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Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

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Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#71

Post by dontmakemelaugh »

etfb wrote: post #8

I'm a recovering Emacser, happy enough with less powerful but more modern text editors. It wasn't the program or the UI that finally did me in, but the community: I had a problem with how Emacs worked, I wanted to figure out a solution, so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse. I realised there's something about Emacs that attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smu…

> so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse.

I checked my logs. It was one guy that was abusive. Everyone else was friendly and helpful.

So you doom the whole Emacs community because of one user on #emacs the one time you were there?

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#72

Post by etfb »

jjaredsimpson wrote: post #45
etfb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was asking all the right questions -- is this possible, what hooks should I consider, what should I take into account to make sure that the stuff I add doesn't stamp all over other stuff. I'm a programmer with thirty years experience and twenty years with Emacs; I know this stuff. Basically, they shut me down. The thing I was asking was contrary to the whole philosophy of Emacs. I had, they assured me, no right to…

You used Emacs for 20 years and one bad interaction on IRC which caused you throw away all that acquired knowledge, let alone elisp you wrote?

The camel was rather overloaded with straw by that stage. I had asked the question two or three times over a long period, and received approximately the same response each time.

I didn't just develop my contempt for the community all in one go. I had to WORK at it!

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#73

Post by deadghost »

leephillips wrote: post #39
stiff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will try to explain. When I came to emacs as a user, a "buffer" seemed just a weird way of saying "tab" without displaying actual tabs. The word choice only started making more sense once I wrote non-trivial amounts of emacslisp. The buffer is the fundamental emacs data structure, like the file is the fundamental unix data structure, so it's really important to understand it well. The definition is really simple: a…

Thanks for taking the trouble to write all this (when all I asked for was a link). It gives a good flavor of what you're talking about. I used to read network news inside of emacs, using a mode called gnus, decades ago, and before I switched to vim. That's probably an example of a complex application that could be written within emacs because of the architecture that you describe. This extensibility is tempting me to…

Getting the vim portions working in emacs was surprisingly easy. I didn't have a significantly modified vim so there wasn't much to port. Stuff like mapping jj to esc and Y to y$ was simple enough. I don't notice any difference between evil and vim.

I'm still trying to figure out the emacs portions of emacs. I don't have the work flow quite right; things like buffer management, saving sessions, shell in emacs, etc.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#74

Post by mjcohen »

terhechte wrote: post #41
thirdtruck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to recommend reading more Pratchett. :) I bought a couple more novels last week and couldn't help but finish one ( Equal Rites ) less than twenty four hours later.

I've read more than 20 Pratchett books (I think I didn't read the last 2-3) and there're two absolutely great books among them: - Nightwatch: Great idea, fantastically written - Going Postal: Great book for everybody who reads HN. Great characters, storyline, and fantasy meets hacking.

That latter title made me think of the story "Spacial Delivery" by Gordon Dickson in his collection 'The Right to Arm Bears'. A fun read.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#75

Post by babs474 »

deadghost wrote: post #73
leephillips wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for taking the trouble to write all this (when all I asked for was a link). It gives a good flavor of what you're talking about. I used to read network news inside of emacs, using a mode called gnus, decades ago, and before I switched to vim. That's probably an example of a complex application that could be written within emacs because of the architecture that you describe. This extensibility is tempting me to…

Getting the vim portions working in emacs was surprisingly easy. I didn't have a significantly modified vim so there wasn't much to port. Stuff like mapping jj to esc and Y to y$ was simple enough. I don't notice any difference between evil and vim. I'm still trying to figure out the emacs portions of emacs. I don't have the work flow quite right; things like buffer management, saving sessions, shell in emacs, etc.

Here are things I use for those 3 things that I find really helpful, maybe you will too.

1.http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractivelyDoThings

2. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DeskTop

3. For 3 I just use built in shell-mode, but what is really neat is saving your shell session to a file "C-x C-w" every so often. Then if you reboot or crash or whatever, emacs-desktop will bring back all your open files and all your shells. I usually have 3, regular bash, a sql session, and maybe an ssh session to somewhere, all with a full record of what I've done, sometimes going back months.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#76

Post by actsasbuffoon »

al2o3cr wrote: post #59
actsasbuffoon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over the years I've learnt quite a few languages, and what strikes me is that they're all so very alike. I used to think this as well, then I learned some Prolog. For those who aren't familiar with it, Prolog is a logic programming language (as opposed to imperative and functional languages). Instead of telling Prolog how to solve a problem, you give it a set of facts and tell it what you want to know. Prolog takes…

+1 on the lambda calculus stuff. Here's a related talk about deriving the Y combinator in Ruby by Jim Weirich: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs (skip to about 28:00 if you're impatient) There are additional versions of this same presentation circulating with the code in Javascript and (I believe) Clojure. Full disclosure: Jim is a co-worker of mine.

I've seen a JavaScript version of that talk. My respect for Jim is one of the reasons I switched to Emacs.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#77

Post by ZaneA »

xiaomai wrote: post #67
ZaneA wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great thing about evil is you can enable it in your .emacs and it mostly just works. But even better, because this is Emacs the vi layer is also easily extendable. Here's an example of adding other operators (adding `mit`, `mit>` etc): https://github.com/ZaneA/Dotfiles/blob/1858a02de25e25de20e96...

I'm tempted by emacs/evil as well, but everytime I try to make the switch I run into two problems: 1) intial emacs setup: it feels really tricky to just get basic editor sanity configured (auto-indent, syntax highlighting, etc.) 2) I worry that by using evil mode, I lose out on a lot of the goodness of emacs major and minor mode's. Do you remap everything to be more vi-ish for each mode that you use? I guess that is…

I second the idea of using Prelude to start with Emacs, along with the package manager which makes the initial setup and adding modes/stuff very easy (see http://melpa.milkbox.net).

I haven't seen any lost functionality by using evil; modes that define bindings continue to work, and the usual C-x/C-c/M-x/whatever works fine with evil. There is the odd major mode that doesn't work with evil out of the box (usually if it redefines j/k) but most have no problems. You can still use most (all?) regular Emacs movement commands with evil as well.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#78

Post by JackMorgan »

klibertp wrote: post #65
etfb wrote: post #8

I'm a recovering Emacser, happy enough with less powerful but more modern text editors. It wasn't the program or the UI that finally did me in, but the community: I had a problem with how Emacs worked, I wanted to figure out a solution, so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse. I realised there's something about Emacs that attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smu…

Well, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmugLispWeenie had to go somewhere and what place would be better for them than Emacs? ;) Actually I had exactly the same feeling when I started using Emacs: the very first thread on some newsgroup I remember reading was about moving lines up and down, like in sublime(?) with M-S- / . The poor guy who dared to ask was immediately told that this is "not the emacs way", that there are many…

Amusingly, I asked that same question on SO, and got a couple very polite suggestions within hours.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#79

Post by JackMorgan »

aetherson wrote: post #56

I'll take issue with this claim: "Work environments are a very personal thing. They exist to serve only one person: you. Me-me-me is a winning attitude when dealing with your environment." I think it's considerably more important to have a (basically good) work environment in which your colleagues can sit down and use fluently than to have one that's absolutely optimized to your individual tastes.

If you pair a majority of the time, sure, make a standardized workstation with your team. My team uses viemu in VS, which the rest of our office detests, but hey, we are the ones pairing 99% of the time.

When I am not pairing for the majority, I setup my machine to my tastes, and simply install a "default" editor for the few times someone else actually needs to type on my machine. Emacs and IDEA both have good ways to revert everything to defaults temporarily.

I do not believe, however, that a perfectly customized setup has only small gains. For example, consider two tools that I have never seen as defaults in any editor or IDE: rainbow parens/brackets and paredit mode. Rainbow parens just highlights pairs: http://stevelosh.com/media/images/blog/2010/09/rainbow.png

And here is a short minute paredit mode explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0

When actually editing code, those two tools save me several hundred keystrokes an hour. And those are just the first two tools I thought to use as an example out of the entire toolbox that is emacs.

If I was to now give up just those two tools, I would be sentencing myself to the mental equivalent of tying five pound weights to my legs for the marathon that is the rest of my programming career. Why would I intentionally require myself to type more keys per hour to do the same editing, rather than just learning a faster way to edit? This is, obviously, also my argument for learning the vim editing system (which I also use in emacs).

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#80

Post by thirdtruck »

terhechte wrote: post #41
thirdtruck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to recommend reading more Pratchett. :) I bought a couple more novels last week and couldn't help but finish one ( Equal Rites ) less than twenty four hours later.

I've read more than 20 Pratchett books (I think I didn't read the last 2-3) and there're two absolutely great books among them: - Nightwatch: Great idea, fantastically written - Going Postal: Great book for everybody who reads HN. Great characters, storyline, and fantasy meets hacking.

Having just listened to the Snuff audio book, I can't wait to read/hear the further adventures of the Nightwatch and its captain.
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