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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

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Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#101

Post by xte »

gnuvince wrote: post #73
oblio wrote: post #42

I tried Emacs several time. The concept is cool but the execution makes it so that for me, in practice, VS Code is better. I'd want either: * tabs with a good UX or * super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX. I'd also want a terminal at least as good as the VS Code one, on Windows, to use with Cygwin. With Emacs I'd have to learn a big bunch of terminology no other ed…

> * super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX. Sounds like you should try ivy and its companions. Ivy offers fuzzy matching for all operations in Emacs (e.g., switching buffers, opening files, looking up documentation) and the counsel packages (e.g., counsel-rg) use that same interface to interact with external tools such as ripgrep or git grep. Ivy has completely take…

EXWM/Fulltime Emacs user here... Well... No, ansi-term, sane-term etc are not like regular terminals, they can work for simple things but they are limited, limiting and buggy...

When I start living in Emacs I reduce significantly the dependency of the shell (tramp and dired do most of the business) and start using eshell a bit, but I still use terminator when I need a real terminal...

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#102

Post by oblio »

xte wrote: post #101
gnuvince wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX. Sounds like you should try ivy and its companions. Ivy offers fuzzy matching for all operations in Emacs (e.g., switching buffers, opening files, looking up documentation) and the counsel packages (e.g., counsel-rg) use that same interface to interact with external tools such as ripgrep or git grep. Ivy has completely take…

EXWM/Fulltime Emacs user here... Well... No, ansi-term, sane-term etc are not like regular terminals, they can work for simple things but they are limited, limiting and buggy... When I start living in Emacs I reduce significantly the dependency of the shell (tramp and dired do most of the business) and start using eshell a bit, but I still use terminator when I need a real terminal...

For all its flaws, the VS Code terminal is quite strong. I've been putting it through its paces recently and if only they'd offer an option for real full screen and proper splits, it could almost get all the way there.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#103

Post by xte »

badpun wrote: post #82
xte wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second to have choose Emacs as a main computing environment and since I often here the question "how much time ..." well... I'd like to add a note: time can't be only measured in hours, days, etc. To learn Emacs enough to decide that's the way I'd like to interact and use my desktop it take a very little time, in around three month I start using Emacs as WM (EXWM), MUA (notmuch-emacs) in around two months with a "f…

> With commercial software you need to invest time (and money) before start, and after having reached a certain amount of knowledge you can't go further, you have to keep yourself up to date following upstream changes and you new knowledge have a very little value in the long run. How's that different from learning to how use FOSS? Except the money investment part.

That commercial software is build normally to lock you in and lock out any possible evolution path, the learning curve is fixed: when you learnt a certain number of things "you are productive" and there is no more, no future.

On FOSS normally software offer many evolution paths, which means you have to learn few thing and you can start, using the software issue or desire arise and you learn new things in an ever grown knowledge that regularly pay off. Also standard terminology is normally used, for instance you never find FOSS project to invent terms like "BIA" (Cisco name for MAC address of a nic, "burn-in address") or "Enable mode", "write terminal" and things like that.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#104

Post by oblio »

ken wrote: post #83
oblio wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Design choices are not always bad. And Open Source != not being opinionated. Regarding the spyware thing, agreed, but at the end of the day, the makers choose how they distribute the thing. It's just like Chrome and many other products. I, for one, am thankful that they're making available a high quality tool for free.

> It's just like Chrome and many other products. Exactly. That's another program whose "open source" status frustrates and saddens me.

I guess you should be looking for Free Software. After all, there was a big kerfuffle about it in the early 2000's.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#105

Post by simias »

pulisse wrote: post #74
simias wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, your link led me to shackle[1] to make transient buffers behave and I have wanted that for... well for as long as I've been using Emacs really, and that's quite a long time now. I don't get how anybody is fine with Emacs' default "let's pop this buffer anywhere, possibly hiding a useful window". [1] https://github.com/wasamasa/shackle

That looks awesome. Emacs's default behavior in this respect is theoretically customizable, but the mechanism for doing so (display-buffer-alist) is (to me) incomprehensible. It seems like what Shackle does is provide a clean interface for specifying rules that get translated into display-buffer-alist rules.

Yeah I've tried a few time to customize this behavior over the years and while I did manage to improve it somewhat it's still far from how I'd like it to be.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#106

Post by vvillena »

purple_ducks wrote: post #4

I really feel VSCode is lining up to be the new goto IDE across multiple languages. Slightly less (directly) extensible than Emacs but still feels it can do pretty much everything that needs doing, plus way nicer & friendlier default UI.

Lots of editors out there are nicer and friendlier than Emacs. Most of them eventually fall out of fashion.

I was using Emacs when Textmate was the hot new thing. The Sublime came around. Then came the first Electron-powered editors like Atom and Brackets. Then came VSCode. While people kept chasing these new editors, I've been using Emacs for more than 10 years. I'll be still using Emacs when the hotter, newer thing eventually comes around.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#107

Post by kashyapc »

Wildgoose wrote: post #18

I have yet to encounter anything that can match the sheer flexibility of Emacs. For example I am currently using Org mode to write some documentation complete with hyper-links, tables, foot notes and the option to export the results as LaTeX, HTML, Open-Office, and so on with just a few keypresses. It's not just an editor, or an IDE, or even a windowing system - it is a cross-platform computing environment that can b…

My sole use of Emacs is for Org-Mode (for extensive note-taking, task breakdown, writing reports, etc). I'm glad I invested the time three years ago.

During the upcoming holidays, I should try to explore and "stumble upon" advanced features and neat tricks that I haven't come across yet.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#108

Post by ludwigvan »

dedosk wrote: post #51
sn41 wrote: post #33

There is a strange editing mode that I stumbled on by myself, which I can do in Emacs. Suppose I am editing a huge file, and need to make change in some other part without necessarily forgetting where I am. I just open a new buffer for the same file, edit the desired area, and close the new buffer. I have the old position restored automatically in the old buffer. Of course, this can be done to arbitrary number of lev…

MSVC IDE has menu Window -> New Window to mimic this iirc.

Little known tip:

Word and Excel (and probably other Office apps) have the same. You can edit one part of the document while viewing another part.

Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

#110

Post by losthobbies »

gnuvince wrote: post #71
losthobbies wrote: post #61

Watching Jonathan Blow flying around Emacs on his Twitch streams is always very impressive.

I find Jon enraging, especially when he whines about Emacs: a number of the things he complains about are either fixed in newer versions of Emacs (he's still on Emacs 23) or packages offer a vastly improved user experience.

I'd be worried about Jon if he wasnt complaining about something.
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