51–60 of 102 posts
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Swap your CTRL and caps lock keys. It will make it a lot easier to use.
If emacs expects 3 modifier keys, and emacs is wildly popular with programmers, then why hasn't someone made a keyboard with the windows key renamed and remapped to the missing meta key?
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I bought it when it first came out, and it is still on my bookshelf. A decent book, as the Amazon reviews indicate, but not outstanding.He does cover a lot of ground, introducing emacs programming (and Lisp, in general). I did not find the "Comprehensive Example" chapter implementing a crossword puzzle mode as particularly helpful. Everyone feels like other people do better negotiating car prices, and I feel the same…
Anything that large will have blind spot for a user. Even commiters might be surprised by some kind of idiom in elisp or in a particular mode. That syndrom can be found in languages. It would be of great value to document this side of things. Some spectrum of learning, showing how everybody travels through and that most people go through the same stages. Maybe how to not waste time or feel frustrated by that process.…
The goal, making it easier to learn and understand.
[1] a lot of knowledge about emacs is outside of it both in location (not in the manual) and form (videos, podcasts, static tutorials). This is influenced by the trend for interactive documents (B.Victor, Wolfram) and Notebook/Persistent repls (ipython,...).
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And what is your last comment about and how does The comment make HN or the internet better? There are lots of places where typical internet behavior is typically acceptable and often encouraged. HN, for better or worse, is not one of them. That means it can't meet everyone's expectations.
It's a community where the consensus is wherever the community decides. If you didn't speak your mind people like me would be the centre, if I didn't speak mine people like you would be the centre. I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve. I've said my comment, I've re-iterated it. You have made two meta comments about HN that I have zero interest in. Create a new thread on HN meta and write about it. Again: the a…
I would personally recommend using vim bindings in emacs, as they are (in my opinion) easier to make sense of and more intuitive. However, I'm sure this book is a great resource for all the other stuff and it seems very well put-together.
Key bindings are totally a matter of personal preferences. I like Emacs-style bindings better. The only thing I think vi in my opinion does better is copying and deleting lines (yy, dd, p), which in Emacs is not so simple for such a common operation.
I haven't read this, but from the contents it seems like you can learn everything there is in the book from the official Emacs GNU documentation: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/in...
Wow, what a really mean-spirited comment, and it's the top one (at the time of writing.) -- did you consider what you said here before writing it? Let me propose a rewrite:- 'If you can't afford to buy this, the official emacs GNU documentation is great - [link]' Instead you first admit you haven't read it, then imply, but in somewhat weasel words, that it doesn't offer anything beyond what the official documentation…
That might not be saying much, but how many people make money writing poetry or genre fiction?
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Swap your CTRL and caps lock keys. It will make it a lot easier to use.
If emacs expects 3 modifier keys, and emacs is wildly popular with programmers, then why hasn't someone made a keyboard with the windows key renamed and remapped to the missing meta key?
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Nope, don't do that. Learn to proper touch-type instead. Use your palms to press the ctrl keys. See: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/swap_CapsLock_Ctrl.html . You can then use Ctrl+m instead of Enter at the command line, as well. Save both pinkies from the extra effort.
Using your palms to press the ctrl keys is only seriously possible on some curved keyboards. Everyone else, who prefers to touch keys with their fingers, like they were meant to, is going to do the sensible stuff and put the more frequently used modifier in the more easily-reachable place. All this press-ctrl-with-your-palms fad is a problem solved in the wrong place. And I have to say I dislike the tone of that page…
It feels fine to me on my flat keyboard with low-profile keys.
I used to use my pinky to press ctrl. Then I briefly remapped to caps-lock, but that felt awkward to use together with the shift key (but I didn't use it enough to get truly used to it). Then I switched to using my palm, and then finally to using god-mode which means that I don't have to use modifier keys as much anymore (though I still use it sometimes, and I still press ctrl just as much in non-emacs applications like terminals and Firefox).
I would personally recommend using vim bindings in emacs, as they are (in my opinion) easier to make sense of and more intuitive. However, I'm sure this book is a great resource for all the other stuff and it seems very well put-together.
When considering a tool with which one will work for many hours a day and many days a month over the course of years, for some people it makes sense to use expressive power rather than initial ease of use as the primary criterion for choosing among alternative sets of bindings. In the case of a tool like Emacs, the user is always likely to encounter new alternative work flows or to invent them theirself. This is what…
I followed this blog for a while and loved it! Strongly recommended for Emacs beginners. Also, one thing beginners miss is how great it is to use an existing configuration to learn. I've personally used @bodil's config from here[1], it's pretty comprehensive and awesome. If you are a beginner though, you should totally start with @bbatsov's Emacs Prelude[2]. [1] https://github.com/bodil/emacs.d [2] https://github.com…
During the first weekend that I started using Emacs, I ended up writing hundreds of lines of Emacs Lisp to optimize Emacs for my usage. I had never written Lisp before, and I think using another person's configuration would have hindered my progress.
But I think that reading other people's configurations can be super helpful.
Phil Hagelberg, the creator of Emacs Starter Kit, seems to have arrived at the same conclusion that I have:
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Key bindings are totally a matter of personal preferences. I like Emacs-style bindings better. The only thing I think vi in my opinion does better is copying and deleting lines (yy, dd, p), which in Emacs is not so simple for such a common operation.
ctrl-k ctrl-y ?