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Take Two: Eshell

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Re: Take Two: Eshell

#51

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

sshine wrote: post #48
networked wrote: post #45

> For file management these days, Dired is my interface of choice. It is simply the more elegant tool for the job. Case in point: renaming a bunch of files in a directory to arbitrary names. With a shell, my standard approach would have been to run some variant of `ls -1 > foo.sh`, edit `foo.sh` to insert `mv` on each line to a renamed target file, `chmod u+x foo.sh` to be executable, run `foo.sh`, delete `foo.sh` an…

I didn't know of vidir, but I just thought I'd share some funny etymology, since I know someone called Viðir. Besides meaning vi + dir, the Icelandic name means "willow tree", which is a cool name for a directory traversal tool.

There is a code witch named Vidrun (https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview), presumably with similar roots.

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#52

Post by Barrin92 »

spauldo wrote: post #10
imiric wrote: post #4

I've been using Emacs daily for well over a decade now, but I just can't get myself to use any of its shells, or features that replace standard shell workflows. I think the main reason—besides muscle memory and the scripts, aliases, and commands I'm already used to—is because a POSIX-compliant shell exposes a generic interface for both programs and users. Programs can receive and output data over standard file descri…

I never understood the need to do everything in Emacs either. I love Emacs, and I use it for all kinds of things, but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too and it seems silly to have to choose one or the other. Calling shell commands from Emacs and inserting their output into a buffer is great, don't get me wrong. But Emacs' terminal experience pales in comparison to plain ol' xterm. At the end of the day, I use the…

>but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too

well, the big advantages start when you aren't in the UNIX ecosystem. One of the biggest benefits of using Emacs and Eshell heavily for me is, I have it on a Windows machine.

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#53

Post by skydhash »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #23
log101 wrote: post #2

I wish someone could write a "The Good Parts" book for Emacs. Even after reading the manual twice, I'm still overwhelmed with the API and forget even the most basic configuration options after a month of inactivity.

I have the same feeling with Vim after using it for like the past 10 years professionally. Granted, it is much smaller, but for instance editing multiple files using just stock config is surprisingly undiscoverable. It comes with the whole buffer mechanism, which is certainly powerful, but I guess that 99% of newcomers just want to open tabs and go left/right, not to learn set of byzantine commands like :rewind or :l…

> but I guess that 99% of newcomers just want to open tabs and go left/right, not to learn set of byzantine commands like :rewind or :last.

There's nano and multiple other editors for that. You want vim for a more powerful interactions than go left and write.

My need for vim is to open a file, go the the place I want to, quickly edit it, and go back to what I was doing (which is reading and thinking). Editing is just a short bust instead of being a continual activity.

Another annoyance with editors like VS Code (and the like) is how tedious to have information. Every file is in own tab (even though you can show more at once, but that's tedious). So you are always flipping back and forth. With vim, I can have everything at once in front of me, and once I have a clear line of action collapse it to the few (2 or 3) I need. Also quickly.

Vim and Emacs are for those that really needs them. There's a lot to learn, but that's because there's a lot you want to do.

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#54

Post by skydhash »

wwarner wrote: post #41
spauldo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is the type of environment you need to immerse yourself in and build an intuition for. There's no shortcut for that. If you can't spend a couple hours a day for a few months using it, you're never going to feel at home in it. It's quite possible you just don't need Emacs.

As a longtime emacs user, this perfectly summarizes what is most awful about it! It makes me cringe when people wag their fingers to correct the "misperception" that emacs is merely a great text editor and IDE, but rather a programmable elisp application platform. In reality, vanilla emacs with only a little bit of configuration (and as with any other editor, substantially more tinkering with installation and configu…

It's also a great file manager, a good shell environment, a document viewer, a mail viewer and composer, a process manager, a music player, and you can play games in it. All powered by elisp.

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#55

Post by kreyenborgi »

wwarner wrote: post #41
spauldo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is the type of environment you need to immerse yourself in and build an intuition for. There's no shortcut for that. If you can't spend a couple hours a day for a few months using it, you're never going to feel at home in it. It's quite possible you just don't need Emacs.

As a longtime emacs user, this perfectly summarizes what is most awful about it! It makes me cringe when people wag their fingers to correct the "misperception" that emacs is merely a great text editor and IDE, but rather a programmable elisp application platform. In reality, vanilla emacs with only a little bit of configuration (and as with any other editor, substantially more tinkering with installation and configu…

It reminds me of the "actually a monad is" explanations. Yes monads are wonderful mathemagical infinityburritos that you can spend phds studying, but they also just happen to be very practical and useful even when you don't know you're using them and even if you have no emotional reaction to the name Simon.

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#56

Post by lvass »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #25

Every few years I put time into learning eshell and it's seriously impressive. But what I really want is eshell outside of emacs. In fact I want all the bits of emacs outside of emacs. The problem with eshell is the problem with emacs. It's a monolith. I know I know that's also its strength, but what I really want is for all the bits of emacs to be exploded out into components that make up an overall environment (yes…

>But what I really want is eshell outside of emacs

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/eshell/S...

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#57

Post by spauldo »

Barrin92 wrote: post #52
spauldo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the need to do everything in Emacs either. I love Emacs, and I use it for all kinds of things, but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too and it seems silly to have to choose one or the other. Calling shell commands from Emacs and inserting their output into a buffer is great, don't get me wrong. But Emacs' terminal experience pales in comparison to plain ol' xterm. At the end of the day, I use the…

>but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too well, the big advantages start when you aren't in the UNIX ecosystem. One of the biggest benefits of using Emacs and Eshell heavily for me is, I have it on a Windows machine.

That's true, although I find that if it's a machine I'm going to be using for a while it's easier to go the WSL route and run Emacs from there.

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#58

Post by spauldo »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #28
spauldo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the need to do everything in Emacs either. I love Emacs, and I use it for all kinds of things, but the UNIX ecosystem has great tools too and it seems silly to have to choose one or the other. Calling shell commands from Emacs and inserting their output into a buffer is great, don't get me wrong. But Emacs' terminal experience pales in comparison to plain ol' xterm. At the end of the day, I use the…

> But Emacs' terminal experience pales in comparison to plain ol' xterm. [lib]vterm reduces this paling to almost zero.

vterm is great - I had it in my config for a while and it's hands down the best way to put a terminal in Emacs. But for me it's the whole "encapsulate a terminal in Emacs" concept that I find unuseful. That's a personal preference though - I've been used to having dozens of xterms scattered around my desktops for longer than I've been using Emacs, so that's just more comfortable for me.

I'll use regular ol' shell occasionally when I just need to throw around some commands but for anything that needs a real terminal emulator I just open another xterm.

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#59

Post by spauldo »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #14
johnisgood wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eshell : Welcome to the Emacs shell ~ $ btop ERROR: Failed to get size of terminal! ~ [1] $ shell : $ btop Terminal size too small: Width = 79 Height = 22Needed for current config:Width = 80 Height = 24 If I increase the width and height, I get an extremely weird output. ansi-term : Same as shell . Any other Emacs shells I missed? In any case, I do not use any shells within Emacs. I use XTerm separately.

For interactive stuff you probably want eat https://github.com/kephale/emacs-eat or vterm (I don't use them, I prefer my shells to last even if I should restart emacs)

Don't say that too loud or the "you should never have to restart Emacs" folks might hear you!

Re: Take Two: Eshell

#60

Post by vkazanov »

imiric wrote: post #9
agumonkey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's truth to this. Emacs is large. I tried RTFM twice, thrice .. not skimming, taking time. And even then I learn later that there was some feature in it that I completely missed. And it's a common joke in the community "I've been using emacs for decades and I didn't know that...". Blessing and a curse ? Maybe they should rebrand emacs as a universe and not an editor.. so that people know there are many galaxies…

The thing is that you don't really learn Emacs . Emacs is just an interface to programs written in Elisp that happens to have editor-like functionality out of the box. There are specific conventions it follows, and Elisp has its own set of quirks and a steep learning curve if the user is not fluent in other Lisp languages, so those can be challenging to learn. But boiled down to its core, there's not much to Emacs it…

Emacs is a path, not a destination!

Saying this as somebody who's been coevolving with emacs for 20 years already. Oh, all the little bits of lisp, all the mechanical memory, all the IDEs that came and went...

My emacs survived them all!

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