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How I am deeply integrating Emacs

joshblais.com

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Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#31

Post by skydhash »

scandox wrote: post #2

> This is how world class athletes, musicians, artists, writers, and of course programmers take what is in their mind and translate it into reality. > It is the ultimate sharpening of the axe before chopping the tree[1] But if part of our axe sharpening is listening to music, reading email, catching up with your feeds and so on then perhaps we need to take a step back and ask if we're just invading our working though…

We do various tasks with computers. And it's not always in a linear fashion. What's important is reducing friction. The latter can manifest in various way, like having to battle with a GUI just to play some music, yet another GUI for email, and another one for your feeds. Emacs stuff can be pretty stable and you have the same interface for everything.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#33

Post by internet_points »

douglee650 wrote: post #8
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #6

I like eMacs but I feel the whole workflow is wrong. Buffers are a stacked tiled window manager inside your window manager. Your browser is a tabbed window manager, and many other applications are also window managers. I wish any sub buffer of any application was for all intents and purposes a dedicated window, so the WM can take care of the rest. Maybe it’s an adjustment that I could make in my workflow, but a globa…

Doesn’t emacs slow down on really long files? I mean like 8,000 lines

My "main" org file is 21k lines, it's no problem at all. My laptop is from 2017 or something.

I do sometimes work on files that are 300k lines (don't ask), and while it's mostly fine, once in a while I'll try to use some less common operation that's not very optimized and have to abort it (e.g. don't try to magit-blame that file). But stuff like searching, scrolling, editing, syntax highlighting are all fast.

If I have to open files >100M I sometimes open them in `fundamental-mode`, which turns off syntax highlighting.

For truly large files (gigabytes), there is the `vlf` (Very Large File) package, which doesn't load it all into memory at once, but still lets you search, scroll and even M-x occur (sort of like grep, but more integrated and editable).

Note that this is on Emacs 31 (there have been some major perf improvements in the last three or so releases, and more is coming with the new garbage collector)

In earlier days there were issues with very long lines; these have partly been mitigated in later releases; on the one hand by faster internals, but also a new builtin package `so-long` that can notice very long lines, default 10k bytes, where Emacs probably should give up syntax highlighting etc. to remain snappy.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#34

Post by Aromasin »

piokoch wrote: post #28
fhd2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the power of Emacs is mainly that I can do everything with the keyboard, which is not only much faster, but also - to me - much more enjoyable than going through visual menus with the mouse. For someone not good with the keyboard, it's probably a nightmare. I suppose it's good for power users and terrible for casual users, and I don't know if there's any way to really build one user interface that works equal…

Believe or not, you can go 100% keyboard-only even on Windows. I had a friend, Win server admin (big Microsoft fun), who wasn't using mouse at all.

You can but that doesn't neccesarily mean you should.

I tried it for a while, after seeing my Eve Online friend skipping through tasks at a rate of knots without any mouse movement. My god the amount of tab pressing I had to do to get anything done was crippling. I might have to jump through 15 times to get to something that would take me less than a second to click.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#36

Post by asicsp »

voidUpdate wrote: post #24

I keep hearing about emacs and how awesome it is, is there a good resource for a complete beginner who is familiar with programming but not necessarily editors like vim or emacs, just to get started?

There's a wiki page with links to plenty of resources: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#37

Post by adlpz »

A question for the heavy Emacs users:

What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs?

I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there.

However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe borders of the preconfigured, leader-key-accessible realm, I'm quite lost. I don't have good intuitions on how to interact with more raw parts of the system.

And I do want to venture further, so I'm feeling I need to get re-started with one of the recommended tutorials/books.

Should I start fresh Emacs install instead?

PS: I've coded in a bunch of lisps in the past and I have already done a bit of customization on top of Doom, so I sort of know my way around, but I'm just not comfortable I guess.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#38

Post by Karrot_Kream »

fhd2 wrote: post #14
sim04ful wrote: post #4

The more I learn about emacs the more I feel we took the wrong fork on road in terms of the desktop metaphor decades ago.

For me, the power of Emacs is mainly that I can do everything with the keyboard, which is not only much faster, but also - to me - much more enjoyable than going through visual menus with the mouse. For someone not good with the keyboard, it's probably a nightmare. I suppose it's good for power users and terrible for casual users, and I don't know if there's any way to really build one user interface that works equal…

When I got into emacs 20+ years ago the "use only the keyboard" thing was a huge point of pride and to this day I don't understand why. Who cares? I use emacs because I can code the entire environment.

Fundamentally the mouse is just a form of modal editing. Emacs supports this in spades of course, and god-mode is my modal input minor mode of choice, but clicking to jump to a position on screen can often be a lot faster than I search or avy-jump commands, say nothing about how much gentler on the wrist it is. Then you can customize the menus and toolbar icons so you can be 1-2 clicks away from something that would otherwise require a chorded keypress or worse, an M-x command.

Then you have the biggest benefit of using the mouse: scrolling around reading code or text while having a drink or snack in the other hand. These days I use a trackball in my left hand. Regardless, the keyboard vs mouse thing always struck me as one of the many dumb flamewars that tech people engage in.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#39

Post by Karrot_Kream »

omnicognate wrote: post #11
nine_k wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is great for people who are fine tinkering with their tools, and adjusting them to their needs and tastes. Emacs improves my quality of life quite a bit. A lot of people hate that, they want a tool that has all relevant to their tasks front and center, all irrelevant invisible or nonexistent, and zero options to tinker with. It should just work, and preferably never change. A middle ground are the browsers that…

> A lot of people hate that It seems a curious attitude for a developer, though. My curiosity about how things work and the joy I get when I make a computer do the specific thing I want it to do for me are the reasons I program for a living.

Life is full of decision points. It is very understandable to use your decision budget on things that matter, like your projects or your job or your money, than things that don't like an editor config. Over my decades of emacs use I've had periods of crazy tinkering and conversely years of doing nothing.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#40

Post by Karrot_Kream »

adlpz wrote: post #37

A question for the heavy Emacs users: What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs? I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there. However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe…

Whatever works for you works. If you want to use your editor for a goal, using the guardrails of Doom is fine. I use a vanilla setup as my base but I've been using emacs since before distributions. If you want to tinker or otherwise learn emacs more deeply, feel free to start from a vanilla config.
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