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Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

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Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#31

Post by dottedmag »

Emacs suggestions in no particular order:

Emacs manual is great, at least skim it to see what's out there in stock Emacs.

Look at what Spacemacs provides in packages: these are most likely the most popular extensions. You don't need to use Spacemacs, but this is the closest to the curated list of useful packages Emacs has (would be glad to be proven wrong - is there a better list?), so at least reading through it will give you an idea what could be added to Emacs to make it more useful.

LSP support is a gift to all non-mainstream-IDE users. Use it.

"Mastering Emacs" is a good book: https://www.masteringemacs.org/book, I wish it was available when I started.

Be aware that many Emacs packages are terribly outdated and not very good to start with. Don't try too hard to make work something that sounds good on paper: if it doesn't work, or cumbersome to configure or use then look for alternatives. Over time I got rid of most of the packages I tried.

Learn some Elisp. It's not a large language, and knowledge of it makes making Emacs lifestyle improvements trivial.

P.S: It helped that at 1998 IDEs were too slow to run on a computer I could afford, so I stick to Emacs and eventually got better at it.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#32

Post by westurner »

asicsp wrote: post #18

> How did you become good at using these editors? Just using them doesn't really work because by myself I'd never discover most of the features and keybindings. I used Vim (GVim to be specific) as part of my job in a semiconductor industry. Everybody in our team used it and we'd help each other. My recollection is not 100% sure, but I think nobody knew how awesome user manuals were (start with vimtutor and then go th…

A document with notes on the software tool https://westurner.github.io/tools/#vim :

- [x] SpaceVim, SpaceMacs

- [ ] awesome-vim > Learning Vim https://github.com/akrawchyk/awesome-vim#learning-vim

- [x] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/vim/

- [ ]

  :help help
  :h help
  :h usr_toc.txt
  :help noautoindent
- [ ] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_the_vi_Editor/Vim/Mod... :

  :help Command-line-mode
  :help Ex-mode
- [ ] my dotvim with regexable comments: https://github.com/westurner/dotvim/blob/master/vimrc

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#34

Post by blackoil »

VSCode is a wonderful IDE with sensible defaults, customizability and a vast ecosystem of plugins. Instead of trying to find some mythical utopia, your efforts to improve your productivity in VSCode. Learning the keyboard shortcuts and right plugins/settings for your usecase will have much higher return on your investment.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#35

Post by mickeyp »

I've written about Emacs for, hm, nearly 13 years [1]. My recommendation is picking one thing you want to start doing in Emacs, and then focus on getting good at that.

Maybe that's doing your shell/terminal work in Emacs. Perhaps it's note taking and organising your thoughts, tasks, and agenda. Perhaps email. Maybe it's small shell scripts at first, before you move on to larger tasks, like full-on programming like you do in your daily job (I am guessing.)

If you try to do everything, while trying to remain productive at your job, you'll probably abandon Emacs.

I've written a book on Emacs, which will definitely teach you Emacs. But it's not a _requirement_ to read a book on it. The manual and tutorial and both good places to start if you'd rather do it for free.

[1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#36

Post by viksit »

Focus. Pick the one you think you might like, don't over think it. And run with it for 6+ months atleast.

I spent most of high school in vim. And college. Then I got into lisp in grad school and picked up emacs.

Now I use vim and emacs, with the latter as my primary IDE. Spent years customizing both, and honestly, can't recommend it enough.

https://github.com/viksit/dotfiles

https://github.com/viksit/dotemacs

https://github.com/viksit/prelude

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#37

Post by onion2k »

when I watch proficient people using these editors I'm always amazed at what they can do, and they appear more productive than I am with VSCode

Editing text efficiently is not the same as being a productive developer. The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code. When you watch a prerecorded video most of the time all the thinking has already happened, and you're watching someone just go through the motions of implementation.

Obviously editing faster is nice, but you'd probably find you just have bigger gaps for thinking rather than a sustained increase in output.

If you want to truly be more productive as dev, focus on learning mental tools for reasoning about code quicker. Learn to step away from the keyboard to think , work with others well, communicate your ideas, how to be more organized, how to understand what algorithms are doing, how to break down problems, etc.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#38

Post by dmichulke »

onion2k wrote: post #37

when I watch proficient people using these editors I'm always amazed at what they can do, and they appear more productive than I am with VSCode Editing text efficiently is not the same as being a productive developer. The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code. When you watch a prerecorded video most of the time all the thinking has already happened, a…

When I think about my coding skills today, I think I owe them primarily

- to languages: partly Java (OO), partly Prolog (declarative style), most importantly Clojure (FP)

- then Emacs

- then i3wm

Each of them "unlocked" something in my head.

Without Emacs I would write slower than I reason, as if I were rate limited

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#39

Post by xcambar »

tylerchurch wrote: post #29
aussiesnack wrote: post #15

A couple of suggestions (in no particular order, and from an ex-Emacs/Xcode/Jetbrains/VSCode and current nvim user): 1. Don't. There's no need to 'switch'. There are marvellously 'productive' developers using every editor under the sun, and neither the quality nor quantity of their work is strongly related to their choice of editor. There are world-class developers who do everything in a vanilla Sublime Text. Others…

Reinforcing #1: It's amazing how productive you can be if you're creating things instead of endlessly trying, configuring, and comparing editors.

Whether you call it over-engineering or procrastination, customizing an editor is a delicious waste of time.

Re: Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?

#40

Post by saurik »

tylerchurch wrote: post #29
aussiesnack wrote: post #15

A couple of suggestions (in no particular order, and from an ex-Emacs/Xcode/Jetbrains/VSCode and current nvim user): 1. Don't. There's no need to 'switch'. There are marvellously 'productive' developers using every editor under the sun, and neither the quality nor quantity of their work is strongly related to their choice of editor. There are world-class developers who do everything in a vanilla Sublime Text. Others…

Reinforcing #1: It's amazing how productive you can be if you're creating things instead of endlessly trying, configuring, and comparing editors.

I mean, you're going to be programming for the rest of your life, right? I put a bunch of time into customizing vim... god, I think it was 15 years ago? Whenever this comes up, people make it sound like you are somehow going to be doing that every single day for the rest of your life or something... and then, awkwardly, I tend to see them screwing around constantly with some new IDE-of-the-week that crashes constantly and slows them down at every turn gloating about how they "saved time" by not spending a small amount of time forever ago to figure out what the hell they actually wanted :/.
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