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Emacs, how it all started for me

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Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#41

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

VariousPrograms wrote: post #29

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 wit…

LOL. 1987 is just about when I stopped using emacs. Suddenly, I feel really old...

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#42

Post by skydhash »

stackghost wrote: post #37
sph wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but "read about the inner workings of an editor before you use it" is horrible UX.

You can start using it without reading, but the UX does not follow common patterns like found in Notepad or VSCode. It is its own thing and reading the tutorial, Mickey's book, or the official manual is way faster than fumbling around. Even my bluetooth speakers came with a manual.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#43

Post by Jtsummers »

rpdillon wrote: post #33
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.

Some distros used to (still do?) drop some of the manuals, it was really annoying to discover this on Ubuntu a few years back. As someone who knew the manuals should be there it was easy to get the right google search to find out how to install them, someone new or inexperienced with emacs would likely not recognize that anything was missing in the first place.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#44

Post by a_e_k »

ashton314 wrote: post #26

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-da…

> The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained.

As a user since '97, I've often felt that this philosophy is entirely, well, backwards. I know how to read the release notes to learn of such changes and how to edit my personal init.el file to revert a setting if I don't like the new default. As long as no one takes away the option, the default doesn't really matter too much to me. But newcomers who might not yet be comfortable with editing their init.el files could really benefit from a more optimal out-of-box experience.

(And besides that, often the newer option is something that I've already moved on to, so making it the new default means I can now remove it from my init.el. I always enjoy when I discover that I can cut something from my init.el because it's now in base Emacs.)

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#45

Post by a_e_k »

tikhonj wrote: post #9
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.

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 i…

Yep. `C-h k` to look up what a key does, `C-h f` to look up a function, and `C-h v` to look up a variable/setting will get you pretty far.

I'd also add `C-h b` to show you the key bindings. (And `C-h` after a prefix key will usually show you the bindings that start with that prefix.) `C-h a` for apropos to search commands by substring can also be useful.

The thing that makes it really "self documenting" is that these help commands reflect the live environment at the moment you use it. If you've added a new binding in your init.el, `C-h b` and `C-h k` will show it. If you've added a new function in your init.el, or loaded a custom package, all those functions can now be found via `C-h f`. The help system will show you the doc strings for them and provide hyperlinks right to the source.

Moreover, this works for anything that you define on the fly. Open an Emacs lisp buffer, type some elisp code to define a function or variable, execute the definition, and now it'll appear under the above in the help system the next time you invoke help.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#46

Post by zingar »

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…

Interesting. I started on spacemacs and never left. My spacemacs is super pimped for the things I want. It feels like if I rolled my own I would end up with something like spacemacs, but not as good.

So I guess you and others here have had the experience of building something that was your own that felt better than the distro?

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#48

Post by bogomog »

rpdillon wrote: post #33
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.

I was mildly disappointed the other day when I did a , and instead of "apropos" I saw "search for command". Apropos was one of those killer features that was, as far as I know, unique to emacs (until the "command palette" appeared in one of the newer editors).

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#49

Post by stackghost »

skydhash wrote: post #42
stackghost wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but "read about the inner workings of an editor before you use it" is horrible UX. You can start using it without reading, but the UX does not follow common patterns like found in Notepad or VSCode. It is its own thing and reading the tutorial, Mickey's book, or the official manual is way faster than fumbling around. Even my bluetooth speakers came with a manual.

>the UX does not follow common patterns like found in Notepad or VSCode. It is its own thing

I know. Emacs is my daily driver.

>reading the tutorial, Mickey's book, or the official manual is way faster than fumbling around.

Hard disagree. It may be more efficient in terms of total time spent, but you can learn 5 commands and start using emacs immediately.

Compared to spending multiple hours reading a book or, worse, the manual, I know which one I'd choose.

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