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Emacs, how it all started for me

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Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#21

Post by bregma »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #13
bitwize wrote: post #2

It 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…

For me what I found was that on early 90s telnet-accessible Unix systems the only pre-installed or easily installed editor that actually let me use... luxuries... like arrow keys and backspace was emacs. Vi was always there but modal editing repulses me and it also didn't work with arrow keys and the like. (I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is j…

> I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on.

It's a holdover from the days when people used to type without looking at their keyboards or waste time and effort taking their fingers off the home row to find and stab around with some kind of multi-axis valuator device sitting on their desk somewhere.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#22

Post by fileeditview »

widdershins wrote: post #20
fileeditview wrote: post #16

A bit of advice to people that have the urge to try Emacs. Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed. Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Alwa…

Agreed. Work through the Emacs tutorial to find out how vanilla editing works. Then look at buffer management, window management (Emacs 'windows' are actually more like frames in other apps) and simple tooling like search. Then start to tweak some settings in your config, find the bare minimum of packages you need to scratch your worst itches (for me: Vertico, Corfu, Avy and Dumb Jump). Finally, figure out tree-sitte…

Yep. I also forgot one important point. If you come from vim, like myself, you should probably use evil-mode right from the start and then just get used to a few important Emacs shortcuts over time and use them additionally to your evil keymaps.

No one will ever convince me that there is something better than vim mode for editing text (or comparable modal editors).

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#23

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bregma wrote: post #21
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me what I found was that on early 90s telnet-accessible Unix systems the only pre-installed or easily installed editor that actually let me use... luxuries... like arrow keys and backspace was emacs. Vi was always there but modal editing repulses me and it also didn't work with arrow keys and the like. (I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is j…

> I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on. It's a holdover from the days when people used to type without looking at their keyboards or waste time and effort taking their fingers off the home row to find and stab around with some kind of multi-axis valuator device…

I've never had a problem hitting my arrow keys on the fly.

I trained in touch typing in the 80s/early 90s in typing classes, on Selectric typewriters. Beautiful keyboards.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#24

Post by gazonk »

It all started in the early eighties. Just got into the university and the machine was a PDP-10 (tops20) and the only option as I remember was Emacs. Has been using it since. Not so much after the introduction of IDEs. But will totally lost for general file editing if there was no Emacs in Linux distrubtions. Hard to grasp? Maybe but for me it was the first thing I learnt and most likely will end with.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#25

Post by bryanlarsen »

fileeditview wrote: post #16

A bit of advice to people that have the urge to try Emacs. Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed. Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Alwa…

There is a middle ground -- https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock or minimal starter kits like it.

Especially if you don't want to use an agent to help you get started. If you're using an agent, starting from vanilla is much more feasible.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#26

Post by ashton314 »

If you find yourself wanting to try out Emacs but are (understandably) turned off by some of its archaic defaults, I encourage you to check out my Emacs Bedrock [1] project. It is not a framework like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs. Instead, it's just a bunch of better defaults, plus some example configuration for some of the most popular packages. It's meant to just be a starting point, and not a framework to keep up-to-date in the long run.

Emacs has come a long way in terms of in-built features. The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained. Just a little bit of simple config (either from Bedrock or, heck, even an LLM) will get you very far.

I'm working on a new version of Bedrock for Emacs 31. If you're using the release candidate (which, because it's Emacs, is more stable than most other operating systems) then check out the `emacs31` branch.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#27

Post by egorelik »

jr_isidore wrote: post #6
iLemming wrote: post #5

Earlier 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 - I first came to emacs during my lisp phase. I didn't stay with lisp, but I did stay with functional programming, and in those days emacs was the best environment for a number of functional programming languages (maybe still is).

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#29

Post by VariousPrograms »

As someone who’s only used Emacs for around 5 years, Emacs is awesome even if you haven’t been using it since 1987. I used to get intimidated by the fact that every single Emacs user has been using it for decades. System Crafters was fantastic for getting a handle on things. It’s one of the coolest programs ever.

That said, I’m usually in vim. Emacs is a neverending rabbit hole of a hobby that begs to be tinkered with forever. I find it easier to just do useful stuff in vim and I’m always trying to add a new efficient keybinding or function to my Emacs config.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#30

Post by fileeditview »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #25
fileeditview wrote: post #16

A bit of advice to people that have the urge to try Emacs. Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed. Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Alwa…

There is a middle ground -- https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock or minimal starter kits like it. Especially if you don't want to use an agent to help you get started. If you're using an agent, starting from vanilla is much more feasible.

There are some good tutorials on youtube to start from zero. E.g. "Emacs from scratch" by System Crafters.

I only started using an AI to help fix issues or understand configuration problems when my config was already >1000 lines.

But yea there are several ways to approach this :)

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