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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

#121

Post by Derbasti »

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 actually started using Emacs at work when work became dangerously boring and I was looking for a distraction. Plus I had read a lot about Emacs in my Vim days and wanted to know what it was all about.

So I suppose I actually switched without a specific need except for curiosity and boredom. I'm glad I did though, since Emacs has improved my life quite a bit since then.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#122

Post by Derbasti »

donniezazen wrote: post #116

I 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?

You should become intimately comfortable with a powerful text editor. Whether that is Emacs or Vim or Sublime Text does not matter too much.

I don't think there is any one axis that clearly marks Vim or Emacs superior. Both are awesome, geeky, sophisticated and powerful.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#123

Post by Tezro »

hogu wrote: post #111

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.

I like the M-x eshell function a lot, too. It supplies identical shell experience across every system which is capable to run emacs.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#124

Post by rwg »

barbs wrote: post #112
rrmm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

On the first day of my first CS class in college, the gruff old professor passed around a stack of photocopied "VI TUTORIAL" papers. In the "MOVEMENT" section, it had pictures of arrow keys, then X's hand-drawn over top of each arrow key, and H J K L handwritten above their corresponding X'd out arrow keys.

Gruff old professor explained that using H J K L was the True and Proper Way and the arrow keys were a work of the Devil, so to make sure we were not tempted by the Dark Lord of cursor motion, he had the department's system administrator recompile vi on the department's (pathetically overworked) Sun to remove support for the arrow keys.

(As an aside, if you've never tried working interactively on a Unix box whose load is higher than its CPU speed in MHz, you've really missed out.)

Rather than get used to using H J K L, I spent that evening waiting for a new vi executable to build in my home directory.

Laziness will find a way.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#125

Post by dima55 »

sbuccini wrote: post #82

I'm learning Emacs for class, and I was wondering: do you use the same hand to hit the command/meta keys? For example, when I'm doing C-n or C-p, I am currently hitting the command key with my left hand, but the identifier with my right. Is this the normal way, or do most people use one hand to execute a command?

Yes. Always hit the modifiers with the opposite hand. This is taught in every keyboarding class, and applies to all modifiers, even Shift. This will make you a faster typist, and your hands will feel much better. Some newfangled keyboards don't include two sets of every modifier, so don't buy those. :)

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#126

Post by mheathr »

shire wrote: post #66

Is it worth learning this over Sublime Text? I love Sublime.

Certainly use whatever tools you like, however emacs and Sublime Text cannot be compared directly to one another.

Sublime Text and Vim or some other text editor can be, however text editing is a small component of emacs' utility to its users.

The reason is that emacs is an environment for running emacs lisp applications, and those target pretty much every imaginable niche.

There exists decades of development in that vein for emacs to the extent that for some domains it is an entirely self-contained ecosystem for that space.

The environment homogeneity is distinctly different from any other app which targets a subset of the tasks associated with an overall workflow; if we narrow the domain to just development a possibly valid comparison would be Visual Studio because of how the environment absorbs every interrelated aspect of development from communication to debugging etc. within one overall application.

Light Table may one day be similarly versatile though and a possible emacs alternative.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#127

Post by RBerenguel »

skylan_q wrote: post #70
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…

I can't repeat myself enough. TRAMP mode: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode I do plenty of work over ssh, and this saves me the headache of dealing with screens and multiple terminals.

Yup. I don't use tramp that much (well, in the last 4 months I used it daily, but...), but having it is great. Every time I have to edit more than 4 lines in a server I resort to it (if it's less I use nano or vim, because it usually means I'm in a ssh session editing some config file)

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#128

Post by RBerenguel »

agumonkey wrote: post #84
Matti wrote: post #26

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 b…

recent alternative https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode

I had a look at god mode when it was posted in r/emacs and it looks neat. I'd choose it above sticky modifiers if it wasn't because I use evil which kind of supersedes (or more precisely, covers most of it) them

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#129

Post by RBerenguel »

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…

Have you tried evil? I mostly live in insert mode in emacs and when I need to do "something" I press Esc and do the magic

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#130

Post by intranation »

singular wrote: post #47
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.

Yes, I tried the cocoa version and that's what I'm referring to. I recall having real issues in particular with ansi-term not having the environment correctly set + simply not being able to resolve that. I'm pretty sure I had other issues too, but I can't remember them. To be fair, I've not tried the cocoa version or any other for some time, so things may have changed. However, I still think OP's point was unfair on…

PATH, exec-path etc. are mangled because of the way OSX loads environment variables. Here's an Emacs package that fixes that:

https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell

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