[HN Gopher] Batteries included with Emacs
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Batteries included with Emacs
Author : e3bc54b2
Score : 223 points
Date : 2021-11-25 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (karthinks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (karthinks.com)
| fermentation wrote:
| I've always wanted to get into emacs, but I only have enough room
| in my life for a single set of keybinds, and vim has taken that
| spot. A lot of the emacs-for-vim-people projects are these huge
| distributions and when something breaks I have no idea how to fix
| it. Do any of you have a good resource for learning emacs from
| the ground up, but with vim keybinds?
| acheron9383 wrote:
| Honestly, to just get moving, installing Doom emacs and
| selecting evil mode during setup. The basic keybinds are all
| Vim then, works great for me with minimal headache.
| throw10920 wrote:
| I started using vim before switching to emacs, and my
| experience was that just installing evil-mode and then picking
| up any normal emacs tutorial was enough - I skipped all of the
| editing specific stuff and got the interesting stuff from the
| rest. You might want to try that.
|
| Actually, your question made me realize that the interesting
| part of vim is the modal editing interface, while the
| interesting part of emacs is everything _but_ the text editing
| bits. So, focus on those.
|
| Does that help, or have you already tried this?
| cpach wrote:
| Some pointers that might be useful:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGP2UnPoZ7HzLGU2cyK1M...
|
| https://github.com/noctuid/evil-guide
|
| https://www.spacemacs.org/doc/VIMUSERS.html
|
| Best of luck!
| worik wrote:
| For me the killer aspect of Emacs (it applies even more to vi) is
| being able to use it in a terminal so being able to use it over a
| network connection.
|
| I know X can export over a network connection, but text mode
| Emacs is much simpler and does not require X.
| submeta wrote:
| After spending endless hours in learning the ins and outs of
| Emacs and starting to learn Elisp, I come to realize that Emacs'
| tinkering-to-doing ratio is too high. I need tools that get out
| of my way. Emacs can get a hobby or an obsession. If you have
| nothing else to do, fine, spend your time sharpening the saw
| instead of cutting wood.
|
| I turned to VS Code + PyCharm for coding. And use Emacs for
| editing text only. And for that, it is excellent.
|
| What I love about Emacs most is the macro recorder. Whenever I
| have to transform text, I record my steps in Emacs' macro
| recorder and replay the steps. That's like magic. I wouldn't even
| bother writing a Python script for these one-off transformations.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I come to realize that Emacs' tinkering-to-doing ratio is too
| high.
|
| You are in full control of how much tinkering you do, though.
| Strange to blame a tool for this.
| tom_ wrote:
| But most of the things you do require a certain amount of
| tinkering, even basic stuff like setting up C indentation,
| making Emacs not use tabs, and configuring keyboard shortcuts
| - especially in the early days, when you might not quite
| understand how things fit together.
|
| Compare and contrast with Visual Studio Code, which has a
| much smoother onboarding experience.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Agreed about the onboarding experience. However, the person
| I was replying to seems quite well versed in Emacs.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Oh damn, I had no idea about undo-in-region. That's so convenient
| and it comes with Emacs stock. Wish I knew about that years ago.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Honestly, I never really had that much love for Emacs until
| relatively recently. I've always dabbled due to it generally
| having good support for most languages (including esoteric ones)
| but recently I got into it a lot more due to the fact that many
| of the new-ish OSS editors but Emacs has always been there and
| likely will always be there.
|
| A few years back I got into Atom quite a bit since it checked all
| the boxes: extensible, open source, and it was very nice. Then
| VSCode killed it. And it seems more and more that VSCode is
| taking over, all the while inserting more proprietary code to the
| point where half the 'big' plugins don't work on Codium, only the
| proprietary MS distribution.
|
| So I got back into Emacs but really worked on my environment.
| Stopped dabbling and started just forcing myself to use it. And
| it's honestly amazing. It checks off every box available in
| VSCode and more. And it's nice knowing that it'll always be
| there. I'm not against proprietary software per-se, but I
| definitely don't have a lot of trust in Microsoft.
| quotemstr wrote:
| And thanks to recent developments in cross-editor
| infrastructure projects like tree-sitter and LSP, editors like
| VSCode, Emacs, Sublime Tex, and even public nuisances like vim
| can all advance at the same time and benefit from each other's
| development work in areas where the editors aren't
| differentiated.
|
| We're very close to a world in which we don't have N
| implementations of finding the start of a C function or
| figuring out what parts of a Python buffer are keywords.
| lc9er wrote:
| > even public nuisances like vim.
|
| I love vim (err... Neovim), and this was great.
| agumonkey wrote:
| we all love vim, especially to mock it absurdly
| smitty1e wrote:
| Spacemacs is bee's knees.
| pronik wrote:
| Somehow, Microsoft managed to invent LSP for VSCode and then
| abandon some parts of it just a couple of years later -- e.g.
| python language server is dead, pylance is there instead,
| closed source, VSCode-specific and with prohibitive license.
| Most language plugins in VSCode don't use LSP anymore IIRC.
| throw10920 wrote:
| One of the (several) unfortunate things about Atom being killed
| by VSCode was that its extension model was much closer to that
| of Emacs - everything ran in the main editor process - far more
| flexible than VSCode, but also with the mass-market appeal of
| JavaScript.
|
| (yeah, that model led to poor performance, but afaict that's a
| combination of (a) just JS things and (b) not putting any
| effort into the design)
|
| > I definitely don't have a lot of trust in Microsoft.
|
| Very wise, given the user-hostile stuff they've been doing in
| Windows recently...
| smallnamespace wrote:
| > (a) just JS things and (b) not putting any effort into the
| design
|
| This feels a bit self-contradictory, since one might argue a
| properly designed extension API must include process
| isolation, so naively-written extensions can't mess up the
| main loop. VS Code extensions are also in JS.
|
| This is the same problem that, say, preemptive multitasking
| solves, and why Windows 3.1 crashed much more than '95 and
| XP.
| rvieira wrote:
| I'm also a recent Emacs enthusiast. Many many years ago, I
| never felt productive with the navigation and keys.
|
| Then, recently, I _really_ wanted to try org and thought "I'll
| force myself to use it". I started with Evil mode and Doom. I
| was blown away tbh. What I thought to be an "old" tool that
| would slow me down, is actually a massive booster (and fun!).
| My personal experience, of course.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Batteries may be included, but some assembly is definitely
| required in learning all of the commands to make it useful.
|
| I'm sure vim and emacs were great tools back when monochrome
| monitors were all that were available. But with modern UI IDEs
| and what not, I only use vim when need to make fast and dirty
| changes directly on the server. I do find all of things that can
| be done in emacs/vim quite impressive, but I'm also quite happy
| that it is not the tool I have to use because nothing else is
| available.
|
| I do find myself getting environments backwards in my head though
| when flipping back and forth quickly. Like typing :wq in my IDE,
| or cmd-s in vim when prompts my terminal to save my session.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I've been using Emacs for about 4 years now, and some of the
| stuff on this list was news to me. Thank you, OP, for sharing
| this; I found it useful!
| Kototama wrote:
| Same, more than 10 years and I really should have known M-\
| earlier :-) (or remembered it, I think I read about it
| earlier).
|
| The thing is with Emacs, you can really optimize every key
| stroke if you want, but usually I'm too busy using it to
| program so I optimize the workflow only time to time.
| ripe wrote:
| For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs,
| when I can use a full GUI IDE?":
|
| One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch
| typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I
| have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs
| my concentration.
|
| With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for
| the mouse, or without even having a mouse plugged in. That's
| particularly nice for using my Ubuntu laptop on a lap desk,
| leaning back in my armchair. The best mouse is no mouse at all.
|
| Yes, I know many IDEs have shortcut keys for some commands, but
| the basic assumption with GUI applications is that you have a
| mouse. Even if you learn the shortcuts, somehow you always end up
| having to use the mouse for some common task, e.g., to select a
| paragraph. That's why I never got to like a GUI IDE, despite
| having had to use Eclipse for years.
| arkaic wrote:
| On your last point, in terms of absolute speed, pointing your
| mouse to the paragraph and dragging to highlight is usually
| faster than the fussiness of multiple key presses and/or chord
| combos needed from a full keyboard setup. That is, unless
| you've macro'd a custom single key shortcut for just that
| particular action
| xhevahir wrote:
| I just started using VS Code a lot last weekend and I didn't
| find myself using my trackpad much. The Vim plugin, whatever
| it's called, allowed me to do the same things I do in Vim
| itself. I can't speak to the Emacs emulation, though, now that
| I think about it.
| b3morales wrote:
| Also a keyboardist, and you can pry my emacs from my cold dead
| fingers, but I still think it would benefit from a bit more
| ability to incorporate platform-appropriate keyboard-driven GUI
| widgets/arbitrary drawing. For example, if the minibuffer could
| look like a regular GUI text field + a drop-down menu, or a
| floating command palette, I genuinely think it would be a nicer
| experience (and would make it "look more modern" which is not a
| terrible thing)1. Similarly for the mode line and fringes. If
| some of the peripheral elements could be enabled to escape the
| "everything is a grid of characters" paradigm I think it would
| be a net positive.
|
| 1I've tried mini-frame, and it's fine, but it's still just a
| utilitarian grid of text.
| chlorion wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that Emacs is not a text-only editor, but
| is able to function in a text only environment if configured
| to. I think many people never consider giving Emacs a shot
| because they think it's purely a terminal based program.
|
| Modern Emacs can be (and mostly is) compiled with GTK support
| and features a GTK interface, but can be launched in text-mode
| with a command line argument. If you don't mind using bleeding
| edge versions, there is a branch called "PGTK" that allows the
| GTK interface to run natively on Wayland!
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > If you don't mind using bleeding edge versions, there is a
| branch called "PGTK" that allows the GTK interface to run
| natively on Wayland!
|
| The two biggest Linux distros (Ubuntu and Fedora) are Wayland
| by default now. And the 'standard' Emacs distribution you
| install through the Software 'store' in both is GTK (which of
| course works). Wayland support isn't really a big deal
| anymore. I haven't come across any apps that don't work on
| Wayland.
| d_tr wrote:
| Yeah, it is GTK but not _pure_ GTK! It uses X11 drawing
| calls for some elements so it needs XWayland on Wayland.
| Pure GTK might be coming with Emacs 28 by the way.
| epolanski wrote:
| To add to this: yes, full blown IDEs have shortcuts but they
| are hard to explore, counter-intuitive and hard to extend.
| lawn wrote:
| I find it amazing how common it is for programmers to not be
| touch typists (I mean typing without looking at the keys).
| Like, isn't that something you pick up by the sheer amount of
| keyboard time?
| edgyquant wrote:
| I can type without looking but I still have trouble placing
| my fingers over the keyboard in the right initial place so
| I'll often start a little off and I type so fast that I'll
| type half a dozen characters before I realize and have to
| correct.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Most keyboards have a little raised bump on the F and J
| keys ;)
| wrycoder wrote:
| I once subscribed to a magazine and received the
| subscription at my address, but with a strange name. I
| took me a minute to realize that it had been touch typed,
| but with the right hand displaced to the right by one
| position.
| mabub24 wrote:
| Most people get by with pseudo-touch typing. They have most
| of the speed down, and look down at the keyboard
| occasionally, but they do not have the accuracy that is
| displayed in true touch-typing.
| bitexploder wrote:
| That sort of blows my mind. How can you not learn to touch
| type? It will take you a month at most and it greatly
| improves life at a keyboard.
| pronik wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "touch-type". I can type
| without looking in three keyboard layouts, but that comes
| through a lot of keyboard time (and a lot of Police Quest
| I), so that I'm unable to use split keyboards because my
| right hand is overreaching to the left half of the
| keyboard. I also ignore home-row dancing, specific finger
| positions etc. I can type fast and blind, but I don't
| think I would qualify as a classical touch-typist.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Because not everyone has time to dedicate to a skill with
| diminishing returns after a certain point, and on top of
| that many people do not at all care about the life of
| their keyboard.
|
| I touch-type, but still occasionally struggle with some
| things eg. using the right shift key instead of always
| preferring the left. I don't see much benefit in
| addressing this, since my typing speed is never the
| blocker with regard to my programming output.
| smallnamespace wrote:
| I'm eternally grateful for Mrs. Walker's 2nd grade class,
| where they shoved us in a room full of Apple 2e's and
| made us play a typing game (and if you finished, you got
| to play Oregon Trail). I'm a bit surprised/disappointed
| that touch typing isn't universally taught in school.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Isn't it distracting to have to look and visually think
| about the keyboard in the midst of working? Genuinely
| asking. I literally can't imagine having to look at the
| keyboard. And how much of a commitment is it really?
| garretraziel wrote:
| To be honest, in programming, the speed of writing on
| keyboard itself isn't the most limiting factor during
| development. I've forced myself to learn to touch type
| (not fully, I don't press spacebar with a thumb of
| opposing hand as last letter written, I also almost
| exclusively use left shift), but that doesn't make me a
| fastest programmer around. Development looks more like "I
| type two words, I look at the screen for 10 seconds, I
| type one symbol, I look at the screens for 5 seconds, I
| type one word". Touch typing helps with that, but IMHO
| isn't really that important.
| epolanski wrote:
| Touch typing isn't about writing without looking at the keys,
| that's something that pretty much every dev I know does. It's
| about writing in an efficient way that minimizes finger
| travel, and zeroes palm and writ movement.
|
| There's a reason F and J have bumps on them, or why we have
| two shifts, etc.
|
| For anyone interested into relearning how to type efficiently
| I want to recommend this free website full of tutorials and
| exercises: https://www.typingclub.com/
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I'm not that old (30's) but we were forced into learning how
| to touch-type throughout grade-school. Pretty much any white-
| collar work requires it. Getting through university basically
| requires it (even humanities courses; good luck writing long
| essays without it). It's shocking that anyone who went
| through school in a developed country can't touch-type.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You're assuming that most of the writing is done on
| computers - but depending on the discipline - it isn't :
| computers aren't nowhere nearly good enough to compete with
| paper / chalk (/ even whiteboard !) when it comes to
| mathematics-heavy domains.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Pure maths is a pretty small niche. The vast majority of
| while collar work, university students, etc...,
| definitely type and use computers constantly.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Yes, but I often work with different keyboards. The place I
| live has a couple of different stupid local variations, and
| then if I have an Anglosphere keyboard it's 50-50 between UK
| and US. Sometimes I change the "layout" and type as if I'm on
| a different keyboard, but usually the keys don't even
| physically match up. Then there are different types of
| keyboard, from super-compact to full numpad monsters and from
| chiclet to hefty mechanical, and then there's my shitty
| touchscreen phone.
|
| I'd love to be able to type from muscle memory, but the
| keyboards keep changing!
| fhd2 wrote:
| I literally trained the correct technique as a child because
| I was so into computers. I'd argue children today are far
| less exposed to keyboards than people (well, nerds) my age
| were.
| [deleted]
| edgyquant wrote:
| Maybe but I've typing since I was a kid on a Windows 95 and
| I still only know the gist of the keyboard and have to look
| down and correct myself every minute or so, so I don't
| that's they only reason. I actually think that typing
| without looking isn't as important as people used to say it
| was for speed.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Just memorising the order of the keys from left-to-right,
| top-to-bottom, and reciting it, was enough for me never
| to have to look down. I have no idea why or how; I assume
| it's something to do with dreaming.
| wrycoder wrote:
| It would be an interesting experiment to have one group
| do that before teaching both groups to touch type. Then
| measure the speed and accuracy of both groups.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I'm a touch typist, but emacs chords always bothered me. I
| feel much more content switching to mouse or track pad for
| things like switching tabs, picking files from a file tree to
| copy / paste or duplicate or whatever, etc.
|
| That said, being a programmer and not touch typing definitely
| sounds odd to me as well
| ced wrote:
| _emacs chords always bothered me_
|
| I got carpal tunnels a few years back from emacs, which
| forced me to try https://ergoemacs.github.io/ . I like it a
| lot, it's more sensibly designed. I've found it a pain to
| install though...
| smitty1e wrote:
| Spacemacs has saved me.
| convolvatron wrote:
| unfortunately I can only really work for long stretches on
| a kinesis split keyboard - with the modifiers all the on
| the thumb. if they would finally make a bluetooth one maybe
| that wouldn't be so bad.
| xhevahir wrote:
| I just got an email about a 20% off sale they're having,
| and I was tempted. Still expensive, though, seeing as how
| there's so many new ergonomic designs available from
| smaller companies.
| someguydave wrote:
| remapping caps lock to control helped me with emacs chords
| pama wrote:
| Some of the very recently upgraded batteries in standard emacs
| include describe-bindings (C-h b gives a neatly organized,
| foldable output that greatly enhances discoverability) and emoji-
| insert that uses a neat selection interface.
| wrycoder wrote:
| 326 lines long!
| Y_Y wrote:
| For discoverability I love using helm with M-x (or SPC-SPC). I
| just think of a function I might like to call, like "git fetch"
| or "sort lines" or "render latex inline" or anything else, and
| pretty quickly I can figure out what it's called and what its
| shortcut is for next time. I take for granted that it exists.
| inetsee wrote:
| I love emacs because of org-mode. I have sometimes wondered
| whether emacs can do something I have often wanted. I write
| poetry. If you write with pencil on paper the edit marks (line
| through, move text, insert) let you see the evolution of a work.
| It's hard to get the same effect with a text editor. After
| reading this web post I went searching for "emacs edit history"
| and I discovered "undo-tree". This is a perfect functionality for
| my use case, and another reason for me to love emacs.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Some cool stuff I had no idea exists! But I can't see anything I
| feel like picking up, I do like to keep it simple. I switched to
| Emacs after something like six years as a vim user, primarily for
| the more beginner friendly key bindings so my coworkers wouldn't
| get _too_ freaked out. Many of the navigation shortcuts work in
| most shells and even all text fields in macOS out of the box too!
|
| I did implement all kinds of funky customisations at first, but
| in the last years I stuck mostly to what comes with Emacs, and
| customize over writing Elisp. I do some work in IntelliJ and
| Xcode out of necessity, but there's nothing quite as productive
| for me as vanilla Emacs and ansi-term. It's all just text - and
| mastering how to deal with text doesn't take that long, and is
| fairly universal.
|
| One of my favourite and most trivial habits is to use
| forward/backward search extensively for navigating around a file.
| stinos wrote:
| Perhaps not the right thread, but: is there anything like 'follow
| mode' in other editors like Sublime Text/VSCode/Visual Studio
| editor? I'm now emulating that with e.g. 'new view into file'
| followed by manually scrolling. Having that autoamtic can be
| really handy.
| baby wrote:
| I'm wondering if a vscode in the terminal could ever exist.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That's like wondering if elephants could ever roam the depths
| of the oceans. If they did, they would no longer be elephants.
|
| What specific features of vscode would you like to see in a
| terminal editor?
| Eelongate wrote:
| Elephants can walk underwater using their trunks as snorkels.
| Maybe they would be too buoyant for it in sea water. It seems
| a fair thing to wonder though.
| cmroanirgo wrote:
| About 15yrs ago I had a nice vim vs vstudio competition with
| a friend. It started with "look what vim can do"... block
| select, block indent, bookmarks, etc Vstudio (& now /vscode)
| can do too. Vim was always slower (mainly bc the guy wasn't
| seasoned by 10yrs of it) to figure it out. The interesting
| thing is that vstudio has the same abilities, but for the
| really arcane stuff (which vim users take as why it's
| better), can be done too, but just more keystrokes. Lots of
| the everyday stuff is often the same or fewer keystrokes than
| vim. And you can always write a macro for edge cases.
|
| So to me, the "win" of vstudio is the tiny command pallete
| that is used & the shortcuts are displayed in menus. (&
| everyone mentions the difficult hill to climb to learn emacs
| or vim by comparison).
|
| The thing which will never work in terminal is ctrl-c and
| ctrl-v. (Macos covers this nicely by using cmd-... tho). It's
| a shame.
|
| I actually use le editor in terminal, but am rather cramped
| using it. I consider learning vim or emacs once every few
| years... and go... nah, no thanks.
|
| Eg. There are a few comments above about region undo. In
| vstudio it sounds ugly, but it's trivially easy. Press and
| hold undo (ctrl-z) and let key repeat until the block appears
| as you want. Select it, copy. Press and hold redo. Select
| area. Paste.
|
| Tastes are different.
| [deleted]
| jorams wrote:
| > The thing which will never work in terminal is ctrl-c and
| ctrl-v.
|
| If you enable cua-mode in Emacs, C-c and C-v work perfectly
| fine as copy and paste. Even in the terminal.
|
| > There are a few comments above about region undo. In
| vstudio it sounds ugly, but it's trivially easy. Press and
| hold undo (ctrl-z) and let key repeat until the block
| appears as you want. Select it, copy. Press and hold redo.
| Select area. Paste.
|
| That works in practically every editor. The entire point of
| region undo is that it's faster and more convenient than
| doing it manually.
| baby wrote:
| I'm not sure why not? Everything has a shortcut in vscode.
| And if it doesn't you can use the command palette.
| dotancohen wrote:
| You might like VIM. In VIM everything has a shortcut as
| well.
|
| In fact, in VIM, everything _is_ a shortcut.
| baby wrote:
| How do you find commands if you don't know the shortcuts
| though? Or if you installed a new plugin? That's my big
| problem with emacs and why I don't use it anymore.
| bitbckt wrote:
| Apropos: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_n
| ode/emacs/Ap...
| lvass wrote:
| There are many terminal web browsers.
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| I think many Vim users look at Emacs and go "Hmm, Emacs is a bit
| more clunky when I use Emacs to do the exact same things I do in
| Vim. Therefore, I'll stick to Vim."
| [deleted]
| lqet wrote:
| As a vim user, I mostly look at this article and think, "Hmm,
| Emacs seems to include an _artists mode_ for drawing ASCII
| images. I need a text editor. Therefore, I 'll stick to vim."
| drivers99 wrote:
| As a vi user, I got to artist mode and was wondering what
| keys you would press to draw rectangles and circles and how
| you would get out of it, but it doesn't say.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That's how I felt until I started using org-mode.
|
| I think that Org-mode is now the fourth piece of software on
| my never-gonna-give-you-up list, after VIM, GNU coreutils,
| and Anki. I seem to add one per decade.
| User23 wrote:
| Then you definitely wouldn't be interested in M-x tetris.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Maybe M-x doctor could help, but maybe not...
| Shared404 wrote:
| How does that make you feel?
| ByteJockey wrote:
| I mean. Emacs has the ability to do basically what vim does.
| Evil mode is really nice (though I can never get used the =
| register evaluating elisp instead of vimscript).
|
| What kills me about emacs is the startup time. Breaks my flow
| when I'm jumping around and need to edit something quickly.
|
| Though I'll admit that doom provides a very nice environment
| for when I want to play around with some lisp.
| cyberbanjo wrote:
| Use emacsclient and don't close emacs server. Super fast
| startup (for emacs). There is a guide on emacswiki afaicr
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Check out Doom Emacs for a fast startup time with no server.
| ByteJockey wrote:
| I mention using doom in the last line of the comment you
| responded to.
|
| But, yeah. I use it for the start up time/vim compatibility
| out of the box.
| tarboreus wrote:
| Run Emacs as a server. Then open with emacsclient. Instant
| and you have access to the same process you've been using
| with all the buffers, etc.
|
| emacs --daemon
|
| emacsclient <fie>
| Jtsummers wrote:
| emacs --daemon=<name> emacsclient -s <name>
|
| Useful for when you have different contexts and want to
| separate them more cleanly.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| "It'd take me longer to figure out how to use emacs than it
| would to just do what I want in vim, and I'm really just trying
| to get to retirement before I lose my mind."
| tra3 wrote:
| Check out evil mode. Makes emacs behave more like vi. Game
| changer for me.
| RMPR wrote:
| One of my pain points with evil mode (and with every vim
| emulation for that matter): it's often incomplete. To keep my
| fingers on the home row I use Alt to exit insert mode (:help
| i_META in neovim) but Alt- is already mapped to something in
| Emacs, and that's just painful.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| And there's nothing wrong with that opinion. As long as the
| basics aren't covered I don't care about extra features.
|
| For me Emacs fulfills the same purpose as Vim, but mostly in
| exactly the opposite way of how I want it. Some people prefer
| that, I don't. It's a great program, but not my cup of tea and
| so I don't use it. Vim does everything I need without annoying
| or distracting me, which is rare enough.
| mlaretallack wrote:
| I really respect people who can use emacs (and vim, vi etc...)
| they wiz around doing allsorts and make it look effortless.
|
| The only reason I have not tried is I seem to spend most of my
| time thinking about the change, and the time saved is easily
| wiped out by the time taked to re-write the line 5 times.
| reddit_clone wrote:
| You don't really have to. Try DoomEmacs or something similar,
| very little tinkering needed to get going.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Sometimes I wish I initially spent my time learning emacs. Vim
| has been great to me. I don't value programming workflows as much
| as I used to so I'm not going through that steep learning curve
| again
| zingar wrote:
| I think you get a lot just out of knowing modal editing.
| Sometimes I don't even realise what is emacs and what is vim
| because of evil keybindings.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Sometimes I wish I initially spent my time learning emacs.
| Vim has been great to me.
|
| Try SpaceMacs, or even just Evil. I've found that Emacs (the
| text editor environment) and VIM (the language for interfacing
| with a text editor environment) skillsets are actually
| complimentary and together form a terrific text editor.
| srcreigh wrote:
| If spacemacs or evil seem too inauthentic or complicated, I
| suggest boon-mode. It's a very simple, modular, minimal modal
| editing package with verbs and motions.
|
| https://github.com/jyp/boon
| jb1991 wrote:
| And if you like modal editing but want to stick to a more
| emacs-centric interaction, there is God mode which I
| eventually found to be better than evil if you are working
| solely within emacs.
| hvgk wrote:
| Conversely I feel I wasted my time learning emacs and moved to
| vim eventually. I also only religiously use a subset of vim
| functionality which is fulfilled by most of the vi equivalent
| editors. This turned into a massive advantage for me as I spent
| most of my career dotting around random Unix and Linux machines
| doing admin work. Vi derivative is always there and the muscle
| memory was ready to go.
|
| One of the key things I found though is that I learned to
| compose tools outside of vi rather than rely on the editor
| functionality. This was applicable to much larger problem
| domains than just editing. The Unix philosophy of using lots of
| small well defined things to solve problems applies to editing
| text.
| cyberbanjo wrote:
| FWIW if I can ssh I can use emacs tramp to edit remotely, if
| there's latency lag, it seems similar to using local editor.
| kovek wrote:
| I really like to use code-server instead
| rthomas6 wrote:
| You may like Doom Emacs. It has really really good Vim
| keybindings. Some people like Spacemacs too, but I found it too
| bloated and too abstracted (hard to fix when it breaks).
|
| I still find myself reaching for Vim when I want to just write
| a simple script. Emacs, VS Code, etc. can just be too much
| sometimes.
| dfinninger wrote:
| Have you looked into emacsclient? If you have emacs running
| you can connect to it in the terminal so that there's
| (practically) no startup time.
|
| It replaced vim on the cli for me.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > I still find myself reaching for Vim when I want to just
| write a simple script. Emacs, VS Code, etc. can just be too
| much sometimes.
|
| I used to do this too. What stopped me was that I often use
| emacs as a terminal multiplexer with vterm, and it becomes
| super difficult to control vim if you have evil-mode
| capturing those same inputs. In the end oh-my-zsh (more
| crappy bloat like spacemacs which I love to bits) has an
| alias called "e" which will open a file for editing in your
| current emacs.
|
| (If only it worked through docker! Or maybe it does and I
| just don't understand TRAMP well enough yet.)
| zingar wrote:
| I had a pretty full featured vim setup (creaking under the
| weight of all those plugins) and then switched to spacemacs.
| You're exactly right that debugging was a pain sometimes, but
| once I started to figure out what everything was, I wanted to
| replicate everything I had in vim.
|
| I realised that if I'd started minimal I would have
| reinvented so many of the spacemacs wheels, but done it
| worse.
|
| Spacemacs could do with being slightly more user friendly. It
| gives you a lot of friendliness already, but to prevent
| people from being frightened off by emacs' formidable
| reputation it really needs to "work" out of the box. For me
| that would be one click install and a reasonable suite of
| IDE-like features for working with a given language pre-
| configured. That would include scripting to install the
| command line tools that they shell out to, e.g. ag or rg.
| hwestiii wrote:
| As far as I know, pure vanilla emacs from GNU comes with
| multiple vi emulations. I've been using viper for 20 years.
| It's the only reason I use emacs at all. I had a co-worker many
| years ago who swore by emacs, but I found the key bindings
| completely counterintuitive having learned vi while getting my
| degree. Having made that discovery I was off to the races with
| emacs, and have never looked back.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Amazing that I have not used emacs in _years_ but I wanted to see
| this artist mode with my own eyes, so I opened it and was
| surprised I could still remember how to get all around with the
| m-x commands... my muscle memory even remembered the combo to
| exit emacs correctly, and even as I type this, I couldn 't tell
| you what that key combo is! It's all in my finger muscles'
| memory. Incredible.
| pantulis wrote:
| This is what Emacs does to your brain. Dont know if that's a
| good or a bad thing, mind you.
|
| My first serious Emacs engagement happened in 1996, with
| XEmacs. Then it became my editor of choice for basically two
| decades. I can confidently say that I can open _your_ Emacs
| setup and manage my way around it (unless you happen to be an
| evil-mode infidel, that is).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| umanwizard wrote:
| C-x C-c
| entropie wrote:
| I use emacs for over a decade now. It took like 2 years and 3
| serious approaches to get into it. Now it feels like home.
|
| I didn't know about SelectiveUndo. Nice.
| adriancr wrote:
| This is what I like about emacs see a few nifty things, easily
| add shortcuts and integrate, (selective-mode is useful for an
| outline of a file).
|
| Power comes from being able to customize - add a easy shortcut to
| show outline, add another to back to non-outlined. Then use these
| to jump around code.
| justinhj wrote:
| Great to see lists like these. I'm a long time Emacs user and
| recently learned to use neovim. I made the same mistake many new
| Emacs users make in that I installed a lot of plugins at once and
| lost control of the editor. Only by installing packages
| incrementally after you have discovered a real need, can you keep
| mentally on top of what your editor is capable of.
| bloopernova wrote:
| This is a very good point. I first tried to jump in Emacs by
| using Spacemacs, and was overwhelmed trying to manage the
| fairly huge and complex init.el that Spacemacs produces. I also
| had lots of trouble before realizing that Spacemacs and vanilla
| Emacs package configurations should really be treated as
| separate and not mixed together.
|
| I'm sure if I went back to Spacemacs now, I'd understand things
| a whole lot better, but as a new user, it was far too much to
| figure out at once.
|
| So I went Vanilla, and haven't looked back. I do think that
| there should be some more articles out there like "so you've
| decided to try Emacs? Here's what to do beyond opening and
| saving documents". With a heavy emphasis on, as you said,
| incrementally adding to your configuration. Something like
| "here's why you split your config file into 2, with automatic
| changes going into one file, and manual going into another"
| followed by "here's use-package" and "if you want to X, here
| are Y packages that do it" with comparisons between each
| different way. But broken down into small chunks so things can
| be done incrementally.
| b3morales wrote:
| That inward-spiralling learning curve never ends. `selective-
| display' is my new trick for the day. Thanks!
| rStar wrote:
| emacs is like a musical instrument in program form. one is only
| limited by their creativity.
| Kessler83 wrote:
| Great article! I like the approach to focus on things that ship
| per default and take no time to learn! Also didn't know about
| undo in region!
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(page generated 2021-11-25 23:00 UTC)