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Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

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Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#131

Post by FrenchyJiby »

tarboreus wrote: post #12
ByteJockey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean. Emacs has the ability to do basically what vim does. Evil mode is really nice (though I can never get used the = register evaluating elisp instead of vimscript). What kills me about emacs is the startup time. Breaks my flow when I'm jumping around and need to edit something quickly. Though I'll admit that doom provides a very nice environment for when I want to play around with some lisp.

Run Emacs as a server. Then open with emacsclient. Instant and you have access to the same process you've been using with all the buffers, etc. emacs --daemon emacsclient

Absolutely worth it, but it needs mentioned that bundled in Emacs is a sytemd job for launching the server at user login(!!!):

    systemctl --user enable emacs.service  # For next login
    systemctl --user start emacs.service  # launches it just this once
This means I never have to even THINK "I should boot the editor", because it's already ready.

Add a keyboard shortcut for emacsclient and you're golden

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#132

Post by pama »

Y_Y wrote: post #107
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.

Helm is great and I still use it occasionally even after I recently transitioned to using orderless, marginalia, consult, vertico, etc. for most things like that. C-h b has become my recent goto for inspecting the keybindings on various modes; I used to do C-h m, but the new interface of describe-bindings is neat.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#133

Post by Mikeb85 »

epolanski wrote: post #122
Mikeb85 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not that old (30's) but we were forced into learning how to touch-type throughout grade-school. Pretty much any white-collar work requires it. Getting through university basically requires it (even humanities courses; good luck writing long essays without it). It's shocking that anyone who went through school in a developed country can't touch-type.

Which developed countries have courses in school to learn touch typing? I have never, ever heard about it. Edit: by touch typing I mean having your index fingers on fj and from there using ALL keys without ever leaving the starting position, and yes that includes shift, alt and control and special characters. I know very few people who are really touch typists (I am a proficient one), and I don't believe for a second…

> Edit: by touch typing I mean having your index fingers on fj and from there using ALL keys without ever leaving the starting position, and yes that includes shift, alt and control and special characters.

Yes, we were taught that all throughout school... Is the US school system really that shit? I'm curious where your scepticism is coming from?

Like really, I didn't know a single kid in university who couldn't consistently type 60 wpm. 40 wpm was literally required to pass high school, pretty slow, but not something you can do staring at the keyboard punching keys one by one. The kids who were really good at it were touching 100wpm. I could get highs of 80-90.

I can count on one hand the amount of people I've met who can't touch-type...

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#136

Post by a_e_k »

pronik wrote: post #119
bitexploder wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on what you mean by "touch-type". I can type without looking in three keyboard layouts, but that comes through a lot of keyboard time (and a lot of Police Quest I), so that I'm unable to use split keyboards because my right hand is overreaching to the left half of the keyboard. I also ignore home-row dancing, specific finger positions etc. I can type fast and blind, but I don't think I would qualify as a clas…

This is very much how I type as well. A couple of other factors for me:

1) I learned to type as a kid at the same time that I was getting into programming. So my typing style tends to optimize for quickly hitting numbers, operators, random punctuation characters, and editor movement/selection/command sequences every bit as much as ordinary letters. (And therefore, I tend to find obsessively staying near the home-row less useful.) I find that I type a little slower at pure linear prose, but a little faster at code than many classical touch-typist.

2) Since I was a self-taught typist who learned to type on a computer keyboard, rather than learned a formal touch typing method that was originally designed for typewriters, I've been comfortable since the beginning with backspace being available. It always used to annoy me whenever I had to take a typing class in school where they emphasized accuracy and dinged my typing speed an arbitrary constant amount for each typo. I can usually sense immediately by feel when I've hit the wrong key, smoothly hit backspace, hit the correct character, and then continue with almost no interruption to the flow of my typing. I usually don't even consciously think about those sorts of corrections.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#137

Post by Avshalom »

epolanski wrote: post #122
Mikeb85 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not that old (30's) but we were forced into learning how to touch-type throughout grade-school. Pretty much any white-collar work requires it. Getting through university basically requires it (even humanities courses; good luck writing long essays without it). It's shocking that anyone who went through school in a developed country can't touch-type.

Which developed countries have courses in school to learn touch typing? I have never, ever heard about it. Edit: by touch typing I mean having your index fingers on fj and from there using ALL keys without ever leaving the starting position, and yes that includes shift, alt and control and special characters. I know very few people who are really touch typists (I am a proficient one), and I don't believe for a second…

How old are you? so I'm 35, USAian, and I had typing as a specific bit of course work (can't remember the program names) in elementary school (so 92-95ish?) and there was a class when I was a freshman in highschool (2000) that was 50% typing (different program, also don't remember the name) and 50% word/excel.

I'd absolutely believe that a lot of us on HN grew up in the narrow slice of time when computers were novel enough that people thought they should teach typing specifically, before that time: too niche; after that time: it's assumed we already know

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#138

Post by sirsuki »

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 found I am unique, I never learned to touch type but at the same time reaching for a mouse really slows me down. I realized years into using Vim that the reason I love it so much is that I can do all my editing from the keyboard and because it is a deterministic state machine (modal) I can have a mental copy of the editor running in my head while I'm not looking at the screen. This is important to me because I look at my hands while typing. When I use GUI editors like VSCode it pops up all kinds of fancy bells and whistles that when I return my eyes to the screen it no longer matches the mental model I had in my head and I have to do a huge context switch to re-sync; just like how I have to context switch when I reach for the mouse. Am I the only one has this method of typing/editing? Praise the creators for Vim and Emacs editors.

Re: Batteries included with Emacs (2020)

#139

Post by BeetleB »

agumonkey wrote: post #60
lc9er wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

we all love vim, especially to mock it absurdly

Which flavor of vi do you use? Spacemacs or Doom?

(Edit: Yes, this is a joke)

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