A great reference with some pragmatic advice.
I've heard that one of the main benefits to emacs is that it can be used to tool itself to one's needs; curious to know if that's what others have found?
Master Emacs in one year
21–30 of 121 posts
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#22After seeing TextMate struggle around the jump from version 1 to 2 and yesterday reading Sublime Text to struggle going from version 2 to 3 (to 4) I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors. Maybe it's time to hold stronger to your emacs, (or vi).
I've been using Emacs as my day-to-day editor for coming up on 15 years now. There is a lot to be said for picking up a tool with that kind of longevity.
> I've been using Emacs as my day-to-day editor for coming up on 15 years now. There is a lot to be said for picking up a tool with that kind of longevity.
To amplify your comment: I'm going on 33 years, and one of the great things about emacs is how it has changed with the times.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with all things, if you don't like it, that's okay. If you're productive in ST3, great! For me, it was the realization that emacs can be configured to do anything you want . If you don't like how it works (and you probably won't), you can change it. Do you wish that Alt- would delete all of the whitespace in front of your cursor and translate the rest of the line to piglatin? You can to that. Do you want to send a…
So what you posted here...this is what I want to see in the OP's otherwise well-intentioned guide. I can say "yes" to a lot of those things, and "maybe" to the others...Don't get me wrong, I love learning new things, especially languages...but in this case, we're talking about a tool that is critical for me to learning other things...when writing an evangelism guide, the saying, "show don't tell", is even more urgent…
I think the learning curve of Emacs is much easier than vim. You still have a GUI that exposes most of the important functions, and can learn the key bindings as you go. You can start using Emacs for basic editing without actually knowing how to "use" it.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a vi user, having learned it when I had to admin dozens of flavours of *NIX in the 90s. I moved to Windows ten years ago for my day job, and had to use many editors which didn't support vi keybindings, so ended up learning to work with only the keys on the PC keyboard. This has worked out quite well, as these days I have vi keybindings in some Windows apps (thanks ViEmu!), but when they're not available, I can fa…
>more bi much Don't you mean "bcw"? ;)
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Re: Master Emacs in one year
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a vi user, having learned it when I had to admin dozens of flavours of *NIX in the 90s. I moved to Windows ten years ago for my day job, and had to use many editors which didn't support vi keybindings, so ended up learning to work with only the keys on the PC keyboard. This has worked out quite well, as these days I have vi keybindings in some Windows apps (thanks ViEmu!), but when they're not available, I can fa…
>more bi much Don't you mean "bcw"? ;)
His would be:
Still much more productive with vi keys!
Yours would be: Still much productive with vi keys!
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using Emacs as my day-to-day editor for coming up on 15 years now. There is a lot to be said for picking up a tool with that kind of longevity.
> I've been using Emacs as my day-to-day editor for coming up on 15 years now. There is a lot to be said for picking up a tool with that kind of longevity. To amplify your comment: I'm going on 33 years, and one of the great things about emacs is how it has changed with the times.
>I'm going on 33 years
Your comment made me realize I'm about the same (ouch.)
I started on TECO EMACS on a DEC-20, then Gosling Emacs on Unix, then GNU Emacs on Unix, then various mini-emacs on PCs, finally back to GNU Emacs.
>how it has changed with the times
Heh, even a glacier will surprise you.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#27Reading guides like these makes me think about how I sound like when I implore novices to try out the command-line. Why should I? I'll peg myself as a half-competent developer, the kind who codes everyday and can lose a weekend to a spontaneous side project. I am completely in agreeance that tool mastery is vital for enjoying and being productive in programming, I just have no concept, not from this guide, and not fr…
> why Emacs is better for me than Sublime Text
Do you use a text editor only for programming? Or do you use your text editor to edit all kinds of text, including emails, letters, notes, to-do lists, etc.? I do the latter, and the last time I evaluated text editors, Emacs was the best choice for editing all the text that I work with daily.
For example, the last time I evaluated Sublime Text, it didn't have package nearly as powerful as Org mode for Emacs. Org mode is the best note-taking tool I've ever used.
In addition to note-taking, another example is email. format=flowed is one of my requirements, and when I search the web for "Sublime Text" "format=flowed", I get fewer than 744 results, and none of the top results are relevant. When I search the web for Emacs "format=flowed", I get 135,000 results, which includes many relevant results.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#28Re: Master Emacs in one year
#29I may be raging, but if you need one year to master an IDE/Text editor there is something wrong.
Re: Master Emacs in one year
#30I may be raging, but if you need one year to master an IDE/Text editor there is something wrong.
Maybe your definition of "mastery" is different than the author's. To help us better understand your definition of mastery, please list for us all of the things that you believe you have mastered, along with the amount of time you devoted to mastering each thing.