8 ms·
A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)
- _sdegutis 9y agoEmacs and the Atreus keyboard and xmonad etc. are white elephants.
- nextos 9y agoCan you define etc, i.e. the other white elephants?
- __s 9y agomac
- y_u_no_rust 9y agomac = shit man
- cat199 9y agoa 'white elephant' is a useless gift that noone wants. neither point stands in these cases. that said, you don't have to like them.
- _sdegutis 9y agoThat's not the definition that I learned: a white elephant is an unnecessary luxury with limited utility that you can't obtain and maintain unless you're pretty far from being in need. That's what I meant here.
- ubernostrum 9y agoThe alleged origin is a king who gave them as gifts, knowing they had no practical use and hoping the cost of feeding and caring for them would bankrupt the recipients.
- deerpig 9y agoFrom Thailand. Elephants are sacred there, especially white elephants. So if someone gave you a white elephant you could not refuse or get rid of it without causing offense.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hnzix 9y ago> white elephants Or perhaps elephant-sized yaks with small shaving blades next to each. (I kid! I kid!)
- franklin_cobb 9y agoMy experience with an Atreus was quite different. The hand positions were comfortable with the tilted, split sides of the keyboard. Using my thumbs for both Space and Enter was also nice. I especially liked the straight, vertical columns of the keyboard. They made touch typing much easier and faster than on a regular keyboard with offset rows. Overall, the Atreus was beneficial to my typing speed and also to my wrists, elbows, and back, since it helped align my body in a more natural typing position. What aspect of the Atreus keyboard do you feel renders it a white elephant?
- _sdegutis 9y agoWow I'm an idiot. I completely forgot about the other (mainstream) definition of White Elephant. I was only thinking of the one that I learned in college. Total brain fart, and now my comment above looks like an insult when it was never meant to be one. I meant they're luxuries that I appreciate having but could easily live without.
- nextos 9y agoThe first time I got introduced to Emacs, I hated it. Who would like to read email inside a text editor with non-standard keybindings? I got it all wrong. It's not an editor, it's a text-mode virtual Lisp machine. The Emacs ecosystem has matured a lot lately. It has two applications I adore. Org, something impossible to describe in a few words, and Magit, the perfect Git porcelain. Plus it has 3 pretty darn good email clients (Notmuch, Gnus and Mu4e). And some great extras: Dired, Calc, Eshell, Erc, PDF Tools... Everything is really well integrated. And if something doesn't suit your needs, changing it is a few ELisp lines away. My computer setup has become very simple: a tiling WM (XMonad), Emacs, Firefox, and a terminal (Urxvt).
- dizzystar 9y agoI also hated emacs when I first tried it, but once I started moving past my first programming language, I found myself sifting 30 IDEs and decided to give it an honest shot. I don't use it for much else than programming, so my must-haves are for that purpose. Just the various built-in interpreters make it worth the price of learning.
- monsieurbanana 9y agoHowever nowadays IDE like Intellij Ultimate give good to best in class support for basically all mainstream languages. I'm an emacs user (in case it matters).
- tazjin 9y agoSome IDEs may offer better language-specific features than the community-supported emacs modes, however I haven't found an IDE that actually does the editing (and displaying) of text as well as emacs. In particular all the little modes that try to emulate emacs functionality (simple things like rainbow-delimiters or slightly more complex things like undo-tree-mode) are always broken in subtle ways in the "modern" applications. Not to mention all the text navigation features: ace-jump & friends, helm-swoop, etc...! I guess a large part of this is that emacs has had 40 years to mature and that it was originally written at a time where software was judged on different criteria than it is today.
- tabeth 9y agoWhen I tried emacs a few years ago I found the learning curve to be far more steep than vim at the time. After trying out https://vim-adventures.com/ https://vim-adventures.com/ (no affiliation, just thought it was useful) I learned it in about 15 minutes. Is there any equivalent for emacs? I'd love to get it another shot.
- xfer 9y agoIf you know vim keybindings you can already use emacs with evil. Just install spacemacs and off you go.
- pmoriarty 9y agoTo be fair, evil and spacemacs will only get you vim-like keybindings (which is all that vim-adventures gives you too), but there's a lot more to both editors than just keybindings. There's even more to emacs than to vim, if you start using emacs for more than just editing, doing things that have no equivalent in vim (like reading email, browsing the web, using IRC, or reading RSS news feeds, etc). For every one of these extra things, there's new stuff to learn, and more time to spend configuring emacs first to just work with those things and then to customize it the way you like. For me the time investment is well worth it, but there's no denying that it takes a lot of time. A lot of time.
- xfer 9y agoThe parent question was 15min quick start to emacs, not learn niche usage like reading email, irc etc. You can use spacemacs for a lot of languages with good support, if you are only familiar with vim keybindings.
- cat199 9y agothe online tutorial (not nearly so animated) but that said, emacs practically is a video game. I suggest developing a lisp habit, this will just about force you to learn some emacs and from there you will get over the learning curve.
- huntie 9y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642088
- antoineMoPa 9y agoI did not know about ido-mode, it always surprises me how much I can find new stuff in emacs every week!
- _sdegutis 9y agoido-mode is pretty well known. ido-vertical-mode is less well known but very useful.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rekado 9y agoMy only complaint about ido-vertical-mode is that it seems to be very slow for long lists. This is why I'm looking for an alternative. I tried helm and ivy, but both of them behave frustratingly differently compared to ido.
- rekado 9y agoI'm now using ivy-mode again. It's much faster and the annoying differences in behaviour (e.g. only "g l" will match "guile" but "gl" will not; double TAB in find-files opens dired; etc) are actually acceptable.
- pksadiq 9y agoI moved from ido-mode to ivy-mode, which I feel better.
- 0xFFFE 9y agoI started off with Emacs and a month a later tried Vi. I found Vi to be a better fit for me than Emacs and haven't looked back since. I have huge respect for both editors, they both are much older than me :) I wish I could write something that people would find useful for years to come. Having said that, I love to jab(friendly) at Emacs users in my circle of friends and colleagues. Makes the conversation even more colourful with a bit of booze inside ;)
- pmoriarty 9y agoAre you using vi or vim? Have you tried emacs with evil?
- 0xFFFE 9y agoNow, Vim. But I would definitely like to give Emacs another try, just for kicks. Do you think emacs with evil is the path with least resistance for a long term Vi/Vim user?
- eadmund 9y agoI think Spacemacs (which is an integrated emacs + evil + a whole lot more) is probably the best upgrade path for a vi/vim user. I even got one of the fellows at the office to upgrade from vim using it!
- 0xFFFE 9y agoThanks, but "upgrade"? ;)
- cat199 9y agonot OP, but yes. most people that cite vi-vs-emacs diatribes these days have never actually even used "real" vi - vim has just about all the "bloat" of emacs but without the real extensibility/programmability.. and just about any emacs session will likely be an order of magnitude smaller than any ide, while on the topic of bloat. - someone who uses emacs and vi (but not vim) ps: BSD is Unix
- arca_vorago 9y agoThe pyramids were built with emacs. Everything else is drywall to me now. More work? Yes. Worth it though. I like to say gnu+emacs is my OS, and linux is simply my kernel. Org-mode alone would be worth it.
- IncRnd 9y agoEmacs may need to be renamed to stEmacs, sixteen megs and constantly swapping. It's no longer 8 megs. :(
- arca_vorago 9y agoIf you want tiny gnu editor, just use nano. They fixed the file corruption bug right?
- pksadiq 9y agoThere is also GNU zile and zemacs[0]. [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/ https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/
- zaarn 9y agoIf you want actually tiny gnu editor, use ed. I use it fairly regularly and the lack of any distracting UI is a fresh breeze compared to the overloaded editors out there.
- IncRnd 9y agoI wouldn't know if nano fixed a file corruption bug or not. I use emacs.
- hellofunk 9y agoI don't think the 8-meg phrase was ever the official name of the program that "emacs" stands for.
- grogenaut 9y agopersonally this article would work way better for me with a set of animated gifs instead of turning into a wall of text. And I'd love to see his workflows for what he puts in his different orgs to help with context switching. as I get more senior I'm switching tasks even more and more.
- pagnol 9y agoI'm sure you'd love to live in the world of Fahrenheit 451, there they have no 'walls of text' and only big tv screens with colorful images, multiple per room.
- grogenaut 9y agoI know, don't feed the trolls. Look, I'm a software engineer, likely like you. I read walls of text all day. However having an engineer provide an explanatory narrative of how they use a terminal ide like emacs, which is still a GUI for the most part, is very difficult and takes a lot of understanding. However some of these things can be done in 3 seconds in an animated gif or 20 minutes in a bad youtube video. And I do have basically the giant tv screens at my desk filling 120 degrees of vision except they're called monitors and there are 7 of them, almost entirely filled with text... except the one that plays baseball all day. My main problem with learning emacs is usually any explanation from people tries to describe it in words and it's hard to grok, or they do videos but have customized the keyboards bindings so I have no clue how to repeat or translate their magic into operations on my machine. Every time I give it a good go, about once a year for a week, I get going pretty good but then have to really jump back into an urgent task and go back to the tools I know because at the end of the day what I need to do is get work done, not learn emacs. And so I forget. As a counter example I picked up Visual Studio 2017 in about a day having not used anything newer than 2008 in years. VS Code or Sublime were mere minutes. Emacs and vim, I've got basic proficency in them but even after multiple months of total trying with each over 20 year career, they haven't stuck beyond basic git commit editing. Finally, what a lot of devs don't get, is your logical assertion that emacs or vim or what have you "Is just better" doesn't really resonate with people, even other engineers (who are born skeptics). What resonates with them are examples of WHY it's good, ones they can innately understand. It, like any Don Draper ad, is about translating the fundamentals to another person as succinctly as possible. Like any sales funnel, any friction is going to turn people off. So if you really want to sell Emacs or Vim or any other gospel, have a good sales pitch and don't get mad at people when they give feedback because "they're too much of a mouth breather like those folks in Farenheit 451 to realize what they're not getting".
- bitexploder 9y agoIt is difficult to even describe a productive hand tuned to fit the individual Emails setup compared to standard. Here are some of my favorite Emacs things: Helm + Projectile. Helm will fuzzy complete almost anything in Emacs. Projectile is project management. Together get to any Git repo and file there in very quick. Helm is an option to compare to IDO. I rarely use IDO due to Helm. Magit, widely regarded as a good Git UI. Using is believing. Better than command line or most GUIs for me. Various editing nodes are good enough (Python, Lisp of course, Markdown). Org mode is it's own beast, but if you like outlines and productivity tools Org is very nice. I use it, not extensively. It holds my todos and meeting notes and makes it easy to ha e very complex notes in one doc. Basic text editing. I think Vi has some things it does better than Emacs here, but it is still very powerful and rewards learning the finer details. Realizing you are in a Lisp machine. A calculator is no further than your Emacs window. Learning to hack Lisp and elisp is its own reward. I think the time spent learning it is worth it. I think the math checks out in terms of efficiency. I also know Emacs is not going anywhere. Same with Vi. There is much more to it all, but these are things off the top of my head. There are many smaller things that connect up how I work via Emacs... But there is a lot to it.
- _asummers 9y agoHelm-ag is great too. I tend to bounce between "helm-projectile-find-file" and "helm-projectile-ag" depending on if I'm grepping or looking for a file name. Fuzzy search makes those terrific. Then within a single file, "helm-swoop" is great. And then "helm-resume" to bring up my previous search.
- pmoriarty 9y agoFor another, related approach, there's counsel-ag, and the various other counsel/ivy/swiper tools. I've personally switched to those from helm, and have found them to be both faster and much more intuitive to use than helm was.
- ams6110 9y agoMagit is the only thing that allows me to make enough sense of git to use it.
- kovek 9y agoSeems like lots of people here are sharing their experience with #emacs. I like it a lot, and think that it would be part of the ideal #workingset for me. However, I have never found a nice 'jump-to-definition that worked for most languages I edit on emacs. I tried ggtags, ctags, pygments. I think I had trouble setting all of these up, and they would not work for many languages I was using. I have not found a good resource on how to get a nice 'jump-to-definition set-up, and did look within the last 6 months. Maybe something new popped up? Edit: I think I had trouble with Javascript, React and/or Ruby.
- cgdub 9y agoYou could give Dumb Jump a shot: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
- clircle 9y agoI have been using dumb-jump with some R packages recently and I'm happy to report that it works very well!
- pmoriarty 9y agoWhich languages were you using that those tags tools didn't work with? Have you tried etags, rtags, or universal ctags?
- tekacs 9y agoYou might want to to try Spacemacs [0]. It's a preconfigured Emacs configuration (a bit of an overhaul, but not too intrusive if you run it in Emacs or Hybrid mode). You can just open source files in languages you haven't touched before and the editor will offer to configure itself for that language. Go to definition works out of the box for more than a dozen languages. :) [0]: https://spacemacs.org https://spacemacs.org
- ww520 9y agoI have good experience on ggtags with GnuGlobal. Here's my setup. 1. Install the ggtags.el package in Emacs and install GnuGlobal outside. 2. Make sure /GnuGlobal/bin is in the path environment variable, so that the global and gtags executables can be launched from Emacs. 3. Build the initial index database outside of Emacs. Emacs will update the index as you add new code. I usually just run the following commands on the root of the source directory. You can modify find to include or exclude certain files. find . -type f >> filelist gtags -f filelist Now M-. should pick up the word at cursor and jump to its definition, or display a list of all its usage if cursor is already at the definition.
- philsnow 9y agoThe tripping block that always gets me out of the emacs flow is integrating org-mode with things my co-workers use to communicate (lately that's and Asana, Jira, and Quip, tomorrow who knows, it's hard for me to dictate choice of issue trackers or wiki based on what integrates with my admittedly nutso setup). Even if I were to get everything working, then if I were to ever switch jobs suddenly I'm back at square one again. Emacs and org-mode are perfect, _if_ you don't have to collaborate with anybody.
- ams6110 9y agoFor about two years I was the lone emacs user in a .NET shop where all the other developers used Visual Studio.
- leethargo 9y agoI once shared an office with another happy user of Emacs and org-mode. We did a small project together and used an org file to manage the project tasks inside the source repo. Even that did not work out so well, because I would also see his tasks on my agenda. I guess this could be improved with tags and filters, but my point is that collaboration with org-mode is difficult beyond the issue of agreeing on the same tool to use.
- RobertDeNiro 9y agoEmacs is like Chinese to me, and truthfully to most developers I know. Is there a gentle intro somewhere? Most of what I've seen is just people throwing out package names with no real explanation.
- ams6110 9y agoThe built in tutorial isn't a bad place to start. I think that's what I used to get going in emacs over 20 years ago.
- innocentoldguy 9y agoI think Harley Hahn's Emacs book is a pretty good place to start: http://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484217023 http://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484217023
- ubernostrum 9y agoStart with zero add-ons. Don't use any fancy modes, just let it do syntax highlighting and maybe ctags and nothing else. Especially no VCS integration, no debugging or shells. Use it to edit text. Get familiar with: buffers; windows; the mark and the region; the kill ring and how to use it; the standard editing and navigation commands available in every buffer. Once you feel comfortable with those, then you can think about adding other stuff on, and can add things one at a time. I've been using Emacs since 2000 or so, and that's how I started. It's also how I still often use Emacs today; I don't particularly care for IDE-like features, and I don't use a lot of packages. And I'm still quite productive with it because the base stuff Emacs is good at is already pretty darned good!
- damontal 9y agoIf you try it, swap your caps lock and CTRL keys. It will make it much easier to use. Also have a look at this blog post. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs
- suprfnk 9y agoIf you don't try it, consider swapping control and caps lock too. Most people use control way more, but caps lock has the superior position on the keyboard. That is, the home row, where your pinky is naturally while resting your index fingers on F and J.
- stevekemp 9y agoIf you write a small pre-processor (simple to do) you can store your emacs configuration file in a markdown file - allowing you to document all the settings neatly. As I was reading this piece I was imagining that is what the author had done, as it is what I did too: https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md
- joshstella 9y agoAuthor here. I didn't, but I might now. Dig this.
- stevekemp 9y ago"Obviously" the code is in init.el in the same directory. But I'm sure there are similar implementations out there you could copy from too.
- rockmananoff 9y agoHi there. Thanks for the article. I'm a newbie when it comes to emacs config files. You said, that we will put (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/") in the .emacs file, but that was before we had created it. Then a few paragraphs later, when we finally do create it, you tell us to just put in ;; set up ido mode (require `ido) (setq ido-enable-flex-matching t) (setq ido-everywhere t) (ido-mode 1) Where do we put in (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/") ?
- joshstella 9y agoDisclaimer: I spend very little time configuring emacs these days, as it's working well for me, and there are others around who are much better at emacs than I am. There are likely better ways to do everything than I have, but I shared what works for me. I've got the `(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/")` pretty early in the file. You can put the `(require `ido) (setq ido-enable-flex-matching t) (setq ido-everywhere t) (ido-mode 1)` where you like. Basically, you just need the lines in your .emacs file - if you add the reference prior to creating the directory and populating it, you'll get an error, but nothing will break. Add the directory and do a `M-x eval-buffer` and it'll pick it up without restarting emacs. Or just restart emacs. Hope this helps. Someone will tell you a better way.
- pksadiq 9y agoI'm mostly a C developer that spend most of my time inside Emacs. I use ivy-mode instead of ido-mode, and avy instead of ace-jump. My setup includes yasnippet, flycheck, company, and ggtags mostly. I have issues using the number keys. So I use a custom vi like mode, but heavily customized: Pressing spacebar results in "_" ("-" in #include), but intelligently. Double space results in "->", ".." results in (|) (where | is the cursor or point) and ",," results in "=". Pressing spacebar after "(" results in "&", then "*" (also "!" if just after "if" or "while"). And my capslock key is just another control key. All the examples above are to be assumed without quotes.
- krylon 9y agoIt took me a few years to undertand this, but Emacs is not really a text editor. It is a development and runtime environment for a programming language that is especially useful for building text editors - and more generally, text-related, interactive programs -, and it happens to come bundled with a variety of such programs. But there are many, many more to discover out there on the Internet. In fact, in recent versions, this, too has gotten easier, since Emacs now comes with a package manager. But it can also be an IRC client, an audio player, a web browser, a database frontend, ... the possibilities are practically endless. And this is why I love Emacs. There are other editors out there that are good, too. Very good. But to me, Emacs takes the prize because it is so much more than an editor.
- SllX 9y agoAlways seemed to me less a text editor and more the intended user interface after rms and his gang of misfit lads finished herding up all the daemons into the eventual (past my expiration date) GNU/HURD. Turns out it was a Lisp machine all along! That said, I too have developed a renewed appreciation for Emacs these past few years.
- krylon 9y ago> Turns out it was a Lisp machine all along! Hehe, in retrospect it is so obvious, but I really did not see that coming.
- laowushi 9y agonice.
- meta_AU 9y agoIn addition to all the other things mentioned (helm, projectile, magit, org), I've found org-ref and interleave great for managing my notes when I read papers or articles. Roughly, I save the PDF to disk and create an org node for it, then add the metadata like file location and bibtex info. Then I have emacs open the PDF and as I'm reading it I can press 'i' to open a note on that page, and then close the note and keep reading.
- leethargo 9y agoVery nice. I don't read PDF in Emacs, but I also use an org file for notes, with references to the file and a bibtex file. When I use org-mode to author articles, the references used are multi-purpose: from Emacs, they link to my notes, but when translated to LaTeX, they become citations. See: https://github.com/leethargo/etc/blob/master/emacs/.emacs.d/lisp/init_literature.el https://github.com/leethargo/etc/blob/master/emacs/.emacs.d/...
- geokon 9y agoI only really enjoyed Emacs once I learned some ELisp (I think I had tried is 2 or 3 times before that). Honestly I find these guides pretty useless b/c you can copy configs and hack together something without really understanding what you're doing but you'll eventually end up extremely frustrated and unable to work around the quirks and conflicts between configurations. I know the people behind Emacs like to think the system as usable out-of-the-box but I think selling it like that is ultimately a disservice b/c people end up underwhelmed and frustrated - never taking the time to learn ELisp. (the Emacs intro/tutorial is just a "welcome to this nano with annoying keybindings") I actually would challenge anyone to find someone who loves emacs and doesn't know a bit of ELisp :) Ultimately ELisp is really not that much work to learn - but the root issue seems to me that ELisp isn't really a general purpose programming language and who wants to invest in learning a language you can't use outside of your editor? It's basically a DSL for a managing text and buffers.. It'd be way sexier to learn if it was a Racket or something I also wrote a little annotated config intro (these are kinda more personal notes for my org/git/C++ workflow). It's a little terse and to the point and isn't trying to sell Emacs, but unlike most guides I tried to document what each lines in the config really means and help the reader learn how Emacs helps you discover more of Elisp as you go. https://geokon-gh.github.io/.emacs.d/ https://geokon-gh.github.io/.emacs.d/ Maybe someone will find it useful! (I'm by no means an emacs expert or Lisp guru.. so if there are problems, let me know please :) )
- pjmlp 9y agoBack in the day our teaching assistance got pissed off that most people were using Emacs as if it was Notepad, and spent the rest of the programming lecture teaching how to use Emacs instead (about 1h). Which then became my to go editor in UNIX systems, until IDEs finally became a thing on UNIX.
- agumonkey 9y agoI'm especially saddened when I see a lisp/clojure talk where the user navigate through emacs using arrows and the likes. A lisper not leveraging sexp ala paredit/parinfer is odd.
- delta1 9y ago> ... I also set Emacs to full screen. I'd like to do this on Windows as well, but Windows and Emacs don't really love each other and it always ends up in some wonky state when I try this (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(fullscreen . maximized)) Seems to work fine for me https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/3008 https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/3008
- HelloNurse 9y agoI use a nice plugin called maxframe, which apart from resizing the frame after a while and not when it's first displayed is not "wonky". I have yet to try multiple frames on multiple screens. Salient code: (defun w32-maximize-frame () "Maximize the current frame (windows only)" (interactive) (w32-send-sys-command 61488)) (defun w32-restore-frame () "Restore a minimized/maximized frame (windows only)" (interactive) (w32-send-sys-command 61728))
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- j7ake 9y agoHas anybody quantified the efficiency gains from using emacs to do work rather than conventional means? Are there certain areas (e.g. Mail, todo, notes,calendar,scheduling) that gains more efficiency than others?
- agumonkey 9y agoWhen you see some users operating under emacs it's clear that it fits their mind and they made it as lean as possible. Guys like Gary Bernhardt does the same using bash / vi / ruby or python. I believe the idea is to just be able to use any for of programmatic tooling to cut right through your tasks as quick and as clean as possible.
- bachmeier 9y agoI don't think it would be easy to quantify the gains from Emacs because it's too specific to the user. For me, it's all about automation. If I notice myself doing something that can be automated multiple times, I write a function. If I find myself calling that function frequently, I turn it into a keyboard shortcut. That's a huge win, because it eliminates a lot of work I hate to do, but it's very specific to the user.
- grkvlt 9y agoGains and losses, remember. There are tasks where the use of a visual IDE just makes things easier to comprehend and use. Emacs will not give an increase in efficiency across the board for all tasks, otherwise we'd all have switched to it long ago!
- goldfeld 9y agoPerhaps the real benefits are having some fun and warding off Alzheimer's, as the time spent learning and tweaking probably cancels out with future productivity gains.
- bluenose69 9y agoThis is a great article, not least because of the tangential comments (e.g. that impact test of bicycle-style tubing was weirdly fascinating). All that's said about Emacs is true. I loved it for decades. And then my hand started cramping up because of the key chords. So I tried vim, and hated it for a few days, disliked it for a few more, and then started to like it. I'd never go back, now. Vim is certainly not as powerful as Emacs, and its macro language is disgusting, but for everyday work it's fine. And I really like Vim's "grammar" approach to describing complex actions, which makes semi-complex tasks into puzzles and not memory exercises. (For really complex tasks, though, there's nothing quite so wonderful as Emacs with elisp ... so this comment may say more about the work I'm doing lately than these two editors.)
- esseti 9y agoWould you advise me to get a try to EMACS? i mostly program in python (django), using docker, kubernetes and so on. I'm using an IDE. On server i use vim (took me a while to understand the commands, but now i found it insanely clever on some comands)
- bitexploder 9y agoMaybe. But if you are using PyCharm it will be hard to get used to Emacs. It takes a while to get to a place where Emacs makes more sense than a good IDE. PyCharm is very good at what it does.
- megaman22 9y agoI've never been able to get into graphical emacs, but emacs-nox has been my terminal editor of choice since college. Coming from a Windows background, vi(m) was too weird to get used to.
- franklin_cobb 9y agoI currently use Sublime Text 3, but I used to use Vim and NeoVim. One complaint I have with Sublime Text 3 is that many of the keybindings are "chords," and I seem to be developing pains in my wrists and elbows from frequently typing the more awkward ones. I've heard Emacs uses similar, chorded keybindings, only to the extreme. I think the problem with ST3 is that many of the chords are awkward to type. How is Emacs? Are the chords more natural, or would I be facing similar issues with chording?
- kuharich 9y agoPrior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10642088
- insulanian 9y ago> A 1933 steel bicycle that I still ride. That's an old bike.
- Areading314 9y agoEmacs is great, but is nearing its end. The package ecosystem is too fragile and lack of any kind of support leads to constant breaking and having to dig through elisp code/config at inopportune times. Core tools like a text editor need to be rock solid and depending on volunteer packages is generally not going to cut it vs. paying a small amount towards a supported product. Full disclosure I recently gave up on Emacs/Spacemacs after several years of using it for Python development (use Pycharm now), Org-mode (Use taskwarrior), and Magit (just use git + some aliases).
- scrumper 9y agoHas anyone got any experience using Emacs with one of those mail tools and gmail with 2FA? I started playing with notmuch half-heartedly but it seemed to expect a local mail store, which is fine but I found myself bouncing between setup instructions for several different tools and I quickly gave up. I would like to get it working; Apple Mail client is a bit slow on my laptop with a high volume, and I'm all about plaintext and keyboards. I'd happily use Emacs.
- Buttes 9y agoI gave up on notmuch for the same reason, it won't just fetch mail over imap. I use gnus now.
- s17n 9y ago"You can recognize emacs by the 'mode line' near the bottom of the screen. If you see anybody using it, fire them immediately - they may be a good programmer but they're going to cause more trouble than they are worth."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- patrickmay 9y agoFunny. Where's it from?
- s17n 9y agoI made it up
- joshstella 9y agoAuthor here. In reading this thread, I'm struck that most of the objections to emacs are both legitimate (as are the arguments for it) and focused on programmer-specific issues. Back when I wrote the original post, I was experimenting with using emacs as a CEO who writes little code these days, but was dealing with a maelstrom of disparate information and interruption. It's been a very successful experiment, which I'll document in a follow up post soon. Glad that it got some good conversations going!
- frabbit 9y ago> I keep my calendar, email, etc., on > another desktop in OS X, which is hidden > while I'm in Emacs, Meh. To use his bicycle analogy, this is like someone putting Campagnolo components on a Trek CF frame.
- bribri 9y agoI use org-mode and emacs (spacemacs) extensively at my job. I start my day by creating org-mode headers as todos, breaking down the tasks that I think will take longer than an hour, and later taking notes in outline mode as I do the tasks. I like planning a few days and checking in with my manager that I'm focusing my energy on the right things. I also use it to take excellent meeting notes and turn those notes into actionable tasks. People are impressed with my nicely formatted word docs that are just org files exported using pandoc.
- lkhz 9y agoI use ivy instead of helm and ido (tried both of them). Swiper and counsel are awesome for text search. company, rtags, anaconda are awesome for autocompletion and code navigation in C++ and Python. I use projectile for project management. gud is not very useful for running a debugger, so I use realgud which is much nicer. Viva Emacs!
- lkhz 9y agortags works with CMake and is the only working intelligent completion system in Emacs I found over the years.
- garfieldnate 9y agoDoes anyone use it to type in languages that require an IME or specialized keyboard usage? I tried Emacs a while ago, but I was disappointed I couldn't use my normal OS functionality for typing Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.
- likelynew 9y agoI primarily use vim for writing code. While I use a lot of standard plugins, I find many things that is not correct with them. I know it's kind of a subjective question, but is moving to spacemacs worth it? Any experiences?