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Ask HN: Any fun ways to learn Emacs?

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Re: Ask HN: Any fun ways to learn Emacs?

#51

Post by iLemming »

iLemming wrote: post #50

There is no "learning" Emacs in a traditional sense, as there is no linear, structured, or categorized methodology. Emacs is vast, learning it is similar to learning a human language. Most of the time when people ask how to approach Emacs, it is like asking "how do I learn to move and live in Brazil," to which the appropriate suggestion would probably be "hmm, maybe start by listening to Portuguese?" Imagine if there…

I understand that the comment above doesn't answer your actual question. I deliberately decided to split my answer into two parts - first about learning Emacs. Now, let's talk about Vim, etc. Vim navigation is amazing, fantastic, and a highly practical model. As someone well-versed in both vanilla Emacs and vim-style, I highly recommend not abandoning it in favor of Emacs' built-in way. Yes, it is beneficial to learn Emacs native keybindings because they are ubiquitous - on Mac and Terminal, readline, etc. Some Emacs key-combinations are nicer than Evil's, but in practical sense, overall, they are inferior to vim-style navigation.

The biggest pain about Vim navigation is that there's no "true vimming" outside of Vim and Neovim. Every single editor that tries to simulate it to a fuller extent has repeatedly failed. Every single Vim plugin for VSCode, IdeaVim plugin for IntelliJ, Sublime plugins, etc., they all have glaring deficiencies compared to the actual Neovim experience. With only one exception - Emacs. In fact, Emacs can and does vim better than Neovim.

Do try Doom Emacs or Spacemacs, at least for a while. Once you grasp the mechanics of stitching different packages together, learn hooks and advising, fearlessly start redefining the keybindings, maybe then you can decide to build your config. But maybe Doom will provide everything you need. Give it a try, it is really good.

Re: Ask HN: Any fun ways to learn Emacs?

#52

Post by buescher »

sph wrote: post #20
nequo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like it was. Ghostbuster.app reports 93% probability and gptzero.me reports 100%. I was pleasantly surprised that the message started empathetically because none of the other responses did. But it makes more sense now, an LLM would do that.

Indeed, LLMs have that distintive and slightly revolting quality of friendly, helpful and inoffensive tone that reminds me of American customer service ideals. Also the user's profile is equally toeing this line of uncanny valley. I guess the only way to identify ourselves as human is to adopt a measure of rudeness, some grammatical mistakes and snark that those stupid AIs still try to avoid at all costs.

I think it has to do with who trained them, and how, and not the technology itself. Just wait until the capability of training on large corpuses is more widely available…

Re: Ask HN: Any fun ways to learn Emacs?

#54

Post by yawpitch »

iLemming wrote: post #51
iLemming wrote: post #50

There is no "learning" Emacs in a traditional sense, as there is no linear, structured, or categorized methodology. Emacs is vast, learning it is similar to learning a human language. Most of the time when people ask how to approach Emacs, it is like asking "how do I learn to move and live in Brazil," to which the appropriate suggestion would probably be "hmm, maybe start by listening to Portuguese?" Imagine if there…

I understand that the comment above doesn't answer your actual question. I deliberately decided to split my answer into two parts - first about learning Emacs. Now, let's talk about Vim, etc. Vim navigation is amazing, fantastic, and a highly practical model. As someone well-versed in both vanilla Emacs and vim-style, I highly recommend not abandoning it in favor of Emacs' built-in way. Yes, it is beneficial to learn…

Thanks for the very thorough response(s)… now, a question, what’s the most basic and minimal bootstrap config of emacs (possibly within Doom) that sets a relative lisp-newbie up to effectively work with elisp inside emacs?

I’ve used lisps, I’ve never used lisp REPLs, and while I hear the beauty of emacs is getting to the point where it’s your terminal and your IDE, it’s non-obvious how to get up to running like that even in its own language.

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