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A new blog dedicated to Emacs

emacsredux.com

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Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#51

Post by __david__ »

gknoy wrote: post #31
acomjean wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things about emacs is its on almost every machine you can find accessible by terminal. Except when its not, which is why I know enough vi commands to do really simple things. (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail). I'll fully admit that the configuration and lisp scripts are confusing in emacs. Its almost too configurable. But they are amazingly powerful. Plus emacs has the indispensable (M-x…

Even when it's not available, if vi is available chances are you can ask the administrator nicely to install emacs through a package manager. I just wish it were easier to use it on my local machine in a terminal but still maintain a GUI version as well.

    emacs -nw

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#52

Post by foobarqux »

zaphar wrote: post #48
elarkin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two macs that both run emacs. I have a private git repository for my .emacs.d folder (an old mirror can be found here: https://github.com/elarkin/.emacs.d ). I have taken special care to make sure that the init.el file is readable, and can be used with a fresh copy of emacs (without any packages installed) and everything works just fine. If you want to try it, just brew install emacs --cocoa and clone the repo…

My emacs automatically downloads and installs all my used packages on first startup on a fresh install. Literally all I have to do on a new box is clone my dotfiles and start emacs.

How do you achieve that?

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#53

Post by claudius »

acomjean wrote: post #30
kami8845 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems similar to Sublime Text 2. Except for the part where you're stuck trying to decipher existing Emacs Lisp. With Python I find I can express what I'm trying to do without too much thought.

One of the things about emacs is its on almost every machine you can find accessible by terminal. Except when its not, which is why I know enough vi commands to do really simple things. (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail). I'll fully admit that the configuration and lisp scripts are confusing in emacs. Its almost too configurable. But they are amazingly powerful. Plus emacs has the indispensable (M-x…

> (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail).

I tend to uninstall vi and install ed on my machines, it is just enough and about 90% smaller! :)

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#54

Post by spacemanaki »

foobarqux wrote: post #52
zaphar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My emacs automatically downloads and installs all my used packages on first startup on a fresh install. Literally all I have to do on a new box is clone my dotfiles and start emacs.

How do you achieve that?

This is what I have at the top of my ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

  (require 'package)
  (add-to-list 'package-archives
               '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/") t)
  (package-initialize)
  (when (not package-archive-contents)
    (package-refresh-contents))
  (defvar my-packages  '(clojure-mode ...)) ; list of packages
  (dolist (p my-packages)
    (when (not (package-installed-p p))
      (package-install p)))

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#55

Post by snotrockets »

quiesce wrote: post #43
ajross wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've played with it a few times, and just did again. The little "minimap" preview thing on the right side is cute (and disableable) -- it actually helps to provide an aesthetic indication as to when your file is Just Way Too Long. The visual display of tab characters is subtle and attractive, and probably useful to many people trapped in editors that do that stuff invisibly or wrong (it's not as good as dtrt-mode in…

People agreed re the minimap: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap

And Minimap can overlay the function names over the map, for even more usability.

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#56

Post by martinced »

josh-j wrote: post #24
jlongster wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding sublime's API, can you split windows? Invoke subprocesses, and create REPLs? Genuinely curious, but I think you can do a lot more with Emacs' APIs, and modify core parts of the editor since most of it is written in ELisp and you can easily swap out functions.

Yes, you can do all of those things with sublime's API ( https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL , https://github.com/SublimeText/Origami ). Yes, emacs is more extensible, but not where it matters, really. I.e., I don't think you're going to see any cool feature made with elisp that can't be ported to sublime.

No latter than yesterday I did a search and replace in Emacs doing Lisp substitution to create the replacement string. Actually it was better than that: I did record a macro who switched back & forth with another buffer, executing something in another REPL, then doing the substitution. It was quite an hack but it worked perfectly. Can you do such things in Sublime?

What about MuMaMo (Multi-Major-Mode)? Can you write something like Emacs' MuMaMo in Sublime? (basically it switched major mode depending on context inside a single file)

What about org-mode, Magit and semi-structural editing with Paredit? Can you do all this with Sublime?

And is Sublime open source?

If you can do all this I may take a look. How easy is Sublime easy to extend and in which language do you code it?

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#57

Post by tangue »

kami8845 wrote: post #13
arocks wrote: post #6

This is how Emacs is different from other editors. Like the blog posts show - you start with a need and try to find how the existing Emacs LISP code is written. Next, you try to customize it to your need. Finally, you assign it to a keyboard shortcut. You adapt Emacs to your workflow, just like you adapt Lisp to your problem domain.

Seems similar to Sublime Text 2. Except for the part where you're stuck trying to decipher existing Emacs Lisp. With Python I find I can express what I'm trying to do without too much thought.

For small plugins yes, it's on par with Emacs, but I've yet to see something like org-mode or tramp in Sublime Text, and it's not open, closed-souce text editor don't last long.

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#58

Post by rhizome31 »

ajross wrote: post #32
stray wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you took the time to learn elisp, you'd experience the same ease with emacs. You didn't always know python. You learned it. I own and use Sublime Text 2 -- and I do enjoy it. I also use and enjoy emacs. Sublime Text 2 is far prettier...

I've played with it a few times, and just did again. The little "minimap" preview thing on the right side is cute (and disableable) -- it actually helps to provide an aesthetic indication as to when your file is Just Way Too Long. The visual display of tab characters is subtle and attractive, and probably useful to many people trapped in editors that do that stuff invisibly or wrong (it's not as good as dtrt-mode in…

> It seems like the kind of editor someone from an IDE would want to use, and which would expose them to "serious programmer's editor" features

This is indeed what happens and I think it's a good thing : it brings the notion of efficient text editing to the masses.

Recently in my town one of my coworker did a friendly Sublime vs. Vim battle : a Sublime user and him were sitting side by side with their laptop display on the wall and taking turn to show off their favourite editor's features. The audience was mostly web developers (no old Unix neckbeard around) and I could hear at the beginning of the session some condescending remarks toward the "archaic" Vim, which was obviously going to get smashed by the "modern" Sublime. Of course it didn't quite turn out like that and at the end everyone seem to think that while Sublime was more sexy and approachable, Vim was a valid choice as well.

One of my coworker who was using exclusively Eclipse recently started to use Vim after trying Sublime. Sublime had opened his mind to efficient text editing and he started using Vim more often because it's free, ubiquitous and easy to use remotely.

I know several long-time Eclipse users who got seduced by Sublime. They had no idea it was possible to edit text so efficiently. Of course Vim or Emacs can achieve the same level of efficiency and beyond, but Sublime makes it more discoverable. Sublime is good for the reputation of text editors as opposed to IDEs, therefore it's good for Vim and Emacs.

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#59

Post by cmpitg »

ww520 wrote: post #26
kami8845 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems similar to Sublime Text 2. Except for the part where you're stuck trying to decipher existing Emacs Lisp. With Python I find I can express what I'm trying to do without too much thought.

No need to decipher elisp. It's pretty simple and straight forward. Being able to express something is not unique to Python. Any language would do.

Not really. Emacs Lisp is really powerful but not a beautiful language. The APIs are unnatural and sometimes inconsistent to those who come from non-Lisp background. I got to write tons of "immediate" APIs to make things prettier. No namespace-like feature and undocumented APIs (like the notorius CEDET or how to create a new mode...) are real pain.

Re: A new blog dedicated to Emacs

#60

Post by cmpitg »

claudius wrote: post #53
acomjean wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things about emacs is its on almost every machine you can find accessible by terminal. Except when its not, which is why I know enough vi commands to do really simple things. (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail). I'll fully admit that the configuration and lisp scripts are confusing in emacs. Its almost too configurable. But they are amazingly powerful. Plus emacs has the indispensable (M-x…

> (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail). I tend to uninstall vi and install ed on my machines, it is just enough and about 90% smaller! :)

TRAMP & eshell would help you achieve 100% your local Emacs productivity on remote machines, and 100% smaller (you actually don't need to install anything on remote machine) :-)
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