3 ms·

Emacs in the real world – part 1

12 points by rayvega 16y ago

silentbicycle 16y ago
Uh, since when is Emacs mythical? This article is a bunch of noise. Yeah, Emacs expects you to play finger-twister sometimes (and I'm not convinced that's a good thing), and yeah, it's extensible as hell (which usually makes up for the awkward keybindings). If you want to learn Emacs, quit fetishizing it with articles like this and just do it. Install it, start it, then hit alt-x, type "help-with-tutorial", and hit enter. Work through the (brief) tutorial. It's not that hard. I'm sorry if xkcd never told you about this. Flagged.
- hugh3 16y ago
  It's not even all that hard to start using, since you can use the menu system for just about any command that a beginner might sensibly want his text editor to perform.
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    Sure, but if it was just about "any command that a beginner might sensibly want his text editor to perform", they could stick with textmate (or whatever). Using menus inherently sucks, because it doesn't scale to hundreds of operations. Emacs transcends both, but I don't begrudge the people who prefer vim either - each cuts the bullshit and focuses on actual editing. Also, a lot of people who build Emacs extensions (self included) consider the menus as an afterthought, best dealt with after cancer (or C++) is cured, i.e., never.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      Sure, but using the menus is just the starting point on the learning curve. After staring at 'em for a while you figure out what "C-x C-f" means and pretty soon you're playing pinkie twister with the best of 'em. That's the way I learned emacs, anyway. Of course there's many, many hidden depths I've never learned after nine years.
    - 1amzave 16y ago
      Hell, I just turn off the menu bar entirely -- and the scroll bar and the toolbar with all the goofy buttons on it...waste of valuable screen real estate that could have text in it, if you ask me. One of these days I'll get around to re-binding M-` to something useful, too...
  - greyfade 16y ago
    There's a menu? No, seriously. I've been using Vim for years and I've been recently trying to earn Emacs (and finding the tutorial to be atrociously unhelpful to me in that process), and all this time, I thought the menu was an XEmacs thing. (Sorta like how it is in GVim.) I never really notice the menu bar, and I still don't know how to activate it. Edit: Oh. M-`. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?
    - silentbicycle 16y ago
      You can also type M-x menu-bar-mode (where "M-x" means "alt-x" or "ESC x").
- hga 16y ago
  "Emacs expects you to play finger-twister sometimes" You know, some fair fraction of Wordperfect for DOS fans liked it for exactly that reason. Or rather, that mode of UI was preferable to using a GUI and they kept using it for a long time after Windows conquered (of course it helped that Wordperfect for Windows was a sick joke).

12 points by rayvega 16y ago

Uh, since when is Emacs mythical? This article is a bunch of noise. Yeah, Emacs expects you to play finger-twister sometimes (and I'm not convinced that's a good thing), and yeah, it's extensible as hell (which usually makes up for the awkward keybindings). If you want to learn Emacs, quit fetishizing it with articles like this and just do it. Install it, start it, then hit alt-x, type "help-with-tutorial", and hit enter. Work through the (brief) tutorial. It's not that hard. I'm sorry if xkcd never told you about this. Flagged.

hugh3 16y ago
It's not even all that hard to start using, since you can use the menu system for just about any command that a beginner might sensibly want his text editor to perform.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  Sure, but if it was just about "any command that a beginner might sensibly want his text editor to perform", they could stick with textmate (or whatever). Using menus inherently sucks, because it doesn't scale to hundreds of operations. Emacs transcends both, but I don't begrudge the people who prefer vim either - each cuts the bullshit and focuses on actual editing. Also, a lot of people who build Emacs extensions (self included) consider the menus as an afterthought, best dealt with after cancer (or C++) is cured, i.e., never.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Sure, but using the menus is just the starting point on the learning curve. After staring at 'em for a while you figure out what "C-x C-f" means and pretty soon you're playing pinkie twister with the best of 'em. That's the way I learned emacs, anyway. Of course there's many, many hidden depths I've never learned after nine years.
  - 1amzave 16y ago
    Hell, I just turn off the menu bar entirely -- and the scroll bar and the toolbar with all the goofy buttons on it...waste of valuable screen real estate that could have text in it, if you ask me. One of these days I'll get around to re-binding M-` to something useful, too...
- greyfade 16y ago
  There's a menu? No, seriously. I've been using Vim for years and I've been recently trying to earn Emacs (and finding the tutorial to be atrociously unhelpful to me in that process), and all this time, I thought the menu was an XEmacs thing. (Sorta like how it is in GVim.) I never really notice the menu bar, and I still don't know how to activate it. Edit: Oh. M-`. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    You can also type M-x menu-bar-mode (where "M-x" means "alt-x" or "ESC x").
hga 16y ago
"Emacs expects you to play finger-twister sometimes" You know, some fair fraction of Wordperfect for DOS fans liked it for exactly that reason. Or rather, that mode of UI was preferable to using a GUI and they kept using it for a long time after Windows conquered (of course it helped that Wordperfect for Windows was a sick joke).