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Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

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Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#61

Post by mabub24 »

lawn wrote: post #49
ripe wrote: 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?

Most people get by with pseudo-touch typing. They have most of the speed down, and look down at the keyboard occasionally, but they do not have the accuracy that is displayed in true touch-typing.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#62

Post by fermentation »

I've always wanted to get into emacs, but I only have enough room in my life for a single set of keybinds, and vim has taken that spot. A lot of the emacs-for-vim-people projects are these huge distributions and when something breaks I have no idea how to fix it. Do any of you have a good resource for learning emacs from the ground up, but with vim keybinds?

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#64

Post by b3morales »

ripe wrote: 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…

Also a keyboardist, and you can pry my emacs from my cold dead fingers, but I still think it would benefit from a bit more ability to incorporate platform-appropriate keyboard-driven GUI widgets/arbitrary drawing. For example, if the minibuffer could look like a regular GUI text field + a drop-down menu, or a floating command palette, I genuinely think it would be a nicer experience (and would make it "look more modern" which is not a terrible thing)¹. Similarly for the mode line and fringes. If some of the peripheral elements could be enabled to escape the "everything is a grid of characters" paradigm I think it would be a net positive.

¹I've tried mini-frame, and it's fine, but it's still just a utilitarian grid of text.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#65

Post by acheron9383 »

fermentation wrote: post #62

I've always wanted to get into emacs, but I only have enough room in my life for a single set of keybinds, and vim has taken that spot. A lot of the emacs-for-vim-people projects are these huge distributions and when something breaks I have no idea how to fix it. Do any of you have a good resource for learning emacs from the ground up, but with vim keybinds?

Honestly, to just get moving, installing Doom emacs and selecting evil mode during setup. The basic keybinds are all Vim then, works great for me with minimal headache.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#66

Post by chlorion »

ripe wrote: 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…

It's worth mentioning that Emacs is not a text-only editor, but is able to function in a text only environment if configured to. I think many people never consider giving Emacs a shot because they think it's purely a terminal based program.

Modern Emacs can be (and mostly is) compiled with GTK support and features a GTK interface, but can be launched in text-mode with a command line argument. If you don't mind using bleeding edge versions, there is a branch called "PGTK" that allows the GTK interface to run natively on Wayland!

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#67

Post by throw10920 »

fermentation wrote: post #62

I've always wanted to get into emacs, but I only have enough room in my life for a single set of keybinds, and vim has taken that spot. A lot of the emacs-for-vim-people projects are these huge distributions and when something breaks I have no idea how to fix it. Do any of you have a good resource for learning emacs from the ground up, but with vim keybinds?

I started using vim before switching to emacs, and my experience was that just installing evil-mode and then picking up any normal emacs tutorial was enough - I skipped all of the editing specific stuff and got the interesting stuff from the rest. You might want to try that.

Actually, your question made me realize that the interesting part of vim is the modal editing interface, while the interesting part of emacs is everything but the text editing bits. So, focus on those.

Does that help, or have you already tried this?

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#68

Post by cpach »

fermentation wrote: post #62

I've always wanted to get into emacs, but I only have enough room in my life for a single set of keybinds, and vim has taken that spot. A lot of the emacs-for-vim-people projects are these huge distributions and when something breaks I have no idea how to fix it. Do any of you have a good resource for learning emacs from the ground up, but with vim keybinds?

Some pointers that might be useful:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGP2UnPoZ7HzLGU2cyK1M...

https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide

https://www.spacemacs.org/doc/VIMUSERS.html

Best of luck!

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#69

Post by jorams »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #43
dotancohen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like wondering if elephants could ever roam the depths of the oceans. If they did, they would no longer be elephants. What specific features of vscode would you like to see in a terminal editor?

About 15yrs ago I had a nice vim vs vstudio competition with a friend. It started with "look what vim can do"... block select, block indent, bookmarks, etc Vstudio (& now /vscode) can do too. Vim was always slower (mainly bc the guy wasn't seasoned by 10yrs of it) to figure it out. The interesting thing is that vstudio has the same abilities, but for the really arcane stuff (which vim users take as why it's better),…

> The thing which will never work in terminal is ctrl-c and ctrl-v.

If you enable cua-mode in Emacs, C-c and C-v work perfectly fine as copy and paste. Even in the terminal.

> There are a few comments above about region undo. In vstudio it sounds ugly, but it's trivially easy. Press and hold undo (ctrl-z) and let key repeat until the block appears as you want. Select it, copy. Press and hold redo. Select area. Paste.

That works in practically every editor. The entire point of region undo is that it's faster and more convenient than doing it manually.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#70

Post by throw10920 »

Mikeb85 wrote: 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…

One of the (several) unfortunate things about Atom being killed by VSCode was that its extension model was much closer to that of Emacs - everything ran in the main editor process - far more flexible than VSCode, but also with the mass-market appeal of JavaScript.

(yeah, that model led to poor performance, but afaict that's a combination of (a) just JS things and (b) not putting any effort into the design)

> I definitely don't have a lot of trust in Microsoft.

Very wise, given the user-hostile stuff they've been doing in Windows recently...

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