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Obviously my personal bias, but it's emacs I can never remember how to exit from.
by doktrin 9y ago
Obviously my personal bias, but it's emacs I can never remember how to exit from.
- oefrha 9y agoI'll first admit I'm a worshiper of the Church of Emacs. I told the trying to exit vi joke for years until someone pointed out to me that C-x C-c was equally if not more obscure. It was a part of me because that was the first thing I ever learned about Emacs. Just like :wq was the first thing I ever learned about vi. Now, I think the fact that people seem to have more difficulty exiting vi is because vi is very likely the fallback for $VISUAL/$EDITOR, and hence much more likely to be trapped in by accident when unprepared.
- cryptoz 9y agoMe too. I once helped organize talks at my school, and helped with bringing Richard Stallman to give a talk one time. I was a vim user, but I did a little bit of prep and refreshed my emacs memory etc. So we're setting up the room for the talk, and we're talking a bit, and some people start to arrive. He asks one if they've ever used emacs, she says no, so I said, "we should start an emacs tutorial here, we can teach everyone about things like C-x C-c, and stuff". I just blurted out the only thing I had remembered recently. He turned a cold shoulder to me, I suppose thinking that I had insulted him directly. I ran out to Google what I had said, and then felt terrible about it, but it was too late. That's my remembering how to quit emacs story.
- weaksauce 9y agoIt was probably because he knew what OS license you'd try to use.
- kazinator 9y agoHmm, it might have just been because "things like C-x C-c and stuff" sounds kind of dumb, not because it refers to quitting Emacs. Like imagine: B. Kernighan: have you ever used Unix? Student: No. You: Hey, how about we start a Unix tutorial here; we can learn all about dollar-sign-1, and stuff. B. Kernighan: * roll eyes * :)
- groby_b 9y agoC-M-footpedal1-q
- NTDF9 9y agoYou got it wrong! It's more like: C-M-handstand-q-footpedal
- digi_owl 9y agoC-M-guru-meditate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyboard
- flavio81 9y agoI seriously would like to have a pedalboard with, say, 5 pedals that i could map to specific functions on Emacs. It would be terrific, particularly for Lisp development with SLIME.
- kazinator 9y agoHmm. MIDI foot controller -> USB MIDI interface -> computer -> driver -> user space scriptology ... What do you think? That would easily give you ten pedals. I use a 1993 vintage ART Ultrafoot X-15 I got off Craigslist --- for my guitar rig, not a text editor. :) https://www.google.ca/search?q=ART+Ultrafoot+x-15&tbm=isch https://www.google.ca/search?q=ART+Ultrafoot+x-15&tbm=isch
- misingnoglic 9y agoWhy not just play the piano for programming?
- kazinator 9y agoA MIDI foot controller isn't a musical keyboard (though such things do exist, mimicing organ pedals). It's used for MIDI program changes. I have a MIDI programmable guitar pre-amp, and so in combination with this pedal, I have access to various amp settings just by stepping on various buttons.
- d0mine 9y agoThe command is: M-x kill-emacs (or to save buffers before the exit: M-x save-buffers-kill-emacs). Perhaps, exit-emacs or quit-emacs aliases could be defined.
- Symbiote 9y agoControl X-C
- marcosdumay 9y agoIt's quite hard to get emacs to open for you when you don't want it. Harder still to get it without a GUI. Overall, both are about as hard to deal with. Vim has a better help message, but it's still difficult to find.
- Bartweiss 9y agoYep - I suspect people are less likely to stumble into emacs without any warning.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoMy anecdotal experience has been that no matter how many times I'm told how to exit Emacs I can't remember but every developer I have taught '<esc>:wq' to has remembered it after one or two times telling them what it is.
- omni 9y ago(kill-emacs) C-x C-e Pretty straightforward.
- doktrin 9y ago> (kill-emacs) C-x C-e > Pretty straightforward If this is a joke, it's totally whooshing over my head right now
- omni 9y agoC-x C-e evaluates the Emacs Lisp expression before the point. This gives the same result as the much more obvious M-x kill-emacs, but with the added fun of writing and executing Lisp directly in whatever buffer you're in. So to close the editor, we've written some code in a weird ancient language into some random text file, fired up an interpreter that's probably so portable you can run it on a 1980s toaster, and executed an expression which we had to make sure was wrapped in those vile parentheses everyone loves to hate. Straightforward. But I just had to explain my own joke, so I'll go wallow in shame for the rest of the day. :(
- doktrin 9y agoNo don't feel bad! It's a good joke I was just sleepy when I responded :)
- masklinn 9y agoEmacs is definitely difficult to exit from. The difference is emacs usually isn't the default/fallback EDITOR on the system, so you rarely get dropped into it unknowingly/unexpectedly.
- dom0 9y agoAlso: Emacs is rarely if ever used in the terminal today, and exiting it through the standard desktop protocol ([X], Ctrl-[Shift]-Q, Alt+F4, ...) always works.
- jordigh 9y agoWe get so many people using it in terminals in #emacs. Obviously there's no way to know how many people are not using it in a terminal because they won't be asking GUI-specific questions. I and a few others do try to discourage the terminal users and nudge them towards the GUI which is more featureful, but some people really want to use a terminal at all costs.
- FullyFunctional 9y agoI don't think that's true. System administrators will happily use it in a terminal. I'd often deliberately run emacs -nw when something requires a quick edit and the GUI would be imposing.
- ams6110 9y agoI use emacs in a terminal all the time (usually in a tmux session, actually). That's how I learned it (in pre-GUI days) and so it feels pretty natural. I never use the mouse with emacs, even in a GUI session.
- masklinn 9y agoNote that GUI emacs doesn't mean using a mouse. I use GUI emacs but almost never interact with it with a mouse, I just have a server-enabled emacs running fullscreen in one of my virtual desktops.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoC-x C-c. It's too easy to hit accidentally, though. I got burned by it a few times, so I eventually unbound the command. I now use M-x kill-emacs when I want to quit (very rarely, anyway).
- falcolas 9y agoCmd-T killall emacs ;)
- JdeBP 9y agoWhat you want is a handy WWW page to refer to. * http://jdebp.eu./Humour/exiting-emacs.html http://jdebp.eu./Humour/exiting-emacs.html