3 ms·

I've been using Emacs for 32 years (hard to believe) and never knew about this incredible but apparently obscure feature of Emacs. On my 27" cinema display, ev

by cpr 15y ago

I've been using Emacs for 32 years (hard to believe) and never knew about this incredible but apparently obscure feature of Emacs. On my 27" cinema display, even using 12pt Monaco for my tired old eyes for extreme legibility, I can get 4-5 columns of 90 lines each, when editing source files or text, for an effective "screen length" of 360-450 lines. With 10pt, you can get 500+ lines "on screen" easily. Docs: http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/emacs/Follow-Mode.html http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/emacs/Follow-Mode... .

VirInvictus_ 15y ago
I've been trying to get into Emacs for the last two years and can't seem to do it. How do you manage? Also, amen to Monaco (although I use 9pt).
- thom 15y ago
  If you're using Monaco, I assume you're on a Mac, so you can get plenty of practice with the default key bindings, as OS X respects the basic emacs/readline bindings everywhere you can type. Discovering M-x apropos was probably the moment I realised emacs wasn't at all scary, and in fact just wanted to help and make me productive. A big hurdle with any text editor is having the discipline to realise that if you're doing something repetitive and boring, you're probably doing it wrong. All the built in documentation and help functions in emacs give you a big head start finding the right way to do what you're doing, and you'll just randomly pick up useful stuff along the way. Beyond that, it's just finding what modes are useful for you. Magit is incredible, org-mode's great if you do that sort of thing, and any language with a REPL thrives under emacs. Most people I know just learn enough elisp to keep their .emacs up to date, so don't be too intimidated by that, but more power to you if you eventually master it.
chrismealy 15y ago
I've only been using emacs for 18 years and I use 19pt Menlo!
ekoontz 15y ago
17 years here and I am happy to make my acquaintance with Follow Mode! :)
swah 15y ago
How old are you current config files?
- cpr 15y ago
  Oh, probably started them 10-15 years ago. Hard to say. I started around 1978 or so with Emacs on ITS (MIT-AI lab Incompatible Timesharing System), which was built in TECO. So those files wouldn't be very useful. ;-) Then moved to TOPS-20 Emacs in 1979-1980, then to Unix Emacs (Gosmacs) for a while in the early 80's, then, finally to the One True Emacs (Gnu Emacs) in the mid-80's on Sun workstations. I don't highly customize Emacs at all, actually. I tend to like a mostly vanilla installation that I can run in terminal mode both locally in Terminal (OS X) and remotely via ssh without even thinking about it.
  - pasbesoin 15y ago
    Out of curiosity and seeing as you have considerable experience with Emacs, what do you do, keyboard-wise (e.g. remapping, custom hardware, or just the defaults?)?
    - cpr 15y ago
      Mostly defaults--I only have a handful of custom keybindings, most of them a carry-over from the old ITS/Twenex Emacs defaults, since I have editing finger habits which are decades old. (It's wonderful that you can get most of the basics in every Cocoa-based edit field in OS X.) I wouldn't even call myself an Emacs power user. I've written a modicum of Emacs Lisp, but nothing major. Custom hardware? Hoo boy, let's not go down that road, too off-topic. ;-) Well, OK, the best keyboard ever made by the Hand of Man is the old Tom Knight AI Lab keyboard (google "Tom Knight Keyboard" and you'll find lots of info). The particular recipe that Microswitch (Honeywell) developed for that generation of keyboards, based on (highly expensive) Hall-effect mechanical switches, is still unparalleled to this day--it had a sort of preternaturally comfortable throw. I even bought one of the Microswitch Symbolics-style keyboards from a custom run (for about $600) at LLNL back in the early 80's, and hacked up a Sun-1 CPU board to read the keyboard's up/down parallel encoding to produce ascii serial out, I was so attached to that quality of keyboard. (Didn't hurt that I could map all the Shift/Meta/Super/Hyper/Network shift keys to the appropriate escape sequences ;-). Had to give it up when ascii terminals died out; sigh. Since then, I've kinda given up, but the Thinkpad keyboards from a few years back were exceptional (don't know if Lenovo has kept the quality up lately), and the latest-generation Apple flat-topped short-throw keyboards are also exceedingly fast and accurate for typing. But none of them come close the pure tactile nirvana of those old Microswitch keyboards. You can still find some of those incredible Microswitch keys on older ATMs. They were designed for millions of abusive presses before failure. (Uh-oh, is my obsession showing? ;-)
kraemate 15y ago
I simply rotate my flatscreen monitor to make it upright. This way i get 900x1600 resolution, and >80 lines (10pt monospace) in one screen. 32 years of emacs! Wow!
- mitchty 15y ago
  I've not been alive for 32 years.... But still learning Emacs, I still run it in viper mode. My old habits die hard. I love to troll the other unix admins at work with vi keybindings in emacs. I'm assuming you aren't rotating your screen under linux, xinerama isn't very robust on things like that.
  - kraemate 15y ago
    Yep, using linux (and KDE). Screen rotation works perfectly. [stock intel 965]

by cpr 15y ago

VirInvictus_ 15y ago

I've been trying to get into Emacs for the last two years and can't seem to do it. How do you manage? Also, amen to Monaco (although I use 9pt).

thom 15y ago
If you're using Monaco, I assume you're on a Mac, so you can get plenty of practice with the default key bindings, as OS X respects the basic emacs/readline bindings everywhere you can type. Discovering M-x apropos was probably the moment I realised emacs wasn't at all scary, and in fact just wanted to help and make me productive. A big hurdle with any text editor is having the discipline to realise that if you're doing something repetitive and boring, you're probably doing it wrong. All the built in documentation and help functions in emacs give you a big head start finding the right way to do what you're doing, and you'll just randomly pick up useful stuff along the way. Beyond that, it's just finding what modes are useful for you. Magit is incredible, org-mode's great if you do that sort of thing, and any language with a REPL thrives under emacs. Most people I know just learn enough elisp to keep their .emacs up to date, so don't be too intimidated by that, but more power to you if you eventually master it.

chrismealy 15y ago

I've only been using emacs for 18 years and I use 19pt Menlo!

ekoontz 15y ago

17 years here and I am happy to make my acquaintance with Follow Mode! :)

swah 15y ago

How old are you current config files?

cpr 15y ago
Oh, probably started them 10-15 years ago. Hard to say. I started around 1978 or so with Emacs on ITS (MIT-AI lab Incompatible Timesharing System), which was built in TECO. So those files wouldn't be very useful. ;-) Then moved to TOPS-20 Emacs in 1979-1980, then to Unix Emacs (Gosmacs) for a while in the early 80's, then, finally to the One True Emacs (Gnu Emacs) in the mid-80's on Sun workstations. I don't highly customize Emacs at all, actually. I tend to like a mostly vanilla installation that I can run in terminal mode both locally in Terminal (OS X) and remotely via ssh without even thinking about it.
- pasbesoin 15y ago
  Out of curiosity and seeing as you have considerable experience with Emacs, what do you do, keyboard-wise (e.g. remapping, custom hardware, or just the defaults?)?
  - cpr 15y ago
    Mostly defaults--I only have a handful of custom keybindings, most of them a carry-over from the old ITS/Twenex Emacs defaults, since I have editing finger habits which are decades old. (It's wonderful that you can get most of the basics in every Cocoa-based edit field in OS X.) I wouldn't even call myself an Emacs power user. I've written a modicum of Emacs Lisp, but nothing major. Custom hardware? Hoo boy, let's not go down that road, too off-topic. ;-) Well, OK, the best keyboard ever made by the Hand of Man is the old Tom Knight AI Lab keyboard (google "Tom Knight Keyboard" and you'll find lots of info). The particular recipe that Microswitch (Honeywell) developed for that generation of keyboards, based on (highly expensive) Hall-effect mechanical switches, is still unparalleled to this day--it had a sort of preternaturally comfortable throw. I even bought one of the Microswitch Symbolics-style keyboards from a custom run (for about $600) at LLNL back in the early 80's, and hacked up a Sun-1 CPU board to read the keyboard's up/down parallel encoding to produce ascii serial out, I was so attached to that quality of keyboard. (Didn't hurt that I could map all the Shift/Meta/Super/Hyper/Network shift keys to the appropriate escape sequences ;-). Had to give it up when ascii terminals died out; sigh. Since then, I've kinda given up, but the Thinkpad keyboards from a few years back were exceptional (don't know if Lenovo has kept the quality up lately), and the latest-generation Apple flat-topped short-throw keyboards are also exceedingly fast and accurate for typing. But none of them come close the pure tactile nirvana of those old Microswitch keyboards. You can still find some of those incredible Microswitch keys on older ATMs. They were designed for millions of abusive presses before failure. (Uh-oh, is my obsession showing? ;-)

kraemate 15y ago

I simply rotate my flatscreen monitor to make it upright. This way i get 900x1600 resolution, and >80 lines (10pt monospace) in one screen. 32 years of emacs! Wow!

mitchty 15y ago
I've not been alive for 32 years.... But still learning Emacs, I still run it in viper mode. My old habits die hard. I love to troll the other unix admins at work with vi keybindings in emacs. I'm assuming you aren't rotating your screen under linux, xinerama isn't very robust on things like that.
- kraemate 15y ago
  Yep, using linux (and KDE). Screen rotation works perfectly. [stock intel 965]