31–40 of 84 posts
There are a number of looks that emacs can have, from emacs -nw (runs in your terminal emulator) to emacs with GTK. And there are colour themes within each. M-x color-theme-select
Have you read O'Reilly's Learning Emacs ? I strongly recommend it. It's a useful tour guide. Failing that, have you read the tutorial? Have you read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs"? If none of that can help or inspire you then I probably don't have much chance. But I'll offer you some coaching anyway. Imagine Vince Lombardi reading this to you: Stop using the mouse. If you're using emacs and you're touching the mouse…
I just read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs", thanks for the link. It was very enlightening on many levels and told me several things that were written between the lines, namely: - Initial user experience is (very) secondary to long-term efficiency - if you aren't in this for the long term don't bother - the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs u…
The optimal solution I've come up with is to use the two keys adjacent to the space bar (typically Alt, but actually Command on the Apple keyboard I generally use) as Control, since that's easily the most important modifier key, so it should be the easiest to access. This makes C-w, C-s, C-r, C-a, C-e, C-p, C-o, C-j, C-l and so on very, very comfortable compared to the corner positioning. As far as I know, this is the way many keyboards were before the extended IBM PC keyboard came up with its insane control key positioning. (My comfort with these keys may also be linked to my use of Macs and ubiquitous command-key shortcuts before I switched to Ubuntu. Ironically, Emacs is much more comfortable now in Ubuntu than it ever was on my Mac, because I can use the most readily accessible modifier key as God intended, rather than the third-tier relegated modifier that Control is on the Mac.)
The two keys adjacent to the new Control keys (ie. 2 away from the spacebar) then become the Alt keys. Whatever is left over (the original ctrl keys, plus Caps Lock and any silly Windows keys left over) can be bound to Super, which is useful for window manager shortcuts so that they don't clobber emacs/bash/screen bindings.
These changes are trivially easy to put in a simple .Xmodmap file to load whenever you log in, and copy to all the other computers you have to use regularly. If you're using Windows, I guess you may have to fiddle with the registry, but it would be worth it.
Don't get ambitious and treat it like your favorite editor just yet. Decide on a small task with complexity (and hence requires you to jump back and forth and rename stuff), like a 20-line script. Make plenty of use of the basic keystrokes (C-f forward, C-b backward, C-p prev line, C-n next line, C-s search, C-r reverse search). That's 6 combinations, and it's enough to witness the kind of speed you have in navigating the text.
Then use it for a real editing job. Shouldn't take long before it becomes second nature. Then, it shouldn't take long before you wished that every text entry window used the same keystrokes.
Oh yeah, type return to complete the search.
I am a die hard vim user who has been learning Clojure recently and I have learned a little Emacs along the way because everyone in the Lisp community bangs on about it. The funny thing is, every time I go to write some Clojure code - I want to open a Vim session, but I am always strangely drawn to Emacs for some reason. Recently, I decided to figure out what it was about Emacs that made me want to use it so much ove…
- No mouse; - No GUI; most people hide even the menu bar; - They have spent and do continue to spend a lot of time in Emacs.
Someone suggested a video recording of an Emacs session. That sounds like a good idea!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs", thanks for the link. It was very enlightening on many levels and told me several things that were written between the lines, namely: - Initial user experience is (very) secondary to long-term efficiency - if you aren't in this for the long term don't bother - the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs u…
the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs use... UNIX/Linux users have considered this mandatory forever, regardless of editor choice. PC keyboards are simply wrong.
YOU know what would be really useful? To have an expert Emacs user do a screencast of himself doing standard programming stuff. I think that would make it really obvious how these types of editors are.
YOU know what would be really useful? To have an expert Emacs user do a screencast of himself doing standard programming stuff. I think that would make it really obvious how these types of editors are.
Anyone with a webcam up for the job ?
:-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs", thanks for the link. It was very enlightening on many levels and told me several things that were written between the lines, namely: - Initial user experience is (very) secondary to long-term efficiency - if you aren't in this for the long term don't bother - the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs u…
Many are a fan of using the Caps Lock key as Control. While better than the insane standard positioning, it's still not optimal: it's not symmetrical between your hands (you're not going to remap Return as another Control) and it still makes for a lot of awkward pinky use. (Imagine playing a piano piece all with your 3rd, 4th and 5th fingers.) The optimal solution I've come up with is to use the two keys adjacent to…
> Why is emacs a great editor? It isn't--don't believe the hype. On the other hand, I couldn't write a line of code without IntelliSense. Does anybody know anything about Emacs.Net that Microsoft is working on? http://www.knowing.net/PermaLink,guid,31fdc849-db2a-4f7d-bf9...
Nope.