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How to Learn Emacs (2012)

david.rothlis.net

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Re: How to Learn Emacs (2012)

#41

Post by Roark66 »

pedrodelfino wrote: post #19

I wish I had read this article in 2012. Unfortunately, I was introduced to Emacs in 2016 and only started using it in 2021. I lost 9 years! It is my favorite piece of software :) This article has an interesting perspective. But, beyond Emacs built-in documentation, my favorite content to learn Emacs is the book Mastering Emacs and the System Crafters' YouTube Channel.

>System Crafters' YouTube Channel.

Oh my. I really genuinely tried to watch it... But it's impossible for me to not fall asleep after 20min. The guy on the channel really should invest in some person that could cut 10 min of content out of each of his 2h live shows and make a short snappy video. Like what the primagen is doing. I think he would get 10x the audience.

The actual content he has is very interesting, but the barrier is the length of it.

Re: How to Learn Emacs (2012)

#42

Post by ivzhh »

I picked up Emacs this summer (together with neovim). The motivation was simple, I was an early adopter of VSCode and SSH remote, but I noticed that sometimes, the session history (bash history, etc.) was not restored after network issue. I don't get along well with tmux thus I need a solution.

I found Emacsclient is a perfect match to my situation and I simply started from empty init.el. It was annoying in the first a few days to set up LSP, counsel, org-mode. But after about 3 days, everything became very natural and I have been using Emacs ever since. I made a lot of elisp in my init.el to set layout, do automatic actions, etc.

I am not a long time user yet so I can speak for the "learn" part: just use it and you will pick the skill up.

Re: How to Learn Emacs (2012)

#43

Post by hyperhopper »

drumhead wrote: post #33

Its great that Emacs is still with us and long may it last. Its incredibly powerful and flexible, but it also really hard trying to sell it to a new user. Most of them will just download and use VS Code. Is is still possible to popularise its use? Most people just want to get up and running straight away, something which Code lets them do, they dont have the time or patience to learn how to use Emacs. It comes from t…

Spacemacs tries to be pretty close to that. Unless you want a lot of custom integrations, spacemacs gives me everything I want out of the box.

https://spacemacs.org

Re: How to Learn Emacs (2012)

#44

Post by hyperhopper »

sgarland wrote: post #20
squeegee_scream wrote: post #6

My learning path was 1) use vim/nvim for a couple years 2) use Doom Emacs. I was shocked at how intuitive Doom is for me. Of course not everyone would agree but it’s worth checking out

Legitimately asking, not trying to start a holy war - what did you find lacking in vim that you found in emacs? I've been using vim for barely a year, and have yet to find anything I can't do in it that I want to do.

If you're legitimately trying to understand, try to flip the question.

What is better about vim? Evil mode in emacs has the same keybinds you're used to. Extensibility and customization is 100x better since everything is lua, instead of trying to twist viml to do what it wasn't meant to do. Unless you just want to use base vi on every machine you ssh into, it's hard to find ways vim is better.

Re: How to Learn Emacs (2012)

#45

Post by sgarland »

hyperhopper wrote: post #44
sgarland wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimately asking, not trying to start a holy war - what did you find lacking in vim that you found in emacs? I've been using vim for barely a year, and have yet to find anything I can't do in it that I want to do.

If you're legitimately trying to understand, try to flip the question. What is better about vim? Evil mode in emacs has the same keybinds you're used to. Extensibility and customization is 100x better since everything is lua, instead of trying to twist viml to do what it wasn't meant to do. Unless you just want to use base vi on every machine you ssh into, it's hard to find ways vim is better.

Tbf when I said vim, in my head I meant neovim, which supports Lua. I'm aware they're quite different, and that's on me for not being specific.

My main reasoning is precisely the opposite reason as your sibling comment mentions - I have no interest in my editor supporting barely tangential things like web browsing, email, etc. The ability to spawn a terminal is nice (and mine can do so), but my terminal (Kitty) can also easily split itself and switch context between nvim/terminal so it's not critical.

Re: How to Learn Emacs (2012)

#46

Post by hyperhopper »

sgarland wrote: post #45
hyperhopper wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're legitimately trying to understand, try to flip the question. What is better about vim? Evil mode in emacs has the same keybinds you're used to. Extensibility and customization is 100x better since everything is lua, instead of trying to twist viml to do what it wasn't meant to do. Unless you just want to use base vi on every machine you ssh into, it's hard to find ways vim is better.

Tbf when I said vim, in my head I meant neovim, which supports Lua. I'm aware they're quite different, and that's on me for not being specific. My main reasoning is precisely the opposite reason as your sibling comment mentions - I have no interest in my editor supporting barely tangential things like web browsing, email, etc. The ability to spawn a terminal is nice (and mine can do so), but my terminal (Kitty) can a…

You can ignore the capabilities that you don't need. But overall as a vim lover, I find the emacs program and configuration to be far superior to [neo]vi[m]

Re: How to Learn Emacs (2012)

#47

Post by db48x »

G3rn0ti wrote: post #39
bigdict wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't learn to use ETags > You would be better served these days using LSP and treesitter Could you elaborate? How do I transition from etags to treesitter? Suppose I'm working on a dynamic C or C++ project where I might need to regenerate the tags daily.

> How do I transition from etags to treesitter? … to LSP: You don’t throw your tags away. If you run an LSP client it will add an “xref-backend” transparently, so Emacs will get all references and definitions from the LSP server. If you turn off LSP mode, Emacs will fall back to the etags backend. I don’t think you need any configuration for this to work. Treesitter modes do not implement an “xref-backend” AFAIK.

They could and should, though.
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