add a easy shortcut to show outline, add another to back to non-outlined. Then use these to jump around code.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#58
post #44

Honestly, I never really had that much love for Emacs until relatively recently. I've always dabbled due to it generally having good support for most languages (including esoteric ones) but recently I got into it a lot more due to the fact that many of the new-ish OSS editors but Emacs has always been there and likely will always be there. A few years back I got into Atom quite a bit since it checked all the boxes: e…

And thanks to recent developments in cross-editor infrastructure projects like tree-sitter and LSP, editors like VSCode, Emacs, Sublime Tex, and even public nuisances like vim can all advance at the same time and benefit from each other's development work in areas where the editors aren't differentiated. We're very close to a world in which we don't have N implementations of finding the start of a C function or figur…

> even public nuisances like vim.

I love vim (err… Neovim), and this was great.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#59
post #49
post #45

For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…

I find it amazing how common it is for programmers to not be touch typists (I mean typing without looking at the keys). Like, isn't that something you pick up by the sheer amount of keyboard time?

I'm a touch typist, but emacs chords always bothered me. I feel much more content switching to mouse or track pad for things like switching tabs, picking files from a file tree to copy / paste or duplicate or whatever, etc.

That said, being a programmer and not touch typing definitely sounds odd to me as well

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thanks to recent developments in cross-editor infrastructure projects like tree-sitter and LSP, editors like VSCode, Emacs, Sublime Tex, and even public nuisances like vim can all advance at the same time and benefit from each other's development work in areas where the editors aren't differentiated. We're very close to a world in which we don't have N implementations of finding the start of a C function or figur…

> even public nuisances like vim. I love vim (err… Neovim), and this was great.

we all love vim, especially to mock it absurdly
Post reply on HN