Live data from Hacker News

Emacs Is My New Window Manager

howardism.org

121–130 of 166 posts

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any other example of an Emacs application assuming it is the only thing running? I ask because I use Emacs a fair bit and don't think I've ever come across something like that.

Emacs is unfortunately still single-threaded at its core, so it indeed happens that some subpar code can hang the whole editor while waiting for some network requests to finish, or take down everything in a crash (but this happens extremely rarely; I think I had only a few random crashes on Windows in years of using Emacs).

TRAMP to me seems to be the worst offender here. If your connection is slow or you mistyped the domain you pretty much just have to wait for it to time out

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#123

I basically have a variation on this set up but I use Vagrant on top of VirtualBox. Then I keep the Vagrantfile and ancillary files on github. So I can theoretically show up to a computer and be able to quickly recreate my environment. I customize my VMs for Python or Clojure development and have a nicely set up emacs as foundations for both. This set up is really useful for Python where different Pythons coming from…

Are the files for this public, can I see your config?

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#124
post #9
post #2

I'm a vim guy, but I've been wanting to try emacs for a long time. Any tip for a convert like me? Is the "trick" just to make the jump and persist until it clicks? How do I still get my job done in the mean time?

I can tell you how I switched a couple of years ago. I started to use emacs for the sql-oracle mode since it was tons better than the standard sqlplus client shipped by Oracle. I still kept doing most of my coding in vim but gradually was learning emacs by working with that sql mode (there is of course a mode for every database there). Later on I started doing notes in org-mode as it was also nicer than anything else…

My experience was similar, except with Sublime. I used Sublime for most things and org-mode for note taking. Then I started using emacs for personal projects but kept using Sublime at work. Eventually I started to feel almost as productive with emacs as Sublime. Once I found projectile and helm-projectile for project navigation, I made the switch entirely.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#125

I basically have a variation on this set up but I use Vagrant on top of VirtualBox. Then I keep the Vagrantfile and ancillary files on github. So I can theoretically show up to a computer and be able to quickly recreate my environment. I customize my VMs for Python or Clojure development and have a nicely set up emacs as foundations for both. This set up is really useful for Python where different Pythons coming from…

Are the files for this public, can I see your config?

Looking at his user info, it looks like this might be it:

https://github.com/julienchastang/dotemacs/blob/master/setti...

It looks like it's meant to be included directly as a config file, which seems like deep magic to me. :-)

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#126
post #93
post #15

My impression has been that emacs is a poor window manager. Granted, I am not incredibly skilled with emacs but even after some weeks I was still confused by the way emacs opened up new windows or changed existing windows when you've clicked on something (for instance, in dired or org-mode's agenda) I ended up to open everything in a new frame and left the management of these frames to awesomewm.

I agree, some Emacs commands use windows unintuitively and destructively. Dired and various searching modes (grep, ack, ag) are major offenders. You should (1) mitigate the problem with winner-mode so you can easily recover your window configuration, and (2) learn enough Elisp to tweak the poorly-thought-out commands. It usually takes me no more than 15 minutes to figure out what function does the wrong thing and add…

Thanks for the suggestion of `winner-mode`! Swapping between buffer arrangements based on task (coding vs shell work, etc) always felt weird.

I solve it with having a giant editor on one monitor on one screen and a large terminal w/ tabs on the other, but that doesn't work so well if I am accessing in a headless way (e.g. remote work).

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#128
post #126
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, some Emacs commands use windows unintuitively and destructively. Dired and various searching modes (grep, ack, ag) are major offenders. You should (1) mitigate the problem with winner-mode so you can easily recover your window configuration, and (2) learn enough Elisp to tweak the poorly-thought-out commands. It usually takes me no more than 15 minutes to figure out what function does the wrong thing and add…

Thanks for the suggestion of `winner-mode`! Swapping between buffer arrangements based on task (coding vs shell work, etc) always felt weird. I solve it with having a giant editor on one monitor on one screen and a large terminal w/ tabs on the other, but that doesn't work so well if I am accessing in a headless way (e.g. remote work).

I use persp-mode (https://github.com/nex3/perspective-el), it solves nearly all my problems managing different projects, shells, code buffers, note-taking, dired, and just about everything else. The only slight wart is term.el performance, making shell output a bit slow sometimes, but I can live with it.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#129
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this handle multiple displays?

I cannot do a definitive test because I only ever use one monitor at a time, but since (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'maximized) does not make use of the fullscreen mode introduced by Apple with Lion, it will almost certainly not suffer from the most-complained-about problem with multiple monitors on OS X. In contrast, (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'fullboth) does make use of Lion's fullscreen mode -- a…

Full screen mode works great with multiple monitors on Mavericks. I vastly prefer it to traditional maximizing.

Re: Emacs Is My New Window Manager

#130
post #42

What is the best way to actually learn emacs? I'm a vim guy who is curious enough to switch but I'd rather just hack the introductory process and get to the fun bits.

The most interesting cultural observation thats not often talked about is bare emacs and bare vi are equivalent-ish, but all the "cool" stuff in emacs is in the addons. If you just use bare emacs you'll think its pretty boring and not see any productivity gains. If you use a pre-packaged set for emacs, you'll be utterly overwhelmed trying to learn a million things at once. There are no pre-pack sets with just systemi…

> The most interesting cultural observation thats not often talked about is bare emacs and bare vi are equivalent-ish, but all the "cool" stuff in emacs is in the addons.

Agreed. That's pretty much the point. "GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor."

So it starts off bare but it's extensible and customizable.

That's it. That's the value proposition right there.

Post reply on HN