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Emacs, how it all started for me

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Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#31

Post by rpdillon »

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…

Emacs guy since '97, strongly agree. If you build your own config, the Ikea effect takes hold and you feel like you've made something that's "yours", even if it's mostly cutting and pasting (or using AI) to cobble things together.

I think bedrock is reasonable, and so is Prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude). I used to have a sprawling init.el, but these days is pretty compact (236 lines), mostly using straight to install packages and then configuration for gptel, agent-shell, and various hydras (https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra) to quickly execute various functions.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#32

Post by dctoedt »

gazonk wrote: post #24

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.

And Brian Reid's Scribe formatter [0] — so much nicer than roff, troff, etc. (descendants of Runoff). In 1981-82 I wrote a user manual and taught my fellow law-review editors — none of whom were computer people — how to use both Emacs and Scribe (PDP-11 / TOPS20). It was a real boon, freeing up our paid secretary from having to repeatedly retype manuscripts after we'd edited them, and cutting down on printer errors that had to be hand-corrected on galley proofs.

[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf (Brian Reid's CMU Ph.D dissertation a.k.a. a manual for Scribe).

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#33

Post by rpdillon »

tempfile wrote: post #7

I'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.

It's crazy man, you can get full text search for any concept you want. Here goes:

    C-h r (open Emacs manual)
    C-s "line numbers"
That's it. Just keep pressing C-s and it will search through every section of the entire manual for the keyword you mentioned. After 5 tries, it lands on "16.24 Customization of Display", and you can read how that works.

Also apropos works.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#34

Post by jr_isidore »

vkazanov wrote: post #10
jr_isidore wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. In other words, it does a neophyte no good to see the matrix without having lived in it first. It's all one can manage learning emacs's editing primitives if you've never seen it before. Reminding them some (but not all!) of these primitives are in fact elisp expressions is just annoying.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#35

Post by jr_isidore »

egorelik wrote: post #27
jr_isidore wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. GGP's critique is typical of poor exposition. Read the first chapter of any maths textbook from the 1970s. It doesn't make any sense because the author already knows where everything leads and lest he appear a fool to his peers, will insist the reader does too.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#36

Post by sph »

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…

Seconded. If you want to learn doing things the Emacs way, I recommend the Mastering Emacs book by Mickey Petersen who roams among these threads. It is excellent.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

This provides an excellent base and exploration of the builtin packages, then you can customize your experience on top and make it your own.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#37

Post by stackghost »

sph wrote: post #36
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…

Seconded. If you want to learn doing things the Emacs way, I recommend the Mastering Emacs book by Mickey Petersen who roams among these threads. It is excellent. https://www.masteringemacs.org/ This provides an excellent base and exploration of the builtin packages, then you can customize your experience on top and make it your own.

I bought a copy of Mickey's book, and it's great, but "read about the inner workings of an editor before you use it" is horrible UX.

Better to just start using it, and ask your friendly local LLM when you need help. Back in the early 2000s, I think I used emacs for 3 or 4 years knowing only how to open/save/close files, switch buffers, undo, and quit.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#38

Post by stackghost »

iLemming wrote: post #5
lanycrost wrote: post #4

I 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…

>Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around.

I've been using emacs as my primary editor since about 2002 and I hate this take. Emacs Lisp is by far the worst part of emacs. It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used, unless at the uttermost end of need.

My config, after more than two decades, is about 400 lines, and I consider that excessive.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#39

Post by stackghost »

iLemming wrote: post #14
jr_isidore wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one, including yourself, approached emacs from a Lisp perspective.

And that's why it cost me two-three years of wasted experience. Looking back, I wish I had focused more on understanding Elisp, learning edebug and the built-in profiler. My bona fide Emacs journey began only after I started writing Elisp without fear.

I guess if one's hobby is fiddling with emacs, then I could see why learning edebug and the profiler are valuable first steps. But I view emacs as merely a tool to get vastly more important work done. I just want it to stay out of my way.

I have been using emacs for 20 years and never heard of edebug before today, and have never used the profiler. If I install some new package and it doesn't immediately work, I usually uninstall it right away. I don't have time to fuck around. I would rather chew glass than debug breaking changes in my init.el so I make changes rarely, and deliberately. To each their own, I suppose.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#40

Post by vondur »

fileeditview wrote: post #30
bryanlarsen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Yikes, that's over 12 hours of videos in that series. Stuff like that scares me away from trying it out.
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