4 ms·

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

by 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.
- angusgr 16y ago
  I'm pretty much entirely lost in a vanilla emacs installation. This is actually one of the things which stops me from going too crazy with my emacs customizations. I have a lot (and long ago disabled toolbars, menus, etc.) but occasionally using coworkers' emacs, and using 'zile' on my OpenWRT routers and the like, means that I like to be able to remember the emacs defaults for most of the common things. :)

by angusgr 16y ago

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.

angusgr 16y ago
I'm pretty much entirely lost in a vanilla emacs installation. This is actually one of the things which stops me from going too crazy with my emacs customizations. I have a lot (and long ago disabled toolbars, menus, etc.) but occasionally using coworkers' emacs, and using 'zile' on my OpenWRT routers and the like, means that I like to be able to remember the emacs defaults for most of the common things. :)