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I installed Emacs to install SLIME so I could play around with Lisp. The REPL-in-a-buffer is so phenomenally powerful that I immediately missed it in TextMate

by ivey 18y ago

I installed Emacs to install SLIME so I could play around with Lisp. The REPL-in-a-buffer is so phenomenally powerful that I immediately missed it in TextMate when coding in Ruby. Thus began my descent into Emacs madness, and my new favorite function, ruby-send-region-and-go I was a vi guy for a very long time, and I mocked the Emacs guys for "eight megs and constantly swapping" and "Emacs claw" ... until I switched to TextMate on the Mac, and realized how Emacs-inspired it is. It was actually very easy to go from TextMate to Emacs. Along the way, I got more productive in my shell. Did you know that M-left moves back a word on the command line? I didn't, and I've been using bash for 10 years. Oh, and it works in all readline-enabled apps.

jimbokun 18y ago
Did you know you can run a shell inside Emacs? I get frustrated when running a shell in a regular terminal. They all implement some subset of emacs editing keystrokes, but never all of them, and the subsets are different. It's wonderful having all editing, searching, etc. functionality of emacs available when typing in your shell. I wrote some Emacs Lisp to jump to the line of a javac syntax error, or stack trace line with a single keystroke. Combining that with the ability to run a shell and browse log files comes in very handy. I also have a macro that searches for the Java symbol under the cursor. It misses a bunch of edge cases, but still very useful. All of this in just 55 lines of elisp. How many lines does it take to write "Hello, World!" as an Eclipse plug in?