6 ms·

Emacs, how it all started for me

157 points by nukifw 4mo ago

bitwize 4mo ago
It was always like that before about 10 years ago. You're getting your feet wet in programming, learning about free alternatives, and you learn that all the world's legendary hackers become proficient in one of either vi (vim) or Emacs. So you dig in and you find that, as your awareness of programming languages grows, Emacs is a "good-enough" solution for working in nearly all of them. (Vim is too, but maybe a bit less so in 1995 when I was starting out.) And if you want to program effectively cross-language, there's nothing you can do but lock the fuck in and learn your editor's idiosyncrasies, shortcuts, and programming/customization features. These days we're all spoiled by Visual Studio Code, Zed, even things like Geany and Notepad++. So it makes less sense for neophytes to start with something as ancient and idiosyncratic as Emacs, and Emacs does not enjoy nearly the prominence or mindshare it had decades ago. (Though I understand its absolute user base has grown.)
- greggroth 4mo ago
  I used vim for about 15 years and emacs for the last 6 or 7 and never has it been easier to emacs. For years it was searching Google, blog posts and manuals for "how do I do X in emacs?" and now it's trivial to ask AI. I always have a Copilot session open in my emacs config so it can tell me how my emacs does something and can update my config for me.
  - neutronicus 4mo ago
    > I always have a Copilot session open in my emacs config Using gptel? Or something else?
    - setopt 3mo ago
      Don’t know about GP, but I’m reasonably happy with chatgpt-shell.
- cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
  For me what I found was that on early 90s telnet-accessible Unix systems the only pre-installed or easily installed editor that actually let me use... luxuries... like arrow keys and backspace was emacs. Vi was always there but modal editing repulses me and it also didn't work with arrow keys and the like. (I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on.) Emacs was literally the sanest option unless you could bribe the sysadmin into installing "joe" or similar. ("pico" and "nano" came later). The other thing is back in the day emacs was often a good option for running clients to connect to things like IRC or MUDs or MOOs, and even Gopher and the early web. It was also an excellent news and mail reader! And so I used emacs as a general text editor and MOO and IRC client long before I ever used it for writing source code really (for which it was also obviously very good).
  - bregma 4mo ago
    > I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on. It's a holdover from the days when people used to type without looking at their keyboards or waste time and effort taking their fingers off the home row to find and stab around with some kind of multi-axis valuator device sitting on their desk somewhere.
    - cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
      I've never had a problem hitting my arrow keys on the fly. I trained in touch typing in the 80s/early 90s in typing classes, on Selectric typewriters. Beautiful keyboards.
lanycrost 4mo ago
I moved to nvim from vim and it's seems me to easy and handy for everyday use. While emacs like rocket since :D
- iLemming 4mo ago
  Emacs is most definitely not a rocket science. The problem with people trying Emacs is that they approach it just like any other text editor, instead of understanding the grand, core principle of it - Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around. Therefore it makes much better sense if you approach it from a Lisp perspective. Alas, many, perhaps most, beginners try it after hearing how "powerful this Emacs thingy is", and try to learn "editor features", instead of focusing on the Lisp side of things. Some even admit that they don't like Lisp and don't understand it and plan to never deal with it. Most posts of "abandonment" and "I switch to VSCode after decades of Emacs use", after closer examination, reveal that the person perhaps never even written any elisp code - at most, they'd just [almost] blindly copy&paste existing snippets into their configs.
  - jr_isidore 4mo ago
    No one, including yourself, approached emacs from a Lisp perspective.
    - vkazanov 4mo ago
      I did. After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to write my thesis in electrical engineering. The tool was parsing my matlab files and generated latex, which i then made into the final pdf, complete with formulaes and calculations. So instead of writing a decent thesis, i learned about makefiles, latex, emacs lisp and the fact that parsers are very interesting. Also, Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp. Surely, i did not work a single day as an electric engineer. PS I keep looking for this book to this very day
      - 4mo ago
tempfile 4mo ago
I've been trying emacs for a while. People keep saying it's self-discovering and I have no idea what they mean. Am I missing part of the manual? I google stuff when I don't understand, like any other piece of software. I've never managed to successfully use the help system to find anything.
- matthew-craig 4mo ago
  Having a good completion package (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`) goes a long way to finding stuff. I regularly find new functions and variables by calling describe-function and describe-command and just searching/auto-completing my way to what I need. It gets even better with the `helpful` package which improves the layout/features of help pages a lot.
  - setopt 3mo ago
    > (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`) I assume you meant orderless?
- tikhonj 4mo ago
  The neat thing with Emacs is that the core concepts of the system are all first-class programming entities with their own documentation. So if you want to know what your current mode does, you can use C-h m to get a bunch of information including commands, key-bindings and links to code. If you have a key command, you can use C-h k, enter the keys, and you'll see exactly what function that command runs. You can get info about functions with C-h f and variables with C-h v; coupled with some kind of fuzzy-find-autocomplete (which, unfortunately, isn't set up by default), it's usually pretty quick to find the functions and config options that are relevant to whatever you're trying to do. I still use web searches to look up Emacs things occasionally, but the built-in help commands are still useful because they're naturally tied to (and organized by) the core code entities that power Emacs.
  - a_e_k 4mo ago
    Yep. `C-h k` to look up what a key does, `C-h f` to look up a function, and `C-h v` to look up a variable/setting will get you pretty far. I'd also add `C-h b` to show you the key bindings. (And `C-h` after a prefix key will usually show you the bindings that start with that prefix.) `C-h a` for apropos to search commands by substring can also be useful. The thing that makes it really "self documenting" is that these help commands reflect the live environment at the moment you use it. If you've added a new binding in your init.el, `C-h b` and `C-h k` will show it. If you've added a new function in your init.el, or loaded a custom package, all those functions can now be found via `C-h f`. The help system will show you the doc strings for them and provide hyperlinks right to the source. Moreover, this works for anything that you define on the fly. Open an Emacs lisp buffer, type some elisp code to define a function or variable, execute the definition, and now it'll appear under the above in the help system the next time you invoke help.
fileeditview 4mo ago
A bit of advice to people that have the urge to try Emacs. Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed. Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Always a distro. It never worked out. Now over the last year I was trying Emacs with a vanilla setup and configured everything from scratch. With the AIs this is super simple because they can help you get out of config trouble. The experience was way better than before. After my one year experience I have switched back to neovim but I still have become a fan of Emacs and I have adapted my nvim config. Stuff like dired, magit, compile-mode I have found equivalent nvim plugins and use them now.
- widdershins 4mo ago
  Agreed. Work through the Emacs tutorial to find out how vanilla editing works. Then look at buffer management, window management (Emacs 'windows' are actually more like frames in other apps) and simple tooling like search. Then start to tweak some settings in your config, find the bare minimum of packages you need to scratch your worst itches (for me: Vertico, Corfu, Avy and Dumb Jump). Finally, figure out tree-sitter modes, project/projectile mode and a couple of other foundations. It will be a struggle. It was around 2 months before I felt remotely comfortable in Emacs. And nearly a year before I really felt at home. It's a long road, but gradually you mold the editor to yourself so tightly that you'll never be able to go back. The remarkable thing is that the progression never stops. The tool just keeps getting sharper and sharper.
  - fileeditview 4mo ago
    Yep. I also forgot one important point. If you come from vim, like myself, you should probably use evil-mode right from the start and then just get used to a few important Emacs shortcuts over time and use them additionally to your evil keymaps. No one will ever convince me that there is something better than vim mode for editing text (or comparable modal editors).
gazonk 4mo ago
It all started in the early eighties. Just got into the university and the machine was a PDP-10 (tops20) and the only option as I remember was Emacs. Has been using it since. Not so much after the introduction of IDEs. But will totally lost for general file editing if there was no Emacs in Linux distrubtions. Hard to grasp? Maybe but for me it was the first thing I learnt and most likely will end with.
- dctoedt 4mo ago
  And Brian Reid's Scribe formatter [0] — so much nicer than roff, troff, etc. (descendants of Runoff). In 1981-82 I wrote a user manual and taught my fellow law-review editors — none of whom were computer people — how to use both Emacs and Scribe (PDP-11 / TOPS20). It was a real boon, freeing up our paid secretary from having to repeatedly retype manuscripts after we'd edited them, and cutting down on printer errors that had to be hand-corrected on galley proofs. [0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf (Brian Reid's CMU Ph.D dissertation a.k.a. a manual for Scribe).
ashton314 4mo ago
If you find yourself wanting to try out Emacs but are (understandably) turned off by some of its archaic defaults, I encourage you to check out my Emacs Bedrock [1] project. It is not a framework like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs. Instead, it's just a bunch of better defaults, plus some example configuration for some of the most popular packages. It's meant to just be a starting point, and not a framework to keep up-to-date in the long run. Emacs has come a long way in terms of in-built features. The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained. Just a little bit of simple config (either from Bedrock or, heck, even an LLM) will get you very far. I'm working on a new version of Bedrock for Emacs 31. If you're using the release candidate (which, because it's Emacs, is more stable than most other operating systems) then check out the `emacs31` branch. [1]: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock
- a_e_k 4mo ago
  > The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained. As a user since '97, I've often felt that this philosophy is entirely, well, backwards. I know how to read the release notes to learn of such changes and how to edit my personal init.el file to revert a setting if I don't like the new default. As long as no one takes away the option, the default doesn't really matter too much to me. But newcomers who might not yet be comfortable with editing their init.el files could really benefit from a more optimal out-of-box experience. (And besides that, often the newer option is something that I've already moved on to, so making it the new default means I can now remove it from my init.el. I always enjoy when I discover that I can cut something from my init.el because it's now in base Emacs.)
  - drdexebtjl 4mo ago
    One solution that I really like for that is having the user configuration carry some kind of version number. Then, to change a default from `old` to `new`, you instead change it to `configVersion >= x ? new : old`, and add some kind of non-fatal warning in the else case instructing users to set their config to `old` explicitly. You don't break people's setups, they become aware of new defaults without reading release notes, and new users get the new defaults.
VariousPrograms 4mo ago
As someone who’s only used Emacs for around 5 years, Emacs is awesome even if you haven’t been using it since 1987. I used to get intimidated by the fact that every single Emacs user has been using it for decades. System Crafters was fantastic for getting a handle on things. It’s one of the coolest programs ever. That said, I’m usually in vim. Emacs is a neverending rabbit hole of a hobby that begs to be tinkered with forever. I find it easier to just do useful stuff in vim and I’m always trying to add a new efficient keybinding or function to my Emacs config.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4mo ago
  LOL. 1987 is just about when I stopped using emacs. Suddenly, I feel really old...
zingar 4mo ago
I love the way this starts with using emacs badly since 2008. I start my own shorter emacs story similarly: “I’ve been using emacs for 10 years, so I’m only a beginner“.
- agumonkey 4mo ago
  emacs'so large, beside core devs, we're all beginners
yolkedgeek 3mo ago
I really, really wish we can focus on schemacs so we have a scheme based emacs. 1. Scheme is much much nicer and more powerful than elisp 2. More speed and multi threading 3. (i think) better extensibility https://codeberg.org/ramin_hal9001/schemacs https://codeberg.org/ramin_hal9001/schemacs

157 points by nukifw 4mo ago

It was always like that before about 10 years ago. You're getting your feet wet in programming, learning about free alternatives, and you learn that all the world's legendary hackers become proficient in one of either vi (vim) or Emacs. So you dig in and you find that, as your awareness of programming languages grows, Emacs is a "good-enough" solution for working in nearly all of them. (Vim is too, but maybe a bit less so in 1995 when I was starting out.) And if you want to program effectively cross-language, there's nothing you can do but lock the fuck in and learn your editor's idiosyncrasies, shortcuts, and programming/customization features. These days we're all spoiled by Visual Studio Code, Zed, even things like Geany and Notepad++. So it makes less sense for neophytes to start with something as ancient and idiosyncratic as Emacs, and Emacs does not enjoy nearly the prominence or mindshare it had decades ago. (Though I understand its absolute user base has grown.)

greggroth 4mo ago
I used vim for about 15 years and emacs for the last 6 or 7 and never has it been easier to emacs. For years it was searching Google, blog posts and manuals for "how do I do X in emacs?" and now it's trivial to ask AI. I always have a Copilot session open in my emacs config so it can tell me how my emacs does something and can update my config for me.
- neutronicus 4mo ago
  > I always have a Copilot session open in my emacs config Using gptel? Or something else?
  - setopt 3mo ago
    Don’t know about GP, but I’m reasonably happy with chatgpt-shell.
cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
For me what I found was that on early 90s telnet-accessible Unix systems the only pre-installed or easily installed editor that actually let me use... luxuries... like arrow keys and backspace was emacs. Vi was always there but modal editing repulses me and it also didn't work with arrow keys and the like. (I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on.) Emacs was literally the sanest option unless you could bribe the sysadmin into installing "joe" or similar. ("pico" and "nano" came later). The other thing is back in the day emacs was often a good option for running clients to connect to things like IRC or MUDs or MOOs, and even Gopher and the early web. It was also an excellent news and mail reader! And so I used emacs as a general text editor and MOO and IRC client long before I ever used it for writing source code really (for which it was also obviously very good).
- bregma 4mo ago
  > I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on. It's a holdover from the days when people used to type without looking at their keyboards or waste time and effort taking their fingers off the home row to find and stab around with some kind of multi-axis valuator device sitting on their desk somewhere.
  - cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
    I've never had a problem hitting my arrow keys on the fly. I trained in touch typing in the 80s/early 90s in typing classes, on Selectric typewriters. Beautiful keyboards.

lanycrost 4mo ago

I moved to nvim from vim and it's seems me to easy and handy for everyday use. While emacs like rocket since :D

iLemming 4mo ago
Emacs is most definitely not a rocket science. The problem with people trying Emacs is that they approach it just like any other text editor, instead of understanding the grand, core principle of it - Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around. Therefore it makes much better sense if you approach it from a Lisp perspective. Alas, many, perhaps most, beginners try it after hearing how "powerful this Emacs thingy is", and try to learn "editor features", instead of focusing on the Lisp side of things. Some even admit that they don't like Lisp and don't understand it and plan to never deal with it. Most posts of "abandonment" and "I switch to VSCode after decades of Emacs use", after closer examination, reveal that the person perhaps never even written any elisp code - at most, they'd just [almost] blindly copy&paste existing snippets into their configs.
- jr_isidore 4mo ago
  No one, including yourself, approached emacs from a Lisp perspective.
  - vkazanov 4mo ago
    I did. After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to write my thesis in electrical engineering. The tool was parsing my matlab files and generated latex, which i then made into the final pdf, complete with formulaes and calculations. So instead of writing a decent thesis, i learned about makefiles, latex, emacs lisp and the fact that parsers are very interesting. Also, Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp. Surely, i did not work a single day as an electric engineer. PS I keep looking for this book to this very day
    - 4mo ago

tempfile 4mo ago

I've been trying emacs for a while. People keep saying it's self-discovering and I have no idea what they mean. Am I missing part of the manual? I google stuff when I don't understand, like any other piece of software. I've never managed to successfully use the help system to find anything.

matthew-craig 4mo ago
Having a good completion package (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`) goes a long way to finding stuff. I regularly find new functions and variables by calling describe-function and describe-command and just searching/auto-completing my way to what I need. It gets even better with the `helpful` package which improves the layout/features of help pages a lot.
- setopt 3mo ago
  > (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`) I assume you meant orderless?
tikhonj 4mo ago
The neat thing with Emacs is that the core concepts of the system are all first-class programming entities with their own documentation. So if you want to know what your current mode does, you can use C-h m to get a bunch of information including commands, key-bindings and links to code. If you have a key command, you can use C-h k, enter the keys, and you'll see exactly what function that command runs. You can get info about functions with C-h f and variables with C-h v; coupled with some kind of fuzzy-find-autocomplete (which, unfortunately, isn't set up by default), it's usually pretty quick to find the functions and config options that are relevant to whatever you're trying to do. I still use web searches to look up Emacs things occasionally, but the built-in help commands are still useful because they're naturally tied to (and organized by) the core code entities that power Emacs.
- a_e_k 4mo ago
  Yep. `C-h k` to look up what a key does, `C-h f` to look up a function, and `C-h v` to look up a variable/setting will get you pretty far. I'd also add `C-h b` to show you the key bindings. (And `C-h` after a prefix key will usually show you the bindings that start with that prefix.) `C-h a` for apropos to search commands by substring can also be useful. The thing that makes it really "self documenting" is that these help commands reflect the live environment at the moment you use it. If you've added a new binding in your init.el, `C-h b` and `C-h k` will show it. If you've added a new function in your init.el, or loaded a custom package, all those functions can now be found via `C-h f`. The help system will show you the doc strings for them and provide hyperlinks right to the source. Moreover, this works for anything that you define on the fly. Open an Emacs lisp buffer, type some elisp code to define a function or variable, execute the definition, and now it'll appear under the above in the help system the next time you invoke help.

fileeditview 4mo ago

A bit of advice to people that have the urge to try Emacs. Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed. Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Always a distro. It never worked out. Now over the last year I was trying Emacs with a vanilla setup and configured everything from scratch. With the AIs this is super simple because they can help you get out of config trouble. The experience was way better than before. After my one year experience I have switched back to neovim but I still have become a fan of Emacs and I have adapted my nvim config. Stuff like dired, magit, compile-mode I have found equivalent nvim plugins and use them now.

widdershins 4mo ago
Agreed. Work through the Emacs tutorial to find out how vanilla editing works. Then look at buffer management, window management (Emacs 'windows' are actually more like frames in other apps) and simple tooling like search. Then start to tweak some settings in your config, find the bare minimum of packages you need to scratch your worst itches (for me: Vertico, Corfu, Avy and Dumb Jump). Finally, figure out tree-sitter modes, project/projectile mode and a couple of other foundations. It will be a struggle. It was around 2 months before I felt remotely comfortable in Emacs. And nearly a year before I really felt at home. It's a long road, but gradually you mold the editor to yourself so tightly that you'll never be able to go back. The remarkable thing is that the progression never stops. The tool just keeps getting sharper and sharper.
- fileeditview 4mo ago
  Yep. I also forgot one important point. If you come from vim, like myself, you should probably use evil-mode right from the start and then just get used to a few important Emacs shortcuts over time and use them additionally to your evil keymaps. No one will ever convince me that there is something better than vim mode for editing text (or comparable modal editors).

gazonk 4mo ago

It all started in the early eighties. Just got into the university and the machine was a PDP-10 (tops20) and the only option as I remember was Emacs. Has been using it since. Not so much after the introduction of IDEs. But will totally lost for general file editing if there was no Emacs in Linux distrubtions. Hard to grasp? Maybe but for me it was the first thing I learnt and most likely will end with.

dctoedt 4mo ago
And Brian Reid's Scribe formatter [0] — so much nicer than roff, troff, etc. (descendants of Runoff). In 1981-82 I wrote a user manual and taught my fellow law-review editors — none of whom were computer people — how to use both Emacs and Scribe (PDP-11 / TOPS20). It was a real boon, freeing up our paid secretary from having to repeatedly retype manuscripts after we'd edited them, and cutting down on printer errors that had to be hand-corrected on galley proofs. [0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf (Brian Reid's CMU Ph.D dissertation a.k.a. a manual for Scribe).

ashton314 4mo ago

If you find yourself wanting to try out Emacs but are (understandably) turned off by some of its archaic defaults, I encourage you to check out my Emacs Bedrock [1] project. It is not a framework like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs. Instead, it's just a bunch of better defaults, plus some example configuration for some of the most popular packages. It's meant to just be a starting point, and not a framework to keep up-to-date in the long run. Emacs has come a long way in terms of in-built features. The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained. Just a little bit of simple config (either from Bedrock or, heck, even an LLM) will get you very far. I'm working on a new version of Bedrock for Emacs 31. If you're using the release candidate (which, because it's Emacs, is more stable than most other operating systems) then check out the `emacs31` branch. [1]: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

a_e_k 4mo ago
> The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained. As a user since '97, I've often felt that this philosophy is entirely, well, backwards. I know how to read the release notes to learn of such changes and how to edit my personal init.el file to revert a setting if I don't like the new default. As long as no one takes away the option, the default doesn't really matter too much to me. But newcomers who might not yet be comfortable with editing their init.el files could really benefit from a more optimal out-of-box experience. (And besides that, often the newer option is something that I've already moved on to, so making it the new default means I can now remove it from my init.el. I always enjoy when I discover that I can cut something from my init.el because it's now in base Emacs.)
- drdexebtjl 4mo ago
  One solution that I really like for that is having the user configuration carry some kind of version number. Then, to change a default from `old` to `new`, you instead change it to `configVersion >= x ? new : old`, and add some kind of non-fatal warning in the else case instructing users to set their config to `old` explicitly. You don't break people's setups, they become aware of new defaults without reading release notes, and new users get the new defaults.

VariousPrograms 4mo ago

As someone who’s only used Emacs for around 5 years, Emacs is awesome even if you haven’t been using it since 1987. I used to get intimidated by the fact that every single Emacs user has been using it for decades. System Crafters was fantastic for getting a handle on things. It’s one of the coolest programs ever. That said, I’m usually in vim. Emacs is a neverending rabbit hole of a hobby that begs to be tinkered with forever. I find it easier to just do useful stuff in vim and I’m always trying to add a new efficient keybinding or function to my Emacs config.

HeyLaughingBoy 4mo ago
LOL. 1987 is just about when I stopped using emacs. Suddenly, I feel really old...

zingar 4mo ago

I love the way this starts with using emacs badly since 2008. I start my own shorter emacs story similarly: “I’ve been using emacs for 10 years, so I’m only a beginner“.

agumonkey 4mo ago
emacs'so large, beside core devs, we're all beginners

yolkedgeek 3mo ago

I really, really wish we can focus on schemacs so we have a scheme based emacs. 1. Scheme is much much nicer and more powerful than elisp 2. More speed and multi threading 3. (i think) better extensibility https://codeberg.org/ramin_hal9001/schemacs https://codeberg.org/ramin_hal9001/schemacs