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The tool for me that I have spent a lot of time learning and improving is my Emacs environment. It wasn't easy but as soon as I got the hang of things I was ab

The tool for me that I have spent a lot of time learning and improving is my Emacs environment. It wasn't easy but as soon as I got the hang of things I was able to improve a lot in terms of overall productivity. Knowing how to debug when things go wrong and where to look to solve it was the first step in my learning journey. I eventually started heavily customizing by making scripts and packages to further suit my needs. > After you master a tool, you internalize it and go minimalist, and reduce it to first principles. This line made me feel like I'm on the right track. Just recently I've cleared up the fluff in my emacs config leaving only simple but effective and essential tools. I realized that I've made a lot of edits to my config and that each one taught me something that eventually led to where i am now. In a way, clearing things out was a learning experience in itself. I still have a lot to learn though. Just recently I've made a jump to reading the enacs source and even took the time to contribute to Remacs, a Rust port of Emacs. I'll admit that this one is a bit overwhelming and may even seem overdoing it, but it is still a fun learning experience. I sure do love my tool.

jrimbault 9y ago
Same with vim (and other text editors), at first I started customizing heavily. Now I can get going with just 3 settings. syntax on set number set relativenumber
- weaksauce 9y ago
  As a long time vim user and lover of the idea of vim. emacs is better at being a vim than vim is. (org, magit, helm, swoop, and all the other great packages are a bonus and work as well as they do because of the way emacs was created.) vim modal editing is life but vim's implementation is really bad comparatively.
  - habibalamin 9y ago
    Which modal editing implementation would you suggest for Emacs?
    - monsieurbanana 9y ago
      There's no really much choice here if you want to have VIM modal editing in emacs: you need to use Evil. The question is rather, - do you want to start an emacs config from scratch (then you install and configure whatever plugins you want, including Evil) - or go for one of the community managed ones? The most popular being spacemacs[1], but there's also doom-emacs[2], both are geared towards people that come from VIM and/or want to use VIM-like editing in emacs [1] http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/ [2] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
    - weaksauce 9y ago
      I personally use spacemacs with a bunch of layers enabled. It uses evil mode for vim emulation.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    I have to disagree. Evil mode in emacs is (on the scale of vim clones) pretty good, but it is still an emulation of vim within emacs, and there are a lot of hard stops throughout the experience for a long time vim user. The biggest hard stop for me was the implementation of C-[, which interpreted word boundaries differently than vim - differently than emacs even. Of course, if all you're looking for is modal editing in emacs and don't mind falling back to emacs keybinds, then evil mode will do just fine for you.
    - arnsholt 9y ago
      I had a similar issue when I had to work in Emacs too. Evil is, on the whole a good emulation, but I kept tripping over ^W not doing what I expected. And then if I messed up the undoing, I got to screw around with Emacs' redo functionality being... idiosyncratic.
    - weaksauce 9y ago
      You can change word boundaries pretty easily though. There is a little bit of friction in some things like that but nothing that is insurmountable. Every single keystroke is a function that can be changed and even wrapped with "advice" to leave the function alone but change the before, after, or both before and after the function is called.
- flukus 9y ago
  I've invested a great deal of time getting plugins to work, scripting my own, customizing every aspect of vim but I really wish I listened to the people saying all along that "vim is the text editor, unix is the IDE". Since I started following this advice I haven't looked back. The two main reasons I ignored this advice initially is that I was mainly on windows and that vim has some great windowing abilities. I knew about cygwin as an answer to the first but I didn't know about tmux previously, perhaps I didn't need to know because vim already had a similar feature set. Nowadays my vim setup is almost as minimal as yours.
  - jrimbault 9y ago
    "I can get going", emphasis on "can" ;) I usually have more settings, but on a temp machine that's all I need.
- yosamino 9y ago
  > set relativenumber why thank you!
  - kazinator 9y ago
    I didn't know about that either. What's this good for? One immediately obvious use is basic navigation. That line above I want to go to is 13, so '13k'. Now I'm there.
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  I wanted to add the few that I like but I think they're all defaults now :) set ruler set wildmenu set showcmd set scrolloff=4
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
I've always had a dream of starting a programming school. Educating new programmers seems like something that's not done very well. (Or maybe I have very limited experience here.) If I ever did, I think I'd start with text processing. If you are an expert at slicing, dicing, processing, and piping text? A bunch of other stuff suddenly becomes much easier.
- cbm-vic-20 9y ago
  I have a friend who teaches woodworking to kids; for their first project, he teaches them how to build a wooden mallet.
- ccvannorman 9y ago
  in Bay Area there are many programming / development / game development schools. I also worked on CodeHero.org for a time. What specifically do you think is wrong with the existing approaches? It's an area I also care a lot about and would like to gain more insight into. :-]
- z3t4 9y ago
  start a blog series.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
I keep refactoring my Emacs config, but it still grows instead of shrinking. Maybe I'm not "there" yet. But for now, I feel that the more things I start doing in Emacs, the more productive I get (and the more fun I'm having). They say Emacs is an OS; I find it to be a damn great one. Its UI model is a better fit for 90% of things I do on a computer than the standard one.
ninjakeyboard 9y ago
+1 - this article makes me think of my journey into emacs

jrimbault 9y ago

Same with vim (and other text editors), at first I started customizing heavily. Now I can get going with just 3 settings. syntax on set number set relativenumber

weaksauce 9y ago
As a long time vim user and lover of the idea of vim. emacs is better at being a vim than vim is. (org, magit, helm, swoop, and all the other great packages are a bonus and work as well as they do because of the way emacs was created.) vim modal editing is life but vim's implementation is really bad comparatively.
- habibalamin 9y ago
  Which modal editing implementation would you suggest for Emacs?
  - monsieurbanana 9y ago
    There's no really much choice here if you want to have VIM modal editing in emacs: you need to use Evil. The question is rather, - do you want to start an emacs config from scratch (then you install and configure whatever plugins you want, including Evil) - or go for one of the community managed ones? The most popular being spacemacs[1], but there's also doom-emacs[2], both are geared towards people that come from VIM and/or want to use VIM-like editing in emacs [1] http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/ [2] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs
  - weaksauce 9y ago
    I personally use spacemacs with a bunch of layers enabled. It uses evil mode for vim emulation.
- falcolas 9y ago
  I have to disagree. Evil mode in emacs is (on the scale of vim clones) pretty good, but it is still an emulation of vim within emacs, and there are a lot of hard stops throughout the experience for a long time vim user. The biggest hard stop for me was the implementation of C-[, which interpreted word boundaries differently than vim - differently than emacs even. Of course, if all you're looking for is modal editing in emacs and don't mind falling back to emacs keybinds, then evil mode will do just fine for you.
  - arnsholt 9y ago
    I had a similar issue when I had to work in Emacs too. Evil is, on the whole a good emulation, but I kept tripping over ^W not doing what I expected. And then if I messed up the undoing, I got to screw around with Emacs' redo functionality being... idiosyncratic.
  - weaksauce 9y ago
    You can change word boundaries pretty easily though. There is a little bit of friction in some things like that but nothing that is insurmountable. Every single keystroke is a function that can be changed and even wrapped with "advice" to leave the function alone but change the before, after, or both before and after the function is called.
flukus 9y ago
I've invested a great deal of time getting plugins to work, scripting my own, customizing every aspect of vim but I really wish I listened to the people saying all along that "vim is the text editor, unix is the IDE". Since I started following this advice I haven't looked back. The two main reasons I ignored this advice initially is that I was mainly on windows and that vim has some great windowing abilities. I knew about cygwin as an answer to the first but I didn't know about tmux previously, perhaps I didn't need to know because vim already had a similar feature set. Nowadays my vim setup is almost as minimal as yours.
- jrimbault 9y ago
  "I can get going", emphasis on "can" ;) I usually have more settings, but on a temp machine that's all I need.
yosamino 9y ago
> set relativenumber why thank you!
- kazinator 9y ago
  I didn't know about that either. What's this good for? One immediately obvious use is basic navigation. That line above I want to go to is 13, so '13k'. Now I'm there.
liveoneggs 9y ago
I wanted to add the few that I like but I think they're all defaults now :) set ruler set wildmenu set showcmd set scrolloff=4

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

I've always had a dream of starting a programming school. Educating new programmers seems like something that's not done very well. (Or maybe I have very limited experience here.) If I ever did, I think I'd start with text processing. If you are an expert at slicing, dicing, processing, and piping text? A bunch of other stuff suddenly becomes much easier.

cbm-vic-20 9y ago
I have a friend who teaches woodworking to kids; for their first project, he teaches them how to build a wooden mallet.
ccvannorman 9y ago
in Bay Area there are many programming / development / game development schools. I also worked on CodeHero.org for a time. What specifically do you think is wrong with the existing approaches? It's an area I also care a lot about and would like to gain more insight into. :-]
z3t4 9y ago
start a blog series.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

I keep refactoring my Emacs config, but it still grows instead of shrinking. Maybe I'm not "there" yet. But for now, I feel that the more things I start doing in Emacs, the more productive I get (and the more fun I'm having). They say Emacs is an OS; I find it to be a damn great one. Its UI model is a better fit for 90% of things I do on a computer than the standard one.

ninjakeyboard 9y ago

+1 - this article makes me think of my journey into emacs