4 ms·

When I began using emacs, I started out by modding it heavily, so that it didn't act all that emacs-y. Besides being a fun exercise in emacs-lisp, it smoothed t

by troels 16y ago

When I began using emacs, I started out by modding it heavily, so that it didn't act all that emacs-y. Besides being a fun exercise in emacs-lisp, it smoothed the transition quite a bit. I would certainly suggest anyone switching to vim or emacs that they mod the heck out of them, just to make it bearable. You can always peel the mods off once you get more comfortable with the tool. After all, what makes these editors so awesome in the first place, is exactly that you can mod them.

mahmud 16y ago
I was quite the opposite. I got the old sturdy Emacs 19 manual (printed by HP Press) and put that well-bound beast on my desk. I started doing everything with emacs; calendar, IRC, calculations, spreadsheet, notes, debugging, running Perl, running connecting to a remote box, etc. I am one of those rare people that can't use MS Notepad; I routinely get weird dialogs popup in applications because I use emacs key-chords from muscle memory.
- __david__ 16y ago
  Me too. I also tend to zip to the beginning of the line a lot, out of habit. Trying to save in notepad or a windows editor can do really bad things: C-a C-x C-s. Ouch.
  - Hexstream 16y ago
    Uh. You just paste back and save again, no?
    - a-priori 16y ago
      Select all, paste whatever happens to be in the clipboard, save to disk. That's a disastrous series of commands.
      - kwantam 16y ago
        C-x is cut. C-v is paste. C-a C-x C-s cuts everything to clipboard and saves an empty file. C-v C-s would restore this. So C-a C-x C-s C-v C-s is just a funny way of saying C-s.
angusgr 16y ago
This actually almost the opposite experience to what I thought most people had with emacs. After all, emacs comes out of the box with menus, a toolbar, normal keybinds, to set people at ease if they are used to "normal" text editors like Notepad or Word or something. At least GUI emacs, that is. I thought that it's after you learn a bit more about emacs that you normally turn all those things off and just rely on commands and key bindings and your own custom modifications. An aside: In my experience, it also seems like this "newbie-friendly" environment sometimes turns off vim users who consider emacs to be somehow "less hardcore" and therefore worthy of scorn. Which is weird for a few reasons.
- dfranke 16y ago
  You kind of need the menus. A lot of modes rely on them outright, and even if they don't you still don't want to memorize a new set of keybindings for a mode that you'll only ever use once. The toolbar, though, isn't much besides a waste of screen real estate.
  - sprout 16y ago
    I don't want to imply that I'm at a higher level of Emacs proficiency than you (It's not at all that simple. http://www.bemroses.net/images/curves.jpg http://www.bemroses.net/images/curves.jpg ) But once you get past sqrt(15i*π)/2 emacs mastery, you stop using the menus and start using M-x with tab completion. There's a standard naming scheme, and usually local commands are prefixed with the mode name. And in any case, there are generally far more than fit on the menu anyway.
    - silentbicycle 16y ago
      Right, and apropos is drastically faster than menus once you know what things are called.
- troels 16y ago
  Well, I actually disabled the menus and toolbars. I came from using Textpad for about 10 years, so I had some very particular ideas about how my editor should behave. I basically removed a lot of the gui chrome, installed tabbar (puts tabs on top), installed cua (cope+paste and selection works as in Windows) mode and then wrote a mode that makes the cursor move around like it does in Textpad. And a bunch of minor tweaks as well. I have used most of this setup for about 4 years now. I'm pretty much entirely lost in a vanilla emacs installation.

by troels 16y ago

mahmud 16y ago

I was quite the opposite. I got the old sturdy Emacs 19 manual (printed by HP Press) and put that well-bound beast on my desk. I started doing everything with emacs; calendar, IRC, calculations, spreadsheet, notes, debugging, running Perl, running connecting to a remote box, etc. I am one of those rare people that can't use MS Notepad; I routinely get weird dialogs popup in applications because I use emacs key-chords from muscle memory.

__david__ 16y ago
Me too. I also tend to zip to the beginning of the line a lot, out of habit. Trying to save in notepad or a windows editor can do really bad things: C-a C-x C-s. Ouch.
- Hexstream 16y ago
  Uh. You just paste back and save again, no?
  - a-priori 16y ago
    Select all, paste whatever happens to be in the clipboard, save to disk. That's a disastrous series of commands.
    - kwantam 16y ago
      C-x is cut. C-v is paste. C-a C-x C-s cuts everything to clipboard and saves an empty file. C-v C-s would restore this. So C-a C-x C-s C-v C-s is just a funny way of saying C-s.

angusgr 16y ago

This actually almost the opposite experience to what I thought most people had with emacs. After all, emacs comes out of the box with menus, a toolbar, normal keybinds, to set people at ease if they are used to "normal" text editors like Notepad or Word or something. At least GUI emacs, that is. I thought that it's after you learn a bit more about emacs that you normally turn all those things off and just rely on commands and key bindings and your own custom modifications. An aside: In my experience, it also seems like this "newbie-friendly" environment sometimes turns off vim users who consider emacs to be somehow "less hardcore" and therefore worthy of scorn. Which is weird for a few reasons.

dfranke 16y ago
You kind of need the menus. A lot of modes rely on them outright, and even if they don't you still don't want to memorize a new set of keybindings for a mode that you'll only ever use once. The toolbar, though, isn't much besides a waste of screen real estate.
- sprout 16y ago
  I don't want to imply that I'm at a higher level of Emacs proficiency than you (It's not at all that simple. http://www.bemroses.net/images/curves.jpg http://www.bemroses.net/images/curves.jpg ) But once you get past sqrt(15i*π)/2 emacs mastery, you stop using the menus and start using M-x with tab completion. There's a standard naming scheme, and usually local commands are prefixed with the mode name. And in any case, there are generally far more than fit on the menu anyway.
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    Right, and apropos is drastically faster than menus once you know what things are called.
troels 16y ago
Well, I actually disabled the menus and toolbars. I came from using Textpad for about 10 years, so I had some very particular ideas about how my editor should behave. I basically removed a lot of the gui chrome, installed tabbar (puts tabs on top), installed cua (cope+paste and selection works as in Windows) mode and then wrote a mode that makes the cursor move around like it does in Textpad. And a bunch of minor tweaks as well. I have used most of this setup for about 4 years now. I'm pretty much entirely lost in a vanilla emacs installation.