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Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

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Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#21

Post by ultimoo »

liyanage wrote: post #18

I tried to get into Emacs on OS X a few times, but one of the things I don't like is the awkwardness of not having the Meta key mapped to a direct simple key press. Activating the "Use option as meta key" isn't a good solution because I sometimes need to type accented characters that require the option key. How do people deal with this when using Emacs in the OS X Terminal app?

I use the 'use option as meta' heavily and haven't till date needed to type accented chars. Maybe you can try to use only the left option as a meta and leave the right one for accented chars? Not sure whether the Terminal.app supports it, better chances of iTerm supporting it though.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#22

Post by burgerz »

RBerenguel wrote: post #17
burgerz wrote: post #14

What benefits does Emacs have over something like Sublime? All I can see is you can customize a million key binds so you don't have to use the mouse. Sorry but I'm not racing type to as fast as possible when I write code, I don't mind spending an extra second and using a cursor.

Emacs also binds almost any REPL (Python, Lisp dialects, Erlang...) There's also AucTeX if you need to write TeX (the best thing for LaTeX out there.) Emacs is also completely configurable with emacs lisp: you can write your own "things." For example, I have a mode I used to format posts for my blog: with just a few custom keybindings I had it formatted to my tastes and special CSS rules. PS: Also, leaving the keyboa…

You can replicate a lot of that behavior in Sublime, plus you get a full GUI, file browser tree and it's easy to use and customize right away.

I'm not really convinced I should invest time in using emacs.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#23

Post by blueblob »

burgerz wrote: post #22
RBerenguel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs also binds almost any REPL (Python, Lisp dialects, Erlang...) There's also AucTeX if you need to write TeX (the best thing for LaTeX out there.) Emacs is also completely configurable with emacs lisp: you can write your own "things." For example, I have a mode I used to format posts for my blog: with just a few custom keybindings I had it formatted to my tastes and special CSS rules. PS: Also, leaving the keyboa…

You can replicate a lot of that behavior in Sublime, plus you get a full GUI, file browser tree and it's easy to use and customize right away. I'm not really convinced I should invest time in using emacs.

Personally, I use vim, but you can get a full gui using xemacs and it also is easy to customize with plugins. It also has the advantage that it can run in a terminal over ssh without X (server deployment).

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#25

Post by abrichr »

rickdale wrote: post #15

When I was in college I had the privilege to work on a project with a developer that understood emacs as on operating system and used it as a way of life. When we started the project he would yell at me whenever I took my hand off the keyboard and tried to use the mouse. Finally he started to hit my hand with a ruler when I would lift it up. My emacs skills are still probably only 1% of his, but after working that sh…

> ... he would yell at me whenever I took my hand off the keyboard ...

> I always come back to emacs ... Just feels like the right tool to me.

Sounds like a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome... ;)

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#26

Post by Matti »

Emacs-related things I have learned recently:

* Sticky modifiers: I don't know why it took me so long for me to activate these. The difference between holding Ctrl while hitting another key or just hitting Ctrl once before the next key makes a huge difference for me. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/StickyModifiers

* Got an old-styled Thinkpad keyboard with the trackpoint buttons below the spacebar? I mapped the left button to C-x and the right one to M-x. These buttons are PERFECT for this purpose. I would have mapped them system-wide to Ctrl and Alt but didn't find a solution for doing that in Debian (console/tty).

* Helm: Incremental completion and selection narrowing. Makes it a lot easier to find those commands which you sort-of-remember-the-name-of: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

* Sunrise Commander: MC-ish file explorer, based on Emacs's Dired: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#27

Post by tazjin »

blueblob wrote: post #19
tazjin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say vanilla emacs, do you include the Cocoa version? ( http://emacsformacosx.com/ ) I'm using that many hours every day and have zero problems. Regarding fullscreen, if you use a recent build both native and non-native fullscreen are supported.

+1 so funny, vanilla=cocoa...

I don't understand your reply. It is quite possible that somebody doesn't know that the Cocoa wrapper is a part of upstream emacs, which is why I asked.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#28

Post by gavinpc »

burgerz wrote: post #14

What benefits does Emacs have over something like Sublime? All I can see is you can customize a million key binds so you don't have to use the mouse. Sorry but I'm not racing type to as fast as possible when I write code, I don't mind spending an extra second and using a cursor.

If you're happy, keep on truckin'.

But to answer your question. This has been said a million times, but here's another angle. In a recent talk, Rich Hickey was talking about the design of electronic music modules:

> In other words, there's a human interface and a machine interface to the same > things. And the machine interfaces were there all the time — in fact, they were > first. And then the human interfaces come. We have to remember that as a > design thing. What's wrong with SQL? What's wrong with SQL is there's no > machine interface to SQL. They only designed a human interface to SQL, and > we've suffered ever since, cause we have to send these strings around. You can > always build a human interface on top of a machine interface, but the other is > often disgusting.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor... (at about 41:00)

Emacs is built on a machine interface first (elisp). Even the mouse actions in emacs are processed with elisp. So the human interface is not hard-wired. That's why hackers like it.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#29

Post by RBerenguel »

burgerz wrote: post #22
RBerenguel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs also binds almost any REPL (Python, Lisp dialects, Erlang...) There's also AucTeX if you need to write TeX (the best thing for LaTeX out there.) Emacs is also completely configurable with emacs lisp: you can write your own "things." For example, I have a mode I used to format posts for my blog: with just a few custom keybindings I had it formatted to my tastes and special CSS rules. PS: Also, leaving the keyboa…

You can replicate a lot of that behavior in Sublime, plus you get a full GUI, file browser tree and it's easy to use and customize right away. I'm not really convinced I should invest time in using emacs.

I was not trying to convince you: if you are happy with Sublime, use it.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#30

Post by RBerenguel »

blueblob wrote: post #23
burgerz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replicate a lot of that behavior in Sublime, plus you get a full GUI, file browser tree and it's easy to use and customize right away. I'm not really convinced I should invest time in using emacs.

Personally, I use vim, but you can get a full gui using xemacs and it also is easy to customize with plugins. It also has the advantage that it can run in a terminal over ssh without X (server deployment).

No need to use xemacs, "standard" emacs has also a gui, file browser, etc etc. I use evil in emacs to have some of vims keybindings, btw
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