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The problem with Emacs and vim, to me, is that they don't fit in. I'm currently trying to take up Emacs (I pick up one of vim and Emacs every few years. Not su

The problem with Emacs and vim, to me, is that they don't fit in. I'm currently trying to take up Emacs (I pick up one of vim and Emacs every few years. Not sure why. Feels like a thing I should do). Here is some of my list of Emacs problems. * The big one. Every other app on my Mac uses the same shortcut keys for cut, copy, paste, save, open, search, search + replace, spell check. That's probably 95-99% of the keys I press, and Emacs has to be special and support none of the standards. I know there are good historical reasons for this, but that's no use to a new user. * Server mode doesn't seem to "understand" Macs -- when I shut down my Mac it just hangs and I have to force kill it. Without server mode I end up with loads of Emacs which seem to load slower than atom can open a window. * I like editting text ,(as opposed to code) in a variable width font. Doesn't seem well supported. * The default settings seem very limited, so then I wonder if I should use something like spaceman's, but that is massive and brings it's own bugs. I can be comfortable, and fairly productive, instantly in sublime, atom, lime and vscode. Why can't Emacs, by default, have a "be like a Mac app" mode?

preek 10y ago
My post wasn't to be about Emacs, but let's give it a try. I'm happy to help. Actually some of the things you mentioned are super awesome strengths to me. 1. key bindings. I understand your point and you are right. But hear me out^^ I'm using Emacs on the Mac and Linux daily. Sometimes I fire up Windows for some cross platform app. Those three OSs have usually different key bindings and would have so in a regular GUI tool. Not in Emacs, though. They are all the same. Muscle memory win^^ Plus, I changed _many_ key bindings in Emacs to that they work better for me - across all OSs. 2. Server mode. Hm, I'm not having an issue here, but I cannot say that with confidence, because I rarely shut down, I always suspend (closing the lid on the MBP). 3. Variable Width Font. Have no expertise here. I tried that once, but it messed with how the code looks aligned which seems important to me. Again, sorry, would love to help, but just don't have expertise in this. 4. Default settings. You're right spot on! This is not an accident, but on purpose. The reason is that they are General Text Editors opposed to most others. That means that could do anything if you teach them. The others can do specific things faster. This approach has served me well and I have huge configurations in VIM and Emacs. Now I'm actually doing everything in Emacs, Mail, writing Books, PDFs, Todos and so on. Of course you don't need that to get going. It's just awesome that you can continue to improve your main tool for ever and ever^^ I learned how to do these things by reading other people's config. If you'd like to look at my Emacs config, it has lots of prose documentation for other people to read: https://github.com/munen/emacs.d/blob/master/configuration.org https://github.com/munen/emacs.d/blob/master/configuration.o... I hope some of that was helpful. One more thing, it's OK if you only seem to vaguely get that VIM and Emacs are worth it. Took me a couple tries, too. Same with most things that are worth it. Like getting to know the right Woman^^
thomasahle 10y ago
Personally I'd prefer if everything else were more like vim. Most platforms seem to have complete abandoned keyboard navigation as a priority. Actually the vimium plugin for Chrome is great in that respect. I guess I can do 80% of my work with vim keybindings now.
- preek 10y ago
  Spot on! One of the biggest strengths is just this. I use VIM key bindings everywhere: Chrome, FF, Terminal, even Emacs. Back in the day where I also did much work on Windows, I also had them in Visual Studio and MSSQL Manager.
- Shorel 10y ago
  I use keyboard navigation all the time. The difference is that I move the hands off the middle row, and use the cursor keys and the home-end-pageup-pagewn keys, sometimes combined with the ctrl-alt-shift modifiers. The hands off the middle row! Heresy!
pavelludiq 10y ago
Emacs isn't trying to be special by having it's own keybindings, it's just that it's the same age as Apple the company(1976). Most editors back then were line editors, meaning you would give it a command to change a line, then you would ask it to print the line you just edited so you can see what you did. So yes, it's annoying to new users, but the fact that we have a system that's had 40 years of thought and effort put into it is pretty cool. I'll likely be using it until the end of my career(hopefully many decades from now) or until we stop using keyboards to program these damn machines. I think it's absolutely amazing that a system can survive for that long and have such a long future ahead of it and not because it's parasitic and it's too expensive to get rid of it like most legacy systems, but because it's actually still useful? That's a rare thing. As for the defaults, vanilla emacs is the worst text editor in existence, building your .emacs file is basically a rite of passage, not sure how to solve that problem, starter packs exist but come with their own problems as you say. But ultimately it's a matter of trade-offs. You can choose to get up and running quickly with a simpler more modern tool, or you can go deep with emacs and hope it'll pay off. I've found that learning emacs has not only payed off the time investment for me, but the benefit is growing the more I use it. Yes, the first week was horrible, the first month was kind of difficult, the first year clumsy, but the next couple of years have given me an unbelievably powerful tool, and a sense of accomplishment for having mastered it's fundamentals. I recently picked up magit and the way I use git has changed now, I am absolutely better at VC now because of emacs. There is no price for that. All of that vastly outweighs any problem like being clunky in a modern environment, it just takes a while for the benefit to kick in. Will OS X even be around in 40 years? Who knows, emacs just might be tough.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
As an emacs user, I can see that. Allow me to counter: 1. As others have pointed out, Emacs shortcuts work everywhere. And if you really want those shortcuts, look into cua-mode, which is closer to what you're used to. 2. Yeah... that might be a legitimate issue for you. 3. Emacs isn't about the default settings: if you find them limiting or frustrating, change them! Emacs isn't about shaping yourself to fit it, it's about shaping it to fit you. The only thing that's just about mandatory is learning a little elisp. If you don't know how to do something, emacswiki and the extensive documentation are good places to look.
krylon 10y ago
IIRC, Aquamacs tries to remedy some of these problems for Mac users. I don't how how well, though. :-/ (Also, macOS has some of Emacs' default keybindings like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, ... in all text editing widgets, which IMHO makes Emacs quite a nice fit on OS X in some ways.)

preek 10y ago

My post wasn't to be about Emacs, but let's give it a try. I'm happy to help. Actually some of the things you mentioned are super awesome strengths to me. 1. key bindings. I understand your point and you are right. But hear me out^^ I'm using Emacs on the Mac and Linux daily. Sometimes I fire up Windows for some cross platform app. Those three OSs have usually different key bindings and would have so in a regular GUI tool. Not in Emacs, though. They are all the same. Muscle memory win^^ Plus, I changed _many_ key bindings in Emacs to that they work better for me - across all OSs. 2. Server mode. Hm, I'm not having an issue here, but I cannot say that with confidence, because I rarely shut down, I always suspend (closing the lid on the MBP). 3. Variable Width Font. Have no expertise here. I tried that once, but it messed with how the code looks aligned which seems important to me. Again, sorry, would love to help, but just don't have expertise in this. 4. Default settings. You're right spot on! This is not an accident, but on purpose. The reason is that they are General Text Editors opposed to most others. That means that could do anything if you teach them. The others can do specific things faster. This approach has served me well and I have huge configurations in VIM and Emacs. Now I'm actually doing everything in Emacs, Mail, writing Books, PDFs, Todos and so on. Of course you don't need that to get going. It's just awesome that you can continue to improve your main tool for ever and ever^^ I learned how to do these things by reading other people's config. If you'd like to look at my Emacs config, it has lots of prose documentation for other people to read: https://github.com/munen/emacs.d/blob/master/configuration.org https://github.com/munen/emacs.d/blob/master/configuration.o... I hope some of that was helpful. One more thing, it's OK if you only seem to vaguely get that VIM and Emacs are worth it. Took me a couple tries, too. Same with most things that are worth it. Like getting to know the right Woman^^

thomasahle 10y ago

Personally I'd prefer if everything else were more like vim. Most platforms seem to have complete abandoned keyboard navigation as a priority. Actually the vimium plugin for Chrome is great in that respect. I guess I can do 80% of my work with vim keybindings now.

preek 10y ago
Spot on! One of the biggest strengths is just this. I use VIM key bindings everywhere: Chrome, FF, Terminal, even Emacs. Back in the day where I also did much work on Windows, I also had them in Visual Studio and MSSQL Manager.
Shorel 10y ago
I use keyboard navigation all the time. The difference is that I move the hands off the middle row, and use the cursor keys and the home-end-pageup-pagewn keys, sometimes combined with the ctrl-alt-shift modifiers. The hands off the middle row! Heresy!

pavelludiq 10y ago

Emacs isn't trying to be special by having it's own keybindings, it's just that it's the same age as Apple the company(1976). Most editors back then were line editors, meaning you would give it a command to change a line, then you would ask it to print the line you just edited so you can see what you did. So yes, it's annoying to new users, but the fact that we have a system that's had 40 years of thought and effort put into it is pretty cool. I'll likely be using it until the end of my career(hopefully many decades from now) or until we stop using keyboards to program these damn machines. I think it's absolutely amazing that a system can survive for that long and have such a long future ahead of it and not because it's parasitic and it's too expensive to get rid of it like most legacy systems, but because it's actually still useful? That's a rare thing. As for the defaults, vanilla emacs is the worst text editor in existence, building your .emacs file is basically a rite of passage, not sure how to solve that problem, starter packs exist but come with their own problems as you say. But ultimately it's a matter of trade-offs. You can choose to get up and running quickly with a simpler more modern tool, or you can go deep with emacs and hope it'll pay off. I've found that learning emacs has not only payed off the time investment for me, but the benefit is growing the more I use it. Yes, the first week was horrible, the first month was kind of difficult, the first year clumsy, but the next couple of years have given me an unbelievably powerful tool, and a sense of accomplishment for having mastered it's fundamentals. I recently picked up magit and the way I use git has changed now, I am absolutely better at VC now because of emacs. There is no price for that. All of that vastly outweighs any problem like being clunky in a modern environment, it just takes a while for the benefit to kick in. Will OS X even be around in 40 years? Who knows, emacs just might be tough.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

As an emacs user, I can see that. Allow me to counter: 1. As others have pointed out, Emacs shortcuts work everywhere. And if you really want those shortcuts, look into cua-mode, which is closer to what you're used to. 2. Yeah... that might be a legitimate issue for you. 3. Emacs isn't about the default settings: if you find them limiting or frustrating, change them! Emacs isn't about shaping yourself to fit it, it's about shaping it to fit you. The only thing that's just about mandatory is learning a little elisp. If you don't know how to do something, emacswiki and the extensive documentation are good places to look.

krylon 10y ago

IIRC, Aquamacs tries to remedy some of these problems for Mac users. I don't how how well, though. :-/ (Also, macOS has some of Emacs' default keybindings like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, ... in all text editing widgets, which IMHO makes Emacs quite a nice fit on OS X in some ways.)