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Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)

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

#201

Post by renlo »

icodemuch wrote: post #199

I've been using Sublime since I started and have no complaints. That being said I always hear about emacs referred to as the OG. I know there's positives and negatives to both, but is there any pressing reason to switch from one to the other?

With emacs/vim (etc) you can edit text from within a terminal, which becomes quite helpful when you SSH in somewhere. Also, with a terminal multiplexor like tmux or screen you can also easily jump from shell to shell, which has personally improved my productivity substantially from when I was using GUI based text editors like Sublime or Notepadd++.

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

#203

Post by marrone12 »

renlo wrote: post #201
icodemuch wrote: post #199

I've been using Sublime since I started and have no complaints. That being said I always hear about emacs referred to as the OG. I know there's positives and negatives to both, but is there any pressing reason to switch from one to the other?

With emacs/vim (etc) you can edit text from within a terminal, which becomes quite helpful when you SSH in somewhere. Also, with a terminal multiplexor like tmux or screen you can also easily jump from shell to shell, which has personally improved my productivity substantially from when I was using GUI based text editors like Sublime or Notepadd++.

Emacs has terminal multiplexing and easy remote editing over ssh built in as well.

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

#204

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

Seconding the recommendation.

On my last project, I decided to do all remote server ops through Tramp, just to see how convenient it was. Turns out, very.

Besides launching a shell, one trick that you can do is piping Tramp invocation, including across different protocols - essentially creating tunnels. One special case I use frequently is for sudo operations.

C-x C-f, then /ssh:username@example.com|sudo:example.com:/etc/someconfig

Suddenly, you're editing as if you launched a session with sudo on the end machine.

Coupled with dired and M-x shell, it becomes a very convenient way of working.

(And in case Tramp causes you trouble, or you just need to close remote buffers and connections, remember about M-x tramp-cleanup-* set of commands.)

EDIT:

And lest I forget - GDB integration works over Tramp too.

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

#205

Post by TeMPOraL »

admax88q wrote: post #140
Vekz wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common selling point for VIM is "its installed everywhere you just ssh in and it's available". To that, I usually bring up tramp and say, who cares you just ssh in from emacs.

> A common selling point for VIM is "its installed everywhere you just ssh in and it's available". I've never understood this argument unless you're coming at it from a sysadmin perspective. Sure if its available everywhere that helps when I'm sshing in to random systems to sysadmin stuff. But I don't do my development by logging in to random new systems all the time. I do my development in an environment that I have…

This really hits at a core of what I call developer vs. sysadmin perspective. A developer usually works in a persistent environment they fully control. A sysadmin does a lot of work on multiple, often short-lived servers. So the former prefers customizing things the way they like; the latter learns and sticks to defaults.

At one of the Lisp projects I worked on, this split was clearly visible. One of my co-workers had the dev perspective, the other had the sysadmin view. Both used Emacs and Slime, but one had it fully customized, and other had it bare-bones, and spent most of his time in raw terminal anyway.

(I, of course, am hard down on developer view. My Emacs config has no peers :)).

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

#206

Post by TeMPOraL »

anyfoo wrote: post #146
admax88q wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A common selling point for VIM is "its installed everywhere you just ssh in and it's available". I've never understood this argument unless you're coming at it from a sysadmin perspective. Sure if its available everywhere that helps when I'm sshing in to random systems to sysadmin stuff. But I don't do my development by logging in to random new systems all the time. I do my development in an environment that I have…

That’s a very specific development story, though, common to e.g. web development. If you’re, for example, a developer working on an embedded platform which (even temporarily) has no ssh, and probably no emacs as well, tramp-mode won’t work. I’m a hard emacser, but it’s true that vi is usually much more ubiquitously available, so it’s good to know how to use it.

SSH isn't the only protocol supported by Tramp (from what I hear, it's actually a late addition). Essentially, if you can get somehow get a shell on a remote machine, you can make Tramp work with it.

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

#207

Post by TeMPOraL »

IronBacon wrote: post #182
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! ^__~

Totally. C-x C-q on a dired buffer, and you can edit most of what's essentially an ls output as if it was a text file. C-c C-c to commit changes. I find myself using it very frequently for file management.

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

#208

Post by TeMPOraL »

lelf wrote: post #142
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…

M-x compile (and related) works too.

And GDB integration.

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

#209

Post by verletx64 »

baldfat wrote: post #178
nothrabannosir wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who cares about the resource difference between EMACS and VS Code in real world practicality? I literally use different apps on battery vs wall power: wall: Firefox, Slack, VSCode battery: Safari, mail, Emacs The difference is clear as night & day. Mac OS X has a tab in Activity Monitor where you can observe energy impact of different apps, and it consistently reports Electron apps as... psychotic. An order of magn…

But what real world difference besides some battery improvements. They are both fast in terms of responsiveness and I find VS Code to be much easier to customize and get up and running.

Unplugging a laptop from the mains is definitely a thing still.

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

#210

Post by TeMPOraL »

renlo wrote: post #201
icodemuch wrote: post #199

I've been using Sublime since I started and have no complaints. That being said I always hear about emacs referred to as the OG. I know there's positives and negatives to both, but is there any pressing reason to switch from one to the other?

With emacs/vim (etc) you can edit text from within a terminal, which becomes quite helpful when you SSH in somewhere. Also, with a terminal multiplexor like tmux or screen you can also easily jump from shell to shell, which has personally improved my productivity substantially from when I was using GUI based text editors like Sublime or Notepadd++.

> With emacs/vim (etc) you can edit text from within a terminal, which becomes quite helpful when you SSH in somewhere.

A very underappreciated functionality. Over the past few months, a good 30% of my work was done this way - by SSHing from my el cheapo Windows 2-in-1 to my much more powerful Linux desktop, and using Emacs in terminal mode. With terminal set to xterm-256, it looks almost as if it was GUI Emacs, and has almost all the same functionalities available. I'm a remote worker now, but this workflow adds an extra order of magnitude more flexibility to my work day, as I can leave my environment running when I go on an errand, and pick the work up in a long queue, or on a bus.

It's one small thing, but the power of Emacs is really in how all those small little things compose together into a powerful environment you can use from almost everywhere, and on almost everything.

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