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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#261

Post by tcmart14 »

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…

Just a comment on the last point and purely opinion. Touch typing is fast and worth it if your typing like a word document. I've tried to get into touch typing, and it can be worth it, but for everyday programming, it doesn't really help me type faster. I type a few lines, stop and think about the code I've written. Programming also makes you hit a series of weird symbols most people don't. Think turbofish operator. The, probably, milliseconds touch typing saves me between writing a few lines to then contemplate just isn't a big enough speed benefit.

With that being said, I consider how I type a combination. I sort of touch type, but Im not completely glued to it. I don't worry if my hands cross as times. However, at the end of the day, if people enjoy touch typing and feel it helps them, they should! No one should swear it off just because I don't feel its that much of a performance boast for me personally.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#262

Post by abhayhegde »

teddyh wrote: post #209
abhayhegde wrote: post #89

Actually, what's the fuss about Emacs being so good? I'm a hardcore vim user to the point that I've installed Vimium for browsers, use vim on my iPad as well. Someone please enlighten me with links, guides or just a comment as to what's in Emacs that makes it productive and special.

Start with the official Emacs Tour: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

Sure, this might help. If you've had experience, what's unique about Emacs for you?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#263

Post by abhayhegde »

psd1 wrote: post #112
abhayhegde wrote: post #89

Actually, what's the fuss about Emacs being so good? I'm a hardcore vim user to the point that I've installed Vimium for browsers, use vim on my iPad as well. Someone please enlighten me with links, guides or just a comment as to what's in Emacs that makes it productive and special.

https://news.ycombinator.com/ There's a lot of non-emacs filler but it's still the best emacs e-zine

I'll use Algolia and search maybe.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#264

Post by tcmart14 »

0zemp1c wrote: post #91
juped wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Emacs is an operating system, not an editor what does it take for this tired and false meme to die?

I am an emacs user, but sometimes I do feel like it isn't a meme. If you could give me a linux kernel that just boots and interfaces with emacs, I am pretty sure it would cover 90-95% of my computer usage cases. Essentially emacs is an OS that just lacks a kernel. And in a way it is a compliment, Emacs is so much more capable than just as a text editor.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#265

Post by plaguepilled »

Blackthorn wrote: post #198
matheusmoreira wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Thank god for musl.

Software people are hilarious. Wow, I sure hate using this amazingly working and workable product because I don't like what the source code looks like! I'm so glad there's an alternative that looks prettier!

Never had to maintain legacy code, huh?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#266

Post by ParetoOptimal »

softirq wrote: post #52
mbork_pl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s really nothing killer in Emacs 1. Org mode 2. Magit 3. Wdired 4. Synergy between various components (shameless plug: https://mbork.pl/2023-01-30_The_benefits_of_everything_being... )

1. Org mode - I will admit that I'm not a fan of org mode and find it to be oversold and another time waster for people who are already wasting time configuring their editors. I personally use vimwiki, there is a vim plugin for org mode. 2. Magit - Tim Pope is the pope of Vim plugins and fugitive is easily as good or better than Magit. I have never had any issue doing any sort of complex task in git or fixing conflic…

> Never had a problem or thought about manipulating directories inside of Vim.

It's extremely useful though, I find myself using the fact I can treat my directory list as a text file quite often.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#267

Post by ParetoOptimal »

papaver wrote: post #222
pmoriarty wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you surf the web in vim? How do you read email, RSS news, and usenet with vim? Does vim have a chat client as powerful as ERC? Mainly, though, is vim programmed in and extended through a lisp, and does it have an entire lisp ecosystem built around it? Don't get me wrong, I love vim, and used it and vi for 25 years before switching to emacs. But my emacs can do far, far more than vim ever did... and there's no…

seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

> seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

Imagine you put tons of information in vimwiki from your browser.

It's not a far stretch to wish you had a text browser inside of vim to more easily get important information into vim wiki.

At some point the browser could even begin to feel like a hindrance to curating and improving upon your higher quality vimwiki notes.

Emacs is like this, but not just for notes... for pretty much everything.

> just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

I'm quite used to my auto-completion and snippets in emacs. As well as my clipboard history. The flexibility of isearch and how intuitive it's UX is.

If I leave emacs I never have all of those familiar things that fit like a glove. I'm in a different world with different rules that is far less malleable, understandable, and introspectable as emacs.

Hopefully that helps make sense of things a bit =)

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#269

Post by Blackthorn »

plaguepilled wrote: post #265
Blackthorn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software people are hilarious. Wow, I sure hate using this amazingly working and workable product because I don't like what the source code looks like! I'm so glad there's an alternative that looks prettier!

Never had to maintain legacy code, huh?

There's nothing legacy about glibc, except maybe that it supports legacy systems quite well.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#270

Post by coutego »

commandlinefan wrote: post #172
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.

> they're not even aware that it was an option Actually in this case I was - but my goal was to use "vanilla" emacs just like I use "vanilla" vi(m). After all, if I'm using vi key bindings... why not just use vi?

The pure text editing is just a tiny detail. I exclusively use vim keybindings inside Emacs, as many others do.

Emacs makes extending the editor a breeze. As a new user this just means that you have packages (like VS 'extensions' or IntelliJ 'plugins') for, well, everything. For a more advanced user it means you can automate away many things that are a pain in the ass to repeatedly do in your daily work.

I'd suggest you try Doom Emacs when you have a couple of free hours to get a taste of what a properly configured Emacs can do. And, once you are on it, just press "SPC f p", select 'init.el' and check what popular packages you can activate just by uncommenting a line and doing a 'doom sync'. Then press "SPC f p" and select 'config.el' to check how even "configuration" in Emacs is just elisp code. You are just running a piece of code you can edit and even debug from itself _while_ you are running it (although that'd require a bit more explanation of how it's done) . This should give you a taste of what Emacs is about.

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