The first 916 days of Emacs are always the hardest.
916 Days of Emacs
21–30 of 309 posts
Re: 916 Days of Emacs
#22I like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn’t respond instantly I don’t want to use it.
Well it really depends on what operations you expect to be instant. Basic editing like movement, inserting, etc is instant, but summing from 1 to 100000000000000000000000 is where elisp would show its poor performance.
Re: 916 Days of Emacs
#23I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…
I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable.
Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git etc. Emacs has three versions of every plugin and they’re all usually not as good as the thin vim wrapper around fzf etc. If you’re not editing and need email, mutt is a great email client. Irssi is a great chat client. Emacs is very much an all or nothing computing environment.
I am glad I tried Emacs though, because I did love which-key and ended up adding it to my Vim config. And Emacs is slightly easier to quit?
ADVICE: Try both Emacs and Vim vanilla before you do anything else. Downloading a "distro" is really doing yourself a disservice by not showing you just how much either can do without the chrome. And for the love of RMS DON'T USE VSCODE.
Re: 916 Days of Emacs
#24I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…
They're the default keys because a lot of programs use the GNU readline package for line editing.
It's also possible to configure GNU readline on your system to use vi keys. See https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Use_vi_shortcuts_in_terminal
Put this in ~/.inputrc
set editing-mode vi
set keymap vi-commandRe: 916 Days of Emacs
#25282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config.
I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
Re: 916 Days of Emacs
#26I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…
I had a very similar experience and at the end of the day I switched back to vi(m) (and specialized IDEs) mostly because I didn't have the time to constantly evolve my emacs environment to solve the tasks at hand efficiently. I can see the appeal of emacs though if you really have the time and energy to deep dive and make it your own environment.
To this day, I still swap ctrl/capslock - that is so useful that it should just be a standard.
Re: 916 Days of Emacs
#27I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…
I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…
Huh, my experience is the other way around. The "killer" of vim is the control scheme, and evil mode ports that over very faithfully to emacs. Then you get the best of both worlds. Why would you use vim other than in very barebones environments where you cannot access your own config?
(I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)
Re: 916 Days of Emacs
#28282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config. I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
Some guys look at a car as going from point A and B. Some guys find
they can get to B faster and more safely if they can modify the car.
Re: 916 Days of Emacs
#29I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…
I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…
I am in the same boat. Been working a lot with C++ recently and could not get debugging working. Threw in the towel and loaded vscode in about 2 hours had everything humming along and being productive.
I'm pretty sure I did the wrong thing and started with a setup like Spacemacs where random stuff would break and wouldn't even know where to look. Thought I can't seem to loose the muscle memory of vim bindings so evil is a must. On my next round will try dooms or centaur so I learn more under the hood. I do miss magit and helm.
Re: 916 Days of Emacs
#30282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config. I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
Its a hardly a requirement, some people just enjoy doing it. You can just use someone else's config, lots to choose from.