Well there is the built in tutorial for that. And it'll leave you at a point where you can frustratingly do text editing and feel a bit confused about what all the hype is and then after a few weeks/months you'll drift back to a more traditional/"modern" text editor. At least that was my experience... twice.. The only way to stick with emacs is to see how extensible and useful it is - which is really all about learni…
I'm a long time vim user, but after a colleague showed me org-mode I installed emacs (with spacemacs). Currently I only use it to edit org files, but it feels like there is a whole ecosystem waiting to be explored.
Agreed, although it's also true that vanilla Emacs is quite spartan and has many questionable defaults. In my opinion it would be much better if plain Emacs provided a nicer user experience out of the box, thus reducing the need for customisation and external packages which is a big barrier to entry for new users.
Do you have a good set of basic customisations that anyone using Emacs should do?
You've probably heard about it, but Mastering Emacs is fantastic.
1. You shouldn't be updating your `.gitignore` continuously. You need to ignore everything and explicitly define exceptions e.g. * !.gitignore !init.el 2. The reason I prefer ~/.emacs.d/ is that I have it in a git repo and on every system, I'll just clone the repo and soft link it in the home directory. This way, I have only one directory inside home about emacs within which my files are explicitly separated and trac…
I solve this issue by using my own config directory; this way I soft-link two things from my dotfiles repo: - .emacs - which defines my config dir and loads everything in there - my own config dir (called .emacs.conf), in which I have lots of .el files with specific configurations Emacs packages still write by default to .emacs.d, and this way I don't have to care about any of that when moving between machines, becau…
I do this as well! I have this repo [0] at ~/cfg, then I symlink what I need [1] as an init script. My end goal is to be able to run a single script and get everything [2] set up on a new machine (I change machines somewhat frequently and I got the manual process to under 45 minutes, so there's room for improvement). More on setting up Macs [3].
There is also GNU Stow [4] that does something similar, and probably better.
Agreed, although it's also true that vanilla Emacs is quite spartan and has many questionable defaults. In my opinion it would be much better if plain Emacs provided a nicer user experience out of the box, thus reducing the need for customisation and external packages which is a big barrier to entry for new users.
Do you have a good set of basic customisations that anyone using Emacs should do?
What is the best way to reduce pain from using ctrl with pinky finger? (emacs pinky?)
I press left ctrl with my pinky curled, so I actually press with the upside of the finger (just above the nail). It puts my wrist at a very small angle and no effort on the pinky finger itself.
I am a little concerned you start with package repository and then org mode. Emacs is at heart a simple, modeless editor. With c-[fbpns] and c-x c-[fa] you can immediately, if laboriously, do anything. Every new thing you learn incrementally speeds you up.
Agreed, although it's also true that vanilla Emacs is quite spartan and has many questionable defaults. In my opinion it would be much better if plain Emacs provided a nicer user experience out of the box, thus reducing the need for customisation and external packages which is a big barrier to entry for new users.
http://spacemacs.org/ solves this exact problem. It's a set of packages, with consistent UX.