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Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

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Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#131
post #99

So, emacs is a platform for text-based programs to do things that i already have other stable, reliable, and familiar programs to accomplish. I’m not sold. I need a better value proposition before i feel sold to spend my time climbing that learning curve.

> Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.

> The more you feel that you can control your environment, and that the things you do are actually working, the happier you are. When you find yourself frustrated, angry, and upset, it’s probably because of something that happened that you could not control: even something small.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des... is actually a great argument for Emacs (even though the only time Emacs is mentioned there is an example of inconsistencies in keyboards shortcuts with other editors).

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#132
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One question I have to more experienced Emacs users: Can you recommend an email client? Contrary opinion from an experienced Emacs user (parts of my init.el are older than many users in this forum): I used to be a fan of Gnus, but then noticed that dragging attachments into E-mails is such a productivity booster than I switched to Mail and haven't looked back. If you are on a Mac, the combination of seamless drag&d…

Interesting. One of the reasons I switched to mutt (well, neomutt) is that it is faster for me to work with attachements from a cli. This is mostly due to tab completion, which for commonly accessed locations is practically muscle memory. Takes me forever to to click my way there.

I often don't even know what the filenames are for my attachments, or where they are in the filesystem. Some are ephemeral.

I'm guessing you haven't worked with MacOS? Most people coming from a Linux/UNIX backgroupd (I was one of them) tend to assume that MacOS doesn't offer much, especially for advanced users, which isn't true. You can do many things significantly faster on MacOS.

In my case, I drag/drop attachments from other applications, from the filesystem, or from LaunchBar (finding things in LaunchBar is way faster than manually navigating through an entire path using tab completion).

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar path to Emacs: became really proficient with Vim, avoided Emacs since everyone I knew hated it, saw someone doing things with incredible speed and efficiency in Emacs at Enova (hi Kyle) that I had never imagined could be done, tried Emacs myself, and spent weeks customizing it to become extremely fast with rapid development in Clojure using CIDER. But now that I do vanilla front-end dev, I have found…

What is the utility of per-pixel scrolling in a text editor?

Similar to the two sibling posters, I find pixel-scrolling (particular with the weighted momentum feeling you get on macos) to be more visually comfortable and easier to track.

I found it frustrating in spacemacs that I couldn't get this set up properly (and I'm not even sure if it's possible too). Everything else in emacs was eye-opening and fun.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#135

I recently tried to switch from vim to Emacs with spacemacs. I enjoyed it until I discovered Emacs has no support for tabs (ui tabs, not the character ;). I went back to vim mainly due to that, but still miss magit....

My solution is eyebrowse-mode, which lets you switch quickly between window setups...I never need to recreate an exact layout in the long term, so it’s more than enough to save and switch on the fly

With the built-in winner-mode you can go back to the previous window layout with C-c left.

Re: Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

#136
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use tabs to switch between window configurations. Say I code in Python, with docs and shell windows on the right. Then I want to quickly take a look at git history. But, if I start magit, it will hijack the window configuration and my carefully placed/resized windows will get messy. So, I open a new tab and start magit there. Now, I can switch between the two tabs - ie. window/buffer layouts - with a single key. Th…

> To each their own of course, just saying there are good uses for tabs in Emacs, unless you want to delegate this to your WM You mention window configurations, and you say " it's much less hassle with tabs." You can assign a single key to switch between window configurations too and then it's practically the same, isn't it?

Yeah, not "practically", but simply "the same" - that's exactly how half of my tabs (elscreen.el) is implemented (the other half being creating, displaying and updating the "tabbar"). In other words, if you use winner mode, or have a couple of custom wrappers around window layouts and use those, you're practically already using tabs, just without a tabbar! ;)
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