Emacs, how it all started for me
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#2It was always like that before about 10 years ago. You're getting your feet wet in programming, learning about free alternatives, and you learn that all the world's legendary hackers become proficient in one of either vi (vim) or Emacs. So you dig in and you find that, as your awareness of programming languages grows, Emacs is a "good-enough" solution for working in nearly all of them. (Vim is too, but maybe a bit less so in 1995 when I was starting out.) And if you want to program effectively cross-language, there's nothing you can do but lock the fuck in and learn your editor's idiosyncrasies, shortcuts, and programming/customization features.
These days we're all spoiled by Visual Studio Code, Zed, even things like Geany and Notepad++. So it makes less sense for neophytes to start with something as ancient and idiosyncratic as Emacs, and Emacs does not enjoy nearly the prominence or mindshare it had decades ago. (Though I understand its absolute user base has grown.)
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#3It was always like that before about 10 years ago. You're getting your feet wet in programming, learning about free alternatives, and you learn that all the world's legendary hackers become proficient in one of either vi (vim) or Emacs. So you dig in and you find that, as your awareness of programming languages grows, Emacs is a "good-enough" solution for working in nearly all of them. (Vim is too, but maybe a bit le…
I used vim for about 15 years and emacs for the last 6 or 7 and never has it been easier to emacs. For years it was searching Google, blog posts and manuals for "how do I do X in emacs?" and now it's trivial to ask AI. I always have a Copilot session open in my emacs config so it can tell me how my emacs does something and can update my config for me.
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#4I moved to nvim from vim and it's seems me to easy and handy for everyday use. While emacs like rocket since :D
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#5I moved to nvim from vim and it's seems me to easy and handy for everyday use. While emacs like rocket since :D
Emacs is most definitely not a rocket science. The problem with people trying Emacs is that they approach it just like any other text editor, instead of understanding the grand, core principle of it - Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around. Therefore it makes much better sense if you approach it from a Lisp perspective. Alas, many, perhaps most, beginners try it after hearing how "powerful this Emacs thingy is", and try to learn "editor features", instead of focusing on the Lisp side of things. Some even admit that they don't like Lisp and don't understand it and plan to never deal with it. Most posts of "abandonment" and "I switch to VSCode after decades of Emacs use", after closer examination, reveal that the person perhaps never even written any elisp code - at most, they'd just [almost] blindly copy&paste existing snippets into their configs.
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#6I moved to nvim from vim and it's seems me to easy and handy for everyday use. While emacs like rocket since :D
Emacs is most definitely not a rocket science. The problem with people trying Emacs is that they approach it just like any other text editor, instead of understanding the grand, core principle of it - Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around. Therefore it makes much better sense if you approach it from a Lisp perspective. Alas, many, perhaps most, beginne…
No one, including yourself, approached emacs from a Lisp perspective.
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#7I've been trying emacs for a while. People keep saying it's self-discovering and I have no idea what they mean. Am I missing part of the manual? I google stuff when I don't understand, like any other piece of software. I've never managed to successfully use the help system to find anything.
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#8I've been trying emacs for a while. People keep saying it's self-discovering and I have no idea what they mean. Am I missing part of the manual? I google stuff when I don't understand, like any other piece of software. I've never managed to successfully use the help system to find anything.
Having a good completion package (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`) goes a long way to finding stuff. I regularly find new functions and variables by calling describe-function and describe-command and just searching/auto-completing my way to what I need. It gets even better with the `helpful` package which improves the layout/features of help pages a lot.
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#9I've been trying emacs for a while. People keep saying it's self-discovering and I have no idea what they mean. Am I missing part of the manual? I google stuff when I don't understand, like any other piece of software. I've never managed to successfully use the help system to find anything.
The neat thing with Emacs is that the core concepts of the system are all first-class programming entities with their own documentation. So if you want to know what your current mode does, you can use C-h m to get a bunch of information including commands, key-bindings and links to code. If you have a key command, you can use C-h k, enter the keys, and you'll see exactly what function that command runs. You can get info about functions with C-h f and variables with C-h v; coupled with some kind of fuzzy-find-autocomplete (which, unfortunately, isn't set up by default), it's usually pretty quick to find the functions and config options that are relevant to whatever you're trying to do.
I still use web searches to look up Emacs things occasionally, but the built-in help commands are still useful because they're naturally tied to (and organized by) the core code entities that power Emacs.
Re: Emacs, how it all started for me
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emacs is most definitely not a rocket science. The problem with people trying Emacs is that they approach it just like any other text editor, instead of understanding the grand, core principle of it - Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around. Therefore it makes much better sense if you approach it from a Lisp perspective. Alas, many, perhaps most, beginne…
No one, including yourself, approached emacs from a Lisp perspective.
I did.
After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to write my thesis in electrical engineering.
The tool was parsing my matlab files and generated latex, which i then made into the final pdf, complete with formulaes and calculations.
So instead of writing a decent thesis, i learned about makefiles, latex, emacs lisp and the fact that parsers are very interesting.
Also, Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp.
Surely, i did not work a single day as an electric engineer.
PS I keep looking for this book to this very day