(setq inhibit-startup-screen t)
C-h b shows all the key bindings, and C-h f will describe any command (and give access to the source where it was defined).
Things I wish they told you about Emacs
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#22My favorite thing I wish they'd told me about emacs: M-x shell Run a shell (or shells) inside emacs. Great for long running apps like servers. You can search back through the output using normal Emacs search commands. For me, one of the killer features of Emacs. Rename the shell buffer to something else to start another shell.
Just curious, why do you prefer shell instead of term or ansi-term? Both of those other modes have better support for curses applications and act closer to an actual terminal emulator than M-x shell does. Also, if you like term, you can use the "multi-term" script ( http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/multi-term.el ), which will automatically open a new terminal window with M-x multi-term, and you can cycle through your o…
Not the parent, but I also prefer shell to ansi-term for my daily usage.
My 99% use-case is running programs that don't need terminal emulator support, but I do commonly use Emacs keybindings for navigating around the buffer -- which requires switching between char and line modes when using ansi-term.
Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#23Parens turn out to be an asset, not a drawback to the language. Allowing macros. Tooling like lispy/paredit takes advantage of the parens too.
Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#24Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#25Emacs is nice. But it's also a fractal of bad usability design. :/
I honestly think the defaults were made bad on purpose to force people to learn how to configure it.
I disagree. People often tend to forget that Emacs has a very long history and what may appear to a newcomer today to be bad design more often than not, has a logical (even if historical) reason.
It is of course a classic design dilemma when porting something across dozens of different systems and supporting something across many decades, whether to try to adapt to the whims of a new target or to stick with a common core. Emacs will never be the Microsoft Notepad of the common computer user and we, the long time Emacs users, tend to see the stability of the interface as an advantage.
Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious, why do you prefer shell instead of term or ansi-term? Both of those other modes have better support for curses applications and act closer to an actual terminal emulator than M-x shell does. Also, if you like term, you can use the "multi-term" script ( http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/multi-term.el ), which will automatically open a new terminal window with M-x multi-term, and you can cycle through your o…
Not the parent, but I also prefer shell to ansi-term for my daily usage. My 99% use-case is running programs that don't need terminal emulator support, but I do commonly use Emacs keybindings for navigating around the buffer -- which requires switching between char and line modes when using ansi-term.
It does not need to be either/or. I have configured the terminal mode of ansi-term to allow the cursor keys to move around in the buffer as usual exactly because I often like to back up a bit to look at some output and keeping remembering that the normal buffer movement keys was not available became annoying.
Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#27My favorite thing I wish they'd told me about emacs: M-x shell Run a shell (or shells) inside emacs. Great for long running apps like servers. You can search back through the output using normal Emacs search commands. For me, one of the killer features of Emacs. Rename the shell buffer to something else to start another shell.
I found that 'shell' mode occasionally got confused, for instance on what the current directory is. I have changed to 'eshell' as my primary shell emulator, one that implements a number of the basic commands directly in elisp. It works quite well, except when running an interactive command which is does not handle well and there are some issues with piping as well.
Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly think the defaults were made bad on purpose to force people to learn how to configure it.
I disagree. People often tend to forget that Emacs has a very long history and what may appear to a newcomer today to be bad design more often than not, has a logical (even if historical) reason. It is of course a classic design dilemma when porting something across dozens of different systems and supporting something across many decades, whether to try to adapt to the whims of a new target or to stick with a common…
It is possible to use something for a long time and still be aware of its shortcomings.
(I have been using emacs since 1996.)
Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#29My favorite thing I wish they'd told me about emacs: M-x shell Run a shell (or shells) inside emacs. Great for long running apps like servers. You can search back through the output using normal Emacs search commands. For me, one of the killer features of Emacs. Rename the shell buffer to something else to start another shell.
Just curious, why do you prefer shell instead of term or ansi-term? Both of those other modes have better support for curses applications and act closer to an actual terminal emulator than M-x shell does. Also, if you like term, you can use the "multi-term" script ( http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/multi-term.el ), which will automatically open a new terminal window with M-x multi-term, and you can cycle through your o…
Basically what swhipple says. I work on long running servers and it's fantastic to run them in a shell terminal and be able to use emacs' incremental search to look through the server output for interesting log output. I have no need for curses support generally, but when I do I use a different shell, though I can't say I find them nearly as useful.
Re: Things I wish they told you about Emacs
#30That I could switch from Vim and still have access to nearly all the vim keybindings and motions that I use in real Vim.
I've been using vim + evil (and prior iterations of evil) for probably ~5 years now, and it really is the best of both worlds for me.