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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

#131

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.

Any reason why you guys chose these themes other than it looks nice? :)

Solarized seems to be the de facto theme these days. I always wanted a theme that had some kind of "science" behind it. It also looks pretty good.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#132

Finally an introduction that has screenshots which don't remind you of the 70's. Fonts and color schemes do matter, specially nowadays with the likes of Sublime and Textmate. Even more so for new users.

If you want to preserve your vision, you probably want to change those colours. You need dark text on light background.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#133

I also recently started using Emacs. Not much progress in learning, yet, though. It would be nice if someone made a nice starting package that would set it up more sanely for all the IDE-oriented people (basically take what modern IDE can do out of the box and setup Emacs that way). Something similar to what Ubuntu did for Linux. I have seen lots of personal configs on Github, and read lots of Emacs Wiki on how to se…

I started following along with Avdi Grimm as he rebooted his .emacs a while back, and it has been tremendously worthwhile. I am very glad I adopted his technique of splitting up my .emacs into multiple smaller files, and using packages in emacs24 has cleaned up things even further.

http://devblog.avdi.org/category/emacs-reboot/

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#134
I've been using vim for 3-4 years now. The plugin system is alright, but it's nothing to brag about. It's an amazing editor, but I think I'm going to try emacs + evil for a bit.

I almost added some other claims but I couldn't put them into words correctly, so I'll just leave it at this :D

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#135
post #124
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Doesn't sound like laziness as much as it sounds like the thinking of an obstinate youngster who secretly is uneasy with learning new things.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#136
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.

I was an Emacs user back in the '90s. At some point I lost all my custom configuration and never had time to reconfigure.

A few weeks ago, I spent pretty much an entire day configuring Emacs, installing packages, themes, etc....In the end, things didn't really work awesomely. Key-binding issues on my OS X, certain short-cuts not working completely in org-mode, etc... (when not using an external keyboard, I absolutely abhor pressing the "option" key on my MBPro keyboard.)

Then I tweaked out Sublime Text. I appreciated how simple it was to change the themes, and install packages (though with emacs 24 m-x install-package was pretty simple, too), and it seems there's a package for anything (including a super-basic org-mode). And spending $70 on cross-platform closed source is probably worth my time that I save in configuration.

Though, who knows....I know enough VIM to edit server config files, maybe it's time I look into that for JavaScrip/Python development.

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#137

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…

Can I include this in the Emacs chapter? Please?

Re: Start Using Emacs – A Thorough Guide for Beginners

#138
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe I should give emacs/slime another try then. I use paredit in vim already, but I guess I could give redshank a go. What I like in vim is shortcuts like "ca(" or "ci(" to change an s-expr or change the contents of an s-expr, or "da(" to delete an s-expr. And of course being able to use vim's other text editing commands and macro recording / replaying, visual mode etc.
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