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Joining the Church of Emacs

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61–67 of 67 posts

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#61
post #28

I’ve always been a vi/vim guy, it’s not a religious thing, it’s just a decently powerful editor available on most servers I managed to kind of get my head around enough to be productive. I find the weird holy war between the two strange and kind of a turn off.

The war is indeed strange since emacs is not so much an editor as it is a customizable shell. It's better to compare emacs to bash or zsh.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#63

I never got into the eMacs cult. Been always a vim/vi guy. To me, using eMacs is like people in the cult of lisp: “Why isn’t lisp running the world?” (While the code in Java 8 every day) I get it, a few friends of mine actually use eMacs and we remain friends. But bruh, I’m a CLI guy and I like Vim. It’s literally everywhere. Even on my all powerful Mac M1 laptop I still use Vim. No not Mac vim, not Visual Code, not…

This is like a Scientologist criticizing Jehovahs Witness :) Okay, since this is HN and not Reddit let me make this post a bit more useful: has anyone tried "mg"? It is an openbsd (?) project that is similar to Emacs on a first glance but even lighter than barebone vim. It is what I use for remote editing instead of vi and nano. https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/mg.1

mg(1) user here, fwiw. I install it on VMs/containers. I find it quite nice, though I also use GNU Emacs, vi (often elvis), and Vim.

Nano drives me up the wall.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#64
post #50
post #23

With all the devotion on display from so many very clever people, it's hard not to be at least a little curious about Emacs. But I still have something holding me back. On the one hand, the entire environment that I've heard described might be very powerful. But at the same time, it is a whole new system to learn and get into, very specific to itself, on top of the operating system I'm already using. People say you w…

> But at the same time, it is a whole new system to learn and get into, very specific to itself If you already know Vim keybindings, it is very easy to get into Emacs with evil-mode.[1] Besides that, Emacs by default comes with a menu system that helps you discover keybindings, too. And there is also cua-mode which I haven’t tried.[2] [1] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil [2] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode

I use cua-mode with a few key bindings and mouse modifications of my own to make it work the way I want. Its pretty easy jumping between windows apps and emacs for me

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#65
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, except the keystroke to "close a file" is C-x k (for kill buffer). Like you said, muscle memory. It's not surprising that you didn't remember the exact name of the keystroke because normally, you just do it.

This is also related to one of those sharp edges of Emacs that can cut you. "C-x c" is pretty close to "C-x C-c", which is the shortcut to exit Emacs. If for some reason, you DID mean to type "C-x c", it's easy to let your Ctrl finger linger a little too long and hit "C-x C-c" instead. And since x and c are next to each other on a US keyboard, it's also very easy (for me) to hit x and c at the same time with a single…

Generally, if I have unsaved work Emacs prompts me to save, so I can C-g out then if I fat-finger kill-emacs.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#66
post #23

With all the devotion on display from so many very clever people, it's hard not to be at least a little curious about Emacs. But I still have something holding me back. On the one hand, the entire environment that I've heard described might be very powerful. But at the same time, it is a whole new system to learn and get into, very specific to itself, on top of the operating system I'm already using. People say you w…

Hey,

> I don't like the idea of digging myself into a groove, even if it should be a comfy one. Powerful ecosystems can be hard to break out of, something I've found with Google and specific social media.

I had the exactly same thought holding me back, then I realized that Emacs doesn't really suffer from vendor lock-in/the walled garden effect: it's way older than most gardens, and bound to be around for as long as we use keyboards to interact with computers.

Come over to the Emacs side, frodetb, we have lambdas.

Re: Joining the Church of Emacs

#67
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also related to one of those sharp edges of Emacs that can cut you. "C-x c" is pretty close to "C-x C-c", which is the shortcut to exit Emacs. If for some reason, you DID mean to type "C-x c", it's easy to let your Ctrl finger linger a little too long and hit "C-x C-c" instead. And since x and c are next to each other on a US keyboard, it's also very easy (for me) to hit x and c at the same time with a single…

Generally, if I have unsaved work Emacs prompts me to save, so I can C-g out then if I fat-finger kill-emacs.

I think that killing the entire app is jarring enough that it should never happen accidentally, regardless of unsaved work. It would be especially harmful for newer users, since they will find it harder to relax and feel comfortable with Emacs. But even for experienced users, Emacs state that you would want to preserve goes far beyond unsaved edits. Expensive startup computation, open buffers, window arrangement, ongoing rgrep operations, etc.
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