6 ms·

I have finally seen the Emacs light

38 points by globalrev 18y ago

Just got to say this to all you netbeaners, eclipsers etc out there. Today i finally groked what makes Emacs so good. I havent groked Emacs itself yet but all the IDEs i have tried have disappointed, they are big, slow and ugly and hard to navigate easily and there is a lot fo unnecessary clutter which you sometimes can and sometimes cannot take away. Emacs has a bit of a barrier of entry but as soon as you learn some keyboard-kung-fu it will make you very productive. Jump between buffers, run an interpreter, search your code, etc. So powerful and so elegant. Emacs captures the essence of good software.

cstejerean 18y ago
after trying to learn Emacs for a couple of years I had a similar experience once I learned enough of the basics. after I started to master Emacs I could no longer go back to any other editor. I just wished I would have learned Emacs sooner instead of looking for excuses for 2 years.
- ajross 18y ago
  Yup, I did the same thing about 14 years ago. I was steadfastly using pico (yeah, yeah, don't ask) until I finally sat down and forced myself to spend a week in emacs, and finally "got it". And I did it all again a few years later when (no longer using terminals or other people's computers) I finally bothered to map the control key to the left of "A", meta to underneath the '/' (sadly not always consistent on PC keyboards), stopped using the non-alpha keys, and realized how nice the "weird" keybindings always were.
- aggieben 18y ago
  I was the same way in school. I also used pico for a long time, and for a while after that, I used vim, but only with the bare minimum necessary for edit, save, up, down, left, right. I finally had a teacher that required us to use Emacs, and I've never looked back.
dkasper 18y ago
I learned Emacs cold turkey this summer and am loving it. The only problem is I use Visual Studio at work and the Emacs key bindings for it are not so good. So I end up deleting a line every time I try to save my files with ctrl-x ctrl-s :-)
- PieSquared 18y ago
  I'm trying to do the same thing right now. After about an hour of using it though, I start wanting to beat my head against the wall because I haven't yet mastered everything in Emacs that I used to be able to do in Vim.
- jcl 18y ago
  Really? I admit I don't normally use the Emacs bindings in Visual Studio myself, but I just tried them and ctrl-x ctrl-s saves the file just fine for me. (This is using Visual Studio 2005, under the Tools | Customize menu option, Keyboard... button, Emacs keyboard mapping scheme.)
  - dkasper 18y ago
    No no, I mean that I don't use the Emacs bindings because other things don't work the way I want, like tabbing. So when I'm using the c# bindings I find myself running strange commands accidentally.
kirubakaran 18y ago
'Guilty Pleasures : I sometimes edit my .emacs file in vim.' http://mark.nirv.net/post/6694167/guilty-pleasures http://mark.nirv.net/post/6694167/guilty-pleasures
- mnemonicsloth 18y ago
  One word: nethack. I use Emacs for everything (including this comment), but every so often I find myself craving a fix of hjkl;
  - vegai 18y ago
    http://www.nongnu.org/nethack-el/ http://www.nongnu.org/nethack-el/
dusklight 18y ago
Try IntelliJ sometime (for Java at least) I love emacs and the philosophy of emacs but IntelliJ just makes a lot more of the pain from Java go away. Ive tried but the emacs-equivalent tools like Semantic are just nowhere near as mature as the IntelliJ equivalents. As far as code generation and refactoring tools go, IntelliJ can't be beat.
mike_organon 18y ago
I learned emacs not too long ago, and I was amazed that the better principles were established so much earlier and abandoned for new tools. One thing about its philosophy I think makes it better is the consistency of everything being buffers, commands, and keystrokes. Eclipse has multiple kinds of buffers, views, panels, dialogs, and keys, menus, toolbars, docks, etc., that aren't interchangeable. It reminds me of the syntax philosophies of Lisp and Java - the tools follow the languages.
- j2d2 18y ago
  I use eclipse for Java still. Our project has something like 100,000 source files. Memorizing this lay-out is hard! There isn't much sense to it. Having the open-type shortcut is a life-saver. So is the type hierarchy browser. Emacs is great for pretty much everything else though!
  - zenspider 18y ago
    100,000 source files? and you haven't quit? you deserve eclipse. :P
  - msg 18y ago
    Here's something like what I do at work. Syntax not quite correct, I'm sure. It's a C++ project, but you can probably adapt it to your situation. Making the TAGS file takes a while every now and then, so you might want to run it as a cron job. shell: find rootdir1 rootdir2 ... rootdirN ".*\.[ch][ch]?" | etags > /convenient/dir/TAGS .emacs: (visit-tags-table "/convenient/dir/TAGS") need a class or function in emacs: (tags-apropos _regexp_)
jrsims 18y ago
Any vimmers out there who would stay with emacs after giving it a fair shake? Any converts from emacs to vim? I want to hear your story. Thanks.
- gravity 18y ago
  I'm in the process of switching from vim to emacs right now. It's frustrating, although viper-mode takes a lot of the pain away, and to be honest I find it a really nice combination to have the vi editing modality readily available within the powerful framework of emacs. Remapping caps lock to Control has helped enormously. The most notable thing is that emacs encourages you to live in it much more than vim. With vim, I would navigate around in the shell, open up a file in vim, edit, close, repeat. With emacs I'm finding that I spend more time just switching buffers instead of running back to the shell because emacs doesn't simply quit when I kill all my open files. There's always more buffers, so the app stays open and I tend to remain there. I'm still in the process of getting up to speed with basic editing things, although I've found that the way it manages buffers and what it calls windows (what the rest of the world calls frames these days) is quite easy and quick to use, and I found myself able to navigate around in emacs fairly quickly. All in all, I'm not 100% sure I'll stick with it, but I'm happy so far and I know that I'm still getting over the hump to where I'll be truly productive with it.
  - antiform 18y ago
    If you are anything like me, that is, someone who loves the speed and "feel" of vim, but also enjoys the buffers of emacs. You might want to check out vile (vi like emacs). [http://invisible-island.net/vile/ http://invisible-island.net/vile/]
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    >With vim, I would navigate around in the shell, open up a file in vim, edit, close, repeat. I do that to. I open up an `eshell`, navigate around. Then I edit a file with `vi filename.py`. That works best if you have `alias vi find-file $1` in your eshell aliases.
- jcl 18y ago
pavelludiq 18y ago
Im a Vim guy, but emacs is fine too. I might learn emacs some day, im not a fan of this religious thing or what ever the emacsVSvim guys try to accomplish.
- j2d2 18y ago
  I'm not a fan of the religion either. If you develop large projects, you'll probably find the power of emacs to be a huge time saver. Instead of having 4 terminals open, each with a vim session (something I typically see), you can just have 4 windows open. Tramp is also really slick for easily editing remote files. Having a python interpreter in running in conjunction with your editor is slick too. Probably worth fighting with for a few days to get it. If you still don't like it, now you know why! Just sayin.
  - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
    :split worksforme, also :! is fun, but your post makes me think there is probably more to it than that.
  - partner55083777 18y ago
    > Just sayin. Not super-saiyan.
  - jauco 18y ago
    well, the thing with these comparisons between vim and emacs features is that they mostly come down to "do you know how to do feature X" because both emacs and vim (vim, not vi) will surely have feature X somewhere. In this case, vim allows tabs and split windows and the Tramp functionality is built in. I'm not sure about the python terminal, but then again, I've never felt the need.
    - j2d2 18y ago
      Fair points. I didn't know vim had tramp functionality. What's it called?
swombat 18y ago
How about TextMate? It's almost as good as Emacs from a power point of view, but nowhere near as painful to learn, and looks a treat too!
- fendale 18y ago
  I hear Textmate is pretty darn good, but it doesn't work in the terminal on my Linux box, and it doesn't run on my windows machine in my cube. I decided a year or two back to learn an editor well, and decided against Textmate for those two reasons.
- cstejerean 18y ago
  I like TextMate and it is probably one of the better GUI editors that are available on OS X, but I wouldn't claim that it's almost as good as Emacs.
- dallasrpi 18y ago
  Try opening a 100MB+ text file in TextMate, it doesnt work so well...
  - silentbicycle 18y ago
    Does that work in Emacs? Serious question.
    - jdale27 18y ago
      Yes.
      - silentbicycle 18y ago
        Ok. I thought I read something where somebody was furious because their thesis had grown large enough that suddenly Emacs couldn't load it (or process the LaTeX?). I'm pretty sure it was Emacs 20, though. I'm glad it's not the case anymore.
      - jodrellblank 18y ago
Kaizyn 18y ago
If you want a more modern tool in the same class as Emacs and Vim, take a look at Sublime Text: http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/ Unfortunately, it's Windows only for now and the author is charging for it which is probably a deal breaker for now.
- urlwolf 18y ago
  sublimetext is the only application that can make my windows box crash to the point that I have to reboot. I tried it at serveral version points. Reported to the author, he couldn't find the problem. And it has exactly one (1) feature that the others don't: the bird-view of your code. Stay away.
travisjeffery 18y ago
TextMate is one of the most over-hyped anythings, ever. The only thing that makes TextMate different from NotePad is the Bundle. The editor itself is weak as shit, and even the Bundles don't add anything that can't already be found in an extension for Emacs (and Vim, but not as well done as in Emacs).
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  The only thing that makes TextMate different from NotePad is the Bundle... Even if this were true -- which it isn't -- the ability to write, distribute, and install open-source extensions to the editor is a hugely important feature. It is, after all, the central feature of emacs itself.
- jacobolus 18y ago
  > The editor itself is weak as shit What does this even mean? > even the Bundles don't add anything that can't already be found in an extension for Emacs This is demonstrably false.
icco 18y ago
I've used VIM pretty consistently for the past two years, and I love it. The only other editor I use is Dreamweaver, and that's such a different beast it's not even funny. I am worried though if someone is using a directory structure they can't memorize. Isn't the point of a directory structure to keep things organized in a reasonable fashion?
huherto 18y ago
I started using vi in '89 to program in C/C++. In 95-97, I used emacs mostly to program in perl. Then I discovered vim, it seemed as powerful and I used it until 2002 when I disovered Jedit. It was around 2005, that I started using Eclipse. I think I was the last kid in the block to use it and it is a big help, I love the refactoring functionality.

38 points by globalrev 18y ago

cstejerean 18y ago

after trying to learn Emacs for a couple of years I had a similar experience once I learned enough of the basics. after I started to master Emacs I could no longer go back to any other editor. I just wished I would have learned Emacs sooner instead of looking for excuses for 2 years.

ajross 18y ago
Yup, I did the same thing about 14 years ago. I was steadfastly using pico (yeah, yeah, don't ask) until I finally sat down and forced myself to spend a week in emacs, and finally "got it". And I did it all again a few years later when (no longer using terminals or other people's computers) I finally bothered to map the control key to the left of "A", meta to underneath the '/' (sadly not always consistent on PC keyboards), stopped using the non-alpha keys, and realized how nice the "weird" keybindings always were.
aggieben 18y ago
I was the same way in school. I also used pico for a long time, and for a while after that, I used vim, but only with the bare minimum necessary for edit, save, up, down, left, right. I finally had a teacher that required us to use Emacs, and I've never looked back.

dkasper 18y ago

I learned Emacs cold turkey this summer and am loving it. The only problem is I use Visual Studio at work and the Emacs key bindings for it are not so good. So I end up deleting a line every time I try to save my files with ctrl-x ctrl-s :-)

PieSquared 18y ago
I'm trying to do the same thing right now. After about an hour of using it though, I start wanting to beat my head against the wall because I haven't yet mastered everything in Emacs that I used to be able to do in Vim.
jcl 18y ago
Really? I admit I don't normally use the Emacs bindings in Visual Studio myself, but I just tried them and ctrl-x ctrl-s saves the file just fine for me. (This is using Visual Studio 2005, under the Tools | Customize menu option, Keyboard... button, Emacs keyboard mapping scheme.)
- dkasper 18y ago
  No no, I mean that I don't use the Emacs bindings because other things don't work the way I want, like tabbing. So when I'm using the c# bindings I find myself running strange commands accidentally.

kirubakaran 18y ago

'Guilty Pleasures : I sometimes edit my .emacs file in vim.' http://mark.nirv.net/post/6694167/guilty-pleasures http://mark.nirv.net/post/6694167/guilty-pleasures

mnemonicsloth 18y ago
One word: nethack. I use Emacs for everything (including this comment), but every so often I find myself craving a fix of hjkl;
- vegai 18y ago
  http://www.nongnu.org/nethack-el/ http://www.nongnu.org/nethack-el/

dusklight 18y ago

Try IntelliJ sometime (for Java at least) I love emacs and the philosophy of emacs but IntelliJ just makes a lot more of the pain from Java go away. Ive tried but the emacs-equivalent tools like Semantic are just nowhere near as mature as the IntelliJ equivalents. As far as code generation and refactoring tools go, IntelliJ can't be beat.

mike_organon 18y ago

I learned emacs not too long ago, and I was amazed that the better principles were established so much earlier and abandoned for new tools. One thing about its philosophy I think makes it better is the consistency of everything being buffers, commands, and keystrokes. Eclipse has multiple kinds of buffers, views, panels, dialogs, and keys, menus, toolbars, docks, etc., that aren't interchangeable. It reminds me of the syntax philosophies of Lisp and Java - the tools follow the languages.

j2d2 18y ago
I use eclipse for Java still. Our project has something like 100,000 source files. Memorizing this lay-out is hard! There isn't much sense to it. Having the open-type shortcut is a life-saver. So is the type hierarchy browser. Emacs is great for pretty much everything else though!
- zenspider 18y ago
  100,000 source files? and you haven't quit? you deserve eclipse. :P
- msg 18y ago
  Here's something like what I do at work. Syntax not quite correct, I'm sure. It's a C++ project, but you can probably adapt it to your situation. Making the TAGS file takes a while every now and then, so you might want to run it as a cron job. shell: find rootdir1 rootdir2 ... rootdirN ".*\.[ch][ch]?" | etags > /convenient/dir/TAGS .emacs: (visit-tags-table "/convenient/dir/TAGS") need a class or function in emacs: (tags-apropos _regexp_)

jrsims 18y ago

Any vimmers out there who would stay with emacs after giving it a fair shake? Any converts from emacs to vim? I want to hear your story. Thanks.

gravity 18y ago
I'm in the process of switching from vim to emacs right now. It's frustrating, although viper-mode takes a lot of the pain away, and to be honest I find it a really nice combination to have the vi editing modality readily available within the powerful framework of emacs. Remapping caps lock to Control has helped enormously. The most notable thing is that emacs encourages you to live in it much more than vim. With vim, I would navigate around in the shell, open up a file in vim, edit, close, repeat. With emacs I'm finding that I spend more time just switching buffers instead of running back to the shell because emacs doesn't simply quit when I kill all my open files. There's always more buffers, so the app stays open and I tend to remain there. I'm still in the process of getting up to speed with basic editing things, although I've found that the way it manages buffers and what it calls windows (what the rest of the world calls frames these days) is quite easy and quick to use, and I found myself able to navigate around in emacs fairly quickly. All in all, I'm not 100% sure I'll stick with it, but I'm happy so far and I know that I'm still getting over the hump to where I'll be truly productive with it.
- antiform 18y ago
  If you are anything like me, that is, someone who loves the speed and "feel" of vim, but also enjoys the buffers of emacs. You might want to check out vile (vi like emacs). [http://invisible-island.net/vile/ http://invisible-island.net/vile/]
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  >With vim, I would navigate around in the shell, open up a file in vim, edit, close, repeat. I do that to. I open up an `eshell`, navigate around. Then I edit a file with `vi filename.py`. That works best if you have `alias vi find-file $1` in your eshell aliases.
jcl 18y ago

pavelludiq 18y ago

Im a Vim guy, but emacs is fine too. I might learn emacs some day, im not a fan of this religious thing or what ever the emacsVSvim guys try to accomplish.

j2d2 18y ago
I'm not a fan of the religion either. If you develop large projects, you'll probably find the power of emacs to be a huge time saver. Instead of having 4 terminals open, each with a vim session (something I typically see), you can just have 4 windows open. Tramp is also really slick for easily editing remote files. Having a python interpreter in running in conjunction with your editor is slick too. Probably worth fighting with for a few days to get it. If you still don't like it, now you know why! Just sayin.
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  :split worksforme, also :! is fun, but your post makes me think there is probably more to it than that.
- partner55083777 18y ago
  > Just sayin. Not super-saiyan.
- jauco 18y ago
  well, the thing with these comparisons between vim and emacs features is that they mostly come down to "do you know how to do feature X" because both emacs and vim (vim, not vi) will surely have feature X somewhere. In this case, vim allows tabs and split windows and the Tramp functionality is built in. I'm not sure about the python terminal, but then again, I've never felt the need.
  - j2d2 18y ago
    Fair points. I didn't know vim had tramp functionality. What's it called?

swombat 18y ago

How about TextMate? It's almost as good as Emacs from a power point of view, but nowhere near as painful to learn, and looks a treat too!

fendale 18y ago
I hear Textmate is pretty darn good, but it doesn't work in the terminal on my Linux box, and it doesn't run on my windows machine in my cube. I decided a year or two back to learn an editor well, and decided against Textmate for those two reasons.
cstejerean 18y ago
I like TextMate and it is probably one of the better GUI editors that are available on OS X, but I wouldn't claim that it's almost as good as Emacs.
dallasrpi 18y ago
Try opening a 100MB+ text file in TextMate, it doesnt work so well...
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  Does that work in Emacs? Serious question.
  - jdale27 18y ago
    Yes.
    - silentbicycle 18y ago
      Ok. I thought I read something where somebody was furious because their thesis had grown large enough that suddenly Emacs couldn't load it (or process the LaTeX?). I'm pretty sure it was Emacs 20, though. I'm glad it's not the case anymore.
    - jodrellblank 18y ago

Kaizyn 18y ago

If you want a more modern tool in the same class as Emacs and Vim, take a look at Sublime Text: http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/ Unfortunately, it's Windows only for now and the author is charging for it which is probably a deal breaker for now.

urlwolf 18y ago
sublimetext is the only application that can make my windows box crash to the point that I have to reboot. I tried it at serveral version points. Reported to the author, he couldn't find the problem. And it has exactly one (1) feature that the others don't: the bird-view of your code. Stay away.

travisjeffery 18y ago

TextMate is one of the most over-hyped anythings, ever. The only thing that makes TextMate different from NotePad is the Bundle. The editor itself is weak as shit, and even the Bundles don't add anything that can't already be found in an extension for Emacs (and Vim, but not as well done as in Emacs).

mechanical_fish 18y ago
The only thing that makes TextMate different from NotePad is the Bundle... Even if this were true -- which it isn't -- the ability to write, distribute, and install open-source extensions to the editor is a hugely important feature. It is, after all, the central feature of emacs itself.
jacobolus 18y ago
> The editor itself is weak as shit What does this even mean? > even the Bundles don't add anything that can't already be found in an extension for Emacs This is demonstrably false.

icco 18y ago

I've used VIM pretty consistently for the past two years, and I love it. The only other editor I use is Dreamweaver, and that's such a different beast it's not even funny. I am worried though if someone is using a directory structure they can't memorize. Isn't the point of a directory structure to keep things organized in a reasonable fashion?

huherto 18y ago

I started using vi in '89 to program in C/C++. In 95-97, I used emacs mostly to program in perl. Then I discovered vim, it seemed as powerful and I used it until 2002 when I disovered Jedit. It was around 2005, that I started using Eclipse. I think I was the last kid in the block to use it and it is a big help, I love the refactoring functionality.