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Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

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Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#51

Post by cgag »

sillysaurus wrote: post #16
krisajenkins wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. Evil is great. I think it's made Emacs my favourite implementation of Vi yet.

Well, the problem is that these bindings don't usually implement the corner case Vim functionality I've come to rely on over the years. Can it record macros perfectly? Does :%s/foo/bar/ work? How about selecting, then :s/foo/bar/gi? Does the period key reproduce all actions properly? How about :%s/foo\([0-9]+\)/bar\1/ ? Do all of the basic actions do exactly the same thing as they do in a vim editor? Does % take you…

It's pretty damn close. I eventually gave up on emacs + evil and just went back to vim + fireplace for clojure, mostly because I didn't like having to set up my own bindings for all the plugins, even if basic editing worked well. Also, I can't find anything remotely as good as nerdtree, if someone knows of something, please let me know.

Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#52

Post by jasonm23 »

samatman wrote: post #18
tikhonj wrote: post #5

Basic Emacs lisp is well worth learning. It takes Emacs from being an editor to being your editor. With something like Eclipse, even adding a little bit of functionality is an undertaking. You have to create a project, write a bunch of boilerplate, load it and so on. With Emacs, it's basically effortless: a line or two of elisp can do wonders. Sometimes I add functionality by just executing elisp directly (with M-:),…

This is why I'm eagerly watching Light Table releases waiting for the "good enough" moment. It's going to have the advantages you mentioned, except in Clojure(script), which is, er, more broadly applicable. The GUI being bog-standard Webkit is another major plus. Emacs has had an astonishing run but is just slightly too opinionated for me to have taken the plunge. The promise of light table has kept me working in sub…

Litable.el is worth a look, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNO-vgq3Avg

Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#53

Post by jasonm23 »

treerex wrote: post #34
artagnon wrote: post #32

If you don't know Emacs Lisp, there's no point of using Emacs. You'd probably be more productive in Vim or [insert favorite proprietary editor here]. Emacs Lisp is probably the most featureless language you can think of; it doesn't even do basic threading and the async stuff is a joke. All the major programming language modes are implemented as ad-hoc Elisp regexp parsers making bugs impossible to fix. Virtually _eve…

I always get a chuckle out of people complaining that Emacs is too slow. Maybe I've just "gotten used to it", but when I first started using it I was sharing a Sun 3 with ten or fifteen other people. I'd also argue that modes in other editors are ad hoc regexp parsers in some other form... regexps, in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, work well. And yes, virtually everything is implemented in Emacs L…

30 Decades!!! wow.

Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#55

Post by jasonm23 »

gruseom wrote: post #42
TomDavey wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a professional programmer, but I spend all day in Emacs primarily because of org-mode. Two years ago I read about org-mode here on HN and was inspired to give Emacs a shot. Today Emacs is my main technical hobby. Extending Emacs with Elisp is a pleasure and a joy. My various init files total over 3,000 lines of code that I wrote my own little self. That said, while I remain incredibly impressed with the integ…

Congratulations for figuring all this out and getting to enjoy the rewards. But I'm curious: what do you do all day in Emacs if not programming?

Here's a short list of possible things...

- Email

- File Management

- Text processing

- IRC

- Newsreading

- Server Admin

- Web browsing (esp. documentation)

- Basically anything you can do in a terminal, and more (it'll display/process images, PDF, SVG)

For most of these hardcore users, it's simply more convenient to stay in a highly programmable environment than it is to go and use an "end user" tool.

Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#56

Post by banachtarski »

sillysaurus wrote: post #16
krisajenkins wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. Evil is great. I think it's made Emacs my favourite implementation of Vi yet.

Well, the problem is that these bindings don't usually implement the corner case Vim functionality I've come to rely on over the years. Can it record macros perfectly? Does :%s/foo/bar/ work? How about selecting, then :s/foo/bar/gi? Does the period key reproduce all actions properly? How about :%s/foo\([0-9]+\)/bar\1/ ? Do all of the basic actions do exactly the same thing as they do in a vim editor? Does % take you…

recording macros works.

the :%s/foo/bar/ works

selecting then substituting works.

I've never encountered a situation where . didn't do what I expected.

The man commented about evil. I don't see how your experience with viper is relevant. Evil is damn good (as a long time vim user of 5+ years). I'd recommend you try it again. Plus, vim indentation behavior sucks compared to emacs. Give it a try, you might be surprised.

Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#57

Post by sprash »

omaranto wrote: post #49
artagnon wrote: post #32

If you don't know Emacs Lisp, there's no point of using Emacs. You'd probably be more productive in Vim or [insert favorite proprietary editor here]. Emacs Lisp is probably the most featureless language you can think of; it doesn't even do basic threading and the async stuff is a joke. All the major programming language modes are implemented as ad-hoc Elisp regexp parsers making bugs impossible to fix. Virtually _eve…

Try textadept! It is structured in a way similar to Emacs: small core in C, most functionality written in Lua. In my opnion the only thing better about Elisp than Lua is that it has macros, everything else, from scoping to speed and coroutines is probably better in Lua. And the icing on the cake? The parsers use LPEG grammars and not regex! Of course there is a downside: it has a tiny fraction of Emacs's functionalit…

Could some Debian dev please step up and package Textadept. Thx!

Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#58

Post by dschiptsov »

patrickmay wrote: post #38
dschiptsov wrote: post #7

Emacs is a miracle, no doubts. It is self-descriptive and self-contained system, like Smalltalk (you could lookup any function, variable or even key-binding, without a fancy browser, but in a way that is good enough). There is nothing much to say, actually. Emacs is just a wonderful thing.

Indeed. The most value I got from from learning to customize Emacs wasn't the functionality I implemented but seeing how powerful a domain specific language can be. The ways that Emacs Lisp supports working with text, whether data or code or documents, showed me what I should be aspiring to when I create a DSL.

Another not quite obvious thing about emacs is the result of

  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --program-prefix=t \
   --without-all --with-x-toolkit=no && make -s bootstrap
Which will give you, say, your beloved Clojure's Nrepl on a remote machine over ssh. Yes, it works perfectly fine in a terminal.

Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#59

Post by artagnon »

omaranto wrote: post #49
artagnon wrote: post #32

If you don't know Emacs Lisp, there's no point of using Emacs. You'd probably be more productive in Vim or [insert favorite proprietary editor here]. Emacs Lisp is probably the most featureless language you can think of; it doesn't even do basic threading and the async stuff is a joke. All the major programming language modes are implemented as ad-hoc Elisp regexp parsers making bugs impossible to fix. Virtually _eve…

Try textadept! It is structured in a way similar to Emacs: small core in C, most functionality written in Lua. In my opnion the only thing better about Elisp than Lua is that it has macros, everything else, from scoping to speed and coroutines is probably better in Lua. And the icing on the cake? The parsers use LPEG grammars and not regex! Of course there is a downside: it has a tiny fraction of Emacs's functionalit…

Let's put aside the fact that it's a one-man project for one second. I tried building it from sources for an hour before giving up: it depends on lots of custom packages which it fetches and custom patches [1]. Okay, so it has a really tiny C core [2], upon which lua modules build up the rest of the editor. I'm impressed: yes, this certainly qualifies as a programmable editor. It has some interesting ideas worth exploring; thanks.

As an open source project, it is a total failure. If a potential contributor can't clone and build the sources in under 10 minutes (or an hour!), it's no better than a research paper. It hasn't been packaged for any major distributions, and it has no users.

p.s- I did manage to grab a fairly recent build from AUR. As far as out-of-the box functionality is concerned, it's absolute rubbish; opening files and navigating buffer is a chore, and I couldn't even get it to indent properly.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6102996

[2]: https://gist.github.com/artagnon/6103013

Re: Learn Emacs Lisp in 15 minutes

#60

Post by lucian1900 »

recuter wrote: post #8
tikhonj wrote: post #5

Basic Emacs lisp is well worth learning. It takes Emacs from being an editor to being your editor. With something like Eclipse, even adding a little bit of functionality is an undertaking. You have to create a project, write a bunch of boilerplate, load it and so on. With Emacs, it's basically effortless: a line or two of elisp can do wonders. Sometimes I add functionality by just executing elisp directly (with M-:),…

An excuse to dive into lisp like that just might pull me away from Vim (Vimscript is terrible, sigh).

The Python bindings are reasonable, much better than Vimscript.

I've been switching between Vim+python and Emacs+Evil for a bit.

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