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Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

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Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#11

Post by mechanical_fish »

mixmax wrote: post #9
mechanical_fish wrote: post #2

Have you read O'Reilly's Learning Emacs ? I strongly recommend it. It's a useful tour guide. Failing that, have you read the tutorial? Have you read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs"? If none of that can help or inspire you then I probably don't have much chance. But I'll offer you some coaching anyway. Imagine Vince Lombardi reading this to you: Stop using the mouse. If you're using emacs and you're touching the mouse…

I just read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs", thanks for the link. It was very enlightening on many levels and told me several things that were written between the lines, namely: - Initial user experience is (very) secondary to long-term efficiency - if you aren't in this for the long term don't bother - the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs u…

It isn't as bad as all that. A few weeks will suffice once you have proper guidance.

But there's certainly years of material left after that, if you want it. After eight years off and on I still haven't touched a sizeable number of emacs features.

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#12

Post by mixmax »

abstractbill wrote: post #6

At this point I've spent about ten years learning Emacs. I'm sure there's still plenty I could learn that would make me even more productive - Emacs is big . When I was in my early twenties, I decided enough of my heroes at the time raved about Emacs that I should just trust them and not care how long it took to learn or how hard it was. This turned out to be a good decision.

This is pretty much the reason I decided to give it more than the normal five minutes of attention that shareware gets before a decision is made. A great number of people that are way smarter than me think it's the best thing since sliced bread. And by definition they can't be all that stupid :-)

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#13

Post by etal »

kylec wrote: post #3

As a followup question, what is the best resource to most efficiently learn the basics of Emacs?

The emacs tutorial included with the editor is good enough to wean you off the mouse, for the most part. You can be productive after that, and you don't even need to open to another window. The startup page might show the hotkey combination for loading the tutorial, depending on the version of emacs.

There's other documentation included with emacs beyond that, e.g. the info pages. Anything that can be read from within emacs has the added advantage of helping you get used to scrolling and moving around inside buffers (again, hopefully without the mouse).

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#14

Post by andypayne »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #8
anamax wrote: post #5

> A nice looking GUI and You're editing text. What "graphical"s are you expecting? (You should be seeing syntax and selection highlighting.) > well designed intuitive interfaces matter to me. What's the difference between "intuitive" and "familiar"? Yes, the keyboard commands are not what you're used to. If you want the keyboard commands that you're used to, you can program them. That's generally a bad idea, but emac…

If you want the keyboard commands that you're used to, you can program them. That's generally a bad idea... Let me underline this sentence. Some people (particularly the ones who think that copy and paste were invented by God on the eighth day of creation) get it into their heads that they should redesign the emacs interface on their first day. This is particularly tempting because the ability to remap keys all over…

I generally agree with you about trying to redesign the interface. However, if you exercise some discipline, it can be a worthwhile way to sequence a gradual adoption of Emacs.

This is especially true for users of other programming-style text editors, such as Vi(m). Using Viper or similar can be a good way to ease into Emacs. It's even structured that way -- you can progress through the levels to gradually transition from Vim's way of doing things to the Emacs way. I did this myself.

As I said, it does require the discipline to periodically learn more and more features to progress. Aquamacs offers a similar transition for Mac OS X users.

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#15

Post by wheels »

All of the things that you list here are what Emacs is not. Above all, Emacs is an investment -- not a two week investment, but one that you'll need a year before it's really an extension of the way you code.

Here are some other additional notes:

- You can get it on every platform. I personally use XEmacs (though I'd recommend GNU Emacs for people starting now) and it's exactly the same on Mac, Windows and Linux.

- Many of the old Emacs die-hards learned Emacs in a time when Emacs had just as good a GUI as anything else. So a lot of our rhetoric comes from an era when everything was driven by keyboard shortcuts. I do, however, believe that learning how to use your editor from the keyboard alone does improve long-term efficiency.

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#16

Post by anotherjesse »

I spent a couple hours every day doing the basics (first learning buffers, then file stuff, then on and on...) within a week I had decided to switch from VIM. (I used only emacs while on vacation for any editing I needed to do)

My suggestion - stop reading all the tutorials and just do it.

Keep a list next to your computer with 5 things you need to know how to do - with the key strokes next to them.

Once you become comfortable create a new list that is what you need to learn now. Don't over extend (ooh, git integration, org-mode, ...) - you'll get there (and probably within a few weeks) - but focus on the basics first. Once those become muscle memory you can figure out the advanced stuff.

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#17

Post by tatofoo »

powellb wrote: post #4
kylec wrote: post #3

As a followup question, what is the best resource to most efficiently learn the basics of Emacs?

A swift kick to the head. After that, mapping CAPS-LOCK to be CONTROL. After that, the previously mentioned O'Reilly book.

This is the second time I've read this:

> mapping CAPS-LOCK to be CONTROL.

Why? At least in my laptop CAPS-LOCK is easier me to press than CONTROL if I want CAPS, maybe there is another reason for it?

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#19

Post by gz »

I remember when, having coded in emacs for a few years, I used it for the first time to do a 3-way merge on thousands of lines of code. The amount of time and effort I saved astounded me. The point here is twofold:

1) emacs is very well integrated with extremely powerful tools (in this case diff, merge)

2) emacs is deep; even as an advanced user you can keep improving your efficiency (albeit at a lower rate)

Having said that, I have a question: once I had become fairly comfortable with emacs I switched back to vi. I felt there was a positive correlation between learning new keystrokes/tricks while coding and the quality of code I produce. Has anyone else observed that? If yes, why do you think this is so?

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#20

Post by shadytrees »

tatofoo wrote: post #17
powellb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A swift kick to the head. After that, mapping CAPS-LOCK to be CONTROL. After that, the previously mentioned O'Reilly book.

This is the second time I've read this: > mapping CAPS-LOCK to be CONTROL. Why? At least in my laptop CAPS-LOCK is easier me to press than CONTROL if I want CAPS, maybe there is another reason for it?

If you keep stretching your pinky to the left Control key (which is used a lot in Emacs), you can actually damage your hand especially with heavy Emacs love. Mapping the Caps Lock to Control is useful because it removes the stretching and, besides, Caps Lock is used infrequently enough to not warrant its being on the home row.

(It also makes Ctrl shortcuts in other applications easier.)

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