Are there any decent books out there on emacs?
The official GNU Emacs Manual is good. I've slowly been working my way through it. It's a free download:
Master Emacs in one year
81–90 of 121 posts
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#82Any one know how Sublime Text's Command Palette alternative in emacs?
maybe smex? http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Smex
I use Smex + ido-vertical-mode which looks like this: http://klibert.pl/ido-vertical.png. It's closer to how the "command palette" looks like than the normal ido. It doesn't display keybindings next to commands like Sublime does, but if you have `suggest-key-bindings` set, Emacs will show you command binding when you execute it: http://klibert.pl/suggest-key-binding.png
Helm (https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm) is another way of doing this, although I don't use it (yet - I'm going to check it out sooner or later).
The "command palette" (M-x or : in Emacs/Vim respectively) is a very useful tool for both exploring and working with the editor. It's kind of sad that people forgot about it for a few decades and only rediscovered it recently thanks to Sublime and similar.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#83Out of curiosity, and this is a real question not a troll : What can emacs and vi do that a regular IDE can't ?
vi: runs everywhere, installed by default on most linux distributions.
emacs: incredibly customizable, you can re-write the way your editor works. Some features that I find important: editing files remotely over SSH, running a shell inside the editor (so the same editing commands work in the shell), easy to write custom file finding functions for searching different parts of a codebase, git integration (a semi-GUI interface to git), and if another editor has a feature, someone has probably created a package that adds that functionality to emacs. Also has tetris and pong.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#84Perhaps a naive question here, but I'm interested in emacs now, and I need to ask: does your left pinky finger get used to all the CTRL and ALT key combos, or do you change the key bindings, or are there special keyboards meant for emacs use, or what? Two minutes into the tutorial I was already thinking about whether there should be some sort of hack to use CAPSLOCK instead of CTRL...
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#85Once 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 haven't found that Emacs has made it harder to use other editors. It's just made me realize how horrible it's always been to use them, hammering away at the arrow keys, using the mouse way more often than should be necessary, spending time on fixing whitespace that should be spent writing code… Then there's the fact that Emacs really isn't an editor. If anything, it's a shell that runs elisp programs, chief among w…
That's similar to what I joke about it being when people complain about it being bloated: It's a LISP VM, which happens to have a thriving ecosystem of utilities that run on it.
Germane to the conversation that emacs make you "good at other editors" (nb: Are other editors as programmable/versatile as Emacs and vi -- certainly edtiors need to be able to rise to a level required by the operator... I haven't worked w/ textmate or sublime, etc., etc.) -- I've recently shelved Emacs for vi to "level-up" my vi skills. I'm as I delve into vi, I'm finding facilities that I really hadn't imagined in my previous episodes w/ vi, and I think part of it can be attributed to my years w/ Emacs, and the attitude that it instilled: "There has to be a way to do what I'm imagining".
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#86Perhaps a naive question here, but I'm interested in emacs now, and I need to ask: does your left pinky finger get used to all the CTRL and ALT key combos, or do you change the key bindings, or are there special keyboards meant for emacs use, or what? Two minutes into the tutorial I was already thinking about whether there should be some sort of hack to use CAPSLOCK instead of CTRL...
I use xmodmap on Linux to remap caps lock to ctrl: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MovingTheCtrlKey
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#87Out of curiosity, and this is a real question not a troll : What can emacs and vi do that a regular IDE can't ?
vi: combinations of commands.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#88Perhaps a naive question here, but I'm interested in emacs now, and I need to ask: does your left pinky finger get used to all the CTRL and ALT key combos, or do you change the key bindings, or are there special keyboards meant for emacs use, or what? Two minutes into the tutorial I was already thinking about whether there should be some sort of hack to use CAPSLOCK instead of CTRL...
honestly i have no idea why people complains about the ctrl and i actually love how accessible ctrl is.
i use ctrl all the time, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-a, ctrl-e etc ... ie; ctrl-xs ctrl-xc just rolls off my finger like nothing. i think capslock thing was just a thing of the past when capslock was where ctrl was/is now.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#89Perhaps a naive question here, but I'm interested in emacs now, and I need to ask: does your left pinky finger get used to all the CTRL and ALT key combos, or do you change the key bindings, or are there special keyboards meant for emacs use, or what? Two minutes into the tutorial I was already thinking about whether there should be some sort of hack to use CAPSLOCK instead of CTRL...
honestly i have no idea why people complains about the ctrl and i actually love how accessible ctrl is. i use ctrl all the time, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-a, ctrl-e etc ... ie; ctrl-xs ctrl-xc just rolls off my finger like nothing. i think capslock thing was just a thing of the past when capslock was where ctrl was/is now.
only thing i had to do was for macs, i had to switch option key to my command key. there was no way i was able to use option key for the emacs meta key.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#90Out of curiosity, and this is a real question not a troll : What can emacs and vi do that a regular IDE can't ?
I used Visual Studio, Zend Studio and Komodo IDE in the past. Some (it's not exhaustive list) of the things Emacs can do and mentioned IDEs can't:
Receiving and sending emails. Being an IRC/Jabber/others client. Displaying images and pdfs directly. Bulk editing of many lines, even from different files, at once. Drawing ASCII-art diagrams. Playing tetris. Being an amazingly powerful "calculator" (http://nullprogram.com/blog/2009/06/23/). Transparently editing file on remote machines, also executing commands on remote machines transparently. Formatting ASCII-art tables. Editing outlines/todos with support for semantic movement inside it (Org-Mode). Working in a terminal. Working in a background (--daemon mode) so that new instances just connect to the backend, reducing startup time to almost zero. Dumping a whole Emacs into single binary - all the memory Emacs uses is written to disk and next time you run it it starts very quickly, because you don't need to compile,, load and run any libraries; it's like suspend/hibernate for OSes. Having a decent mode for almost every file format out there. Displaying info about currently running OS processes, like top (proced). Multiple cursors. Rectangular selection and manipulation of rects. Registers for storing pieces of text, locations in files and others. Easy running of external commands, with or without capturing their output. Find&replace with an Elisp function as replacement (quick and effective way to transforms more complex files). Being a terminal emulator (you can run mc inside Emacs, although it's not the best possible experience). Being a shell (Eshell). Easy integration with external REPLs (like IPython, with colors and all). Displaying and working with IPython Notebooks. Splitting windows horizontally and vertically as many times as you want. If you made a bit too many windows (these are Emacs windows, they live inside one OS level window) you can enable tiling window manager for them. Easy integration with external linters for many languages. Displaying man and info pages. Having easily reachable docstrings for all the functions implemented in the editor. Hierarchical keymaps. Semantic editing of sexp (any lisp) code.
And probably much more - I still learn about some new, crazy useful feature at least once a week.
IDEs win in the autocompletion department and project navigation, but that depends on a language being used. For example editing Python with Jedi and Jedi.el (and Rope) in Emacs feels like working with full-featured IDE, with very accurate, context sensitive autocompletion, refactoring support, visual debugger and others.