3 ms·

Emacs is so customisable that as soon as I want to customise anything, I get lost searching for solutions online and inevitably give up on using Emacs altogethe

by jstx1 5y ago

Emacs is so customisable that as soon as I want to customise anything, I get lost searching for solutions online and inevitably give up on using Emacs altogether.

rvieira 5y ago
That is true. I use emacs-mac with spacemacs which works pretty well out of the box. What I try to do, to not go into the "hacking Emacs" rabbit hole, is to really avoid tweaking it unless something is really interfering with my workflow.
marco_craveiro 5y ago
I think the biggest problem with Emacs is that you cannot really make sense of a lot of stuff until you start programming elisp in anger. I tried for many years to copy and paste snippets etc, but now I realised you just need to bite the bullet and learn it like any other programming language and be prepared to do "real development" in Emacs. Its very difficult to be a "tourist" in Emacs, IMHO, a lot of things just don't make sense until you became more of a elisp programmer.
- laserlight 5y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. I used to get annoyed that I had to copy and paste code snippets that I found over the Web just to configure basic stuff. It got out of control pretty quickly. Now I understood that Emacs is supposed to be used by programming it. Turns out it was meant to be a feature, not a bug.
  - Fice 5y ago
    I'd go further and say that computers are supposed to be used by programming them.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  > Its very difficult to be a "tourist" in Emacs Exactly. Ironically, Emacs is also the place where transition from tourist to resident is the smoothest. You can stray writing and evaluating Elisp practically anywhere. (Almost) Everything is programmable via Elisp, everything is documented in excruciating detail, learning about any system attribute is two keychords away, there are debugging and profiling tools built in, and source code for very built in thing is available. If the target is to make average Joe into a programmer with least effort, things don't get much better than this.
bloopernova 5y ago
Emacs is fantastic for Yak Shaving. You can spend hours or days tweaking and modifying its configuration files if you're not careful. My advice for those seeking to get into Emacs: start from scratch. Learn how to split your custom.el from your init.el, and make sure you're using git to manage those files. Then start slowly and install org-mode from source and go from there: 8 │ ;; Save customizations in a different file. Prevents this file being 9 │ ;; modified by Emacs. 10 │ ;;; Code: 11 │ (setq custom-file (expand-file-name "custom.el" user-emacs-directory)) 12 │ (when (file-exists-p custom-file) 13 │ (load custom-file)) 14 │ 15 │ ;; Before anything else, orgmode: 16 │ (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.orgsrc/org-9.4/lisp") 17 │ (require 'org-loaddefs) 18 │ 19 │ ;; First off, we need MELPA and the org-mode repo: 20 │ (require 'package) 21 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t) 22 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("org" . "https://orgmode.org/elpa/") t) 23 │ (package-initialize)
- bloopernova 5y ago
  And some more snippets since I'm copying and pasting already. (I'm using "bat" to view files. Get it from https://github.com/sharkdp/bat https://github.com/sharkdp/bat ) 40 │ ;; Taken from https://karl-voit.at/2017/02/11/my-system-is-foobar/ 53 │ ;; Check if system is GNU/Linux 54 │ (defun my-system-type-is-gnu () 55 │ "Return non-nil if system is GNU/Linux-based." 56 │ (string-equal system-type "gnu/linux") 57 │ ) 59 │ ;; make Linux a bit more mac-like 60 │ (when (my-system-type-is-gnu) 61 │ (global-set-key (kbd "s-/") 'comment-or-uncomment-region-or-line) 62 │ (global-set-key (kbd "s-<backspace>") '(lambda () (interactive) (kill-line 0))) 64 │ ) 362 │ (defun newer-than-7-days(file) 363 │ "Return list of files newer than 7 days old in directory FILE." 364 │ (> 7 365 │ (/(float-time(time-subtract 366 │ (current-time) 367 │ (nth 5 (file-attributes file)))) 368 │ 86400))) 407 │ (setq org-agenda-files 408 │ (seq-filter #'newer-than-7-days 409 │ (directory-files-recursively "~/Org/Journal" "\\.org$"))) Yes, Emacs is an operating system that also edits text :)

by jstx1 5y ago

Emacs is so customisable that as soon as I want to customise anything, I get lost searching for solutions online and inevitably give up on using Emacs altogether.

rvieira 5y ago

That is true. I use emacs-mac with spacemacs which works pretty well out of the box. What I try to do, to not go into the "hacking Emacs" rabbit hole, is to really avoid tweaking it unless something is really interfering with my workflow.

marco_craveiro 5y ago

I think the biggest problem with Emacs is that you cannot really make sense of a lot of stuff until you start programming elisp in anger. I tried for many years to copy and paste snippets etc, but now I realised you just need to bite the bullet and learn it like any other programming language and be prepared to do "real development" in Emacs. Its very difficult to be a "tourist" in Emacs, IMHO, a lot of things just don't make sense until you became more of a elisp programmer.

laserlight 5y ago
Couldn’t agree more. I used to get annoyed that I had to copy and paste code snippets that I found over the Web just to configure basic stuff. It got out of control pretty quickly. Now I understood that Emacs is supposed to be used by programming it. Turns out it was meant to be a feature, not a bug.
- Fice 5y ago
  I'd go further and say that computers are supposed to be used by programming them.
e3bc54b2 5y ago
> Its very difficult to be a "tourist" in Emacs Exactly. Ironically, Emacs is also the place where transition from tourist to resident is the smoothest. You can stray writing and evaluating Elisp practically anywhere. (Almost) Everything is programmable via Elisp, everything is documented in excruciating detail, learning about any system attribute is two keychords away, there are debugging and profiling tools built in, and source code for very built in thing is available. If the target is to make average Joe into a programmer with least effort, things don't get much better than this.

bloopernova 5y ago

Emacs is fantastic for Yak Shaving. You can spend hours or days tweaking and modifying its configuration files if you're not careful. My advice for those seeking to get into Emacs: start from scratch. Learn how to split your custom.el from your init.el, and make sure you're using git to manage those files. Then start slowly and install org-mode from source and go from there: 8 │ ;; Save customizations in a different file. Prevents this file being 9 │ ;; modified by Emacs. 10 │ ;;; Code: 11 │ (setq custom-file (expand-file-name "custom.el" user-emacs-directory)) 12 │ (when (file-exists-p custom-file) 13 │ (load custom-file)) 14 │ 15 │ ;; Before anything else, orgmode: 16 │ (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.orgsrc/org-9.4/lisp") 17 │ (require 'org-loaddefs) 18 │ 19 │ ;; First off, we need MELPA and the org-mode repo: 20 │ (require 'package) 21 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t) 22 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("org" . "https://orgmode.org/elpa/") t) 23 │ (package-initialize)

bloopernova 5y ago
And some more snippets since I'm copying and pasting already. (I'm using "bat" to view files. Get it from https://github.com/sharkdp/bat https://github.com/sharkdp/bat ) 40 │ ;; Taken from https://karl-voit.at/2017/02/11/my-system-is-foobar/ 53 │ ;; Check if system is GNU/Linux 54 │ (defun my-system-type-is-gnu () 55 │ "Return non-nil if system is GNU/Linux-based." 56 │ (string-equal system-type "gnu/linux") 57 │ ) 59 │ ;; make Linux a bit more mac-like 60 │ (when (my-system-type-is-gnu) 61 │ (global-set-key (kbd "s-/") 'comment-or-uncomment-region-or-line) 62 │ (global-set-key (kbd "s-<backspace>") '(lambda () (interactive) (kill-line 0))) 64 │ ) 362 │ (defun newer-than-7-days(file) 363 │ "Return list of files newer than 7 days old in directory FILE." 364 │ (> 7 365 │ (/(float-time(time-subtract 366 │ (current-time) 367 │ (nth 5 (file-attributes file)))) 368 │ 86400))) 407 │ (setq org-agenda-files 408 │ (seq-filter #'newer-than-7-days 409 │ (directory-files-recursively "~/Org/Journal" "\\.org$"))) Yes, Emacs is an operating system that also edits text :)