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Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

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Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#51

Post by silentbicycle »

kylec wrote: post #3

As a followup question, what is the best resource to most efficiently learn the basics of Emacs?

In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour.

After working through that, some combination of reading the Emacs Wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki) and a recent edition of _Learning Gnu Emacs_ will get you off to a good start.

Getting really effective with Emacs takes a while (probably at least a month), but it is very deliberately designed to be keep growing with you. If you come to prefer it for editing, you can bundle together your config files and extensions and run Emacs on all the major OSs. It becomes its own extensible environment, much like Firefox with its extensions. (This is why the time spent learning it pays off.)

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#53

Post by silentbicycle »

bprater wrote: post #24

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.

Watching the screencast for SLIME (a common lisp mode) was what convinced me to switch to Emacs. (It may very well convince you to avoid it, but it'll be an honest impression of what Emacs looks like with a power user.)

Link in the comments from here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230990

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#54

Post by Hutzpah »

gz wrote: post #19

I remember when, having coded in emacs for a few years, I used it for the first time to do a 3-way merge on thousands of lines of code. The amount of time and effort I saved astounded me. The point here is twofold: 1) emacs is very well integrated with extremely powerful tools (in this case diff, merge) 2) emacs is deep; even as an advanced user you can keep improving your efficiency (albeit at a lower rate) Having s…

I am no coder, I use Emacs as my 'DTP package. But I can relate something rom graphic design. Why a graphician should be able to draw stuff with pen and paper rather than only work at the computer? Because the connection between thought and hand is faster with pen and paper. Hence, broadband output and feedback loop. Not just faster but enhaced quality: so fast that feedback loop becomes subconscious, direct, flow. Maybe in programming with vi /emacs the same thing occurs.

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#55

Post by maw »

ragnemalm wrote: post #32
mixmax wrote: post #9

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…

My solution is to not stick pedantically to the home row but wherever and however my hands and wrists feel comfortable. When my hands are at rest but on top of the keyboard, that works out to about AEFV N[IK]L'. It's a position not dissimilar to what you get on a split keyboard, but with the advantage that you can actually type this way. The middle columns of keys (TGB and YHN) are typable with both hands. Alt is left thumb only (I use the other Alt as an AltGr key; right thumb only). Control is left pinky only, but pressed with the first knuckle, not the tip of the finger.

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#56

Post by imgabe »

bprater wrote: post #24

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.

I learned a lot from this screencast when I was first starting to use emacs. It is geared specifically towards lisp programming with SLIME, but you do get a good look at an emacs expert doing some programming, as well as a look at his .emacs file which is always very helpful. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050728.html

There's another film by the same person about using UncommonWeb (a lisp web framework) that has more emacs goodness. Note the UCW tutorial is probably somewhat out of date as the framework has changed a bit since then. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050727.html

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#57

Post by maw »

jbert wrote: post #41
mixmax wrote: post #9

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... I'd argue that this is ergonmically essential for long-term emacs use, otherwise you run the risk of 'emacs claw'. Took me less than a week to get used to it. If you regularly use other people's machines then it's not a good idea (but then, neither is emacs unless you are carrying around your .em…

I have plenty of nonstandard keybindings (a bad idea, but I didn't know it it 10-11 years ago when I decided upon them, and now I'm too accustomed to them), but what I'd miss more is the various functions I've written that save so manual effort.

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#58

Post by ivey »

pdrummond wrote: post #30

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…

I installed Emacs to install SLIME so I could play around with Lisp. The REPL-in-a-buffer is so phenomenally powerful that I immediately missed it in TextMate when coding in Ruby. Thus began my descent into Emacs madness, and my new favorite function, ruby-send-region-and-go

I was a vi guy for a very long time, and I mocked the Emacs guys for "eight megs and constantly swapping" and "Emacs claw" ... until I switched to TextMate on the Mac, and realized how Emacs-inspired it is. It was actually very easy to go from TextMate to Emacs.

Along the way, I got more productive in my shell. Did you know that M-left moves back a word on the command line? I didn't, and I've been using bash for 10 years. Oh, and it works in all readline-enabled apps.

Re: Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor?

#60

Post by schtog »

pdrummond wrote: post #30

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…

Isn't it possible to use a repl in VIM?
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