161–170 of 262 posts
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You do not need to see what "tabs" are open at all times. You only need it when you want to switch. It's also incredibly limiting. At this moment I have 127 buffers open in emacs. How would you deal with that?
> You do not need I find it interesting that you can decide for me what I "need" or "do not need" :)
Emacs is habit forming. I started using emacs as an undergrad in the late 80s, as it was the only way I knew of at the time to have multiple windows open on a standard DEC VT-220 terminal. ( I did not know about screen; it was quite new at the time ). I switched to using my UNIX account daily from VMS mainly to get access to this feature that I saw my friends and upperclassmen using. After I got access to an X11 base…
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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 grow…
In the context of emacs, you only ever need to learn terminology like - major and minor modes, - special, regular, mini and read-only buffers, - frames, - backup files, - dired, - mark and kill rings, - hooks, - the difference between C-x and M-x, - mode line, - registers - and whatever else there is in emacs' configs, packages etc. I dunno. Perhaps in emacs lingo "standard" means "no one uses these terms anymore"?
Consider a thing: commercial always say "start with us is quick", and they do their best for that. Unfortunately they omit an important fact: start it's quick, if you already came from commercial environment witch is the most common case right now, but all the rest is a pain. And we normally start once in our life, but we have the entire life to live...
"no one but few do something" for me is not a bad thing per se, consider how many dictatorship exists around the world or in witch conditions most human live around the Earth: do you prefer being in the center of Gaussian which means being a poor man fighting for some bad food just to keep up in some dictatorship or you prefer western welfare and the least bit of democracy we have?
And Mac users should know that Mac OS X has had basic support for Emacs style editing in native controls, inheriting it from NextStep.
Another subtle but important use of emacs : it is a good playground for (a flavor of) Lisp. Together with the source code galore in site-lisp/, it is a really good environment to learn how a full-blown system can be put together in Lisp. [Hooks, macros, advice - all the goodies to shoot yourself in the foot in that wonderful Lisp way!] Also relevant is the great article by Stallman on the exact C-vs-Lisp division of…
“Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it.”
This reminds me of a story I heard that early on at Amazon supposedly the company used applications built onto Emacs instead of building in-house web applications for internal use. I had a chance to talk with an early employee but unfortunately forgot to ask about it.
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…
Org mode is really awesome. A chemist basically does his work with org ( http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu ) and recently another guy showing his colleague’s poster done with org and Beamer ( http://irreal.org/blog/?p=7651 ). I find org and mu4e really make mundane stuff easily done. On a mac and iOS system to get email, calendar, to do list, and notes done, it is usually 4 different programs, with emacs it is just o…
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…
Question: I often find tramp to be significantly laggy and much slower when compared to simply sshing into the remote host. It is almost as if tramp is opening up a new ssh connection for every command. What do people here do about tramp lagginess? I've researched this problem but I have not found a good solution.
I gave emacs another try earlier this year. First vanilla, but then I missed vim keybindings so I installed evil. Then I switched to spacemacs. Eventually I decided I was barely using any emacs-specific features and just went back to vim. Vim feels so much snappier. I do miss some of the more ide features (jump to definition, execute selected code) but it wasn't worth the overhead, imho.