The best feature of emacs is running shells in buffers. For interactive work, this is supremely useful because you can easily search your history, grab previous lines/chunks of code, and edit them into future commands. I do this all the time for data exploration with python.
Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
111–120 of 138 posts
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#112When 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…
hah! I did this to people too. I ended up popping the keycaps of the arrows off the keyboard and taping over the hole.
I don't know much about emacs, but that would be a good way to train yourself to use vim :)
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#113Question to the Emacs crowd: how do I hit Alt comfortably? My instinct is to use my left ring finger, but have trouble doing that without moving my other fingers much. Could it be because I have very large hands (or because my keyboard sucks)? Is it a good idea to just remap capslock to be the meta key?
Having two control keys is really useful because then you can alternate hands. My layout looks like this:
[super] - [left meta] - [left control] - [space] - [right control] - [right meta]
Having control and meta right next to each other also makes C-M-* combinations easier to reach.
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#114I 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 Caps-lock as control and Command as meta. Has worked great for me.
I'm always curious why people remap the caps lock to be control. For me, extending my pinky to the caps lock makes the second key press hard. Like quitting emacs would be harder for me. I should make command the meta key though. That seems super beneficial
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#115Irrespective of the merits of emacs itself, this feels like a nearly perfect introductory tutorial. I've never seriousny used emacs, but this made me want to go try it and made me feel like I would probably succeed. Good show, whoever wrote this.
Thank you!
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#116I am not a developer but am learning programming. I picked up vim and have slowly build memory muscle for it for at least basic commands. I have never use Emacs. It seems to be quite popular. Is it worth learning? Is there a decisive answer to Emacs vs vim?
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use cmd for meta, there is an option for that: (setq mac-option-modifier nil mac-command-modifier 'meta)
I'll have to try that. Is this with the regular emacs in the Terminal app? Does it interfere with shortcuts like Cmd-N to open a new Terminal window?
Iterm2 will let you swap option and command. I also cheat and use Keyboard Maestro to UN-swap Cmd-Tab and Cmd-` so that application switching and window switching still works.
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can enter accented characters into emacs by hitting M-x 8: M-x 8 ` e -> è M-x 8 / a -> å M-x 8 E -> € The number of these binds does not cover all of unicode, but it's surprisingly high nonetheless. If your desired character does not have a direct bind like that, or you just can't find one (C-h b lists them), you can insert a character by hitting M-x 8 RET and then typing its name: M-x 8 RET "Em dash" -> — M-x 8…
It's C-x 8, not M-x 8. Use C-x 8 C-h for help
Uhh, whoops! I can't believe that I messed that up. Sorry!
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#119Is it worth learning this over Sublime Text? I love Sublime.
Sublime will do fine if you are't headed to Hogwarts. It's an awesome piece of software.
Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might be biased (I'm the author), but I don't think that emacs-starter-kit prevents you from doing things the normal way. You can still modify your emacs config and include vendor elisp, and ESK doesn't make it more difficult. And with the tutorial - I have a pretty low opinion of it. I mean, it starts out talking about how to navigate up and down one screen - who cares about that when they're starting to learn a n…
That was kind of my point about the rough start, you won't get emacs to do the real work without putting time into figuring out how to get it to go. The tutorial is more of a get you started and make sure you can actually edit text in emacs. The most important parts of the tutorial are the how to save (which most people get to) and getting more help which is probably what people don't get to or understand. It isn't t…
"That was kind of my point about the rough start, you won't get emacs to do the real work without putting time into figuring out how to get it to go."
I disagree. It's not true for most IDEs, why should it hold for Emacs? This argument was also raised about Linux, but then Ubuntu came along and proved it was wrong. This seems to me like a religious stupidity - you have to use it for everything or it won't work at all.
My main motivation to use Emacs is org-mode and Common Lisp. That's already real work; although I try to use Emacs for everything, but using it for just one of these things would be perfectly valid use case for many people.
It's not that I wouldn't like to mess with the editor either; in fact I did a lot. But it still was not enough for it to work decently. I will have to try one of the starter packages yet (probably Prelude), though.