15 ms·

Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

247 points by unhammer 7y ago

triska 7y ago
Very nice list, thank you for the writeup and for sharing this! One interesting thing about the Emacs modes listed here is that many one of them are by themselves already enough to justify the use of Emacs for at least someone in specific application domains. For example, there are statisticians who do not use much of the breadth of Emacs, except for the listed ESS mode, and who do a lot of their work in that mode. The same for magit, Org mode, calc, dired, Tramp and others. In addition to this richness in features and flexibility, a major attraction of Emacs is that switching between all these aspects is instantaneous.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  And with org-mode you can start to weave them together using the source blocks! I’ve been doing a fair bit of numerical code lately, and being able to have a Maxima repl, org, and my C source all in the same place has been amazing.
rbanffy 7y ago
The way I see it, there are two major approaches to IDEs - Extendable text editors (of which Emacs is the best example) and Visual Studio knock offs. There is no right or wrong answer, but I like the Emacs way.
- yaantc 7y ago
  I'd put it slightly differently, but I guess it is the same idea. There are two major approaches to software development: 1) powerful text editors (vi, Emacs) or 2) IDE. Powerful text editors are universal, but up to now their language support was often subpar compared to IDEs. They tend to do well for niche languages with no dedicated IDE, as then they're the reference editors. But for mainstream languages on can usually find IDEs with better language specific support. Still, they shine in pure editing power and after an initial investment you can use them for anything text based. Then an IDE can have the best language support for some usually small set of languages, but is not as powerful as a vi or Emacs for pure editing. That's the situation so far, but I see this changing thanks to the language server protocol [1]. It's the pattern seen in portable compilers, where a universal IR avoid a MxN explosion with M languages front-ends and N target ISA. Except here one avoids the M editors times N languages by having a universal protocol between an editor and a LSP server for a language. What the LSP allows is decoupling your editing front-end from the language support back-end (the LSP server). All this is a bit young, and moving fast, but in time it offers the possibility of a no-compromise experience: use the best editor for you, and still get the best language support available. It's already possible to extract Eclipse Java support, or Microsoft Python support, and use it with any LSP compliant editor for example, with some ad-hoc work. In time, all this should get more streamlined. Which makes me happy to have invested into Emacs ;) [1] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    Also, IDEs tend to have better framework support (it's nearly impossible to write Java code without one because you want an IDE that knows about Spring or Hibernate and can make all the Gradle stuff work), but that's economics - it's easier to sell an IDE than to sell an Emacs minor mode (which would end up having to fit in a with set of other things that may or may not conflict with what you have).
  - josteink 7y ago
    > That's the situation so far, but I see this changing thanks to the language server protocol It’s really interesting how LSP shifts what I’ll call “Visual Studio only features” into all editors, while at the same time you had Microsoft being the ones who initially pushed for LSP-adoption. I wonder how many internal discussions they had on this subject before saying “Go”. It’s a fantastic initiative and I’m glad it’s there for me, in my Emacs today.
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      Visual Studio-like IDEs are a dead end. There is little revenue opportunity in them and a huge downside in losing relevance in the overall developer mindshare. How many of us would be using a Microsoft IDE/text editor if it were not for VS Code?
      - coldtea 7y ago
        The millions that use and will continue to use Visual Studio?
        rbanffy 7y ago
        Visual Studio is great for developing on Windows software that'll run on Windows or XBox. Feels like a dead end to me. The ecosystem has colossal inertia, but it's easy to see the lack of future.
        dmitriid 7y ago
- jhbadger 7y ago
  And ironically, I'd argue that Visual Studio Code despite the name is more of a member of the former (it is basically an Atom clone) than it is like traditional Visual Studio.
- overgard 7y ago
  I'd say the two approaches are: - Editors that prioritize text operations - Editors that prioritize AST structure operations IDEs are the latter.
tasubotadas 7y ago
I remember giving Emacs a serious go 5 years ago. I really wanted to like it but the archaic mode switches[1] were just too much when you are used to the convenience of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (I'll call these "modern shortcuts"). I've tried using ErgoEmacs[2] but what I've learned was that it doesn't really play nicely with all the other extensions. It's a shame because I've wanted to find something a bit more powerful than nano for config and code updates on remote machines. [1] http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_kb_shortcuts_pain.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_kb_shortcuts_pain.html [2] https://ergoemacs.github.io/ https://ergoemacs.github.io/
- didibus 7y ago
  You can use CUA mode: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode I also highly recommend Spacemacs. If VI isn't your thing, it is still great to use it, just set it up in Holy mode using Ivy. What it adds (on top of a great default config), is bindings which start with M-m (that's Alt+m). For almost everything. Like saving your file is M-m f s (that's Alt+m release, f release, s release).
  - fao_ 7y ago
    Sure, but with a leader key in vim set to 'f', I can save with f-s (that is, press the f key and then the s key), which after a month is next to automatic
    - dan-robertson 7y ago
      You’re arguing about vim shortcuts in reply to a description of what one can do if one doesn’t want vim shortcuts. Note that the equivalent in vim is not really f s, but ESC f s, because in most modes where one might do M-m f s, most characters insert themselves, the equivalent of insert mode in vim. Note also that in regular emacs one can do C-x C-s (ie holding control press x then s).
crispyambulance 7y ago
No thanks. I've had several bouts of trying to learn emacs throughout my life. It isn't necessary to list all the benefits, sure, there's a lot. Yes, I get it's "extensible" and you can write little elisp programs to do just what you want. Here's the obstacle: Motor skills. It just takes way to long to first memorize reams of commands and then to train your fingers to issue those commands effortlessly. In the meantime, searching, "apropos" and googling stuff isn't an attractive thing to do when you have _actual_ work to do. That's a serious obstacle and no listing of all the awesome-ness of emacs is going to convince many of us to put in that kind of effort.
- fipar 7y ago
  I had a similar experience to yours until I realized that the extensible part also means you don't need to use the builtin commands and shortcuts. I have been using emacs for 10 years (used vim for about 12 before that, using emacs with evil-mode now) and, to this day, I have to google 'how to quit emacs' when I am faced with a vanilla emacs :) I just feel it's "my" editor more than any other editor I've ever used. edit: typos
  - ljm 7y ago
    I’ve basically used Hydra (as opposed to Evil) for creating a series of mappings that make sense for me.
  - klibertp 7y ago
    > I just feel it's "my" editor more than any other editor I've ever used. So true! When I first tried to get into Emacs it was as a somewhat seasoned programmer who wanted to play with a Lisp other than Scheme. I've read the built-in tutorial and almost ran away in horror. I get it - for non-programmer users, yes, it makes sense to try to teach them the usage of an editor. I lost quite a lot of time trying to remember exotic chords like C-u C-x ^ a and so on, but it was ultimately meaningless - not one such shortcut remains in my config. Emacs is an IDE for Emacs Lisp written in Emacs Lisp (and it's incredibly powerful at that, BTW). In other words, it's a bunch of APIs you can call, and it also gives you the place where you can interactively execute any elisp code and see the effects immediately in the same instance of the editor. It's obvious in hindsight, but I believe I'd get into Emacs much faster if I started with Emacs Lisp manual or maybe "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" book instead of going through the Emacs manual (huuuuuge!) first and trying to bend my habits to fit the vanilla Emacs. I think most programmers who wish to switch to Emacs should try to do it the other way: start with learning Elisp syntax and Paredit, then learn about modes, hooks, and key-maps and start hacking your own config. Everything else - buffers, windows, fringes, faces, what-have-you - you'll learn as needed when you need to implement a particular command which deals with them. Pull in a healthy amount of plugins then read their source - or just read the source of Emacs, as you can jump to definition of any function in one click, even if it's written in C - and before long you'll have a comfortable environment to work in, with all the features you learned to love from your previous editor. And that's when the fun part start: exploring Emacs features that you've never seen or heard about, wrapping external tools and streamlining their workflows, exploring the huge pile of add-ons.
raphinou 7y ago
I recently tried to switch from vim to Emacs with spacemacs. I enjoyed it until I discovered Emacs has no support for tabs (ui tabs, not the character ;). I went back to vim mainly due to that, but still miss magit....
- wmeddie 7y ago
  Aquamacs (http://aquamacs.org http://aquamacs.org) get's it tabs from somewhere...
- rout39574 7y ago
  You can have many things going at the same time, and select between them using the buffer menu. I find the devotion of yet another chunk of screen real estate to the tab list rather a waste, but shrug aesthetics. C-x C-b shows you the list of tabs ("buffers") and lets you select from them easily. As a bonus, the title portion isn't compressed to incomprehensibility when they get numerous.
  - klibertp 7y ago
    I use tabs to switch between window configurations. Say I code in Python, with docs and shell windows on the right. Then I want to quickly take a look at git history. But, if I start magit, it will hijack the window configuration and my carefully placed/resized windows will get messy. So, I open a new tab and start magit there. Now, I can switch between the two tabs - ie. window/buffer layouts - with a single key. The fact that I mention saving the layout of windows should hint that I know you can do this in vanilla Emacs by saving and restoring window configurations, but it's much less hassle with tabs. Also, you can hide tab bar (as well as menu bar and button bar) when you don't need it, and it's actually quite handy when you do need it. To each their own of course, just saying there are good uses for tabs in Emacs, unless you want to delegate this to your WM and launch one frame per window config.
    - gpderetta 7y ago
      hum, tabs for frames, not buffers basically. That seems useful. What's your setup?
aldanor 7y ago
Being a vim guy myself, I only use Emacs (Spacemacs, to be precise, so as to get rid of all those a-x a-y a-z a-m-s-x type shortcuts and replace them with something ergonomic) as a git client - because Magit is the best git client out there. I’ve tried using Spacemacs as a main editor for a while, but it’s too much of a mess, and if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks, thanks but no thanks, I’ll use vim or kak as the actual text editor. I also noticed I spent an enormous amount of time constantly tweaking my spacemacs config as opposed to doing actual work.
- alpaca128 7y ago
  Have you looked at Vimagit? I haven't used it but it's supposed to imitate magit in Vim.
  - juandazapata 7y ago
    Sadly, it's not even close.
- xenophonf 7y ago
  if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks Is Spacemacs really that broken? I use the same GNU Emacs configuration across Windows, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, and macOS, along with packages like tramp, magit, slime, and python-mode, and the worst thing that's happened in recent memory is that either jinja2-mode or salt-mode (I forget which) doesn't indent things the way I like.
  - quanticle 7y ago
    Spacemacs is that broken. The problem is that Spacemacs tries to impose its own shortcuts onto other emacs packages that may or may not know about spacemacs. For modes that perform extensive customization of their own, spacemacs alterations to emacs can result in some very weird behavior. For example, markdown-mode's highlighting, will, for mysterious reasons break when used with spacemacs [1]. The other problem with spacemacs is that if you're trying to use another emacs package, now you have to look up two sets of documentation. You have to look up the package's documentation to find the command that you want to execute, and then you have to look up the documentation for the relevant spacemacs layer to figure out what spacemacs has remapped the command to. I tried to use spacemacs as a transition path from vim to emacs, but I found that I had much more success by just "ripping off the bandaid", remapping caps-lock to ctrl and spending a weekend forcing myself to relearn how to perform my most commonly used vim commands in emacs. [1]: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/11790 https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/11790
RaycatRakittra 7y ago
I love Emacs. For all of its warts, "historical reasons", and vestigal features, it is the editor that really opened my eyes to alternative ways to do introspection and programming, in general. I want to believe the friction comes if you try to "fix" Emacs too early. You kinda have to conform to the Emacs way when learning it and leave all of your assumptions at the door. I see a lot of people who come to Emacs from Vim expecting Evil Mode to be the panacea for Emacs. It's not. At the end of the day, it's still Emacs and people run into friction because they expect it to be Vim-ish all over or they want to force Emacs to be Vim. Personally, I came from Vim to Emacs via Spacemacs. I was a bit of a zealot about Vim until I tried Emacs. I left all of my expectations behind and I was pleasantly surprised by many things inside. Were there things I disliked? Of course. But, I wasn't looking for an excuse to hate it.
- eequah9L 7y ago
  > I see a lot of people who come to Emacs from Vim expecting Evil Mode to be the panacea for Emacs. It's not. At the end of the day, it's still Emacs Yes. I've been Emacs guy for close to two decades now, and switched to Evil about four years ago, because Vim controls are just better, no two ways about it. However you still need to escape back into Emacs every now and then to do various un-Evil'd tidbits. That's easy for me, but would be problematic for someone who expects Evil to (as you put it) "fix Emacs".
- sdegutis 7y ago
  I had a similar path to Emacs: became really proficient with Vim, avoided Emacs since everyone I knew hated it, saw someone doing things with incredible speed and efficiency in Emacs at Enova (hi Kyle) that I had never imagined could be done, tried Emacs myself, and spent weeks customizing it to become extremely fast with rapid development in Clojure using CIDER. But now that I do vanilla front-end dev, I have found VS Code to give me nearly all the same productivity I had before, but with practically no configuration, and in an editor that actually has reasonable per-pixel scrolling. (Emacs added per-pixel scrolling in 2017 but still got it wrong somehow.)
  - boustrophedon 7y ago
JohnStrangeII 7y ago
I'm using Emacs for my daily tasks, both writing and programming. One question I have to more experienced Emacs users: Can you recommend an email client? It needs to be able to display html mails. Currently, I use claws-mail and am fairly happy with it, except for the search. I've got about 30,000 mails in the inbox and full-text searching them takes too long. Is there a way to transition my claws-mail folders to Emacs, or ideally use both programs at the same time for a while? The article recommends notmuch-emacs. But I'm afraid of 2 things, (i) loosing existing mails in the transition (due to e.g. faulty conversion tools), and (ii) that after a complicated transition I'm not happy with the new setup. Any recommendations? Is it possible to use the claws-mail email inboxes directly in Emacs? Another thing is org-mode. I never really managed to get deep enough into it to really see the benefits. I've even bought the printed org-mode manual, but the setup seems so complicated. Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for?
- nextos 7y ago
  Notmuch is excellent. I guess if your email is in maildir format, you can use it directly within Notmuch. One thing that sets Notmuch apart from other MUAs is that it never ever touches your email files.
- yaantc 7y ago
  > Another thing is org-mode. [...] Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for? I would recommend starting using Org just for note taking, using its outline capabilities. It's simple and avoid being overwhelmed and buried in features. One tutorial for this is [1], but even then it has advanced parts you can ignore at first. There are many Org tutorials, at some point it's best to just pick one and dive in instead of looking for the best one and ending up paralyzed by choice (a problem sometimes with Org and Emacs...). Then once familiar with this you can extend your usage in various directions: add TODO and agenda for GTD, use it to export to nice web pages with a "read the doc" theme [2], etc. [1] https://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-org/ https://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with... [2] https://github.com/fniessen/org-html-themes https://github.com/fniessen/org-html-themes
- 7y ago
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I bookmarked this. I have been using Emacs since I bought a manual around 1980, but, the article mentioned a few packages I didn’t know about.
- m463 7y ago
  This happens all the time to me. The other day, I found my old hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy infocom image (interactive fiction) and it turns out someone wrote some elisp that lets you play it in emacs. (that said, elisp isn't a very expressive language for me, python is my favorite language right now)
roland35 7y ago
I am currently only using Emacs for org mode, and overall it works great for taking notes, keeping track of tasks, and outputting documentation. However... I would _love_ to see a GUI version of just org mode which would combine a few features of OneNote, well I would be happy if it only made adding pictures better!
sprash 7y ago
I used emacs for years and had accumulated about 10000 loc init.el over that time. With my new employer I'm forced to use notepad++ on Windows. The difference in actual productivity: zero! Emacs is a nice hobby but when you want do get shit done it won't help you being more productive except for some rare corner cases. So don't buy into the Emacs Plattform. Maybe just learn the basics because sometimes it is the only editor installed. If you spend more than two hours on it you are wasting your time.
- jerf 7y ago
  I've used emacs for 25 years, and I kinda agree, actually. What keeps me using it is precisely that it's been stable that long. Given that I don't really need that many features, it's been nice to not have to change editors, what, 5 or 6 times in that period of time? I've got some very light customization to expose the macro features more conveniently, and like three or four keybindings for my major languages I work in. Other than that, part of what keeps me in emacs is that it supports SSH'ing to remote systems to edit things very well, so I can use my desktop editor in all kinds of environments with everything I'm used to, no matter where I'm having to edit something, as long as SSH can get to it. While there are other editors that can do this to some extent, I find that when it's nominally "time" to switch to New Editor of the Half-Decade it's often a missing or poorly-implemented feature. Also, as strange as it may seem, a lot of editors aren't all that great at editing 5 files at a time. They certainly can, but they're not that great at it. Emacs is pretty good. I don't even use any funky extensions for it. I still don't really know elisp. I've seen emacs wizards, and I'm not one, despite 25 years with it. Given that editor features aren't really that important, why not pick one decent tool and stick with it? At least then I'm not surprised when I have to pick up a new tool and, oh, crap, it doesn't do networks, and, tabs, seriously, tabs for multiple buffers with no keyboard access based on names? No. (I do also know enough vi to get around in it when I have to use it on some system for some reason.)
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  Once or twice a quarter I'll end up with a relatively mechanical task that I can do with a keyboard macro, query-replace-regexp/dired-do-find-regexp-and-replace. That normally saves me at least 30-45 minutes compared to either doing it manually or writing a script.
fourier_mode 7y ago
I've been a vim guy for 5 years now. And last month I tried to switch to emacs. But it just didn't feel natural for the following reasons: 1. My usual coding session would involve Vim+Tmux, on trying the same with emacs. I was seeing some lag(although small, but noticeable). 2. I am very used to the key strokes "g-d, g-D" in vim to quickly move around calls/declarations of functions. For that emacs makes use of Ctags, which is more versatile but not great for a quick lookup. 3. I have had better luck with Vim's linting plugins like ALE and haven't found similar plugins for Emacs which was eventually a major game changer to switch back to Vim. On the other set of tools: - Org-mode and latex-preview-pane-mode are the 2 set of tools which I have integrated into my workflow and they are very suitable to me. - ERC is also pretty neat. - I have tried Magit and although seems useful, for my use case of Emacs currently doesn't hold a lot of promise. - Switch to Gnus, mu4e as mail clients replacements is too painful, at least to a Thunderbird user.
- zeveb 7y ago
  > I have had better luck with Vim's linting plugins like ALE and haven't found similar plugins for Emacs … Did you try flycheck?
- dan-robertson 7y ago
  Regarding your first point, do you mean that you try running emacs inside a tmux inside a terminal? If that is the case, I would recommend not doing that. The emacs gui will give you more colours, images, thinner window borders, better keyboard shortcuts (eg a difference between C-m and RET), mouse controls (if you ever want them), as well as potentially less lag. The analog to the vim-in-tmux workflow is to instead keep emacs always open in the gui, run somewhere between none and all shell commands from emacs (depending on how you feel), and have a terminal in another window (as you might for web browsing or email) for more prolonged terminal things. One might skip this somewhat by running shell (or even term-mode) in emacs. Similarly, for editing remote files one uses tramp to ssh from inside emacs and edit files whereas with vim one sshes into the remote box and runs vim.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
betenoire 7y ago
As a former Vim addict of over 12 years: to those who would like to try to move to Emacs, and Spacemacs doesn't cut it, try Doom! https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs It is a much thinner configuration, and you will learn Emacs instead of layers and Spacemacs conventions. It only took me about a week of deliberate use to adapt my work flow and get used to it, and it has been my primary editor for nearly a year now.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  At first glance, I thought this would be an Emacs tutorial superimposed on top of the Doom engine, ala DOOM as a Tool for System Administration.[0] [0]https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
burtonator 7y ago
I used Emacs for 15 years. I've been off of Emacs for about 5-6 years now and I won't ever go back. Here's why: 1. Refactoring. The refactorings in IntelliJ are amazing. Amazing. The ability to say (yeah, this class is now called Foo instead of Bar) and have everything automatically changed is outstanding. This is a basic example of course but you can also do things like remove a function parameter, and also do things like lookup reverse symbols. 2. Stable. IntelliJ is just amazingly stable. Part of this is that I had to write elisp to get Emacs to do stuff that IntellJ just already provides for me. Everytime Emacs would upgrade I would have to upgrade Emacs. 3. Pair programming. I could NEVER work with other engineers on their code and vice versa. We just didn't speak the same language. Now mind you I also created a lot of the code you use in Emacs. I co-created EDE for example.
- dmortin 7y ago
  Even if you don't use emacs for coding Java, etc. it can be still useful, e.g note taking, task management with org mode.
- kamaal 7y ago
  Java is more like assembly language programming at this point in software history. You shouldn't be editing Java with any editor, let alone emacs. This is because if you are using 3 frameworks, and 30 classes with DI and reflection, just to post a json to a http end point, you should be using an IDE to handle that kind of madness.
  - ethelward 7y ago
    That's more of an architecture problem rather than an intrinsic characteristic of Java though. I'm not a fan of the language, but I think the latest versions added some nifty features that make working with the language not as bad as it used to be.
module0000 7y ago
Logging into "work" systems and typing "emacs" == "command not found". Typing "vi" opens a useful editor. It's not that I hate emacs or have some aversion to anything except vi/vim. The problem is that vi is everywhere, and by mastering the always-available editor, I always have my tools at hand. On foreign systems, or highly regulated systems that I can't add software to, this is a huge advantage.
- yaantc 7y ago
  True, but the workflow you describe is not the natural one for Emacs. Emacs has a built-in package called TRAMP [1] for remote work. You don't log into a distant server and open Emacs there, you use Emacs on your local PC and open the remote file naturally, using a syntax like /method:user@host:/path/to/file, but most often /-:host:/path/to/file (when using SSH access set as default, with your local user name). Except for the special file path it's just like for a local file. Then when launching a shell command, or a full shell, or a grep or compile or whatnot from a buffer editing a remote file, Emacs will automatically launch the command remote machine too. That makes the experience rather transparent. It's possible to have multiple buffers editing files on different machines at the same time. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Quick-Start-Guide https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Quick-Start-Guide
- dmortin 7y ago
  As the sibling comment says you should try editing remote files with the editor running on your computer. Tramp provides this transparently for Emacs. You don't have to manually log in to edit remote files.
- yarrel 7y ago
  Yes vi is there on systems where you don't have Emacs. Vi is simple enough to remember the commands you need if this ever happens, and this is not really a reason to eschew something more powerful everywhere else.
spellcard199 7y ago
---- TLDR ---- I completely agree with the others who say: - learn elisp instead of learning "emacs" - if you want to memorize something, just learn the name of the command: if you use it very often then learn/define a keybinding for it ---- part 1: I'm happy I've learned elisp in the last year People complain about memorizing emacs keybindings, but most of the time I just call the command name with M-x command-name. Only if I find myself using it often I bother memorizing or setting a keybinding for it. As for why I use emacs, I started using it for org-mode, which I considered it's only killer feature at the time. Since 1 year ago I started learning elisp and I think only now I can see what's the whole point of emacs. In just 1 year of (beginner-level) elisp I wrote 75 files containing elisp functions to help myself with dozens of tasks that comprise: - move/mirror parts of ascii diagrams - automate some tasks just clicking on custom org-mode links - wrap ammonite-term-repl to get Ammonite completion for scala scripts [1] [2] - add rudimentary support for kawa scheme to geiser (my first pull request ever (still waiting for response)) - control video player from within emacs while I'm writing subtitles ---- part 2: you can have different emacs configurations Another common complain is that emacs tends to become slower as you add more and more packages. As a spacemacs user, I noticed that too. For this reason when I don't need spacemacs goodies I use multiple, different emacs configurations (with evil-mode though). This is how I do it: 1 - Make a new ".emacs.d" user directory somewhere 2 - Make a new "init.el" user file inside it 3 - Add to the beginning of init.el : (setq user-init-file (or load-file-name "path-to-init.el")) (setq user-emacs-directory (file-name-directory user-init-file)) 4 - Call emacs with: emacs -Q --load "path-to-init.el" That's it. You could achieve the same result using cask, which would be more elegant imo, but takes a couple of seconds more to start. ---- part 3: use elisp to call other languages As for elisp, once you have learned enough of it (not much), if you are determined not to use it, there are different ways to call other languages from it: - clojure through cider plus clomacs - common lisp through slime - shen through shen-elisp [3] - different compiled languages through dynamic modules: - C (example at [4]) - go (example at [5]) - ... many others I haven't investigated... Just out of curiosity, I explored the shen-elisp path. I tried a whole week to see if I could replace it with shen-elisp. At the end of the week I learnt how to call elisp from shen-elisp and shen-elisp from elisp... and the fact that every time you restart shen-elisp you have to re-declare types. However I abandoned the idea for 2 reasons: - Plain elisp is faster: I don't know the implications - I wanted to focus on elisp so I can contribute better to other elisp projects ---- references [1] https://github.com/zwild/ammonite-term-repl [2] https://github.com/spellcard199/ammonite-term-repl-completion [3] https://github.com/deech/shen-elisp [4] http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2017/07/08/Adding-numerical-methods-to-emacs-with-dynamic-modules/ [5] https://mrosset.github.io/emacs-module/
egypturnash 7y ago
“I don’t care what editor you use for source code – you can use Quick basic for all I care – but look, you have to know that Magit exists. Even if you don’t use Emacs in any other capacity, you may want to use it for Magit.” There are exactly two instances of “Magit” in this web page and I just quoted both of them.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  A quick web search brings me to Magit’s page, which tells me that Magit is “A Git Porcelain inside Emacs” which just creates further questions. How does one make delicate pottery out of a version control system? In what circles is “a porcelain” a synonym for “user interface”?
  - quanticle 7y ago
    As far as I can tell, it's only in git circles. Git refers to its command line interface as "porcelain" to distinguish it from the "plumbing" that is the .git folder.
  - gknoy 7y ago
    The Git documentation refers to everything Nicely Shaped that is tacked on to the core git functionality as "porcelain" [0]. (Pretty much everything that we normally use when interacting with git counts as porcelain.) 0: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Porcelain https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Po...
  - iak8god 7y ago
    I can get over "porcelain," but the Magit site would certainly benefit from better organization. You can skim the entire landing page without gaining much sense for what it's all about, and then it turns out that if you just click on the first screenshot on that page, you end up at "A visual walk-through" https://magit.vc/screenshots/ https://magit.vc/screenshots/, which is much more helpful. But you have to mouse over that screenshot and notice that the pointer changes in order to even realize that it's a link.
JohnAtCC 7y ago
Real men use vi
milin 7y ago
Vim is life.
lame88 7y ago
So, emacs is a platform for text-based programs to do things that i already have other stable, reliable, and familiar programs to accomplish. I’m not sold. I need a better value proposition before i feel sold to spend my time climbing that learning curve.
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  >text-based programs Not text based, it has buttons, widgets, can embed pictures and graphics. >reliable, and familiar programs to accomplish In emacs these bits of code are integrated, so I could, for example, save an IRC chat as buffer, edit it, and send a e-mail. Or open an interactive REPL of maxima, for example, copy result to latex having embedded previews for formulas, and then compile it to pdf (and preview in emacs). Different parts could be combined in any possible way with elisp code. You can easily call any email-related or rfeed-related function from your code at any time.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    The question is: is it worth it? Trying to figure out all those functions, setting all tose modes, and then programming them the way you described. Especially when all you just described can be done with regular copy-paste between dedicated programs if needed.
- unhammer 7y ago
  > Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality. > The more you feel that you can control your environment, and that the things you do are actually working, the happier you are. When you find yourself frustrated, angry, and upset, it’s probably because of something that happened that you could not control: even something small. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-design-for-programmers/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des... is actually a great argument for Emacs (even though the only time Emacs is mentioned there is an example of inconsistencies in keyboards shortcuts with other editors).
jstewartmobile 7y ago
If only Emacs had become the VM of the web rather than Chrome! I'm more than ready to trade our impending soyberpunk police-state dystopia for a case of carpal tunnel syndrome.
ReneFroger 7y ago
A good resource for anyone who wants study Emacs further or try out things, I found this very helpful for me: https://emacs.zeef.com https://emacs.zeef.com

247 points by unhammer 7y ago

Very nice list, thank you for the writeup and for sharing this! One interesting thing about the Emacs modes listed here is that many one of them are by themselves already enough to justify the use of Emacs for at least someone in specific application domains. For example, there are statisticians who do not use much of the breadth of Emacs, except for the listed ESS mode, and who do a lot of their work in that mode. The same for magit, Org mode, calc, dired, Tramp and others. In addition to this richness in features and flexibility, a major attraction of Emacs is that switching between all these aspects is instantaneous.

tonyarkles 7y ago
And with org-mode you can start to weave them together using the source blocks! I’ve been doing a fair bit of numerical code lately, and being able to have a Maxima repl, org, and my C source all in the same place has been amazing.

rbanffy 7y ago

The way I see it, there are two major approaches to IDEs - Extendable text editors (of which Emacs is the best example) and Visual Studio knock offs. There is no right or wrong answer, but I like the Emacs way.

yaantc 7y ago
I'd put it slightly differently, but I guess it is the same idea. There are two major approaches to software development: 1) powerful text editors (vi, Emacs) or 2) IDE. Powerful text editors are universal, but up to now their language support was often subpar compared to IDEs. They tend to do well for niche languages with no dedicated IDE, as then they're the reference editors. But for mainstream languages on can usually find IDEs with better language specific support. Still, they shine in pure editing power and after an initial investment you can use them for anything text based. Then an IDE can have the best language support for some usually small set of languages, but is not as powerful as a vi or Emacs for pure editing. That's the situation so far, but I see this changing thanks to the language server protocol [1]. It's the pattern seen in portable compilers, where a universal IR avoid a MxN explosion with M languages front-ends and N target ISA. Except here one avoids the M editors times N languages by having a universal protocol between an editor and a LSP server for a language. What the LSP allows is decoupling your editing front-end from the language support back-end (the LSP server). All this is a bit young, and moving fast, but in time it offers the possibility of a no-compromise experience: use the best editor for you, and still get the best language support available. It's already possible to extract Eclipse Java support, or Microsoft Python support, and use it with any LSP compliant editor for example, with some ad-hoc work. In time, all this should get more streamlined. Which makes me happy to have invested into Emacs ;) [1] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/
- rbanffy 7y ago
  Also, IDEs tend to have better framework support (it's nearly impossible to write Java code without one because you want an IDE that knows about Spring or Hibernate and can make all the Gradle stuff work), but that's economics - it's easier to sell an IDE than to sell an Emacs minor mode (which would end up having to fit in a with set of other things that may or may not conflict with what you have).
- josteink 7y ago
  > That's the situation so far, but I see this changing thanks to the language server protocol It’s really interesting how LSP shifts what I’ll call “Visual Studio only features” into all editors, while at the same time you had Microsoft being the ones who initially pushed for LSP-adoption. I wonder how many internal discussions they had on this subject before saying “Go”. It’s a fantastic initiative and I’m glad it’s there for me, in my Emacs today.
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    Visual Studio-like IDEs are a dead end. There is little revenue opportunity in them and a huge downside in losing relevance in the overall developer mindshare. How many of us would be using a Microsoft IDE/text editor if it were not for VS Code?
    - coldtea 7y ago
      The millions that use and will continue to use Visual Studio?
      - rbanffy 7y ago
        Visual Studio is great for developing on Windows software that'll run on Windows or XBox. Feels like a dead end to me. The ecosystem has colossal inertia, but it's easy to see the lack of future.
        dmitriid 7y ago
jhbadger 7y ago
And ironically, I'd argue that Visual Studio Code despite the name is more of a member of the former (it is basically an Atom clone) than it is like traditional Visual Studio.
overgard 7y ago
I'd say the two approaches are: - Editors that prioritize text operations - Editors that prioritize AST structure operations IDEs are the latter.

tasubotadas 7y ago

I remember giving Emacs a serious go 5 years ago. I really wanted to like it but the archaic mode switches[1] were just too much when you are used to the convenience of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (I'll call these "modern shortcuts"). I've tried using ErgoEmacs[2] but what I've learned was that it doesn't really play nicely with all the other extensions. It's a shame because I've wanted to find something a bit more powerful than nano for config and code updates on remote machines. [1] http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_kb_shortcuts_pain.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_kb_shortcuts_pain.html [2] https://ergoemacs.github.io/ https://ergoemacs.github.io/

didibus 7y ago
You can use CUA mode: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode I also highly recommend Spacemacs. If VI isn't your thing, it is still great to use it, just set it up in Holy mode using Ivy. What it adds (on top of a great default config), is bindings which start with M-m (that's Alt+m). For almost everything. Like saving your file is M-m f s (that's Alt+m release, f release, s release).
- fao_ 7y ago
  Sure, but with a leader key in vim set to 'f', I can save with f-s (that is, press the f key and then the s key), which after a month is next to automatic
  - dan-robertson 7y ago
    You’re arguing about vim shortcuts in reply to a description of what one can do if one doesn’t want vim shortcuts. Note that the equivalent in vim is not really f s, but ESC f s, because in most modes where one might do M-m f s, most characters insert themselves, the equivalent of insert mode in vim. Note also that in regular emacs one can do C-x C-s (ie holding control press x then s).

crispyambulance 7y ago

No thanks. I've had several bouts of trying to learn emacs throughout my life. It isn't necessary to list all the benefits, sure, there's a lot. Yes, I get it's "extensible" and you can write little elisp programs to do just what you want. Here's the obstacle: Motor skills. It just takes way to long to first memorize reams of commands and then to train your fingers to issue those commands effortlessly. In the meantime, searching, "apropos" and googling stuff isn't an attractive thing to do when you have _actual_ work to do. That's a serious obstacle and no listing of all the awesome-ness of emacs is going to convince many of us to put in that kind of effort.

fipar 7y ago
I had a similar experience to yours until I realized that the extensible part also means you don't need to use the builtin commands and shortcuts. I have been using emacs for 10 years (used vim for about 12 before that, using emacs with evil-mode now) and, to this day, I have to google 'how to quit emacs' when I am faced with a vanilla emacs :) I just feel it's "my" editor more than any other editor I've ever used. edit: typos
- ljm 7y ago
  I’ve basically used Hydra (as opposed to Evil) for creating a series of mappings that make sense for me.
- klibertp 7y ago
  > I just feel it's "my" editor more than any other editor I've ever used. So true! When I first tried to get into Emacs it was as a somewhat seasoned programmer who wanted to play with a Lisp other than Scheme. I've read the built-in tutorial and almost ran away in horror. I get it - for non-programmer users, yes, it makes sense to try to teach them the usage of an editor. I lost quite a lot of time trying to remember exotic chords like C-u C-x ^ a and so on, but it was ultimately meaningless - not one such shortcut remains in my config. Emacs is an IDE for Emacs Lisp written in Emacs Lisp (and it's incredibly powerful at that, BTW). In other words, it's a bunch of APIs you can call, and it also gives you the place where you can interactively execute any elisp code and see the effects immediately in the same instance of the editor. It's obvious in hindsight, but I believe I'd get into Emacs much faster if I started with Emacs Lisp manual or maybe "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" book instead of going through the Emacs manual (huuuuuge!) first and trying to bend my habits to fit the vanilla Emacs. I think most programmers who wish to switch to Emacs should try to do it the other way: start with learning Elisp syntax and Paredit, then learn about modes, hooks, and key-maps and start hacking your own config. Everything else - buffers, windows, fringes, faces, what-have-you - you'll learn as needed when you need to implement a particular command which deals with them. Pull in a healthy amount of plugins then read their source - or just read the source of Emacs, as you can jump to definition of any function in one click, even if it's written in C - and before long you'll have a comfortable environment to work in, with all the features you learned to love from your previous editor. And that's when the fun part start: exploring Emacs features that you've never seen or heard about, wrapping external tools and streamlining their workflows, exploring the huge pile of add-ons.

raphinou 7y ago

I recently tried to switch from vim to Emacs with spacemacs. I enjoyed it until I discovered Emacs has no support for tabs (ui tabs, not the character ;). I went back to vim mainly due to that, but still miss magit....

wmeddie 7y ago
Aquamacs (http://aquamacs.org http://aquamacs.org) get's it tabs from somewhere...
rout39574 7y ago
You can have many things going at the same time, and select between them using the buffer menu. I find the devotion of yet another chunk of screen real estate to the tab list rather a waste, but shrug aesthetics. C-x C-b shows you the list of tabs ("buffers") and lets you select from them easily. As a bonus, the title portion isn't compressed to incomprehensibility when they get numerous.
- klibertp 7y ago
  I use tabs to switch between window configurations. Say I code in Python, with docs and shell windows on the right. Then I want to quickly take a look at git history. But, if I start magit, it will hijack the window configuration and my carefully placed/resized windows will get messy. So, I open a new tab and start magit there. Now, I can switch between the two tabs - ie. window/buffer layouts - with a single key. The fact that I mention saving the layout of windows should hint that I know you can do this in vanilla Emacs by saving and restoring window configurations, but it's much less hassle with tabs. Also, you can hide tab bar (as well as menu bar and button bar) when you don't need it, and it's actually quite handy when you do need it. To each their own of course, just saying there are good uses for tabs in Emacs, unless you want to delegate this to your WM and launch one frame per window config.
  - gpderetta 7y ago
    hum, tabs for frames, not buffers basically. That seems useful. What's your setup?

aldanor 7y ago

Being a vim guy myself, I only use Emacs (Spacemacs, to be precise, so as to get rid of all those a-x a-y a-z a-m-s-x type shortcuts and replace them with something ergonomic) as a git client - because Magit is the best git client out there. I’ve tried using Spacemacs as a main editor for a while, but it’s too much of a mess, and if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks, thanks but no thanks, I’ll use vim or kak as the actual text editor. I also noticed I spent an enormous amount of time constantly tweaking my spacemacs config as opposed to doing actual work.

alpaca128 7y ago
Have you looked at Vimagit? I haven't used it but it's supposed to imitate magit in Vim.
- juandazapata 7y ago
  Sadly, it's not even close.
xenophonf 7y ago
if anything goes wrong (and it often does) you’re stuck with obscure lisp tracebacks Is Spacemacs really that broken? I use the same GNU Emacs configuration across Windows, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, and macOS, along with packages like tramp, magit, slime, and python-mode, and the worst thing that's happened in recent memory is that either jinja2-mode or salt-mode (I forget which) doesn't indent things the way I like.
- quanticle 7y ago
  Spacemacs is that broken. The problem is that Spacemacs tries to impose its own shortcuts onto other emacs packages that may or may not know about spacemacs. For modes that perform extensive customization of their own, spacemacs alterations to emacs can result in some very weird behavior. For example, markdown-mode's highlighting, will, for mysterious reasons break when used with spacemacs [1]. The other problem with spacemacs is that if you're trying to use another emacs package, now you have to look up two sets of documentation. You have to look up the package's documentation to find the command that you want to execute, and then you have to look up the documentation for the relevant spacemacs layer to figure out what spacemacs has remapped the command to. I tried to use spacemacs as a transition path from vim to emacs, but I found that I had much more success by just "ripping off the bandaid", remapping caps-lock to ctrl and spending a weekend forcing myself to relearn how to perform my most commonly used vim commands in emacs. [1]: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/11790 https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/11790

RaycatRakittra 7y ago

I love Emacs. For all of its warts, "historical reasons", and vestigal features, it is the editor that really opened my eyes to alternative ways to do introspection and programming, in general. I want to believe the friction comes if you try to "fix" Emacs too early. You kinda have to conform to the Emacs way when learning it and leave all of your assumptions at the door. I see a lot of people who come to Emacs from Vim expecting Evil Mode to be the panacea for Emacs. It's not. At the end of the day, it's still Emacs and people run into friction because they expect it to be Vim-ish all over or they want to force Emacs to be Vim. Personally, I came from Vim to Emacs via Spacemacs. I was a bit of a zealot about Vim until I tried Emacs. I left all of my expectations behind and I was pleasantly surprised by many things inside. Were there things I disliked? Of course. But, I wasn't looking for an excuse to hate it.

eequah9L 7y ago
> I see a lot of people who come to Emacs from Vim expecting Evil Mode to be the panacea for Emacs. It's not. At the end of the day, it's still Emacs Yes. I've been Emacs guy for close to two decades now, and switched to Evil about four years ago, because Vim controls are just better, no two ways about it. However you still need to escape back into Emacs every now and then to do various un-Evil'd tidbits. That's easy for me, but would be problematic for someone who expects Evil to (as you put it) "fix Emacs".
sdegutis 7y ago
I had a similar path to Emacs: became really proficient with Vim, avoided Emacs since everyone I knew hated it, saw someone doing things with incredible speed and efficiency in Emacs at Enova (hi Kyle) that I had never imagined could be done, tried Emacs myself, and spent weeks customizing it to become extremely fast with rapid development in Clojure using CIDER. But now that I do vanilla front-end dev, I have found VS Code to give me nearly all the same productivity I had before, but with practically no configuration, and in an editor that actually has reasonable per-pixel scrolling. (Emacs added per-pixel scrolling in 2017 but still got it wrong somehow.)
- boustrophedon 7y ago

JohnStrangeII 7y ago

I'm using Emacs for my daily tasks, both writing and programming. One question I have to more experienced Emacs users: Can you recommend an email client? It needs to be able to display html mails. Currently, I use claws-mail and am fairly happy with it, except for the search. I've got about 30,000 mails in the inbox and full-text searching them takes too long. Is there a way to transition my claws-mail folders to Emacs, or ideally use both programs at the same time for a while? The article recommends notmuch-emacs. But I'm afraid of 2 things, (i) loosing existing mails in the transition (due to e.g. faulty conversion tools), and (ii) that after a complicated transition I'm not happy with the new setup. Any recommendations? Is it possible to use the claws-mail email inboxes directly in Emacs? Another thing is org-mode. I never really managed to get deep enough into it to really see the benefits. I've even bought the printed org-mode manual, but the setup seems so complicated. Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for?

nextos 7y ago
Notmuch is excellent. I guess if your email is in maildir format, you can use it directly within Notmuch. One thing that sets Notmuch apart from other MUAs is that it never ever touches your email files.
yaantc 7y ago
> Another thing is org-mode. [...] Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for? I would recommend starting using Org just for note taking, using its outline capabilities. It's simple and avoid being overwhelmed and buried in features. One tutorial for this is [1], but even then it has advanced parts you can ignore at first. There are many Org tutorials, at some point it's best to just pick one and dive in instead of looking for the best one and ending up paralyzed by choice (a problem sometimes with Org and Emacs...). Then once familiar with this you can extend your usage in various directions: add TODO and agenda for GTD, use it to export to nice web pages with a "read the doc" theme [2], etc. [1] https://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-org/ https://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with... [2] https://github.com/fniessen/org-html-themes https://github.com/fniessen/org-html-themes
7y ago

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I bookmarked this. I have been using Emacs since I bought a manual around 1980, but, the article mentioned a few packages I didn’t know about.

m463 7y ago
This happens all the time to me. The other day, I found my old hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy infocom image (interactive fiction) and it turns out someone wrote some elisp that lets you play it in emacs. (that said, elisp isn't a very expressive language for me, python is my favorite language right now)

roland35 7y ago

I am currently only using Emacs for org mode, and overall it works great for taking notes, keeping track of tasks, and outputting documentation. However... I would _love_ to see a GUI version of just org mode which would combine a few features of OneNote, well I would be happy if it only made adding pictures better!

sprash 7y ago

I used emacs for years and had accumulated about 10000 loc init.el over that time. With my new employer I'm forced to use notepad++ on Windows. The difference in actual productivity: zero! Emacs is a nice hobby but when you want do get shit done it won't help you being more productive except for some rare corner cases. So don't buy into the Emacs Plattform. Maybe just learn the basics because sometimes it is the only editor installed. If you spend more than two hours on it you are wasting your time.

jerf 7y ago
I've used emacs for 25 years, and I kinda agree, actually. What keeps me using it is precisely that it's been stable that long. Given that I don't really need that many features, it's been nice to not have to change editors, what, 5 or 6 times in that period of time? I've got some very light customization to expose the macro features more conveniently, and like three or four keybindings for my major languages I work in. Other than that, part of what keeps me in emacs is that it supports SSH'ing to remote systems to edit things very well, so I can use my desktop editor in all kinds of environments with everything I'm used to, no matter where I'm having to edit something, as long as SSH can get to it. While there are other editors that can do this to some extent, I find that when it's nominally "time" to switch to New Editor of the Half-Decade it's often a missing or poorly-implemented feature. Also, as strange as it may seem, a lot of editors aren't all that great at editing 5 files at a time. They certainly can, but they're not that great at it. Emacs is pretty good. I don't even use any funky extensions for it. I still don't really know elisp. I've seen emacs wizards, and I'm not one, despite 25 years with it. Given that editor features aren't really that important, why not pick one decent tool and stick with it? At least then I'm not surprised when I have to pick up a new tool and, oh, crap, it doesn't do networks, and, tabs, seriously, tabs for multiple buffers with no keyboard access based on names? No. (I do also know enough vi to get around in it when I have to use it on some system for some reason.)
alexhutcheson 7y ago
Once or twice a quarter I'll end up with a relatively mechanical task that I can do with a keyboard macro, query-replace-regexp/dired-do-find-regexp-and-replace. That normally saves me at least 30-45 minutes compared to either doing it manually or writing a script.

fourier_mode 7y ago

I've been a vim guy for 5 years now. And last month I tried to switch to emacs. But it just didn't feel natural for the following reasons: 1. My usual coding session would involve Vim+Tmux, on trying the same with emacs. I was seeing some lag(although small, but noticeable). 2. I am very used to the key strokes "g-d, g-D" in vim to quickly move around calls/declarations of functions. For that emacs makes use of Ctags, which is more versatile but not great for a quick lookup. 3. I have had better luck with Vim's linting plugins like ALE and haven't found similar plugins for Emacs which was eventually a major game changer to switch back to Vim. On the other set of tools: - Org-mode and latex-preview-pane-mode are the 2 set of tools which I have integrated into my workflow and they are very suitable to me. - ERC is also pretty neat. - I have tried Magit and although seems useful, for my use case of Emacs currently doesn't hold a lot of promise. - Switch to Gnus, mu4e as mail clients replacements is too painful, at least to a Thunderbird user.

zeveb 7y ago
> I have had better luck with Vim's linting plugins like ALE and haven't found similar plugins for Emacs … Did you try flycheck?
dan-robertson 7y ago
Regarding your first point, do you mean that you try running emacs inside a tmux inside a terminal? If that is the case, I would recommend not doing that. The emacs gui will give you more colours, images, thinner window borders, better keyboard shortcuts (eg a difference between C-m and RET), mouse controls (if you ever want them), as well as potentially less lag. The analog to the vim-in-tmux workflow is to instead keep emacs always open in the gui, run somewhere between none and all shell commands from emacs (depending on how you feel), and have a terminal in another window (as you might for web browsing or email) for more prolonged terminal things. One might skip this somewhat by running shell (or even term-mode) in emacs. Similarly, for editing remote files one uses tramp to ssh from inside emacs and edit files whereas with vim one sshes into the remote box and runs vim.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

betenoire 7y ago

As a former Vim addict of over 12 years: to those who would like to try to move to Emacs, and Spacemacs doesn't cut it, try Doom! https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs It is a much thinner configuration, and you will learn Emacs instead of layers and Spacemacs conventions. It only took me about a week of deliberate use to adapt my work flow and get used to it, and it has been my primary editor for nearly a year now.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
At first glance, I thought this would be an Emacs tutorial superimposed on top of the Doom engine, ala DOOM as a Tool for System Administration.[0] [0]https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

burtonator 7y ago

I used Emacs for 15 years. I've been off of Emacs for about 5-6 years now and I won't ever go back. Here's why: 1. Refactoring. The refactorings in IntelliJ are amazing. Amazing. The ability to say (yeah, this class is now called Foo instead of Bar) and have everything automatically changed is outstanding. This is a basic example of course but you can also do things like remove a function parameter, and also do things like lookup reverse symbols. 2. Stable. IntelliJ is just amazingly stable. Part of this is that I had to write elisp to get Emacs to do stuff that IntellJ just already provides for me. Everytime Emacs would upgrade I would have to upgrade Emacs. 3. Pair programming. I could NEVER work with other engineers on their code and vice versa. We just didn't speak the same language. Now mind you I also created a lot of the code you use in Emacs. I co-created EDE for example.

dmortin 7y ago
Even if you don't use emacs for coding Java, etc. it can be still useful, e.g note taking, task management with org mode.
kamaal 7y ago
Java is more like assembly language programming at this point in software history. You shouldn't be editing Java with any editor, let alone emacs. This is because if you are using 3 frameworks, and 30 classes with DI and reflection, just to post a json to a http end point, you should be using an IDE to handle that kind of madness.
- ethelward 7y ago
  That's more of an architecture problem rather than an intrinsic characteristic of Java though. I'm not a fan of the language, but I think the latest versions added some nifty features that make working with the language not as bad as it used to be.

module0000 7y ago

Logging into "work" systems and typing "emacs" == "command not found". Typing "vi" opens a useful editor. It's not that I hate emacs or have some aversion to anything except vi/vim. The problem is that vi is everywhere, and by mastering the always-available editor, I always have my tools at hand. On foreign systems, or highly regulated systems that I can't add software to, this is a huge advantage.

yaantc 7y ago
True, but the workflow you describe is not the natural one for Emacs. Emacs has a built-in package called TRAMP [1] for remote work. You don't log into a distant server and open Emacs there, you use Emacs on your local PC and open the remote file naturally, using a syntax like /method:user@host:/path/to/file, but most often /-:host:/path/to/file (when using SSH access set as default, with your local user name). Except for the special file path it's just like for a local file. Then when launching a shell command, or a full shell, or a grep or compile or whatnot from a buffer editing a remote file, Emacs will automatically launch the command remote machine too. That makes the experience rather transparent. It's possible to have multiple buffers editing files on different machines at the same time. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Quick-Start-Guide https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Quick-Start-Guide
dmortin 7y ago
As the sibling comment says you should try editing remote files with the editor running on your computer. Tramp provides this transparently for Emacs. You don't have to manually log in to edit remote files.
yarrel 7y ago
Yes vi is there on systems where you don't have Emacs. Vi is simple enough to remember the commands you need if this ever happens, and this is not really a reason to eschew something more powerful everywhere else.

spellcard199 7y ago

---- TLDR ---- I completely agree with the others who say: - learn elisp instead of learning "emacs" - if you want to memorize something, just learn the name of the command: if you use it very often then learn/define a keybinding for it ---- part 1: I'm happy I've learned elisp in the last year People complain about memorizing emacs keybindings, but most of the time I just call the command name with M-x command-name. Only if I find myself using it often I bother memorizing or setting a keybinding for it. As for why I use emacs, I started using it for org-mode, which I considered it's only killer feature at the time. Since 1 year ago I started learning elisp and I think only now I can see what's the whole point of emacs. In just 1 year of (beginner-level) elisp I wrote 75 files containing elisp functions to help myself with dozens of tasks that comprise: - move/mirror parts of ascii diagrams - automate some tasks just clicking on custom org-mode links - wrap ammonite-term-repl to get Ammonite completion for scala scripts [1] [2] - add rudimentary support for kawa scheme to geiser (my first pull request ever (still waiting for response)) - control video player from within emacs while I'm writing subtitles ---- part 2: you can have different emacs configurations Another common complain is that emacs tends to become slower as you add more and more packages. As a spacemacs user, I noticed that too. For this reason when I don't need spacemacs goodies I use multiple, different emacs configurations (with evil-mode though). This is how I do it: 1 - Make a new ".emacs.d" user directory somewhere 2 - Make a new "init.el" user file inside it 3 - Add to the beginning of init.el : (setq user-init-file (or load-file-name "path-to-init.el")) (setq user-emacs-directory (file-name-directory user-init-file)) 4 - Call emacs with: emacs -Q --load "path-to-init.el" That's it. You could achieve the same result using cask, which would be more elegant imo, but takes a couple of seconds more to start. ---- part 3: use elisp to call other languages As for elisp, once you have learned enough of it (not much), if you are determined not to use it, there are different ways to call other languages from it: - clojure through cider plus clomacs - common lisp through slime - shen through shen-elisp [3] - different compiled languages through dynamic modules: - C (example at [4]) - go (example at [5]) - ... many others I haven't investigated... Just out of curiosity, I explored the shen-elisp path. I tried a whole week to see if I could replace it with shen-elisp. At the end of the week I learnt how to call elisp from shen-elisp and shen-elisp from elisp... and the fact that every time you restart shen-elisp you have to re-declare types. However I abandoned the idea for 2 reasons: - Plain elisp is faster: I don't know the implications - I wanted to focus on elisp so I can contribute better to other elisp projects ---- references [1] https://github.com/zwild/ammonite-term-repl [2] https://github.com/spellcard199/ammonite-term-repl-completion [3] https://github.com/deech/shen-elisp [4] http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2017/07/08/Adding-numerical-methods-to-emacs-with-dynamic-modules/ [5] https://mrosset.github.io/emacs-module/

egypturnash 7y ago

“I don’t care what editor you use for source code – you can use Quick basic for all I care – but look, you have to know that Magit exists. Even if you don’t use Emacs in any other capacity, you may want to use it for Magit.” There are exactly two instances of “Magit” in this web page and I just quoted both of them.

egypturnash 7y ago
A quick web search brings me to Magit’s page, which tells me that Magit is “A Git Porcelain inside Emacs” which just creates further questions. How does one make delicate pottery out of a version control system? In what circles is “a porcelain” a synonym for “user interface”?
- quanticle 7y ago
  As far as I can tell, it's only in git circles. Git refers to its command line interface as "porcelain" to distinguish it from the "plumbing" that is the .git folder.
- gknoy 7y ago
  The Git documentation refers to everything Nicely Shaped that is tacked on to the core git functionality as "porcelain" [0]. (Pretty much everything that we normally use when interacting with git counts as porcelain.) 0: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Porcelain https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Po...
- iak8god 7y ago
  I can get over "porcelain," but the Magit site would certainly benefit from better organization. You can skim the entire landing page without gaining much sense for what it's all about, and then it turns out that if you just click on the first screenshot on that page, you end up at "A visual walk-through" https://magit.vc/screenshots/ https://magit.vc/screenshots/, which is much more helpful. But you have to mouse over that screenshot and notice that the pointer changes in order to even realize that it's a link.

JohnAtCC 7y ago

Real men use vi

milin 7y ago

Vim is life.

lame88 7y ago

So, emacs is a platform for text-based programs to do things that i already have other stable, reliable, and familiar programs to accomplish. I’m not sold. I need a better value proposition before i feel sold to spend my time climbing that learning curve.

ernst_klim 7y ago
>text-based programs Not text based, it has buttons, widgets, can embed pictures and graphics. >reliable, and familiar programs to accomplish In emacs these bits of code are integrated, so I could, for example, save an IRC chat as buffer, edit it, and send a e-mail. Or open an interactive REPL of maxima, for example, copy result to latex having embedded previews for formulas, and then compile it to pdf (and preview in emacs). Different parts could be combined in any possible way with elisp code. You can easily call any email-related or rfeed-related function from your code at any time.
- dmitriid 7y ago
  The question is: is it worth it? Trying to figure out all those functions, setting all tose modes, and then programming them the way you described. Especially when all you just described can be done with regular copy-paste between dedicated programs if needed.
unhammer 7y ago
> Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality. > The more you feel that you can control your environment, and that the things you do are actually working, the happier you are. When you find yourself frustrated, angry, and upset, it’s probably because of something that happened that you could not control: even something small. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-design-for-programmers/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des... is actually a great argument for Emacs (even though the only time Emacs is mentioned there is an example of inconsistencies in keyboards shortcuts with other editors).

jstewartmobile 7y ago

If only Emacs had become the VM of the web rather than Chrome! I'm more than ready to trade our impending soyberpunk police-state dystopia for a case of carpal tunnel syndrome.

ReneFroger 7y ago

A good resource for anyone who wants study Emacs further or try out things, I found this very helpful for me: https://emacs.zeef.com https://emacs.zeef.com