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Use GNU Emacs

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Re: Use GNU Emacs

#221

Post by kickaha »

There are a million things to say here, and many have said them better than I can. But there's an important generational aspect to the discussion.

I learned Emacs in 1988 or so. Only a couple years before, I had traded my Commodore 64---on which I did real work, like writing term papers---for an IBM PC XT clone. WordPerfect. Hobbyist BBSer, but networking was in the future.

When I got to college, Unix and Emacs were a revelation. This is how it's supposed to work! And the background ASSUMPTION that you could understand everything, and control everything, was something nobody at the time would have questioned. With hindsight it turns out that understanding everything was a mirage and controlling everything was the gateway drug to possibly literal addictive behaviors, but that was the ethos.

I left CS after only a couple semesters, and my career has completely diverged from it. So it's a TOTAL FLUKE that today I can comprehend---god, the whole model! of a Lisp machine! of Lisp at all! For a young person starting with modern tools? Maybe we can agree that we all see the big chasm....

But I will never give it up.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#222

Post by lkjdsklf »

chucksmash wrote: post #144
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Emacs for 25 years, and I use a stock install and I never even touch the .emacs file. It's just a text editor. For many tasks it has better usability than the competition. This is why I use it. (Not for everything, though, and that's okay.) I'd guess most people are like me. Configuring text editors is not our hobby.

> I use a stock install and I never even touch the .emacs file. Not even to centralize the `backup.foo~` and `#auto-save.foo#` files that emacs loves to litter the file system with? I can't wrap my mind around it.

I find it fun to find random poop.cpp~ from 5 years ago in some random place on the filesystem. It's like discovering buried treasure. Who knows what's in there? Could be anything!

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#223

Post by xrd »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #220
xrd wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since reading your comment, I have gotten very excited about Doom Emacs in the last 45 minutes. But, now I realize this is a very powerful configuration of Emacs if and only if you prefer using the VI keybindings. It looks like spacemacs is that as well. I actually enjoy Emacs keybindings, and would like to find something as polished and supported as Doom, but without using VI keybindings. Does anyone know where I sh…

As mentioned, you can disable evil mode in spacemacs or doom. There's also prelude which doesn't include evil by default. Not quite as fully featured as doom/spacemacs, but it's a good place to start. All that said, you could just set it up from scratch. Now that lsp-mode and dap-mode are things, you can setup a fully featured IDE in not very much config at all. I have everything in my init.el and setting up projecti…

Lol, that last comment.

Can't I beg you to share your init.el? I want LSP and the other stuff but Doom even when turning off evil mode seems to far away from the emacs I'm familiar with.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#224

Post by lkjdsklf »

tronx wrote: post #174
xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

I have only used IDEs and tried getting into emacs because I heard so many times how great it is, but it was the learning curve paired with the lack of good tutorials for beginners that made me eventually give up.

If you're actually interested in learning, there's a pretty good series "Emacs From Scratch" on the systemcrafters youtube channel.

He starts with a completely empty emacs config and builds it up to a full blown IDE explaining how everything works along the way.

Some of the things he does, there are better alternatives these days but most is still relevant and it'll teach a lot about how emacs works.

That said, emacs is more of a hobby than an IDE. If you just want to get work done, using something like vscode or intellij or whatever else makes way more sense. If you find it fun to tinker around and customize your editor you can make emacs incredible, but it's something you have to want to spend time on.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#225

Post by chimprich »

xrd wrote: post #163
forty wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from VSCode to Doom Emacs with very little of my own customization (doing TS, Scala, Rust mostly) a few years ago. There is not one thing of VSCode that I miss, and I enjoy some of the most powerful features like wgrep & all, and a great vim emulation layer (the one I had in VSCode sucked).

Since reading your comment, I have gotten very excited about Doom Emacs in the last 45 minutes. But, now I realize this is a very powerful configuration of Emacs if and only if you prefer using the VI keybindings. It looks like spacemacs is that as well. I actually enjoy Emacs keybindings, and would like to find something as polished and supported as Doom, but without using VI keybindings. Does anyone know where I sh…

Alternative opinion that you completely didn't ask for: I wouldn't bother with Doom, or any of the other pre-packaged Emacs distributions. If you like the default Emacs bindings, I would suggest just... using Emacs.

Unconfigured Emacs is a bit clunky, but you'll understand it a lot better if you configure it yourself. Also, just in my opinion, there are better options than the packages supplied by Doom.

My suggestion is to set up Emacs with use-package for package configuration (this will be in Emacs 29 anyway), and then you can easily play around with different package combinations.

I'd add a nice-looking theme first of all, then try adding the following modern packages, one at a time. Play around with them a bit before adding another so you know what they do.

Vertico - visual completion UI (selecting files, buffers, commands etc.)

Orderless - user-friendly completion framework

Consult - search and navigation commands

Embark - contextual actions

Marginalia - fancy completion decorations

Magit - nuclear-powered Git framework

Eglot - lightweight LSP functionality (will be in Emacs 29)

...that gives you a powerful selection of features that play nice together and you can easily build on.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#226

Post by crabbone »

worldsayshi wrote: post #13

I used Emacs for a while and now I use Intellij. Now I don't understand the appeal of customizing the editor to such degree. I'm not that unique. I just want stuff that works. Give me the same setup as everyone else so that when issues arise everyone will push for them to get fixed and everyone can help each other.

Intellij out of the box offers such a crappy text editor, I feel like programming with one hand behind my back... well, actually even worse, because I'm forced into using mouse and a crappy text editor at the same time when touching this stuff... This has nothing to do with extending the editor. People making Intellij editors simply don't know how to make editors, they don't have a good understanding how a professional would want to edit text. Their whole approach is based on satisfying inexperienced users (because that's the only thing they know).

As for helping each other: yes, my wife is using VSCode (she's also in IT, but more of a scientific research that uses IT wing). When she has problems, I SSH into her laptop and use Emacs.

And, for users who have problems with their editor, I can only say: git gud. If you are so pathetically bad you cannot solve problems with the only tool you are supposed to know how to use well, then take a class on how to use it, spend a few weekends reading documentation. It's your responsibility to know this stuff, if you don't, you are a liability for your team.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#227

Post by gshulegaard »

xrd wrote: post #163
forty wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from VSCode to Doom Emacs with very little of my own customization (doing TS, Scala, Rust mostly) a few years ago. There is not one thing of VSCode that I miss, and I enjoy some of the most powerful features like wgrep & all, and a great vim emulation layer (the one I had in VSCode sucked).

Since reading your comment, I have gotten very excited about Doom Emacs in the last 45 minutes. But, now I realize this is a very powerful configuration of Emacs if and only if you prefer using the VI keybindings. It looks like spacemacs is that as well. I actually enjoy Emacs keybindings, and would like to find something as polished and supported as Doom, but without using VI keybindings. Does anyone know where I sh…

I had the same realization...so I took some bits of doomemacs/spacemacs and incorporated it into my personal emacs configuration. I am not great at maintaining my config or writing elisp in general, but feel free to reference my config if you wanted to take a stab at creating a doomemacs-like experience with your own configuration choices:

https://gitlab.com/gshulegaard/my-emacs

Disclaimer: This config is a bit perpetually dusty at this point, so I wouldn't copy it verbatim but instead use it as inspiration for some packages that might be worth looking into. JFYI anything that is from Marmelade might be worth avoiding as I suspect it is unmaintained given it's SSL cert expired in 2018. I just haven't gotten around to removing it from my config.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#228

Post by crabbone »

tzhenghao wrote: post #33

I'm more of a vim guy, but "I get it". I started using these "serious" editors back in college and eventually settled with vim over emacs. I don't wanna get into the whole editor wars - it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game. I went through the whole phase of adding a bunch of plugins, custom macros and have a huge .vimrc file that, once in a while, would break if I was using the wrong vim variant {vi,…

At least for Emacs, dealing with big codebases isn't a problem. Modern approach to dealing with this is to use language servers. This is also what VSCode does. So, suggesting you have better autocompletion in VSCode vs Emacs (or Vim) is just a sign of not knowing how that works, because they are, literally, doing the same thing...

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#230

Post by fxbois »

I’ve started to use emacs in my computer sciences school 30 years ago (EPITA in Paris). The Lab was surrounded by Mips, Sun, Alpha, … great time.

The only weakness of Emacs (according to me) was the lack of a good major mode (module) to edit web template : imagine editing a php block inside a javascript part embedded inside html.

After testing many modes, I started to develop web-mode (http://web-mode.org) that is now compatible with about thirty template engines. What a wondeful trip it was to discover the power of Lisp and what a pleasure it is everyday to know exactly what happens when I hit a key while editing an html file.

I am the only Emacs user in my company (kernix.com) but nothing would make me switch. I can not imagine using an editor that would not open in less than a second (or that would eat hundreds of Mo of RAM)

I Hope Emacs will see a usage surge with the inclusion of tree sitter… editing in emacs will be even faster and more robust. Not sure tree sitter is suitted for multi languages files … but for this you have web-mode ;)

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