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Bad Emacs Advice
- jmclnx 5y agoCorrect, I did not know about 'C-h k', very nice ! very nice write up
- Yuioup 5y agojust like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice. I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious!
- szszrk 5y agoTried pineapple pizza on multiple occasions and it never gave me a bad advice!
- going_ham 5y agoI think that pineapple topping on the pizza meme is designed by pizza elitist to fool normal people from trying it out. Once you try pizza with pineapple toppings, it gives this extraordinary taste. Sweet, sour and salty. All at same time!
- bryanlarsen 5y agoJust like a good salad, a pizza has 6 things: salt, crunch, fat (cheese), acid (tomatoes), sweet (pineapple/mango/fig or a stewed sweet tomato sauce) and umami (Parmigiano Reggiano/Grana Padano/etc or anchovy). But not all 6 in every bite. Most Americans use a fairly sweet pizza sauce. Adding pineapple to that makes it too sweet. But I like my sauce with more tomato acid, so a little bit of fig or pineapple complements the flavours. The nice thing about pineapple is that you don't get it in every bite like you do with a sweet sauce. Edit: and now I sound like the pizza snob. :) It should be 7 -- good pizza has both crisp and chew.
- lvass 5y agoMost americans use a fairly sweet everything. God even their barbecue is full of sugar. I have the impression the whole country is sugar addicted. I'm from a culture where mixing salty and sweet stuff is considered abhorrent (south america), I could not find a single food I liked in the time I spent in the US (except desserts), and was soon forced to cook myself or I'd barely eat at all.
- Fwirt 5y agoIt gets added to pretty much every prepared food here whether you like it or not. Even "staples" like bread have sugar added even to the "healthy" brands. It's easy to get addicted when it's difficult to avoid unless you cook every meal at home from scratch. (And even then you have to be careful because some ingredients have sugar added to them.) There are many of us that don't like the situation but once you're addicted your tastes change and when everything around you keeps sneaking it in it's hard to eliminate from your diet.
- toyg 5y agoIt's because it was not a thing in Italy, so accepting it was seen as the sign of being out of touch with "real pizza" traditions. Sadly, a natural reaction of disgusted rejection by Italians has been adopted by snobs all over the world. Nowadays you'll find it even in Italy, because tourists demand it and they pay hard cash, so fuck it all anyway.
- prussian 5y ago>It's because it was not a thing in Italy I'm pretty sure even Tomatoes weren't. I hope this isn't the reason for the disdain.
- _jal 5y agoI'm fine with disdain. If pizza were French, there'd be legislation about it.
- ycombinete 5y ago“Of course it’s not real pizza, that’d have to be imported from the Pizza region in Italy”
- Bayart 5y agoThat sentence works if you replace pizza with parmesan, or any of the Italian protected origin foods.
- ska 5y agoIt's easy to poke fun, but DOP isn't just about region and it does matter, at least for many things. I don't know that "you can't call it X" is the right approach, but there should be some really clear to consumers way of saying "X was made to a particular standard" vs "all bets are off with Y" - then let them decide.
- 5y ago
- black6 5y agoOT: mango is another good topping.
- Koshkin 5y agoAs is emacs without the menu, the toolbar, and the scrollbar!
- convolvatron 5y agoI agree. when they added those things I immediately turned them off and never looked back. the author argues that they are just a couple lines..but they are a couple lines of useless noise
- Jtsummers 5y ago> but they are a couple lines of useless noise for people who know the system. The menubar is useful for discovery if you're new to the system, which seems to be the audience they're writing for.
- bananamerica 5y agoThis meme is so popular because the overwhelming majority of people thinks pineapple on pizza is a disgusting abomination. I empathize with you, it's tough being the contrarian sometimes. I say that as someone who likes the Star Wars prequels :P
- asciimov 5y agoThere is definitely a silent majority of people who love pineapple on their pizza. My local pizza guy tells me Hawaiian is one of his top selling pizzas. Those that like pineapple on their pizza just don't speak up because they don't feel the need to be harassed over their pizza choices.
- simiones 5y agoMost people in Europe especially, and especially in Southern Europe (Eastern Europe as well, but that's less relevant to pizza), tend to dislike sweet-and-salty combinations, with some limited exceptions (such as carrots or peas).
- euroderf 5y agoBut are you quite prepared for tuna on pizza ?
- Naga 5y agoHawaiian pizza (cheese, ham and pineapple) is normalized here in Canada. I'm not personally a fan, but I have always had a hard time finding it unusual.
- esclerofilo 5y agoDespite the name, it originated in Canada, you'd expect it to be normal there.
- pantulis 5y agoPretty normal in Spain as well. In fact it's my go-to choice when ordering.
- mickeyp 5y agoOP here. I just like funny quips; it's just there to break up my rambling monologuing :-)
- siver_john 5y agoTo be fair when I push the meme I do it because I personally dislike Pineapple, I sincerely don't care what people put on their personal pizza, just don't put it on mine. Counter, I have enjoyed Brussel Sprouts on pizza and I feel that is a much bigger sin.
- retzkek 5y agoShaved Brussels sprouts, fried (or roasted), with a balsamic glaze? Sounds good to me!
- memling 5y ago> I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious! Arnold has an opinion.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKV74qkokmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKV74qkokmk
- C4stor 5y agoIf think the joke is that author himself don't side with the (mostly pointless) debate about pizza and pineapple, so whatever your own opinion, you can see his point.
- distantsounds 5y agoso let me get this straight: - read the manual - follow the tutorial - customize it to your liking wow, what enlightening advice! this must be unique to emacs and not _any_other piece of software! once again, all you need to get FP'd on hackernews is to put the word "emacs" in your title. zoom! to the front page!
- alpaca128 5y agoIt would be great if every other software had documentation comparable to Emacs', but that's simply not the case.
- fabianmg 5y agoWe have found the vim user...
- bananamerica 5y agoAcessing manual, documentation, values, functions, and source code on Emacs is so easy that it would be hard to summarize all the ways you can do it. It's an integral part of your workflow, and literally unlike anything else. Unlike other programs, that really can and should be an integral part of your daily routine. One thing I dislike about the manual is that it rarely presents examples, but commands like describe-variable and describe-function often help elucidate usage. Not to mention external packages that makes all that even easier.
- drothlis 5y agoI suspect it's because so many Emacs tutorials out there cover the same material as the built-in tutorial. And so many pre-packaged Emacs configuration files disable the menu-bar for no good reason other than that's what everyone else seems to be doing. e.g. "Emacs Prelude", one such configuration or "distribution" of Emacs, used to disable the menu-bar by default as recently as a year ago: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/commit/878cffb https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/commit/878cffb
- bitwize 5y agoI agree that the tool and menu bars are helpful for beginners. I disable mine to reclaim the vertical space (precious in a 16:9 world), to focus my attention on using the command keys, and because I'm a relatively experienced Emacs user! If keeping them helps you get your way around Emacs, by all means go nuts!
- drothlis 5y agoYears ago I wrote the Emacs tutorial I wish had existed when I was learning Emacs: https://david.rothlis.net/emacs/tutorial.html https://david.rothlis.net/emacs/tutorial.html It follows a similar philosophy as the OP: Start by reading Emacs's built-in tutorial, and then my tutorial shows you how to leverage the built-in help system to figure out how to achieve what you want to do.
- mickeyp 5y agoI'm the OP. That's a nice tutorial, and I agree with your sentiment that you should build on Emacs's ability to query it to figure out what to do. That's the main focus of my book, too, for the exact same reason.
- NateEag 5y agoWhen people ask me how to learn Emacs, I point them to your tutorial. It was hugely helpful to me in learning Emacs. Thank you so much for writing it!
- drothlis 5y agoThanks! I spent 3-4 months on it (getting up at 5am most days to spend 1-2 hours on it before my day job) so it's nice to know it was of some use! :-)
- aww_dang 5y agoFeels like these problems mostly relate to the tech-wizard elitism theme. By all means use the help features and GUI menus if that's what you need. I believe when you run these commands via GUI you also get feedback explaining the equivalent keystroke sequence. Reminds me of the old days of IRC posturing, newbie bashing and RTFMing. Today most info can be obtained by a well crafted search query.
- 0xdky 5y agoAnother lesson I learned from almost 2+ decades of using Emacs: Track your customizations in a version control. Using customize package and reading the diff in dot Emacs file has taught me quite a bit about certain aspects of the package. Side note: It would be awesome if Emacs could do the versioning as part of saving the customizations - build Emacs with libgit2 and make it a native git client.
- mickeyp 5y agoYou could probably write it. Emacs is able to track which settings you've _applied_ but not yet saved; that could serve as the linchpin for generating versioned changes.
- bananamerica 5y agoThe customize interface is quite useful. It's probably more adequate if you don't have a huge intricate init. With time, custom.el (or init.el if you keep everything in the same file) can get difficult to manage. When that happen, a lot of people opt for something more readable and human friendly, like use-package or a distribution such as doom-emacs. The author mentions that some things can be hard to do outside of the customize interface. That is true. When that happens, I just use the interface and then move the setting from custom.el to use-package. But that's rare, I can't remember the last time I did that.
- TacticalCoder 5y agofor a reason I forgot my .emacs.d/ ("hidden" dir) is a symlink to emacsdotd/ (not hidden) and, yup, it's in git. Some are going to say: "why stop there!? version your entire user dir" and I can see the appeal (but haven't tried yet). I'm one of those who track everything Emacs: including all the packages. When I upgrade packages, I first check that nothing broke then I commit "Bump avy to 20220114" or whatever. This way I can easily share the exact same config on several machines/several user accounts and I know I can easily roll back to a known fully working setup. YMMV.
- oblio 5y agoIf by "version your entire user dir" you mean "version all your manually edited configs", that can work. Init a git repo in your $HOME, add a .gitignore that by default excludes everything then manually add just the files and folders you want to track. Especially if you want to publish the repo, be careful, because it's <<extremely>> easy to accidentally expose confidential stuff.
- beepbooptheory 5y agoJust to add: the built-in "Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" is also really really great. I have been using emacs for a while, with one framework or another, but always hesitated actually learning lisp. I was too focused on learning the kinds of languages and systems that might get me a job, and it felt like too big of a venture in learning a whole language just for my development environment. Now, I have a given up on the employable thing, and have been enlightened by SICP and lispey languages, and in general, the simple beauty of Emacs itself, not just what I can make it do. It takes only a little time to get comfortable with the nested (), and weird vocabulary, and it just really will click with you at some point, how simple it all really is, how every function bears on the simple syntactic principles of the language as whole, its lists all the way down! You can see the language work, by looking at the code. It may not get me a fancy computer job, but I think I am happier on the whole anyway, giving myself to lisp. Something therapeutic about it.
- gypsyharlot 5y agoHow do you access the built-in "Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp"?
- nanna 5y agoC-h i m 'Emacs Lisp Intro'
- gypsyharlot 5y agoThat doesn't work for me.
- Jtsummers 5y agoDon't use the quotes for the phrase, just type it verbatim. If that still doesn't work then either the info page isn't installed (weird) or something else is up. You can also, from the first info page at C-h i, type "C-s emacs lisp intro" which should bring you to it. And again, if it's not there then something is wonky with your install.
- mynameismon 5y agoMaybe it's me, but starting out with Emacs the previous month, I tried using Doom Emacs the other week, and the number of packages it was being used frightened me. Building your own init.el is much much better, because you know your Emacs in and out, and dont have random keybindings triggering stuff. Maybe I'll never get the popularity of Doom
- mcbuilder 5y agoIf you have spent years writing your own config, you appreciate all the things doom brings to the table. I know I'd never end up writing such a good system from the ground up.
- tharne 5y agoI think doom is really good for inspiration. I used it for a while and it gave me a lot of good ideas on the kinds of things I could do with emacs and elisp. I now use my own much simpler config, but I've borrowed heavily from the things I like about Doom.
- clircle 5y agoYes, this is exactly how I use Doom. When I first found it, I transplanted its startup optimizations into my existing config, but left everything else alone. When I look to do something new in Emacs, one of my first instincts is "well, let's see how Doom is doing it." It's works well because I fall into the Evil+Use-package Emacs hegemony with my custom config.
- remedan 5y agoI had a very similar experience when I decided to learn Emacs recently. The first thing I did was try Doom Emacs. It was nice but I felt that there is this big layer of stuff separating me from having complete control over my editor. So I deleted my config. Went through the tutorial with vanilla setup. Then I continuously kept adding packages and tinkering with my config. After about two weeks, I felt that my productivity was on par with what it was previously in Neovim. I've been using Emacs for a couple of months now and I'm happy I went this route. It is a tool I use almost daily and thus having a deep level of understanding and control is worth it.
- taeric 5y agoI do disable those things. But mostly out of aesthetics. That and I am easily distracted. I remember used to trying to find how to accommodate all items in the menu bar into my use. Completely agree with this article, though. Happy with my purchase of this book a while back.
- thom 5y agoI dunno, everything the menu does can be recreated in the minibuffer (and you have things like apropos if you're really lost). Personally I like to reclaim as much space as possible, so I turn off modelines too (I have a bit of status info written into the minibuffer, but I'd kill that too if you could).
- dark-star 5y ago"But just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice." I stopped reading after this. If you want to look like you're objective, don't use pizza as an argument
- rbanffy 5y agoI have been turning off the menu bar for quite some time because I get distracted easily and any content that's not necessary just gets in the way. That said, you can always call it up as a pop-up menu.
- forgetfulness 5y agoThe menu bar is pretty good for discovery, you'll have to rely more on naming convention and documentation without it. The toolbar is pretty fungible though, few modes do anything with it and the core functionality you get from the standard chords you find in the tutorial, little bang for the pixels.
- aidenn0 5y agoFor those picking up emacs for lisp development, I'll add another piece of terrible advice: enabling paredit mode. I think these all have a similar theme to them "I am more productive now since I have turned them on, so I wish I had switched sooner" but they ignore the fact that each of those things adds friction to learning the basics, and at some point people will just nope-out.
- felideon 5y agoYes, good point. Learn how to balance parens with rainbow delimiters (if anything) and, once you you're comfortable with sexps, give paredit a try.
- crumbits 5y ago>menu bar I never leave it enabled any more. When I was a beginner it was helpful but as time goes on you learn more of the system and better ways of finding commands. One thing I suggest is building emacs without dbus and using only Athena widgets. Both contribute to overall emacs stability.