201–210 of 228 posts
Discoverability problem? You don't say?
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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…
All these friendly gooey things want to help you by popping up this kind of stuff. But luckily, some of them let you turn it off. I've told IntelliJ and Eclipse and VSCode to please stop popping up suggestions, and let me type Ctrl+space to summon them. Aaaah. Much better.
I can recommend it to anyone that tried emacs but didn't like it.
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?
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…
For learning a lot of cool stuff about implementing my best book is The Craft Of Text Editing
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I'm also a recent Emacs enthusiast. Many many years ago, I never felt productive with the navigation and keys. Then, recently, I _really_ wanted to try org and thought "I'll force myself to use it". I started with Evil mode and Doom. I was blown away tbh. What I thought to be an "old" tool that would slow me down, is actually a massive booster (and fun!). My personal experience, of course.
I had a very similar experience, but I started with plain Emacs, and little by little adding what I needed. I was afraid of getting something really bloated, or not understanding how it all bundles together. I think it has paid off a bit, but the learning curve has been steep.
Doom seemed right to me at the time because I just wanted to uncomment `;; org` in `init.el` , not learn a lot of keybindings and get started.
I think I'll start an "Emacs from scratch" someday too.
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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…
Mine did (Europe). Junior high. Around the age of 13, I think. It's been a while. But only as part of a particular course, which I didn't take - I had picked another one. I don't remember which one included the touch typing, but apparently it was one which a lot of students attended.
I learned touch typing at home when I was 14 or 15, my mother changed careers and had to learn touch typing, so she borrowed a Scheidegger typewriter (those with the coloured keys) and a course book, and I thought "Why not?" and did about 15 minutes every day. I tried to be consistent and do it "right", and after three weeks I had it pat down (I should add that those who followed the school course were for the most part a bit sloppy, and most didn't really learn it even though they had the course for the whole semester).
Then when I did my mandatory military service we had to go through a touch type course as well. It wasn't even half as good as the Scheidegger course, but in any case I could touch type already so I didn't care.
For me it helped greatly to be able to touch type when I started working in programming - my mind would fly and I could keep up with my typing. I cringed when I watched over the shoulder of (equally young) colleagues who constantly had to break their concentration to hunt for keys to press, one at the time (of course as years went by those people got much faster, with the same method, and those particular problems disappeared for them).
And in my job I've always had to write a lot of documents, and of course touch typing helps greatly there.
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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
I'm quite annoyed. I was working on a minor-mode because I tire of having to switch to my browser for asciiflow. Reading this article, it turns out artist-mode is built in to stock emacs. And it's quite good, better than anything I could build. Discoverability problem? You don't say?