21–30 of 84 posts
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?
At some point it becomes clear that emacs is actually a programming environment for text editing with emacs lisp in the position of universal configuration, scripting and compute language. If you can think of something you want to do with text,files or code (albeit limited to an ascii interface) you can either find it in the extension community or you can quickly bend emacs to do what you want.
My learning curve was approximately two years to feel very competent, five or so to feel like a power user, and then 8 or so to feel make it do most anything.
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 agree with what you said about about intuitive UIs. Intuitive just means familiar. After enough time, emacs (or vi, or any text edit) will be come familiar, i.e. you won't have to consciously think about using the editor. At that point it becomes intuitive.
One thing I really love in Emacs is that every text is basically displayed in a buffer, regardless of it being editing text, external program output, file listing, menu items or completion candidates. It means you can use common editing commands (incremental search, region selection, copy&paste, etc) uniformly to navigate those information. It's all text, so you should be able to do so. Then I turn to a supposedly intuitive GUI app that shows a menu with 100 items and I'm just lost since I cannot regexp-search through those items.
To have an expert Emacs user do a screencast of himself doing standard programming stuff.
I think that would make it really obvious how these types of editors are.
It isn't--don't believe the hype. On the other hand, I couldn't write a line of code without IntelliSense.
Does anybody know anything about Emacs.Net that Microsoft is working on?
http://www.knowing.net/PermaLink,guid,31fdc849-db2a-4f7d-bf9...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
However, when you're at your desk, the most awesome Emacs upgrade is to buy a Kinesis Ergo "Contoured" keyboard (http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/). It moves all of the control/alt/Apple/Meta keys from all of the random locations to your thumbs and so once you get used to it, it's way, way better than anything else.
The only downside is that it only comes in one size so if you have large hands / long fingers it might be too cramped.
For the skeptics, once you get used to it, it's actually quite easy to go back and forth between the laptop keyboard and the Kinesis. I.e., very little mental dissonance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Precisely. You can get productive with emacs after a relatively short period of time, but you will have a lifetime of learning afterwards. After 10 years, I'm still discovering new things.
> 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…
Occasionally you'll want to use emacs on someone else's system, usually in their current session. You'd like to be able to do that without customizing their system. Similarly, you want them to be able to use your system/session without undoing your customizations.
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…
UNIX/Linux users have considered this mandatory forever, regardless of editor choice. PC keyboards are simply wrong.
The funny thing is, every time I go to write some Clojure code - I want to open a Vim session, but I am always strangely drawn to Emacs for some reason.
Recently, I decided to figure out what it was about Emacs that made me want to use it so much over Vim. I soon realised it was all about being able to load a REPL process in a window and interact with it on the fly.
I can run Emacs, open a Clojure source file, write a function then hit C-M-x to send the function to the REPL to be evaluated. Also relevant is that Clojure support in Emacs was available shortly after Clojure's release to the public late in 200.
This is a very specific case (lisp-style interactive development) but it's why I personally think Emacs is great and for me it has nothing to do with Emacs text editing features! I will always prefer Vim for pure text editing power.