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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

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

#181

Post by axelrosen »

simias wrote: post #13
thecryusofiran wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Emacs user I'm mostly "afraid" of VSCode getting so popular that people will make cool tools targeting VSCode only. Like, it'll become the Chrome of text editors.

Emacs hasn't been really mainstream in quite a while and it's still actively maintained and improved upon. I'm not too worried. A small-ish skilled community is enough to keep the project going. What's VSCode's market share anyway? Is it really that big? I've never used it personally and I had no idea it was so popular.

It's just my impression, but for the new generation of developers "born" into a js-first world it's pretty much the primary choice. And again I don't have numbers but it does seem like the new generation is MUUCH larger and much more active on mainstream social media. Hacker news must seem like what slashdot seems to me.

I can see a situation where 0 users switch to VSCode and in a few years it still has, say, 80% of market share, just by getting all the new ones.

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

#182

Post by IronBacon »

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…

Forget Org mode, forget Tramp, the killer feature is renaming multiple files with Dired! ^__~

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

#183

Post by leoc »

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.

Chad Fowler's "professional services barrier" label https://books.google.ie/books?id=ig9QDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT48&lpg=PT... is a fair stab at explaining some of the difference. Which isn't to say that the distinction is really black and white, especially for non-programmers or people who don't have a lot of time to invest in a particular kind of tool.

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

#184

Post by thestephen »

FPGAhacker wrote: post #68
purple_ducks wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's one thing I will always be grateful to emacs for; it will be changing Caps Lock -> Ctrl Life changing.

I completely agree, but I have the os do that. Except on my iPad where I am grateful for blink to have that capability. On windows I had a special mode for caps lock via autohotkeys. Press and release meant esc. Press followed by another key and release was ctrl-key. I really liked that, but I couldn’t do it on Mac or iPad so I just settled on ctrl. My old //e has control there naturally.

The behaviour you have for Windows is available for Mac with Karabiner-Elements. It's tremendously helpful.

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

#185

Post by xte »

kazinator wrote: post #180
xte wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in the past I have used Eclipse, Netbeans, SunStudio (essentially netbeans), IntelliJIdea, Oracle JDeveloper and others: all of them are enormously bugged, perhaps Netbans/Sunstudio was the least bugged. All of them suffer from an ever grown dotdirs that sooner or later brake and you need to restart from scratch... In Emacs I have had brackeage, and an emacs bankruptcy. But in all case I have recovered anything…

Exactly. If all those IDEs in the IDE graveyard were so good, why are they dead, while your Emacs is still here? Too tied to a platform or language, perhaps, and very specific processes related to these? No vision for extensibility or future maintenance? Sometimes IDEs are very tied to specific target platforms: like IDEs from microcontroller and DSP vendors and such. E.g. if you're programming PICs, you use Microchi…

Modern GUIs have no extensibility, they are designed from the widget library to the entire software as commercial product, FOSS included because the idea of "modern" GUIs is commercial at design stage.

Emacs, like LispM, Xerox ancient worsktation etc instead was born in a world where software is free, only hardware is commercial. So they are designed from start to be flexible, user-centric, non product-centric.

It's worth remembering an ancient joke of MIT AI lab: An engineer ask few secretaries if they know how to program; they respond no. It ask if they were sure; they respond "of course". As a matter fact they use Emacs and program the mode they need, only no one tell them that's programming, they simply learn how to bend a flexible environment to their needs. Another thing worth mentioned is the classic "In the beginning was the command line" paper, short and nice.

Unfortunately people born in commercial world that do not know IT history can't really imaging that world and it's power. They are incapable of think outside actual business model so they do not understand that other models and software exists...

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

#186

Post by krylon »

dmitriid wrote: post #28
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…

Emacs is an OS that lacks a decent text editor (the joke is as old as Emacs).

As a long-term emacs user, I obviously disagree, but it is a good joke. ;-)

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

#187

Post by craigsmansion »

del82 wrote: post #133

OK, question from a fellow Emacs user: If a student asked you which text editor / IDE they should learn _ab initio_, would you recommend Emacs without reservation? I'm not sure I would. I'll certainly never stop using it, because I've got 15+ years in it now and the key bindings and my config are as automatic as breathing. But I wonder if the investment is worth the cost for a new user, who could just use another exc…

CS student? Yes, without reservations. And any other student probably as well.

Emacs is not a program just for coding. It can be used for anything that can be expressed in a text oriented way: writing a book, a thesis, an email, etc. And most editing commands work in exactly the same way in those contexts.

> if the investment is worth the cost

As you said: 15+ years. And that's not really any sort of exception in the emacs world. Of all the software in existence, I'd say emacs is one of the most likely not to stop development in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today (and I'm not even talking about being able to maintain it yourself if push comes to shove).

So for anyone serious about writing anything at all, emacs is never a bad recommendation.

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

#189

Post by anonacct37 »

julienchastang wrote: post #169
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…

I also recommend helm-tramp for added tramp greatness for example if you regularly access many different hosts/VMs. 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 goo…

The enable ssh mastercontrol and persistent connections.

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

#190

Post by badpun »

xte wrote: post #103
badpun wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 grow…

That is certainly true for some FOSS, but not for all. Many FOSS seems to not differ much from their non-FOSS equivalents, ex. LibreOffice, Firefox, Blender, Eclipse.
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