[HN Gopher] An Interview with Mickey Petersen, Author of Masteri... ___________________________________________________________________ An Interview with Mickey Petersen, Author of Mastering Emacs Author : cocacola1 Score : 76 points Date : 2022-11-19 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (syntopikon.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (syntopikon.substack.com) | chipotle_coyote wrote: | If you use Emacs in Vim mode -- I'm not much of an Emacs user in | general, but lately I've actually tentatively taken to Doom | Emacs, much to my own surprise -- is _Mastering Emacs_ still | useful? | ashton314 wrote: | _Editing code is easy; there 's myriad editors, including Emacs | of course, that can do this. But there aren't many tools to track | bibliography, your agenda, email, notes, and writing. But Emacs | can easily do all of that, and much more._ | | There is a certain ilk that prefers to tinker with their tools, | until they are just the right shape, versus those who learn to | compensate for quirks in their tools. Emacs is definitely quirky, | but its strength is it handling your manic desire for total | workflow integration. | alfiedotwtf wrote: | I went through Mastering Emacs before actually jumping ship from | Vim to Emacs. Glad I did! | | After more than 25 years of Vim, in the last month I've | completely switched to Emacs. And it feels like a super power... | I'll be using it for the next 25 years and beyond! | nnoitra wrote: | Why, what's so good about it? | nnoitra wrote: | bch wrote: | Enjoy the new environment. | | I used to be a "competent" vi user, laughing at the Emacs vs vi | jokes, until I realized I didn't _really_ know Emacs. I gave | myself a 4-week challenge where I'd use nothing but Emacs, for | the challenge, and to learn. Fast forward 5-6 years later, | still an Emacs user, I wondered if I could understand vi as | well as I'd come to know Emacs. I gave myself a challenge, ... | | Have since done the same w ex(1), but I didn't let it stick for | many years as a daily-driver. | | I'd recommend the challenge to anybody. I did the transition | doing "production work", so it's possible - you may not have to | "wait for the right time." | | Enjoy your editing in good health. | smitty1e wrote: | I'm a https://www.spacemacs.org/ devotee. I love the Vim | commands, but physically cannot take more than light | interaction with the Emacs default key bindings. | | How sweet it is to completely reconfigure the environment | without losing magit and org-mode. | wentin wrote: | The closest I ever got with vim is with this game: https://vim- | adventures.com/ How different is Vim and Emacs' user experience? | Would the vim-adventures also apply to emacs? | thrown_22 wrote: | No. | | Vim is a text editor. | | Emacs is a lisp interpreter whose dialect of lisp is | specialized for text manipulation. In emacs the user interface | is incidental to the main goal of programmatic text | manipulation. | | In vim the user interface is the be all and end all. Which is | why vim is now a specialized emacs mode when you need character | based text manipulation. | mark_l_watson wrote: | Nice interview. I have been using Emacs for about 40 years, and I | am getting a lot out of Petersen's book. He recommends reading | the Emacs Manual - I mostly did that decades ago, and forgot most | of it. | | Anyway, I recommend his book. | uptownfunk wrote: | What helped you most getting up to speed in emacs? Every time I | try I give up | rayiner wrote: | I learned it by using it to do a project in college in Common | Lisp using SLIME. There wasn't really a good Lisp environment | for the editor I was used to before that (visual studio) so o | had to power through. | mark_l_watson wrote: | In the early days, it was easy to install Emacs on any system | I was working on. | | In modern times, VSCode is a fine substitute for Emacs, so | try that. I generally prefer Emacs because I am so used to | it. | User23 wrote: | VS Code has many pleasant properties, but its lack of | respect for user freedom is a real turn off. Also it is | considerably less conveniently extensible than Emacs. That | however is definitely a double edged sword and there are | valid reasons to go with a less customizable tool. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-19 23:00 UTC)