Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mastering Emacs

masteringemacs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 131 posts

Re: Mastering Emacs

#121

Post by lproven »

omaranto wrote: post #83
lproven wrote: post #79

I will take the time to master Emacs when Emacs comes to meet me in the middle, and adopts what has been the industry-standard UI for a third of a century: CUA. I would love someone to do an Emacs distro which integrated ErgoEmacs into it from the beginning: https://ergoemacs.github.io/ No, CUA-mode is not enough.

Why is CUA-mode not enough?

Because it does not change the program's UI. It just changes a few editing keys.

I used to know one or two dozen totally different editors in the 1980s, some radically different, such as Acorn's two-cursor system, with a source cursor and a target cursor.

There was no standardisation; this was necessary if you wanted to be able to edit text on any random platform you came across. I also worked with one or two dozen totally different operating systems in those days, from Netware to RISC OS to EPOC16 to CP/M to AIX 2 to OS/2 1 to GEOS to TOS/GEM to AmigaOS.

Now, it's different. In the 1990s there was a huge wave of standardisation. Most of those OSes went away and the few that survived adopted standard UIs.

IBM CUA became the industry-standard UI, for DOS, Windows 2/3/95/NT upwards, for Linux with Qt or Gtk based GUIs, for much of Mac OS X, for OS/2 2.x and upwards.

The same base menu layout. The same keystrokes: Ctrl-S saves, Ctrl-O opens, Ctrl-F finds. Yes even on a Mac (but it's Cmd-S, Cmd-O, Cmd-F, but it's very easy to adjust.)

I no longer have to know a dozen editors. I know one UI and it works on every editor from FreeDOS to Windows 11 to macOS to KDE 5.27 to Xfce, LXDE, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE.

(OK, not GNOME, but that is just one reason among many that I don't use GNOME.)

It is the industry standard and it has been for a third of a century.

Any new editor I might try must conform to it, or I am not wasting my time.

I don't care how much legacy it has. I don't care how powerful it is. I don't care if it will break 40 years of tradition.

It's meant to be infinitely customisable. So customise it. If the user has any existing config file at all, fine, honour it, turn off all the new stuff and start in 1976 mode. No problem. I have no config. I am 100% happy for that to stay for those who know it.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#122

Post by omaranto »

lproven wrote: post #121
omaranto wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is CUA-mode not enough?

Because it does not change the program's UI. It just changes a few editing keys. I used to know one or two dozen totally different editors in the 1980s, some radically different, such as Acorn's two-cursor system, with a source cursor and a target cursor. There was no standardisation; this was necessary if you wanted to be able to edit text on any random platform you came across. I also worked with one or two dozen t…

You don't mention any specific part of this so-called industry-standard UI that CUA mode does not provide. I guess if I were really motivated I could try to figure that out on my own, but it seems like a lot of effort because I'd have to play around with both CUA mode and some industry-standard editor (which I'd have to install first).

Re: Mastering Emacs

#123

Post by lproven »

omaranto wrote: post #122
lproven wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it does not change the program's UI. It just changes a few editing keys. I used to know one or two dozen totally different editors in the 1980s, some radically different, such as Acorn's two-cursor system, with a source cursor and a target cursor. There was no standardisation; this was necessary if you wanted to be able to edit text on any random platform you came across. I also worked with one or two dozen t…

You don't mention any specific part of this so-called industry-standard UI that CUA mode does not provide. I guess if I were really motivated I could try to figure that out on my own, but it seems like a lot of effort because I'd have to play around with both CUA mode and some industry-standard editor (which I'd have to install first).

I did, you know.

Big notable ones:

* The menu tree.

* The keystrokes to access the commands in that menu tree.

The terminology. I do not have a meta key. You don't have a meta key, either. No new computer since the 1970s has a meta key. I'm a keyboard collector with a deep fondness for clicky mechanical keyboards; in daily use I use a keyboard from 1991. It predates USB and the "Windows" key. It doesn't have a meta key.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on CUA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Which, incidentally, I expanded from a stub about 18 years ago.

Another excellent piece of evidence that cua-mode is inadequate is that ErgoEmacs exists: https://ergoemacs.github.io/

It's actually not bad, but it's a total pig to try to install and configure unless you are already an Emacs guru.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#124

Post by overlyambitious »

onehair wrote: post #82
lbj wrote: post #15

It's crazy that here in 2023, Emacs is still the absolute beast when it comes to developer productivity. I had a colleague review one of my workflows the other week and after a minute or so he said "Whoa, I would have been in 5 different tools by now". If you're not into Emacs, I suggest you give it a whirl. For most development, nothing else will get you close to the joy and productivity that a well configured Emacs…

> that a well configured Emacs can Well, that's the real issue for me. I spent a month an a half working on "configuring" NeoVim. I got it to a somewhat ready to use state for my usual workflows. But I still had a big pile of tasks in my backlog to actually get it finally 100% mine. Then I discovered Helix, which doesn't need any configuration, no plugins to play around with. Builtin LSP, Builtin Fuzzy Finding of fil…

That's what Doom Emacs is for.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#125

Post by helmut_hed »

fransje26 wrote: post #77
sleiben wrote: post #32

I saw people (in their 30s) using emacs for almost everything. Coding, reading mails, organizing their todos and so on. It was impressive to see their workflow. The only thing which hold me back to really learn it, were the stories about repetitive strain injuries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36718793

> The only thing which hold me back to really learn it, were the stories about repetitive strain injuries Without wanting to be a troll, that's exactly what happened to me within 3 days after switching to emacs.. So I reluctantly terminated my emacs experiment early and switched back to vim..

You definitely needed to be on evil-mode or a framework (like Doom) based on it. The key bindings with ctl, alt, etc. are the least important part of Emacs but sadly, the part everyone thinks of first...

Re: Mastering Emacs

#126

Post by helmut_hed »

xormapmap wrote: post #111

I'm a long time vim user who tried Emacs for a good few months. I started out with a minimal config and just got used to it out of the box, and over time evolved to using something more like evil mode and packages for everything. The things that drove me back to vim were basically: - Poor mercurial support. Monky is supposed to be like Magit but lacked support for staging individual hunks or any of the hg evolution c…

Re: the C code, Emacs will happily let you ignore your own config settings. Just turn off anything labeled "electric" and nothing will happen automatically. And don't press tab, that will reindent the current line.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#127

Post by helmut_hed »

hatmatrix wrote: post #88

Been using emacs since 2003. One thing I turn to VS Code these days for is Jupyter / Quarto notebooks. It's not possible to have the same development workflow with Quarto and Org-babel since you can't run/rerun code chunks up to your current cell and automate figure management (for Org-babel). I think these are not difficult to implement but these days I just want to use something that has these features out of the b…

I used https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook at one employer and it works quite well for Jupyter. Of course Org is great but if your coworkers are unfamiliar it's probably a non-starter.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#128

Post by helmut_hed »

psunavy03 wrote: post #4

I don't see why people are still using 1970s-era IDEs in 2023. Sure, it's a joke that emacs and vim users are at loggerheads, but name me one user of either who isn't a graybeard at this point. And specifically a graybeard who refuses to use more modern tools.

There are a remarkable number of people attending our Emacs meetup who are under 30. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it myself.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#129

Post by fransje26 »

helmut_hed wrote: post #125
fransje26 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing which hold me back to really learn it, were the stories about repetitive strain injuries Without wanting to be a troll, that's exactly what happened to me within 3 days after switching to emacs.. So I reluctantly terminated my emacs experiment early and switched back to vim..

You definitely needed to be on evil-mode or a framework (like Doom) based on it. The key bindings with ctl, alt, etc. are the least important part of Emacs but sadly, the part everyone thinks of first...

At the time I was thinking that if I had to change something as fundamental as the key bindings to get it to work, it was maybe not the right tool for me, as these base bindings were probably a key part of the whole Emacs philosophy that I would then completely miss-out on..

But if you say that they are the least import part of Emacs, I might revisit it when I have the time. Thank you for the tip.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#130

Post by worthless-trash »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #120
worthless-trash wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Open a jira request backport in https://github.com/ahungry/org-jira - Check to see that there isnt an MR outstanding bysomeone else ( using https://github.com/isamert/lab.el ) - (Optional) Cherry pick the commit from another stream where it may be fixed (magit-cherry-pick) - Often massage the code (emacs cedet) - Commit the code (magit) - Submit a build (local built in code, elisp calling a local binary) - Tag the…

Can you share details of your experience with org-jira? My question would be: Is it feature complete? Does it allow one to do everything one can do in browser Jira? Set custom fields, handle multiple boards and so on?

> Is it feature complete?

Its enough for me to complete my day to day work.

>Does it allow one to do everything one can do in browser Jira?

I dont think it can do the dashboards and reporting metrics, but for the 'issue' work yes.

> Set custom fields

Yes. Although i had to maintain a map of custom field names to what they actually were, or you'd see cf_023042432 as the name.

> handle multiple boards

I don't use jira this way to know what it means, is that the same as multiple project prefixes (if so yes, i dont know what boards are).

Post reply on HN