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Emacs 24.4 released

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Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#71
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All C-x space does is visualize the rectangular region. You still use all the old binding (C-x r t for instance) to do anything with the region. The annoying thing about C-x space, is that it used to do something completely different (set gud breakpoint), but I digress.

> All C-x space does is visualize the rectangular region. You still use all the old binding (C-x r t for instance) to do anything with the region. Really? Upon reading the release notes, I was excited that I'd probably be able to just use commands like C-w or C-x u to act on rectangles. Sad to see it won't be the case.

Ah, right you are. In any case, the old bindings do still work.

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#72
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Emacs isn't a big Lisp interpreter. It's a text editor that is extensible with Emacs Lisp. Sure it contains a Lisp interpreter, but saying that Emacs is only a Lisp interpreter implies that the entirety of the text editor is implemented in Lisp, which is clearly not the case. I use Emacs as a text editor, which means I use it to edit anything that has text. Granted that is a huge part of my computing needs. I d…

I'm not sure who's right and I don't even use emacs but I just wanted to point out that emacs has about 400k lines of C and about 1.2m lines of lisp.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Wr...

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1bmhg/the_case_...

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#73
post #65

I'm a comparative youngin to most of the people here, and I've never tried emacs. I'd like to learn my way around it someday, but I don't know how high of a priority I should place on it. I've managed to pick up enough vim to make my life easier, would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost? How good is evil mode?

"would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost?"

No. Although I first used emacs roughly 22 years ago so my memory might be rusty, the learning curve was extremely steep. Its not a GUI app with low maximum performance but very short learning curve, its more like something you'll have to mess with for a month to year to wrap your brain around. Its like learning dwarf fortress vs angry birds. In the very long run you'll probably like DF more, but not for the first day / week / month.

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is not a great place for bug reports, just saying.

I'm asking for guidance, since I don't know where to file what I consider a clear bug, and where to check first. (Ubuntu? GNU?) Instead, I already received a downvote and this... Thanks, anyway.

You should use the new Emacs StackExchange! It's the perfect place for these types of questions.

emacs.stackexchange.com

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#75
post #73
post #65

I'm a comparative youngin to most of the people here, and I've never tried emacs. I'd like to learn my way around it someday, but I don't know how high of a priority I should place on it. I've managed to pick up enough vim to make my life easier, would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost? How good is evil mode?

"would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost?" No. Although I first used emacs roughly 22 years ago so my memory might be rusty, the learning curve was extremely steep. Its not a GUI app with low maximum performance but very short learning curve, its more like something you'll have to mess with for a month to year to wrap your brain around. Its like learning dwarf fortress vs angry birds. In t…

I feel like it took me about a month to get to the point where I was glad I had invested the time to learn.

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs has a web browser?

> Emacs has a web browser? At one point there were only two web browsers in the world, one was Mosaic (Mozilla is short for Mosaic Killer) and one was W3 (the emacs web browser).

I don't think Mosaic was the original browser and I believe others predated Emacs, such as Lynx. Here's Wikipedia's version of events, for what it's worth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#77
post #65

I'm a comparative youngin to most of the people here, and I've never tried emacs. I'd like to learn my way around it someday, but I don't know how high of a priority I should place on it. I've managed to pick up enough vim to make my life easier, would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost? How good is evil mode?

Coming from Vim, Evil is awesome to me. I can simply have "both" :)

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#78
post #65

I'm a comparative youngin to most of the people here, and I've never tried emacs. I'd like to learn my way around it someday, but I don't know how high of a priority I should place on it. I've managed to pick up enough vim to make my life easier, would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost? How good is evil mode?

I would say that learning your IDE or editor well is a worthwhile investment, whether that is emacs, vim, or a more rich IDE like Eclipse.

Vim or Emacs are really powerful tools that will serve you well over your entire career, so getting adept at them will pay dividends. It's similar to learning how to touch-type, or typing with a faster WPM, in that it's not a pre-requisite to becoming a good and productive developer but it certainly helps.

Emacs is my personal favorite editor, and I've found that the more adept I get at using it, the easier it is for me to get into "flow" and be productive. I don't use my brain's CPU cycles to fumble around trying to manipulate text as much, since through repetition and muscle memory I can work at it effortlessly (compare that to someone who has to two-finger peck while programming).

Similar to other powerful tools though, becoming good takes practice and a time investment. But I would argue that the initial upfront investment will pay off in the long run.

TL;DR: Yes, absolutely. Learning Emacs (or Vim/SublimeText/Eclipse if that's your choice) well will definitely boost your productivity in the long run.

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#79
post #50
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or is that browser (after looking at the screenshot) really "eww"?

Well it is limited by Emacs' display engine. It is obviously not supposed to replace your default browser. But it is usually good enough to view html documentation. Which is really something you want inside your editor.

> But it is usually good enough to view html documentation. Which is really something you want inside your editor.

Is it? I'd much rather have proper HTML rendering in another window than a kludge "in my editor".

Re: Emacs 24.4 released

#80
post #65

I'm a comparative youngin to most of the people here, and I've never tried emacs. I'd like to learn my way around it someday, but I don't know how high of a priority I should place on it. I've managed to pick up enough vim to make my life easier, would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost? How good is evil mode?

I spent a couple of years using vim before switching to emacs around 3 years ago. I'll write about my own experience with both editors.

Learning emacs won't automatically give you a huge productivity boost the way learning vim does. Vim is this blazing fast editor; it's been designed from the ground up to be good at editing text. If your goal is to increase your productivity, I'd say invest time learning vim advanced features, like jumps, macros, registers, and the plethora of other things I don't know about.

Emacs is not about speed. It's about control. It's a fully customizable environment to manipulate text. You can use it to edit prose, code, scientific formulas, but also emails, IRC/Jabber clients, clients for virtually anything with a REST API. Here are some of the use cases that make my work easier using emacs:

+ Evaluating pieces of code at once. I write a lot of Python. Most REPLs out there allow editing of one line at a time. emacs allows me to fire a python interpreter and evaluate regions (multiline function definition, or data structure) at once. Similar features exist for other "dynamic" languages.

+ Better code review workflow. I receive code review requests via email immediately inside emacs. I can play with the diff files, the source files. I can make modifs or run the code without leaving my editor. And since the code review system has an HTTP API, I can even post my comments and votes back.

+ Org-mode (http://orgmode.org/). I would use emacs for this module alone. It's a note taking system that can easily transform into an agenda, todo lists, memo, document markup, tables (oh, the org-mode tables!), ...

Basically, to answer your question: I think you'll get a lot of benefits from emacs if you enjoy customizing it and integrating it to your workflow. If you don't like spending time customizing and prefer something that will just make you write text (well, code and configuration files) faster, stick to vim and spend this time learning advanced commands.

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