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Emacs, how it all started for me

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Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#71

Post by fileeditview »

zingar wrote: post #46
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?

For me it was mostly that these distros overwhelmed me and I could not get into their code. I had to "start small" if you want. Also I encountered troubles regularly because some things did not feed my needs.

I am not saying they are bad, just not for me.

And I think they make it somehow harder to discover the true power of emacs: bending it to your will & basically forging your own custom environment, not only for editing but so much more (git, mails, pdfs,...).

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#72

Post by vkazanov »

iLemming wrote: post #56
jr_isidore wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I have not forgotten my own "beginner's journey" - au contraire - I vividly remember it, and thus I'm sharing an admonition - so people wouldn't waste their time. Because I did. Besides, I have successfully mentored people from zero-to-hero and helped them learn Emacs. My suggestion to focus on Elisp is not like tech-splaining monads, and Lisp is not that difficult. Definitely not even in the same league of difficult…

How did you approach emacs onboarding? In my case it wad sheer enthusiasm of 20 year old who want to do cool things, no matter the amount of effort.

So if it takes learning a language, language it was.

But i gave up on teaching Emacs. My current stance is: if you want emacs then you know how to do it.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#73

Post by [deleted] »

stackghost wrote: post #65
iLemming wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs Lisp is by far the worst part of emacs Say what you want, but I wouldn't trade it for any other (non-homoiconic) language. Sure, it won't win the contest of the "nicest Lisp", nevertheless - it's a Lisp, and therefore far better suited for the things Emacs is designed to do. Have you ever thought why Org-mode, developed and maintained by a handful of people (perhaps fewer people than the React.js core team ha…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#74

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

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.

Good recommendation, you (the reader) may also like https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#75

Post by iLemming »

vkazanov wrote: post #72
iLemming wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not forgotten my own "beginner's journey" - au contraire - I vividly remember it, and thus I'm sharing an admonition - so people wouldn't waste their time. Because I did. Besides, I have successfully mentored people from zero-to-hero and helped them learn Emacs. My suggestion to focus on Elisp is not like tech-splaining monads, and Lisp is not that difficult. Definitely not even in the same league of difficult…

How did you approach emacs onboarding? In my case it wad sheer enthusiasm of 20 year old who want to do cool things, no matter the amount of effort. So if it takes learning a language, language it was. But i gave up on teaching Emacs. My current stance is: if you want emacs then you know how to do it.

> How did you approach emacs onboarding

I'd typically would start by showcasing a single (albeit enormously important) aspect of it, like search. When someone sees the countless ways to search for things in Emacs:

- isearch, query-replace, occur, multi-occur, project-search, find-file (with wildcards), ffap, apropos, xref-find-definitions/find-references, consult-line, consult-ripgrep, consult-fd, consult-hn, consult-omni, browser-hist-search, magit-find-file, magit-dired-log, etc.

That typically, already is enough for them to say - "darn, I want this...". Then next step is to show them that there's nothing to fear - everything is documented, described and can be inspected on the go.

In teams where pair-programming is a normal practice, I would typically watch their efforts with something in VSCode, IntelliJ, or even Vim and ask them if they'd want to see how I'd do the same/similar thing in Emacs. If the person is not interested, I won't push for it, but at that point, someone who worked with me on the same team knows that I can show them something entertaining and interesting to see, even if they don't get the immediate urge to dive into it.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#76

Post by iLemming »

egorelik wrote: post #68
iLemming wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just Elisp, I think, just any Lisp dialect gets this reaction. Which, honestly, I can't fully comprehend. Wait, how do even people use Emacs while at the same time hating Lisp? Isn't that kind of a painful way to deal with it in general? Sounds like having extreme motion sickness but still loving cars, puking all the way while driving them.

I think there is a crowd, maybe less common than the others, that just want less warts. I can understand that, though I'm not sure the usual dialects that get thrown around are much better. What I don't understand is wanting to replace elisp with a mainstream scripting language. None of them are really functional-style languages; it's just a completely different world. (Non-scripting languages are a different story,…

> I don't understand is wanting to replace elisp with a mainstream scripting language

That typically comes from people without any experience in any Lisps. They don't know "REPL-driven development", they haven't heard about "structural editing", Lisp looks like a parenthesized mess to them. I looked at it the same way until I learned. Now I don't even notice parens - I see structure, beauty and reason.

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#77

Post by fsckboy »

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…

>(Emacs 'windows' are actually more like frames in other apps)

I dont use your "other apps" enough to know exactly what you mean, but it gives me the urge to point out, "Emacs 'frames' are actually more like windows in other apps" :)

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#78

Post by skotobaza »

stackghost wrote: post #65
iLemming wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs Lisp is by far the worst part of emacs Say what you want, but I wouldn't trade it for any other (non-homoiconic) language. Sure, it won't win the contest of the "nicest Lisp", nevertheless - it's a Lisp, and therefore far better suited for the things Emacs is designed to do. Have you ever thought why Org-mode, developed and maintained by a handful of people (perhaps fewer people than the React.js core team ha…

[flagged]

It's ironic to talk about "condescending attitude" while exhibiting the exact same behavior...

Re: Emacs, how it all started for me

#80

Post by setopt »

matthew-craig wrote: post #8
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.

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.

> (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`)

I assume you meant orderless?

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