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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#141

Post by tjr »

superdisk wrote: post #99
retrocryptid wrote: post #78

Oh man. I'm embarrassed to say I've been using emacs for almost 40 years and it probably accounts for 80% of my screen time. I wonder how many people know emacs predates gnu-emacs? I remember being skeptical of open source until I saw what gnu emacs could do. Then I got slightly more skeptical when I looked at the code ;-)

Tell us more. What were you using before GNU?

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5736

is about pre-GNU Emacs, with history of Emacs going back to the mid-1970s.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#143

Post by eequah9L »

juped wrote: post #75
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I'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…

Emacs is an operating system, not an editor; I'm really not sure why Stallman constantly promoted the "emacs vs. vi" meme. You might as well try to switch from Notepad to Linux. It's just a type error, and you'll have a bad time.

Not an operating system, more like a desktop environment.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#144

Post by codr7 »

Yeah, thanks a lot, I just lost two hours setting up and configuring EXWM.

Very cool, makes me wonder why I didn't think of this before, I've been using Emacs since forever.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#145

Post by tmtvl »

LastNevadan wrote: post #98
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I'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…

When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials. I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi. After I had been programming professionally for about ten years, I decided that my harsh judg…

That's weird, I'm a Dvorak touch typist and I find the Alt keys to be much easier to reach than Escape. To reach Escape I basically have to leave the home row, while to reach one of the Alts I simply have to bend my ring finger.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#146

Post by tpmx »

tpmx wrote: post #76
adamc wrote: post #36

I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange. I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.

I've used emacs for 25+ years. I was never into LISP; I just really liked the interface. And muscle memory goes deep. Two months ago I switched to VSCode. The "Awesome Emacs Keymap" extension by Yuichiro Tachibana made it possible: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee... It's not 100% perfect, but close enough. I'm quite enjoying using VSCode now. It's fantastic having a wealth of actually use…

The incremental search behavior still trips me up; it sorta works but not exactly.

Then there are a few crucial key bindings missing (like creating and closing split windows) - that seems doable without changing the core VSCode behavior.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#147

Post by tpmx »

cyrialize wrote: post #71
adamc wrote: post #36

I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange. I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.

I'm in the same boat - I've used it almost daily for 7ish years at this point. It's so much fun to use and customize, but there are easier options out there. When people find out I use Emacs I always caution them against using it. It's taken me a long, long time to be productive in Emacs. VSCode, JetBrains tools, etc. don't have the same requirement and start up time to productivity. Buying into Emacs does give you a…

> Emacs way of splitting panels, going through buffers, going through files, always feel better than other applications for me.

Yes!

Some of the people who built GNU Emacs were legit UX geniuses.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#148

Post by neilparikh »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #24
mtnygard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-command

You'll also want `set show-mode-in-prompt on`.

Note that this feature is broken when you have a PS1 with a \n in it, in an older version of readline/bash (I am not sure which), so if you're having this problem, just upgrade your bash version.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#149

Post by tric »

LastNevadan wrote: post #98
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I'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…

When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials. I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi. After I had been programming professionally for about ten years, I decided that my harsh judg…

> Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist.

hmm.... I wonder if this is the reason Mac OS uses the option key for things like 'kill word' (ctrl+backspace on other OSes or ctrl+w in vi). I have a hard time typing quickly using option/command instead of ctrl.

I also prefer vi-like keybindings.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#150

Post by ejolto »

smokel wrote: post #104
LastNevadan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials. I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi. After I had been programming professionally for about ten years, I decided that my harsh judg…

Many people who use Emacs a lot make CapsLock an additional Ctrl. Using your left-hand little finger makes it trivial to use C-p, C-n, C-f, C-b as cursor keys.

Lots of vim users do that too, in fact the ADM-3A terminal vi was written on had ctrl where caps-lock is now and escape where tab is.
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