4 ms·

> Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face

> Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face with "emacsism" at some time. Speaking from the experience of someone who has repeatedly bounced off Emacs for going on two decades now, you absolutely will. :) > When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things. This sort of "little thing" is, perhaps ironically, why I keep going back to BBEdit, at least for my technical writing work: it has a whole lot of these little "multipurpose tool" commands for text manipulation -- and, because they're in old-school Mac menus, they're discoverable. Thinking about it, that's one of the main reasons I bounce off both Emacs and Vim: it's not that I can't figure out the basics or even the, er, intermediates; it's that so much of the advanced stuff is relatively opaque. I am sure that there is probably a command in both Emacs and Vim that equates to, for instance, "find all lines matching this regex that occur more than once in this document, delete them, and copy them to a new document" (a task which sounds like I am making it up, but I swear I have had to do on multiple occasions in my current role). But I am also sure that it is not as easy as selecting "Text > Process Duplicate Lines..." and checking "Delete duplicate lines", "Leaving one" and "Match using pattern".

anyfoo 5y ago
Top of my head, I am pretty sure that I can do that with a "keyboard macro" involving list-matching-lines, and delete-matching-lines (that is literally what the commands are called). "Keyboard macro" by the way is a good and a bad name at once: It does not fully describe the vastly more powerful feature, as it is much more semantic than just repetition of keystrokes, but at its surface it looks like that and helps you get started. If anyone reading this hasn't used keyboard macros in emacs, try it out the next time you do something repetitive. It's amazing how it can simplify those tasks. "C-x (" to start defining one, "C-x )" to end it, "C-x e" to run it, which conveniently also ends definition if you want to use it right away. Of course you can do things like "M-5 C-x e" to run it 5 times. But I do get your point: Things are probably much less discoverable in emacs, unless you are relatively proficient in it already maybe. You need to switching into a "programmer" mind fairly quickly, while BBedit probably just lets you do powerful stuff through simple UI.
- zrail 5y ago
  Once you've hit C-x e once you can keep bouncing e to repeat the macro as well.
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    Thanks for the reminder. I knew that once, but completely forgot about it!
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Using non-standard notation for describing keyboard shorcuts doesn't help.
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    This is the notation that emacs has been using forever, and also displays to the user, so every user should be well comfortable with it. It even says “Press C-x C-c to exit emacs” at startup.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      It's still non-standard, and is yet another barrier to adoption.
  - opan 5y ago
    I found it handy and I often use it outside of emacs as well when describing shortcuts to people. Mainly C-something for ctrl.
taeric 5y ago
With modern autocomplete for commands, discovering commands in emacs has never been easier. "M-x sort" will show you all fuzzy completions of that commands basically instantly. The flow you just mentioned I think looks nigh identical.
- ashton314 5y ago
  I'll second this. Take a look at Vertico [1] and Consult [2] which really improve discoverability. Other nice packages (links found on the Vertico page) include Marginalia and Orderless. [1]: https://github.com/minad/vertico https://github.com/minad/vertico [2]: https://github.com/minad/consult https://github.com/minad/consult
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Even the current version of Emacs doesn't do fuzzy completion for M-x commands, just start-of-token completion; out of the box the completion is a little basic. I know there are packages which make this a lot better, but you have to know about the packages. :) Even so, the "sort lines" example works well with even the out-of-the-box completion. But, Emacs sometimes has its own language for things. If I didn't know the keyboard commands for "make region uppercase" and "make region lowercase" (which in fact I'd forgotten, although they're pretty trivial), then as far as I could tell the best way I could find them would be: Google. Inside Emacs, I could type "M-x up" and get the correct "upcase-region", but if I'd typed "M-x upp", I'd be out of luck. And Emacs-ese for "lowercase" is "downcase"; I wouldn't have guessed that at all! So I'm not sure the flow looks nigh identical for that many cases like this. The way I remember learning Emacs basics many years ago was actually through menus. Looking at Emacs's menus now, in v27.2, they're...kind of eclectic? The basics are there, but a lot, well, isn't. BBEdit is admittedly somewhat at the other extreme, with possibly just too damn much in its menus, but that does make a lot of its functionality very easily discoverable. At any rate, I should be clear that I think this is a mild knock against Emacs; I bounce off it in part because of this relative lack of discoverability, and also because it just seems like it takes a lot of effort relative to most other editors to set up comfortably. The flip side of that is that, as the "Lock-In Effect" article notes, once you do have it set up the way you like it, you are probably never going to have any motivation to switch. That is absolutely not a knock -- it's configurable and extensible in a way nothing else is.

anyfoo 5y ago

Top of my head, I am pretty sure that I can do that with a "keyboard macro" involving list-matching-lines, and delete-matching-lines (that is literally what the commands are called). "Keyboard macro" by the way is a good and a bad name at once: It does not fully describe the vastly more powerful feature, as it is much more semantic than just repetition of keystrokes, but at its surface it looks like that and helps you get started. If anyone reading this hasn't used keyboard macros in emacs, try it out the next time you do something repetitive. It's amazing how it can simplify those tasks. "C-x (" to start defining one, "C-x )" to end it, "C-x e" to run it, which conveniently also ends definition if you want to use it right away. Of course you can do things like "M-5 C-x e" to run it 5 times. But I do get your point: Things are probably much less discoverable in emacs, unless you are relatively proficient in it already maybe. You need to switching into a "programmer" mind fairly quickly, while BBedit probably just lets you do powerful stuff through simple UI.

zrail 5y ago
Once you've hit C-x e once you can keep bouncing e to repeat the macro as well.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Thanks for the reminder. I knew that once, but completely forgot about it!
frosted-flakes 5y ago
Using non-standard notation for describing keyboard shorcuts doesn't help.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  This is the notation that emacs has been using forever, and also displays to the user, so every user should be well comfortable with it. It even says “Press C-x C-c to exit emacs” at startup.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    It's still non-standard, and is yet another barrier to adoption.
- opan 5y ago
  I found it handy and I often use it outside of emacs as well when describing shortcuts to people. Mainly C-something for ctrl.

taeric 5y ago

With modern autocomplete for commands, discovering commands in emacs has never been easier. "M-x sort" will show you all fuzzy completions of that commands basically instantly. The flow you just mentioned I think looks nigh identical.

ashton314 5y ago
I'll second this. Take a look at Vertico [1] and Consult [2] which really improve discoverability. Other nice packages (links found on the Vertico page) include Marginalia and Orderless. [1]: https://github.com/minad/vertico https://github.com/minad/vertico [2]: https://github.com/minad/consult https://github.com/minad/consult
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
Even the current version of Emacs doesn't do fuzzy completion for M-x commands, just start-of-token completion; out of the box the completion is a little basic. I know there are packages which make this a lot better, but you have to know about the packages. :) Even so, the "sort lines" example works well with even the out-of-the-box completion. But, Emacs sometimes has its own language for things. If I didn't know the keyboard commands for "make region uppercase" and "make region lowercase" (which in fact I'd forgotten, although they're pretty trivial), then as far as I could tell the best way I could find them would be: Google. Inside Emacs, I could type "M-x up" and get the correct "upcase-region", but if I'd typed "M-x upp", I'd be out of luck. And Emacs-ese for "lowercase" is "downcase"; I wouldn't have guessed that at all! So I'm not sure the flow looks nigh identical for that many cases like this. The way I remember learning Emacs basics many years ago was actually through menus. Looking at Emacs's menus now, in v27.2, they're...kind of eclectic? The basics are there, but a lot, well, isn't. BBEdit is admittedly somewhat at the other extreme, with possibly just too damn much in its menus, but that does make a lot of its functionality very easily discoverable. At any rate, I should be clear that I think this is a mild knock against Emacs; I bounce off it in part because of this relative lack of discoverability, and also because it just seems like it takes a lot of effort relative to most other editors to set up comfortably. The flip side of that is that, as the "Lock-In Effect" article notes, once you do have it set up the way you like it, you are probably never going to have any motivation to switch. That is absolutely not a knock -- it's configurable and extensible in a way nothing else is.