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Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

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Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#101

Post by xhevahir »

convolvatron wrote: post #92
zdragnar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

unfortunately I can only really work for long stretches on a kinesis split keyboard - with the modifiers all the on the thumb. if they would finally make a bluetooth one maybe that wouldn't be so bad.

I just got an email about a 20% off sale they're having, and I was tempted. Still expensive, though, seeing as how there's so many new ergonomic designs available from smaller companies.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#102

Post by pama »

Some of the very recently upgraded batteries in standard emacs include describe-bindings (C-h b gives a neatly organized, foldable output that greatly enhances discoverability) and emoji-insert that uses a neat selection interface.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#103

Post by wrycoder »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #91
edgyquant wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe but I’ve typing since I was a kid on a Windows 95 and I still only know the gist of the keyboard and have to look down and correct myself every minute or so, so I don’t that’s they only reason. I actually think that typing without looking isn’t as important as people used to say it was for speed.

Just memorising the order of the keys from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and reciting it, was enough for me never to have to look down. I have no idea why or how; I assume it's something to do with dreaming.

It would be an interesting experiment to have one group do that before teaching both groups to touch type. Then measure the speed and accuracy of both groups.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#104

Post by Y_Y »

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?

Yes, but I often work with different keyboards. The place I live has a couple of different stupid local variations, and then if I have an Anglosphere keyboard it's 50-50 between UK and US. Sometimes I change the "layout" and type as if I'm on a different keyboard, but usually the keys don't even physically match up. Then there are different types of keyboard, from super-compact to full numpad monsters and from chiclet to hefty mechanical, and then there's my shitty touchscreen phone.

I'd love to be able to type from muscle memory, but the keyboards keep changing!

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#105

Post by phist_mcgee »

bitexploder wrote: post #95
mabub24 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sort of blows my mind. How can you not learn to touch type? It will take you a month at most and it greatly improves life at a keyboard.

Because not everyone has time to dedicate to a skill with diminishing returns after a certain point, and on top of that many people do not at all care about the life of their keyboard.

I touch-type, but still occasionally struggle with some things eg. using the right shift key instead of always preferring the left. I don't see much benefit in addressing this, since my typing speed is never the blocker with regard to my programming output.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#107

Post by Y_Y »

pama wrote: post #102

Some of the very recently upgraded batteries in standard emacs include describe-bindings (C-h b gives a neatly organized, foldable output that greatly enhances discoverability) and emoji-insert that uses a neat selection interface.

For discoverability I love using helm with M-x (or SPC-SPC). I just think of a function I might like to call, like "git fetch" or "sort lines" or "render latex inline" or anything else, and pretty quickly I can figure out what it's called and what its shortcut is for next time. I take for granted that it exists.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#108

Post by Y_Y »

rthomas6 wrote: post #20
animal_spirits wrote: post #11

Sometimes I wish I initially spent my time learning emacs. Vim has been great to me. I don't value programming workflows as much as I used to so I'm not going through that steep learning curve again

You may like Doom Emacs. It has really really good Vim keybindings. Some people like Spacemacs too, but I found it too bloated and too abstracted (hard to fix when it breaks). I still find myself reaching for Vim when I want to just write a simple script. Emacs, VS Code, etc. can just be too much sometimes.

> I still find myself reaching for Vim when I want to just write a simple script. Emacs, VS Code, etc. can just be too much sometimes.

I used to do this too. What stopped me was that I often use emacs as a terminal multiplexer with vterm, and it becomes super difficult to control vim if you have evil-mode capturing those same inputs. In the end oh-my-zsh (more crappy bloat like spacemacs which I love to bits) has an alias called "e" which will open a file for editing in your current emacs.

(If only it worked through docker! Or maybe it does and I just don't understand TRAMP well enough yet.)

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#109

Post by someguydave »

zdragnar wrote: post #59
lawn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

remapping caps lock to control helped me with emacs chords

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#110

Post by smallnamespace »

throw10920 wrote: post #70
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 defini…

> (a) just JS things and (b) not putting any effort into the design

This feels a bit self-contradictory, since one might argue a properly designed extension API must include process isolation, so naively-written extensions can't mess up the main loop. VS Code extensions are also in JS.

This is the same problem that, say, preemptive multitasking solves, and why Windows 3.1 crashed much more than '95 and XP.

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