Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Master Emacs in one year

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 121 posts

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#41

Post by hollerith »

diminish wrote: post #2

After seeing TextMate struggle around the jump from version 1 to 2 and yesterday reading Sublime Text to struggle going from version 2 to 3 (to 4) I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors. Maybe it's time to hold stronger to your emacs, (or vi).

>I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors [such as Textmate].

I'm not afraid. After 22.5 years on Gnu Emacs, I'm considering a jump to Textmate 2.

(I probably would not be considering a jump, however, without the boost to sustainability caused by Textmate 2's having been open-sourced. ADDED: also, being able to edit files on remote hosts is not important to me.)

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#42

Post by mentos »

Can anyone share what they feel are their top 3 greatest workflow improvements in productivity going from a point and click IDE to a shortcut based IDE like emacs?

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#43

Post by msg »

danso wrote: post #17
michael_h wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with all things, if you don't like it, that's okay. If you're productive in ST3, great! For me, it was the realization that emacs can be configured to do anything you want . If you don't like how it works (and you probably won't), you can change it. Do you wish that Alt- would delete all of the whitespace in front of your cursor and translate the rest of the line to piglatin? You can to that. Do you want to send a…

So what you posted here...this is what I want to see in the OP's otherwise well-intentioned guide. I can say "yes" to a lot of those things, and "maybe" to the others...Don't get me wrong, I love learning new things, especially languages...but in this case, we're talking about a tool that is critical for me to learning other things...when writing an evangelism guide, the saying, "show don't tell", is even more urgent…

Also, and this is weird, you can get vi bindings in emacs through editing modes like viper-mode or evil. So if you want, in emacs you can have both.

In contrast, you will never see emacs inside of vim.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#44

Post by dman »

mentos wrote: post #42

Can anyone share what they feel are their top 3 greatest workflow improvements in productivity going from a point and click IDE to a shortcut based IDE like emacs?

1. Doing funky things with symbol under cursor. In past lives ive had documentation for things like assembly instructions, opengl apis etc displayed inside emacs.

2. Emacs macros.

3. Lack of hopping between terminal and editor.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#45

Post by rdtsc »

mentos wrote: post #42

Can anyone share what they feel are their top 3 greatest workflow improvements in productivity going from a point and click IDE to a shortcut based IDE like emacs?

The improvement for me:

* speed of typing : I really appreciate not having to take my finger off of the main part of the keyboard to use arrows or the mouse, I also don't like the 2 stack (2 mode) switching for vi. Somehow I find it easier to remember the few keyboard cords the toggling of modes.

* works in a terminal : launch with emacs -nw and you can work across an ssh terminal with same syntax highlighting, same shortcuts

* available for most OSes : my co-workers use fancy new editors except they have to rsync code from the server back to their latest Ubuntu, OSX or Windows just to edit it.

* people like to customize it and there are modes for all kinds of esoteric languages and build systems : i don't fiddle much with my .emacs so it is not benefiting me personally but others swear by it

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#46

Post by fearandclothing »

dublinben wrote: post #23
danso wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you posted here...this is what I want to see in the OP's otherwise well-intentioned guide. I can say "yes" to a lot of those things, and "maybe" to the others...Don't get me wrong, I love learning new things, especially languages...but in this case, we're talking about a tool that is critical for me to learning other things...when writing an evangelism guide, the saying, "show don't tell", is even more urgent…

I think the learning curve of Emacs is much easier than vim. You still have a GUI that exposes most of the important functions, and can learn the key bindings as you go. You can start using Emacs for basic editing without actually knowing how to "use" it.

I remember back before I knew how to use vim (I was an Emacs guy then) it was a nightmare when I would forget to set my EDITOR variable and get dropped into vi to write commit messages; I couldn't edit my way out of a paper bag and could never remember how to exit without saving, though after a while ':q!' became the only vim command I knew.

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#47

Post by npsimons »

danso wrote: post #4

Reading guides like these makes me think about how I sound like when I implore novices to try out the command-line. Why should I? I'll peg myself as a half-competent developer, the kind who codes everyday and can lose a weekend to a spontaneous side project. I am completely in agreeance that tool mastery is vital for enjoying and being productive in programming, I just have no concept, not from this guide, and not fr…

I was half expecting you to realize that you answered your own question before you asked it (why do you implore novices to try out the command-line?). But what the hey, I'll throw out some links that go better into why Emacs is still a very viable contender for your editor of choice.

Steve Yegge wrote a classic programming read "Tour De Babel"[1], which has a bit on Emacs under the Lisp section. He also wrote "Effective Emacs"[2], which just the intro tries to explain why you should use Emacs. Lastly, there's Vivek Halder's "Levels of Emacs Proficiency"[3] which will either amuse/awe you or scare you.

[1] - https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

[2] - https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

[3] - http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3996068979/the-levels-of-em...

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#48

Post by gooseyard »

hollerith wrote: post #41
diminish wrote: post #2

After seeing TextMate struggle around the jump from version 1 to 2 and yesterday reading Sublime Text to struggle going from version 2 to 3 (to 4) I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors. Maybe it's time to hold stronger to your emacs, (or vi).

>I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors [such as Textmate]. I'm not afraid. After 22.5 years on Gnu Emacs, I'm considering a jump to Textmate 2. (I probably would not be considering a jump, however, without the boost to sustainability caused by Textmate 2's having been open-sourced. ADDED: also, being able to edit files on remote hosts is not important to me.)

I gave Sublime Text a shot (20 years emacs), but ran into the same thing that has kept me from using emacs x11 for more than a few weeks at a time, which is that I spend maybe 30% of my time editing files on remote machines, connected over ssh, often through complicated tunneling arrangements that make using Tramp a pain to use.

I keep thinking that what I really need is to switch all the machines I use to Plan9 to abstract away the remote sessions, I guess then I'd have to learn Acme :)

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#49

Post by [deleted] »

gooseyard wrote: post #48
hollerith wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors [such as Textmate]. I'm not afraid. After 22.5 years on Gnu Emacs, I'm considering a jump to Textmate 2. (I probably would not be considering a jump, however, without the boost to sustainability caused by Textmate 2's having been open-sourced. ADDED: also, being able to edit files on remote hosts is not important to me.)

I gave Sublime Text a shot (20 years emacs), but ran into the same thing that has kept me from using emacs x11 for more than a few weeks at a time, which is that I spend maybe 30% of my time editing files on remote machines, connected over ssh, often through complicated tunneling arrangements that make using Tramp a pain to use. I keep thinking that what I really need is to switch all the machines I use to Plan9 to a…

[deleted]

Re: Master Emacs in one year

#50

Post by Goladus »

rikkus wrote: post #39
Goladus wrote: post #10

Once you have mastered Emacs, you are good at all other editors I haven't found that to be true at all. I find that due to archaic idiosyncrasies and the customization possible with emacs, the more time I spend with it the more difficult it becomes to use different editors.

I spent 5 years learning and using vi (n perhaps a dozen different Unix-like OSes, so they were all different, meaning I could only use a core set of features. I then spent a few years working on Windows where I had Vim, but other editors I used were, well, 'standard'. Then ViEmu came along and I now move between Vi-like editing in VS and Vim, and 'normal' editing in other apps. It's not too bad, to be honest. I'm ed…

True I rarely have a problem editing in web text boxes, I never really committed to using emacs as a word processor. But I'd be lying if I said I've never accidentally closed a browser tab when absent-mindedly trying to do a backward-kill-word ('ctrl-w').

I was thinking more about programming and system administration. After years of using emacs, I find it harder to adapt to the popular mainstream tools like Visual Studio, TextMate, etc.

Post reply on HN