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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#151

Post by papaver »

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…

would definitely agree. i find tmux + vim does almost everything i need. granted i don't try to script anything myself. generally there are command line tools or vim plugins that do most i want. adding to much gravy to vim also just slows vim down which can be incredibly frustrating when one is used to typing very fast.

i would say just a couple of years of vim isn't enough to really become one with the software. think it took me around 5 years to really understand why vim is amazing. took me at least one year just to get the hang of it properly and be highly productive. i can't even type in a normal editor anymore as my brain is wired to vim commands. and i still to this day learn new commands which make my life easier.

that being said i totally understand why people love emacs. but i get a decent amount of the window management stuff just using the tmux.

and vi is installed almost everywhere as an editor which makes editing in 90% of environments a breeze. even when in windows gvim does pretty good.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#152

Post by tmtvl »

rirze wrote: post #54
leephillips wrote: post #20

I 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.

Recent releases have greatly improved performance. That is, unless you're talking about launching emacs each time you want to edit a single file, then emacs won't load instantly like vi will.

Eh, you can run Emacs as a daemon and starting a client is pretty fast.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#153

Post by lanstin »

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 ;-)

I got less enamoured of GNU when I started reading glibc. It works and it's solving for a complex set of build constraints and so on, but wow, it is not what I'd type.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#154

Post by wrs »

tric wrote: post #149
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…

> 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.

Original Macs didn’t have a control key.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#155

Post by lanstin »

ejolto wrote: post #150
smokel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never thought of making tab be alt/escape. Hmm.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#156

Post by lanstin »

Scarbutt wrote: post #123
Y_Y wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean you have a nice setup for running emacs as a server on a remote machine and connecting via a local client? I've tried this a couple of times but it seems to be prohibitively awkward and I'm stuck with the idiosyncrasies of Tramp or even just saying in a vterm. I'd be very grateful if you (or anyone else) can explain how to do this.

I just run emacs on the remote server (inside tmux), emacs works great on the terminal, in fact, I don't use GUI emacs. code, orgmode, magit are just text.

Yeah, this is how I do it. If it's a reasonably modern remote image you even get color highlighting. And in a way, it lets me segregate, "on this host, I'm working on this project, on this host I'm on this project, all the state/context is there when I re-activate my tmux ready to see what's up.

If I'm writing a lot of code or doing a refactor needing more thought, I'll do it locally, to be sure.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#157

Post by lanstin »

pmoriarty wrote: post #103
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…

What all the hype is about depends on how you use emacs, what you add to it and how you configure it. I used vi and vim for 25 years before switching to emacs, and I spent a ton of time making it very vim like. Now my emacs can do way more than vim ever did. Things like: - browse the web through emacs - read my email through emacs - use org-mode to take notes in outline format, with hyperlinks, tables, executable sou…

What browser do you use? I used to use w3 but it is unsatisfactory now.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#158

Post by slashdev »

Why do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and intellij?

I’ve heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be honest. They’re more like rationalizations for why they stick to what they know.

I just don’t get it. Why use inferior tools?

Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It’s nothing compared to your salary.

Both may let you type slightly faster and move around faster. Maybe. But that’s not the bottleneck anyway.

Why? Am I missing something or is it just an irrational attachment to software they learned long ago and prefer to stick with rather than learn something new?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#159

Post by pmoriarty »

kentosi wrote: post #129
pmoriarty wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they're not even aware that it was an option. Many people don't realize that emacs' default keybindings can be changed to be modal in exactly the same as vim, by using evil.

Sorry for the naive question, but if you're changing all your bindings to vim, then why use emacs at all? Is there any extra functional difference?

There's a ton more to both editors than just keybindings.

See this post[1] where I talk about some of the things I've done with emacs -- none of which have anything to do with bindings.

You can do millions of other things too, as I'm not using emacs nearly to its full capacity. Same with vim.

Bindings in editors are like symbols in math. Yes, they're necessary, and you can do a lot with them, but symbols are not nearly all there is to math.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35560107

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#160

Post by peterashford »

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…

I simply rebound the keys.
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