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916 Days of Emacs
- pyrophane 3y ago> Poof I made my free-time disappear - Ellis Kenyő, on being called an "elisp mage" Haha, this is exactly what I fear if I tried to switch from Neovim to Emacs. I have a pretty bare-bones Emacs config that I started a while back, but haven't spent the time to really get it going.
- goldfeld 3y agoMaybe Doom Emacs can win me back, I ended up preferring the vim emulation mode in Emacs, evil, over nvim but my dotfiles bitrotted over the long years
- ddavis 3y agoCool post! I really don't want to know how much time I've spent configuring Emacs over the last 12 years :P The explosion of great Emacs Lisp packages over the last few years has absolutely made it difficult to avoid forever playing around with Emacs.
- TheCondor 3y agoHave you tried any of the distributions? I have had sort of a semi-annual ritual of re-evaluating my emacs configuration. This last December I've tried Centaur out and while it's not perfect, it's not too bad. Definitely an interesting place to start from.
- ddavis 3y agoI’ve never used one. I’ve declared init.el bankruptcy a few times in those 12 years but I always build from vanilla Emacs- lots of use-package use though.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoI'd love to give it another try, but not convinced it's a good fit for me. Love it conceptually though. The stumbling block I usually come to is wondering how to utilize these data sets on my smartphone in an efficient and effective manner.
- ryukafalz 3y agoIt does only work for a subset of org-mode functionality, but for TODOs and similar I find Orgzly on Android works great. I sync between my laptop and phone via Syncthing.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoWow! That's exactly what I hoped for. That's lovely looking.
- ctur 3y agoI find the iOS app BeOrg great for mobile access to my org mode inbox. It works well as not only a place to write quick notes but also to, say, "share to" links from Safari and other apps to create inbox entries as well to quickly capture URLs to view later.
- arminiusreturns 3y agoI use emacs from termux frequently, even better if I use my bluetooth keyboard and hdmi out to a tv, but even though the text is small in normal mode I still prefer it to any of the fdroid emacs or org mode packages. For those who worry about runaway configs, I highly suggest starting with sanemacs for a good minimal configuration you can start with and build from a good foundation on.
- bitwize 3y ago> As I said, I started from the point of zero experience with Lisp. I had a degree in software engineering, but I don’t feel like it has helped me in any direct sense. At most, it exposed me to different kinds and concepts of programming, but I am confident that it’s anything but a prerequisite, as also shown by the story of Protesilaos. A reminder that back in the late 1970s, secretaries at MIT who knew nothing about programming were using Lisp to customize Multics Emacs to their liking and workflow -- and Emacs was far less convenient then than it is now! The weird trick they used was, telling the secretaries they were just customizing their editor, not programming it!
- camgunz 3y agoThis website is a treasure trove of emacs config goodness. Bookmarked to come back to to explore switching from vim once again.
- Pr0ject217 3y agoI switched from VSCode to Doom Emacs a couple of months ago. I've been using ChatGPT (GPT-4) to help me write config (~1,000 lines of elisp code so far) and it's been very interesting/fun. I'm not going back.
- bachback 3y agovery cool can you share more?
- Pr0ject217 3y agoMy process is kind of organic. I'll start working on a project, and if I run into something that feels wrong about the Doom Emacs default config/keybindings, I'll just open up a conversation with ChatGPT (the GPT-4 model, it's much better than 3.5). I'll tell it that I'm using Doom Emacs, and then explain what I want, or what problem I'm having, and it will output code that I can try. It's not always correct on the first try, and sometimes I have to have a dialogue with it for a little while before it gets it right. Sometimes it struggles and begins to guess - and for those cases, I'll fall back to doing manual searches in Google, and if that fails, give up entirely and just write myself a TODO comment and keep marching forward. It's help me set up config quickly that would've taken me a very long time to figure out.
- BeetleB 3y agoThat's interesting. I've asked Bing Chat and ChatGPT several times to write me elisp code, and not once did it work well. It often invents APIs.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoHm, I've had luck with openai gpt4. I've had it make fake APIs before, but usually when I say "fooFakeApi doesn't exist" it corrects itself.
- pmoriarty 3y agoBut how well does it do on elisp?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- commandlinefan 3y agoI've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which are (for some reason) the default cursor movement commands in most command line environments like the Postgres CLI.
- celeritascelery 3y agoI am surprised you didn’t use evil-mode to emulate the vim keybindings. Or was this a an attempt to use “pure” Emacs without packages and customization?
- pmoriarty 3y agoIt sounds like they're not even aware that it was an option. Many people don't realize that emacs' default keybindings can be changed to be modal in exactly the same as vim, by using evil.
- kentosi 3y agoSorry for the naive question, but if you're changing all your bindings to vim, then why use emacs at all? Is there any extra functional difference?
- skydhash 3y agoEmacs is more like an ecosystem around text, so switching keybinding does not matter much. And most people's system is installed on a single computer, very much like Photoshop or Visual Studio. Vim is all about editing text and the keybinding are like a DSL for this purpose, so changing things will make you awkward everywhere.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
- xphos 3y agoHow did you collect such detailed statistics of your usage that's the crazy part in my opinion not that you actually switch but you have the statistics to monitor the switch!
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoIf you've done any significant amount of contract work you get used to logging your time for multiple clients. Arguably you then grow wiser and charge per day.
- leephillips 3y agoI like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn’t respond instantly I don’t want to use it.
- pascal_wizzard 3y agoWell it really depends on what operations you expect to be instant. Basic editing like movement, inserting, etc is instant, but summing from 1 to 100000000000000000000000 is where elisp would show its poor performance.
- hospitalJail 3y agoThis is basically why I don't use intellij. Work pays for everything, I just dont want to wait 10 minutes for an environment to change.
- peterashford 3y agoI use Goland at work - which is intellij. Switching between project environments is about 2 seconds. Cold start is about 5 seconds.
- Icathian 3y agoPeople talk about its slowness, but I've got mine pretty damn kitted out and it's still faster than VSCode, VStudio, and JetBrains products. It's not as fast as vim, I'll admit, though.
- rirze 3y agoRecent releases have greatly improved performance. That is, unless you're talking about launching emacs each time you want to edit a single file, then emacs won't load instantly like vi will.
- tmtvl 3y agoEh, you can run Emacs as a daemon and starting a client is pretty fast.
- comonoid 3y agoThe first 916 days of Emacs are always the hardest.
- pjkundert 3y ago916 days to flatten the curve!
- sanitycheck 3y ago282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config. I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
- EnigmaCurry 3y agoIts a hardly a requirement, some people just enjoy doing it. You can just use someone else's config, lots to choose from.
- throwawaysalome 3y agoSome guys look at a car as going from point A and B. Some guys find they can get to B faster and more safely if they can modify the car.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dwringer 3y agoFurthermore I'd say that I (presumably like most emacs users) am probably closer to 45 minutes per month, or per year, on general emacs config stuff, certainly not per day. It has still made a huge difference for me in terms of convenience and just general aesthetics.
- 1066 3y agoRight, it's an extension of your life right. Some people find it fulfilling to kit out there house with exactly what they think they desire. Its just a matter of processing the stuff that makes you happy while providing _internal_ development.
- School-Cotton 3y agoThe whole point of emacs is that it’s not “fiddling with config”, it’s programming. Which is an activity a lot of people enjoy. Emacs is essentially an IDE for developing emacs.
- adamc 3y agoI've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange. I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.
- crabbone 3y ago[flagged]
- SettembreNero 3y ago> I haven't met anyone who used VSCode / MSVS / IntelliJ products or Eclipse who was good at writing code. How many people have you met?
- crabbone 3y agoProfessionally? -- Couple hundreds... well, probably more than average programmer: I worked in HP as Ops, and a big chunk of my job was to help Java programmers to cope with their programming environment. I.e. we (the ops) supplied them with Maven build, and they didn't know and didn't learn how to use it, so every day I had to go cubicle to cubicle fixing the same problems for these people. You learn to despise people like these for not being able to perform basic stuff on their computers... stuff like look for a file with a particular text in it or opening a file with an extension not recognized by their editor of choice. So... the campus I was on at that job had three buildings. Two had five floors and another one had I think a dining room on the ground floor and like two more floors, but mostly non-programmers there. A floor had like... four cubicles on the short side and maybe a dozen on the long side. Some cubicles had two occupants, but obviously I didn't visit every one there... Still, just in HP I must've met more than a hundred. I worked all in all in 13 companies over my career. Two of these way too small (<5 people) to count, beside HP, I also worked in Google (through acquisition) and I work in a company of a similar size today (also, through acquisition). Two more companies were 100+ employees (of course, I didn't meet everyone), and the rest are under 100. That's over something close to 25 years.
- JohnMakin 3y agothe .vimrc I've been using for like 7 years has 8 lines
- todd8 3y agoIn grad school in the 80’s I used Emacs. At home around 1984 I got my first PC running MSDOS. For years I used a commercial product that used Emacs keybindings (Epsilon) because Emacs wouldn’t run on my PC. When I went to work at IBM I was disappointed that concerns over the Gnu license forced me to use vi for a few years, but I discovered it to be great an editor for me. I eventually was drawn back to Emacs and now, many years later, I enjoy playing with my config file every week. There is always something new to be added. It’s org mode and magit that make it impossible to leave Emacs. (Right now I’m experimenting with a configuration where I’ve installed the top 600 most popular add on packages at once. I’m kind of using the wisdom of crowds approach to picking packages this time. Next week it will be something else.)
- numbers 3y agoI love posts like this. It reminds me of having fun with computers is so rewarding. Reading a post like this reminds me of being young and diving into Vim and learning new tricks with it every day!
- retrocryptid 3y agoOh man. I'm embarrassed to say I've been using emacs for almost 40 years and it probably accounts for 80% of my screen time. I wonder how many people know emacs predates gnu-emacs? I remember being skeptical of open source until I saw what gnu emacs could do. Then I got slightly more skeptical when I looked at the code ;-)
- superdisk 3y agoTell us more. What were you using before GNU?
- tjr 3y agohttps://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5736 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5736 is about pre-GNU Emacs, with history of Emacs going back to the mid-1970s.
- Y_Y 3y agoHow many fingers do you have left?
- retrocryptid 3y agoMe? I lost a finger in the great key-binding wars of the late 80s. Like I said... if you make it to your deathbed with all 9 fingers, you're not trying hard enough.
- lanstin 3y agoI got less enamoured of GNU when I started reading glibc. It works and it's solving for a complex set of build constraints and so on, but wow, it is not what I'd type.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoYeah. Thank god for musl.
- abhayhegde 3y agoActually, what's the fuss about Emacs being so good? I'm a hardcore vim user to the point that I've installed Vimium for browsers, use vim on my iPad as well. Someone please enlighten me with links, guides or just a comment as to what's in Emacs that makes it productive and special.
- psd1 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ There's a lot of non-emacs filler but it's still the best emacs e-zine
- abhayhegde 3y agoI'll use Algolia and search maybe.
- throwawaysalome 3y agoPlenty of google-able info to answer your question. But to wax poetic for a moment, you may think of vim as chess and emacs as baduk. You can learn chess quickly, and the game goes as deep as you're willing to go. Absorbing baduk takes significantly more time, but once you get it, it's like peering into another dimension.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago> baduk (for people who don't know it by this name: this is apparently the Korean name of the board game Go.)
- teddyh 3y agoStart with the official Emacs Tour: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/
- abhayhegde 3y agoSure, this might help. If you've had experience, what's unique about Emacs for you?
- kaveh808 3y agoA few random Emacs thoughts... One really nice feature of MacOS text widgets is the inclusion of basic Emacs key bindings such as C-k, C-d, C-a, etc. Brought forward from the Next days. I used Zmacs on Lisp Machines back at MIT in the early 80's. A couple of my favorite Emacs-related acronyms are the editor EINE (Eine Is Not Emacs) and its successor ZWEI (Zwei Was EINE Initially). I remember at one point in the late 80's using Emacs in the shell on SGI Irix workstations. No mouse support at that time for it. Today I still use Emacs/Slime for my Common Lisp 3D graphics hacking.
- codr7 3y agoYeah, thanks a lot, I just lost two hours setting up and configuring EXWM. Very cool, makes me wonder why I didn't think of this before, I've been using Emacs since forever.
- slashdev 3y agoWhy do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and intellij? I’ve heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be honest. They’re more like rationalizations for why they stick to what they know. I just don’t get it. Why use inferior tools? Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It’s nothing compared to your salary. Both may let you type slightly faster and move around faster. Maybe. But that’s not the bottleneck anyway. Why? Am I missing something or is it just an irrational attachment to software they learned long ago and prefer to stick with rather than learn something new?
- Paul-Craft 3y agoYou seem to be missing that they're not actually inferior tools. I can't think of a single thing that can't be done at least approximately as easily with emacs than with VSCode and the like.
- slashdev 3y agoAre they really? Do you get all the same plugins, all the lints and hover info, refactoring, jump to usages/definition, smart auto complete, etc? They seem awfully limited to me by comparison.
- stevenhuang 3y agoYes. https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim Or https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig https://github.com/hrsh7th/nvim-cmp https://github.com/hrsh7th/nvim-cmp No different than installing plugins in VSCode for completions, they all work via calling out to a LSP server using https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ When you don't understand something it's only natural to be unaware of its capabilities, yes.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago> They seem awfully limited to me by comparison. Can you list your most important feature(s) in chosen your ide or editor that you suspect emacs doesn't have or can't easily have?
- UI_at_80x24 3y agoFor the EMACS guru's in this thread I have a question. How practical is EMACS for a non-programmer? My preferred environment is FreeBSD + i3WM. I'm a sysadmin, I have no programming skills so anything beyond tweaking the odd configuration file is of no interest to me. I know that being able to write elisp is a major component of using emacs, but how usable is it without being able to write your own programs?
- cvdub 3y agoAs a sysadmin you’re probably very tech savvy, so Emacs should be very usable for you without ever learning elisp. This video by a self professed non-programmer about using Emacs in the broader Unix ecosystem might pique your interest enough to give it a try: https://youtu.be/qTncc2lI6OI https://youtu.be/qTncc2lI6OI
- UI_at_80x24 3y agoThanks, that's just what I was looking for!
- wwarner 3y agorecently put effort into improving my emacs environment and i love it more than ever. great things that were new to me: wgrep, native compilation, rg-mode, dir-locals, straight.el. Not new to me, but lsp and magit are still fast and intuitive. After the initial push, i haven’t had to give it much thought. To be fair, yaml-mode is still the pits.
- 7e 3y ago[flagged]
- phissenschaft 3y agoI just stopped worry and succumbed to https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil. Now I only mostly just fiddle with orgmode configs to generate nice looking HTML and PDFs.
- pjmlp 3y agoI have used XEmacs for about a decade (1995 - 2005), to the point I still remember most stuff. However that was only due to being in UNIX environments where IDE was a foreign word, and nothing compared to the likes of Borland offerings. Nowadays there are plenty of IDE choices for UNIX like workloads, I don't miss Emacs, and basic VI knowledge is enough for editing configuration files on bare bones POSIX systems.
- nathants 3y agoemacs is a lot more fun if you explore xmodmap setups too. i have control left of space, alt left of that. capslock is also alt, and is used for most alt presses.