I'm a competent Lisp developer (and fanatic), yet I use Vim. I've also met Vim-bashing Emacs fanatics who didn't know the second thing about Lisp (the first thing, of course, being all those parentheses).
Master Emacs in one year
91–100 of 121 posts
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#92Perhaps 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 tend to lean on the control key with the corner of my palm rather than pressing it with a finger tip. (Though I don't use a normal home-row style of touch typing, either, so YMMV.)
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#93A developer who is curious enough to try Lisp is possibly more intelligent than average This is the kind of exaggeration that makes a lot of people to avoid even trying Lisp. Any programming language that uses a different programming paradigm than the one you are familiar with will make you a better programmer.
That quote is taken out of context and was written by someone who's first language is obviously not English. I took the paragraph to mean that Emacs users are possibly more technical because it attracts those who are curious enough to research less mainstream programming languages.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#94Can 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?
Emacs is not an IDE- its a text editor. It would be nuts to use Emacs to edit Java compared to Intellij or even Eclipse. Having said that, it is no more productive than any other text editor at editing text (as compared to Vim or Sublime Text 3). Even if that weren't true, would you really invest years into learning a new editor to make editing text a few percent faster? Programming is limited by thought, not typing (common pain here is solved by plugins anyway). The benefits of using emacs are as follows:
1. terminal based 2. key chords 3. (e)lisp 4. open source 5. stable 6. extensible
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#95Out of curiosity, and this is a real question not a troll : What can emacs and vi do that a regular IDE can't ?
Emacs and Vi are not IDEs. They operate on strings, not ASTs. Intellij Idea is an IDE for Java- it allows you to eg change the name of a method and have all call sites be updated. A text editor forces you to do this yourself with a string based find/replace. Having said that, text editors are easier to extend.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#96Any one know how Sublime Text's Command Palette alternative in emacs?
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Re: Master Emacs in one year
#97Out of curiosity, and this is a real question not a troll : What can emacs and vi do that a regular IDE can't ?
Emacs and Vi are not IDEs. They operate on strings, not ASTs. Intellij Idea is an IDE for Java- it allows you to eg change the name of a method and have all call sites be updated. A text editor forces you to do this yourself with a string based find/replace. Having said that, text editors are easier to extend.
Sounds like you haven't used emacs in a few years (or longer). There are tools like CEDET that allow building language modes with AST-level understanding of the source code. I don't know about the vim world in general, but I use omnisharp in emacs to provide C# refactoring tools like you describe, and that was originally built for vim.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#98Perhaps 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 always rebind capslock to control. That's essential. The other thing is adjusting the bindings to your taste; for example, I change a number of standard bindings to better suite a dvorak layout.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nevermind why I should consider taking a year (an eternity in technological time) to master it. I don't want to proselytise, but maybe that hints at one of the core appeals of emacs. A year is nothing in terms of the span of time emacs has been around, and so time invested in making emacs your editor is effort that won't be discarded in the next technological cycle. The other aspect is what I mean by "making emacs…
Visual Studio, or Eclipse have been around for a fair while as well now. Its not like they will disappear with the next text cycle. And you can get productive with them in far less than a year.
Every five years or so I decide to give whatever editors/IDEs are in vogue a decent shot, to make sure I'm not missing out on anything (better still is to work along side of someone who is really productive in a radically different environment, like acme). Usually I come away from it with a few tweaks to my emacs configuration, but I have yet to be compelled away from emacs.
For example, I gave Visual Studio another shot recently (VS2013); and I mean, I read books on using it productively, I read the various tip blogs, advice for customization online, et cetera; I used it extensively. Unfortunately, I just don't see what people see in it. From my point of view, it's still slow, cumbersome, expensive (for any version with features that are actually useful), much less featureful than (customized) emacs, and doesn't run on most of the platforms I use to develop software. In theory, I could dedicate a few years writing extensions for one of these IDEs to duplicate all the emacs modes I use, but I'd probably never be able to fix, for example, buffer switching, or all the places where the mouse is the preferred form of interaction, or where modal dialogs steal focus (let alone all the dialogs that inexplicably aren't resizable). Meanwhile, the nice features like Intellisense and so on are the kind of customizations I've had in emacs for most of my prefered languages for years anyway.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#100FTFY Get Emacs pinky in one year