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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

#101

Post by Baalbetherim »

cgag wrote: post #87
jcurbo wrote: post #62

I had tinkered with emacs over the years but mostly used vim for programming, until the past year or so when I started writing Haskell and LaTeX for school and put in a determined effort to use Emacs full time. I've found I like a 'regular' text editor more than vi's modes, and that (like rickdale's comment) when I've tried out other editors like Textmate or Sublime Text, they feel like they're missing something comp…

Interesting, I honestly was pretty confident no one who got used to modal editing ever wanted to go back to crazy key chording.

I think it depends on what people are using their editor for whether they'll jump ship. I started out on vim, and I really loved it. Then I was typing up papers using the vim latex suite and syntax highlighting would cause my machine to choke every time I scrolled through text. I could have just turned off syntax highlighting, but I tried emacs and auctex, and it worked wonderfully. Since then, I found a bunch of other things that I prefer about it, and only really use vim for quick config file edits. Now that I've been playing with it for a while, chords are second nature, just like modal editing became for me with vim.

I imagine that nobody who's terribly accustomed to either editor will switch unless they've got a specific need their current editor doesn't meet.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#102

Post by tiziano88 »

mmariani wrote: post #96
AndreasFrom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to switch back and forth between Vim and Emacs and am curious. What causes the hate in your relationship with Vim?

Vim is an excellent text editor. But I mostly use it for coding, and that's the problem. Vim is not an IDE. It relies on plugins to deliver a half baked IDE experience. Sometimes these plugins are broken and other times they refuse to play nice with each other. As I sort of need them to get the job done I end up wasting time fixing broken things instead of solving real problems. That's why I'm ready to throw this too…

Can Emacs replace eclim (eclipse + vim) as a Java IDE? Are there plugins that can make editing Java in Emacs nicer and more productive?

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#103

Post by weavie »

mmariani wrote: post #4

After about a year developing a love/hate relationship with Vim I've finally had enough. After reading this post I think I'm ready to make the switch. Very good writing. Thanks for posting it.

Seriously what someone needs to do is write Vim in Lisp to put an end to these dilemmas.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#104

Post by mheathr »

cgag wrote: post #87
jcurbo wrote: post #62

I had tinkered with emacs over the years but mostly used vim for programming, until the past year or so when I started writing Haskell and LaTeX for school and put in a determined effort to use Emacs full time. I've found I like a 'regular' text editor more than vi's modes, and that (like rickdale's comment) when I've tried out other editors like Textmate or Sublime Text, they feel like they're missing something comp…

Interesting, I honestly was pretty confident no one who got used to modal editing ever wanted to go back to crazy key chording.

I use both Vim and Emacs, and in most contexts Evil-Mode within Emacs that emulates most of Vim's vanilla functions.

Emacs also has modal editing that allows for per mode based keybindings.

Where Vim wins out though on the keybinding game is with its grammar that enables a great deal of mnemonics and the ability to bind keys based on key sequences that do not all have to be prefix keys except for the last key in the sequence, which is the case with Emacs currently.

That opens up a lot more options for generating terse keybinds that are simply not possible with the way Emacs binding system currently works, and coming from Vim I found the system extremely confusing until I read how Emacs keymaps lookups work in greater detail.

That spills over into what is possible with Evil-Mode bindings as well to a degree because of the prefix key requirement with the sequences.

And in Emacs, because of its keymap hierarchy system it is extremely easy to have custom keymaps shadowed and overruled by a higher ranking mode mapping, which again coming from Vim is not obvious what is happening there and how to overcome that behavior.

Even though I now grok how Emacs processes keymaps, I still much prefer Vim's system that allows for any key sequences to be interleaved to make very terse sequences.

The workaround to the situation with long chord sequences that use the Meta and Control keys is that I will bind the frequently used command to the hyper or super keys which are largely not used by modes nowadays and are much less crowded as a result.

There is no inherent reason why Emacs could not move towards a key sequence rather than a chord sequence binding scheme, so resolving the quagmire is at least tractable.

I do use Emacs chords where they are reasonable though rather than changing states just to interact with a REPL or a VCS mode, and in the context of working with Lisp I always use Emacs' chords as paredit obviates the need for any of Vim's grammar, which by default lacks a sexp object or ways of transposing objects well.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#105

Post by mheathr »

capisce wrote: post #13
Flenser wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install evil-mode and you can use all the vim movement shortcuts you're familiar with.

I've tried using emacs/slime with evil but currently I prefer vim/slimv. Evil just felt a little bit "off" compared to regular vim, or maybe it was the slime integration. Anyhow, I recommend giving slimv a try, there's a nice tutorial here: http://kovisoft.bitbucket.org/tutorial.html

I am a big Vim fan and promote its design for the most part, however with Lisp paredit and redshank covers text object movement, editing, and refactoring entirely so there is no benefit to using Evil-mode there once paredit and redshank is understood.

One downside though it that it will leave users wanting that in all languages, something which is sadly not available elsewhere as fluidly. I find myself thinking,"this is great, but what would really improve this situation is if it was inherently structured so that I could exploit that" in other contexts.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#106

Post by jcurbo »

Baalbetherim wrote: post #101
cgag wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I honestly was pretty confident no one who got used to modal editing ever wanted to go back to crazy key chording.

I think it depends on what people are using their editor for whether they'll jump ship. I started out on vim, and I really loved it. Then I was typing up papers using the vim latex suite and syntax highlighting would cause my machine to choke every time I scrolled through text. I could have just turned off syntax highlighting, but I tried emacs and auctex, and it worked wonderfully. Since then, I found a bunch of oth…

I had a similar experience, really. Do I want to use emacs to edit system files and such? Not really, I'll continue to use vim. But for programming projects and document writing I like emacs better. To be honest I think the thing that started it was messing with Sublime Text; after using it for a few weeks I started tinkering with emacs again and never looked back. I will say that I never fully bought into vim in terms of movement keys and in depth shortcuts; I pretty much used cursor keys and the mouse and didn't do anything too advanced.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#108

Post by justinhj »

tiatia wrote: post #6

Emacs is one of the most powerful and impressive programs I have ever seen. It just lacks a decent editor.

As a poke at Emacs' creeping featurism, vi advocates have been known to describe Emacs as "a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor".

From Editor War on Wikipedia

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#109

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

mmariani wrote: post #96
AndreasFrom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to switch back and forth between Vim and Emacs and am curious. What causes the hate in your relationship with Vim?

Vim is an excellent text editor. But I mostly use it for coding, and that's the problem. Vim is not an IDE. It relies on plugins to deliver a half baked IDE experience. Sometimes these plugins are broken and other times they refuse to play nice with each other. As I sort of need them to get the job done I end up wasting time fixing broken things instead of solving real problems. That's why I'm ready to throw this too…

Lots of people who code with VIM don't use IDE's out of choice though. And Vim has had 20+ years of development, so I don't think it's going to stabilize any more.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#110

Post by lord_quas »

terhechte wrote: post #69
lord_quas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most beautiful theme I've come across, and the one I am currently using: https://github.com/jasonm23/emacs-purple-haze-theme

Interestingly, I use Soothe ( https://github.com/jasonm23/emacs-soothe-theme ) also by the same guy, which is also one of the most beautiful themes to ever grace one of my editors.

Indeed, I used Soothe for a while too. Loved that as well.
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