4 ms·

Throw the mouse out and just use emacs!

by smithza 6y ago

gumby 6y ago
As a bonus you get more fine hand exercise -- on both hands!
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Be sure to remap Caps Lock to work as CTRL, or else you may overtrain your left pinkie.
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    Or to alt, as the Flying Spaghetti Monster intended. Earlier keyboards had ctrl next to the space, which is why it's such a used modifier key (thumb is stronger than pinky, and is quite easy to use both left and right keys). Not that I personally do that, I'm too used to ctrl mapped to caps lock. If I could go back in time to before I started using emacs though... I would learn emacs with vim bindings. As a more general recommendation, getting used to both right and left control (whatever it's mapped to) is a huge ergonomic improvement. When you need to use Ctrl with a key in the left side of the keyboard, use right ctrl, and left ctrl when using a key in the right side. This avoid having to crumple your hand to reach, eg., ctrl+a.
throwkeep 6y ago
Tempting. For those who have never used emacs or vim, how long would it take to get up to speed?
- smithza 6y ago
  If you are seriously interested (which I highly recommend) just throw yourself into it. In the case of emacs, effort put in is directly correlated to efficiency gained. I was proficient in basic text/code editing in a few hours and incrementally tried to shoehorn most editing/scripting problems to be solved with emacs. There is an emacs wiki[0], the tutorial built into emacs[1], and a stack exchange network (mostly for questions related to emacs lisp which you will want to tinker in pretty soon after using the tool) [2]. Just a note, emacs could be a full desktop experience, supporting reading/writing email, web browsing, document browsing (pdfs, html, etc.), picture viewing, text editing, automation guru, etc etc etc. Some caution against some of these features but I use it mainly for text editing and automation support. It has a very robust keyboard-macro-recording tool, for example. [0] https://www.emacswiki.org/ https://www.emacswiki.org/ [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTutorial https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTutorial [2] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/ https://emacs.stackexchange.com/ Additional reading [3] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf [4] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs
  - karatinversion 6y ago
    I’ve found the emacs manual to be superior to the emacs wiki pretty much always (three months into my emacs journey here), fwiw.

Throw the mouse out and just use emacs!

gumby 6y ago

As a bonus you get more fine hand exercise -- on both hands!

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Be sure to remap Caps Lock to work as CTRL, or else you may overtrain your left pinkie.
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  Or to alt, as the Flying Spaghetti Monster intended. Earlier keyboards had ctrl next to the space, which is why it's such a used modifier key (thumb is stronger than pinky, and is quite easy to use both left and right keys). Not that I personally do that, I'm too used to ctrl mapped to caps lock. If I could go back in time to before I started using emacs though... I would learn emacs with vim bindings. As a more general recommendation, getting used to both right and left control (whatever it's mapped to) is a huge ergonomic improvement. When you need to use Ctrl with a key in the left side of the keyboard, use right ctrl, and left ctrl when using a key in the right side. This avoid having to crumple your hand to reach, eg., ctrl+a.

throwkeep 6y ago

Tempting. For those who have never used emacs or vim, how long would it take to get up to speed?

smithza 6y ago
If you are seriously interested (which I highly recommend) just throw yourself into it. In the case of emacs, effort put in is directly correlated to efficiency gained. I was proficient in basic text/code editing in a few hours and incrementally tried to shoehorn most editing/scripting problems to be solved with emacs. There is an emacs wiki[0], the tutorial built into emacs[1], and a stack exchange network (mostly for questions related to emacs lisp which you will want to tinker in pretty soon after using the tool) [2]. Just a note, emacs could be a full desktop experience, supporting reading/writing email, web browsing, document browsing (pdfs, html, etc.), picture viewing, text editing, automation guru, etc etc etc. Some caution against some of these features but I use it mainly for text editing and automation support. It has a very robust keyboard-macro-recording tool, for example. [0] https://www.emacswiki.org/ https://www.emacswiki.org/ [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTutorial https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTutorial [2] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/ https://emacs.stackexchange.com/ Additional reading [3] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf [4] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs
- karatinversion 6y ago
  I’ve found the emacs manual to be superior to the emacs wiki pretty much always (three months into my emacs journey here), fwiw.