10 ms·

As a followup question, what is the best resource to most efficiently learn the basics of Emacs?

by kylec 18y ago

powellb 18y ago
A swift kick to the head. After that, mapping CAPS-LOCK to be CONTROL. After that, the previously mentioned O'Reilly book.
- tatofoo 18y ago
  This is the second time I've read this: > mapping CAPS-LOCK to be CONTROL. Why? At least in my laptop CAPS-LOCK is easier me to press than CONTROL if I want CAPS, maybe there is another reason for it?
  - shadytrees 18y ago
    If you keep stretching your pinky to the left Control key (which is used a lot in Emacs), you can actually damage your hand especially with heavy Emacs love. Mapping the Caps Lock to Control is useful because it removes the stretching and, besides, Caps Lock is used infrequently enough to not warrant its being on the home row. (It also makes Ctrl shortcuts in other applications easier.)
    - johnm 18y ago
      That makes sense if you're using Emacs on a laptop. However, when you're at your desk, the most awesome Emacs upgrade is to buy a Kinesis Ergo "Contoured" keyboard (http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/). It moves all of the control/alt/Apple/Meta keys from all of the random locations to your thumbs and so once you get used to it, it's way, way better than anything else. The only downside is that it only comes in one size so if you have large hands / long fingers it might be too cramped. For the skeptics, once you get used to it, it's actually quite easy to go back and forth between the laptop keyboard and the Kinesis. I.e., very little mental dissonance.
      - rbanffy 18y ago
        There has been some discussion on the importance of a good chair. I find the keyboard a very important component, perhaps as much as good office furniture. I use to half joke that my disdain for Microsoft is not as extensive as it may appear from one reading what I post (I got a -8 mod a couple days back for saying no real programmer would accept programming under Windows). In fact, I love several Microsoft products and, for me, the three best products they do today are the natural keyboards, the mice and SQL Server. In that order. I loved the Z-80 softcard too. Would place it above SQL Server if it were still in production.
        JoeBlu 18y ago
        MSFT does not get enough credit for its peripherals. The keyboards aren't pretty, but they are some of the most comfortable I've ever worked on.
        rbanffy 18y ago
        It's because they decided to focus on their more profitable software business, where they are marginally competent, while their core competency, the one they are unanimously praised for, is hardware gizmos.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - silentbicycle 18y ago
    That puts control on the home row. You'll be pressing / holding down control quite often in Emacs. (Frequently typed characters should be on the home row for efficiency. That's why Qwerty has semicolon on the home row.)
    - maw 18y ago
      "Frequently typed characters should be on the home row for efficiency." Only if you miniscule hands and recordbreakingly narrow shoulders.
      - silentbicycle 18y ago
        Not a fan of touch-typing, eh?
  - mindslight 18y ago
    That's exactly the point. What's the purpose of caps lock? If you're SHOUTING you should be HOLDING DOWN THE SHIFT KEY AS HARD AS YOU CAN SO THAT YOUR FEELING IS GENUINE!
etal 18y ago
The emacs tutorial included with the editor is good enough to wean you off the mouse, for the most part. You can be productive after that, and you don't even need to open to another window. The startup page might show the hotkey combination for loading the tutorial, depending on the version of emacs. There's other documentation included with emacs beyond that, e.g. the info pages. Anything that can be read from within emacs has the added advantage of helping you get used to scrolling and moving around inside buffers (again, hopefully without the mouse).
silentbicycle 18y ago
In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour. After working through that, some combination of reading the Emacs Wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki) and a recent edition of _Learning Gnu Emacs_ will get you off to a good start. Getting really effective with Emacs takes a while (probably at least a month), but it is very deliberately designed to be keep growing with you. If you come to prefer it for editing, you can bundle together your config files and extensions and run Emacs on all the major OSs. It becomes its own extensible environment, much like Firefox with its extensions. (This is why the time spent learning it pays off.)
- jrockway 18y ago
  In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour. IMHO, the tutorial is useless. It spends too much time on C-p and C-n and not enough time on anything useful. I recommend reading the Info documentation. It is very well written and very complete. You should also read the Elisp reference manual; having an understanding of the internals is helpful even if you don't intend to program emacs.
  - silentbicycle 18y ago
    I definitely agree about the Info documentation (I forgot to include that), but I think the tutorial is still worth doing: it covers the extreme basics using Emacs's terminology. It's hard to figure out how to do some things in Emacs via the info pages (or apropos, emacswiki, etc.) without knowing that, for example, each pane inside the Emacs window is called a "window" (Emacs calls the main window(s) "frames"). Also, it covers some conceptual things upfront, like how C-f is forward-char but M-f is forward-word, and that M-somekey is often a more abstract version of C-somekey. (Also, how to read the "C-x M-c butterfly" style keyboard shortcuts in the first place.) A lot of the things it covers ("C-x C-s is save") are pretty basic, but it tries to introduce some of Emacs's cultural/design quirks, which are probably what really trip up a lot of people.

As a followup question, what is the best resource to most efficiently learn the basics of Emacs?

by kylec 18y ago

As a followup question, what is the best resource to most efficiently learn the basics of Emacs?

A swift kick to the head. After that, mapping CAPS-LOCK to be CONTROL. After that, the previously mentioned O'Reilly book.

tatofoo 18y ago
This is the second time I've read this: > mapping CAPS-LOCK to be CONTROL. Why? At least in my laptop CAPS-LOCK is easier me to press than CONTROL if I want CAPS, maybe there is another reason for it?
- shadytrees 18y ago
  If you keep stretching your pinky to the left Control key (which is used a lot in Emacs), you can actually damage your hand especially with heavy Emacs love. Mapping the Caps Lock to Control is useful because it removes the stretching and, besides, Caps Lock is used infrequently enough to not warrant its being on the home row. (It also makes Ctrl shortcuts in other applications easier.)
  - johnm 18y ago
    That makes sense if you're using Emacs on a laptop. However, when you're at your desk, the most awesome Emacs upgrade is to buy a Kinesis Ergo "Contoured" keyboard (http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/). It moves all of the control/alt/Apple/Meta keys from all of the random locations to your thumbs and so once you get used to it, it's way, way better than anything else. The only downside is that it only comes in one size so if you have large hands / long fingers it might be too cramped. For the skeptics, once you get used to it, it's actually quite easy to go back and forth between the laptop keyboard and the Kinesis. I.e., very little mental dissonance.
    - rbanffy 18y ago
      There has been some discussion on the importance of a good chair. I find the keyboard a very important component, perhaps as much as good office furniture. I use to half joke that my disdain for Microsoft is not as extensive as it may appear from one reading what I post (I got a -8 mod a couple days back for saying no real programmer would accept programming under Windows). In fact, I love several Microsoft products and, for me, the three best products they do today are the natural keyboards, the mice and SQL Server. In that order. I loved the Z-80 softcard too. Would place it above SQL Server if it were still in production.
      - JoeBlu 18y ago
        MSFT does not get enough credit for its peripherals. The keyboards aren't pretty, but they are some of the most comfortable I've ever worked on.
        rbanffy 18y ago
        It's because they decided to focus on their more profitable software business, where they are marginally competent, while their core competency, the one they are unanimously praised for, is hardware gizmos.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  That puts control on the home row. You'll be pressing / holding down control quite often in Emacs. (Frequently typed characters should be on the home row for efficiency. That's why Qwerty has semicolon on the home row.)
  - maw 18y ago
    "Frequently typed characters should be on the home row for efficiency." Only if you miniscule hands and recordbreakingly narrow shoulders.
    - silentbicycle 18y ago
      Not a fan of touch-typing, eh?
- mindslight 18y ago
  That's exactly the point. What's the purpose of caps lock? If you're SHOUTING you should be HOLDING DOWN THE SHIFT KEY AS HARD AS YOU CAN SO THAT YOUR FEELING IS GENUINE!

etal 18y ago

The emacs tutorial included with the editor is good enough to wean you off the mouse, for the most part. You can be productive after that, and you don't even need to open to another window. The startup page might show the hotkey combination for loading the tutorial, depending on the version of emacs. There's other documentation included with emacs beyond that, e.g. the info pages. Anything that can be read from within emacs has the added advantage of helping you get used to scrolling and moving around inside buffers (again, hopefully without the mouse).

silentbicycle 18y ago

In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour. After working through that, some combination of reading the Emacs Wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki) and a recent edition of _Learning Gnu Emacs_ will get you off to a good start. Getting really effective with Emacs takes a while (probably at least a month), but it is very deliberately designed to be keep growing with you. If you come to prefer it for editing, you can bundle together your config files and extensions and run Emacs on all the major OSs. It becomes its own extensible environment, much like Firefox with its extensions. (This is why the time spent learning it pays off.)

jrockway 18y ago
In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour. IMHO, the tutorial is useless. It spends too much time on C-p and C-n and not enough time on anything useful. I recommend reading the Info documentation. It is very well written and very complete. You should also read the Elisp reference manual; having an understanding of the internals is helpful even if you don't intend to program emacs.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  I definitely agree about the Info documentation (I forgot to include that), but I think the tutorial is still worth doing: it covers the extreme basics using Emacs's terminology. It's hard to figure out how to do some things in Emacs via the info pages (or apropos, emacswiki, etc.) without knowing that, for example, each pane inside the Emacs window is called a "window" (Emacs calls the main window(s) "frames"). Also, it covers some conceptual things upfront, like how C-f is forward-char but M-f is forward-word, and that M-somekey is often a more abstract version of C-somekey. (Also, how to read the "C-x M-c butterfly" style keyboard shortcuts in the first place.) A lot of the things it covers ("C-x C-s is save") are pretty basic, but it tries to introduce some of Emacs's cultural/design quirks, which are probably what really trip up a lot of people.