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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

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

#151

Post by typon »

nicolashahn wrote: post #72
typon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Ctrl-O and Ctrl-I exist is just a tiny example of why the modern editors just can't compete with vim and the plethora tiny productivity features it has.

Hardcore vimmer here, but I don't think you're right. I know at least VSCode has this functionality and probably other editors as well. I don't use vim because of it's features but more because modal editing and the keybindings are cemented into my muscle memory. There's also the extremely lightweight nature that let's me have several projects open in vim at once with little resource impact. Were I to start over toda…

I respectfully disagree. I think VSCode's ergonomics pale in comparison to Vim. I just mentioned Ctrl-O, but there's a hundred little other features that I use constantly that VSCode doesn't have, and even if it does, it executes them much slower than Vim does. If Vim's plugin system was improved, it would blow VSCode out of the water.

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

#152

Post by xte »

dmitriid wrote: post #141
wry_discontent wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the trouble. It's more flexible than most ides, but you have to configure it, which isn't easy if you lack the imagination or the technical know-how (elisp).

> isn't easy if you lack the imagination wat? > or the technical know-how (elisp) It's not just the technical know-how of knowing elisp. It's also the often arcane ways of configuring emacs and the arcane and often undocumented ways of configuring the packages and plugins and modes that you bring into the system. The amount of hacks one needs to maintain a reasonably working emacs is mind-boggling, and has nothing to…

With req-package and org-mode init you do not need any specific hack and anything that does not work remain "isolated".

Many try el-get, borg, ... but personally I found simple setup effective enough and in years my config is now ~4000 lines of org+elisp + few personal packages...

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

#153

Post by mr_overalls »

Vekz wrote: post #143
mr_overalls wrote: post #109

Is Emacs worth learning well if you're not primarily a software developer? For a DBA or data engineer, for example (as I am)?

Yes. you can use org-mode to create a living 'literate code' document of database connections and queries. You can then execute the queries directly from this document. something like https://truongtx.me/2014/08/23/setup-emacs-as-an-sql-databas...

Wow, this is fantastic!

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

#154

Post by simias »

drieddust wrote: post #149
pulisse wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A small-ish skilled community is enough to keep the project going. The trends of the last few years are worrisome, though, particularly as regards the pool of developers who can work on Emacs core (the part written in C). Right now there's only one dev who's in a position to do non-trivial work on the display engine, and he also took on primary maintainer responsibilities a couple of years ago. When he burns out, t…

It feels like Emacs Developers are actively tries to shoo away modernization and people who do not want to put in hours trying to actively learn just Emacs. At one point I tried using Emacs for everything but it didn't work out for me. Now I still use it but only for tasks management and coding. Unless you want to spend hours of your time customizing it and then a lot of other person also does the same customization.…

Well the problem is that people caring about Emacs have learned a long time ago what a kill-ring, the point, the cursor and meta mean in the context of Emacs. In its defence, a lot of that predates modern user interface conventions. Changing this lingo would probably make it more approachable for newcomers but it would confuse experienced users. On top of that you can be sure that not all elisp out there will be updated quickly (if ever) and you end up with two different words for the same things in different docs which is not exactly a win for anybody.

Beyond that Emacs's docs are unparalleled in the editor world as far as I know, you can explore pretty much any functionality by calling "describe-key", "describe-mode" etc... Even decades later very few (if any) editor can rival the flexibility and self-documenting nature of Emacs.

Regarding key bindings I agree that it's definitely a pain point for newcommers, it's just too different from the modern standard (while not necessarily being better. C-_ for undo? I got used to it but it's hard to defend). Unfortunately making a complete new set of bindings that would play nice with 3rd party packages is probably very difficult.

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

#155

Post by mkettn »

Tistel wrote: post #119

You should check out tramp-mode too. Its a killer feature that lets you edit files remotely (AWS, Azure, even docker containers!) as if they are local. All the stuff work, so you can do diffs between a local file and an a AWS file and it all appears to be local. If you are editing a remote file and do a git action (through magit) it knows to work on the remote file. You can open up remote shells also. You just go: CT…

tramp supports a great amount of protocols, but only ssh is on active support. I worked in a greater company for a while and used it to access remote files shared via windows file sharing (smb). It worked a long time but then server update came, next smbclient update came and at last tramp update came... hindering me in my workflow for a couple of month.

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

#156

Post by noufalibrahim »

alan_wade wrote: post #75

I have to share it here: http://emacsrocks.com/ This is an absolutely insane series of tutorials that will explode your mind and make you feel godlike. If you want to learn why people love emacs so much, watch this.

I used to run http://emacsmovies.org/ and the first video of that was similar to the original article here. Terminology and basic keystrokes. The Emacs refcard whose source comes with Emacs is also quite useful and I usually provide printed copies to all my students.

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

#157

Post by wry_discontent »

I used to be a heavy emacs user, but I've mostly abandoned it because I'm lazy.

It takes a fair amount of effort to keep up with new environments. If I change jobs (which isn't infrequent), I'll need to reconfigure a lot of the setup to work how I like. Packages upgrade and break.

For me, I just found the amount of effort it required to keep the environment set up nicer than, say intellij, just wasn't worth it.

Nowadays, I mostly use VS Code for a text editor, and intellij for larger codebases. I still drop down into emacs if I need to do serious text manipulation or weird git stuff, but that's about it for me.

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

#158

Post by xte »

idle_zealot wrote: post #123
xte wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... For me it also have a decent text editor... The bad point is that it lack a bootloader+kernel+userland that let me ditch basic Linux kernel... GuixSD is nicely integrated but Emacs Guile port is not "official" and "mature" enough to have it really as a sole OS, also GuixSD use bash by default, not Emacs at login... For now I'm happy enough with NixOS+EXWM despite few annoyance not directly caused by Emacs :-)

Would you mind sharing your nix config?

Since I plan to re-write it in org and cleanup I do not publish it however here http://ix.io/1vf0 there is a quick redacted NixOS config of my desktop :-)

When I have time I will port both NixOS, homeManager and Emacs config in org, with proper docs. But I do not know when I will do that...

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

#159

Post by zzzzzzzza »

alpaca128 wrote: post #99
purerandomness wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not funny. Evil mode was released in 2013.

I tried Evil mode a few months ago and went back to Vim very quickly. It's one of the best Vim plugins out there, but it still misses a few features and it also behaves differently in a couple of situations. It never really feels like Vim, more like a minefield of unknown shortcuts with a layer of Vim bindings on top. But I get why some people like it, if you can't stand modal editing then Emacs is a great choice.

spacemacs.

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

#160

Post by j0e1 »

Even though this is a beginner's guide, I feel it should introduce the reader to the Emacs way of navigating using the C-`b f p n` keys at least, let alone their M-[] alternatives. These would significantly improve the users ability to move around the buffer without having to keep shifting hand position to the arrow keys.
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