5 ms·

Learn Emacs in Ten Years

76 points by pw 17y ago

GeoffWozniak 17y ago
I recommend trying Gnus. The several weeks you waste trying to figure out how to point Gnus at your mail server more than pays for itself by the amount you learn while driving yourself mad. I have a hard time agreeing with this statement, especially since I experienced just that. The only thing I learned was that the documentation for the process was awful. Furthermore, the statement is some curious attempt at irony that undermines his argument. I don't want to spend 10 years setting up a development environment, I want to spend 10 years learning a development environment. Such a line can be very fine, indeed. (This being said as a regular Emacs user.)
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  Data point: I can't stand gnus. It was a paon to config, and I never got RSS working. (mh-e is nice, though.) Building a mail system into a single-threaded text editor seems a bit silly to me...
  - asjo 17y ago
    Building a mail system into a single-threaded text editor seems a bit silly to me... I have never encountered a system that could replace Gnus, though. What do you use to read nntp, email and rss in a coherent interface?
    - silentbicycle 17y ago
      Firefox, actually. (Which is the new program-with-a-million-extensions.) I just use gmail for mail these days, though I would probably go back to mh or mutt if I started using a client program again. I've never found an RSS reader I've been satisfied with, though. I was working on one at one point that had an interface like mh, but I haven't gotten back to it in a while.
  - sielskr 17y ago
    Building a mail system into a single-threaded text editor seems a bit silly to me... Why's that? The (not gnus) mail system I use on Emacs will hang the Emacs process for a few seconds sometimes when I hit send while the Emacs process talks to my ISP's mail server, but that is the only way the mail system's single-threadedness ever really bites. When I check for new mail on my ancient Pentium III system, the Emacs process hangs for less than a second or 2 usually. Those delays are nothing compared to the time I waste waiting for Firefox to do something.
    - silentbicycle 17y ago
      I prefer the Unix (and Erlang!) model of having lots of independent processes communicating, and individually serving a specific function. While I really like using Emacs's buffer-based environment as the common interface (such as working in a shell buffer and being able to edit results), I'm not convinced that adding more and more functionality to the same process is a good idea from an architectural standpoint. (And unlike Firefox, GNU Emacs doesn't even have good namespacing / isolation for its extensions, hence all of the variables with package-variable-name-with-several-parts names.) Plan9's ACME preserves most of what I like about Emacs, but it's mouse-chord-based UI is a dealbreaker for me.
Ben65 17y ago
Cool, nothing better than a discussion about which editor to use. Of course you could learn vi in five years.
- kirubakaran 17y ago
  'Editing' is just one tiny subset of what Emacs does[1] and vi competes with that part well. But why is vi brought up whenever Emacs is discussed? [1] Or rather, "empowers you to do"
  - igorgue 17y ago
    because they're both awesome and we always want to know which one is awesomer!, now please lets not include TextMate in this conversation :) I'm a VIM user and I always like the cool things Emacs users can do, even though I'll never use Emacs.
    - yters 17y ago
      The only editor anyone should ever need is that which the blessed pg provides in these little text boxes.
  - biotech 17y ago
    "But why is vi brought up whenever Emacs is discussed?" Because emacs users and vim users are disjoint, despite having almost everything else in common!
- dabeeeenster 17y ago
  Yes, but you'd only be doing it for Escape.
wglb 17y ago
I like the ten year rule. I have a similar rule for cars--it takes about one year for a driver to completely master the peculiarities of a new car--its handling, judging exactly where the tires are relative to curves, potholes, how well the mirrors tell you when to stop backing up. But I have been using emacs for way more than ten years daily and still have much to learn. Yes, I can imagine that you can learn vi in a shorter time, but I know very little about it. I actually know more about 'ed' than I do vi. One (strenuous) exercise is to write a full, complete tutorial for a language. Explain it to your grandmother, for example. That will get you there quicker. And you will learn things about the product that you would not otherwise know. Another exercise to completely learn a language is to write a compiler for it. This will flush out the corners of the language for you. But these are admittedly a bit extreme methods. I agree that it is worthwhile to master your tools.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Another exercise to completely learn a language is to write a compiler for it. This will flush out the corners of the language for you. Warning, there is a strong tendency to write a compiler for the language as you understand it, not as it is. The surface structure of the language, it's syntax, can be mastered by reading its grammar, and the kinks ironed out by actually implementing a lexer/parser for it. However, it's deep structure, the semantics and evaluation are only understood through rigorous mathematical semantic models, or at least through implicit understanding after 10 years of use. At least for sophisticated languages. A previous knowledge of other superior languages will corrupt your current attempt to understand an inferiour language. To give you an example, I think any Scheme programmer will have a difficult time implementing Pascal as it's specified. He will see the language lacking in drastic ways that can improved with little effort.
  - wglb 17y ago
    Well, not sure how to write a compiler that generates machine code without fully understanding the semantics and evolution. I have done two of them and did not do rigorous mathematical semantic models. One was an implementation language targeting 8085 with the compiler written in Bliss 36, which had clearly superior semantics, and there was no hint of the corruption that you suggest. I think it would be a fun project to write a pascal compiler in scheme. I argue that there are things that you are likely to run across in generating code that you might not see in mastering the language. See, there are two kinds of study going on here. One is the study that I have done of emacs, which is what I think the article was talking about and that is starting with a small set of knowledge and expanding bit by bit as you use it in daily life. The other kind of study, which I was trying to illustrate (and apparently failed) is a thorough, directed study (e. g., reading the User Manual and Report until it is about ready to fall apart), or reading the spec for the target language and working with the users closely. In the second case, we (three of us) wrote the compiler in a year, and just about replaced the use of assembler language in the OS project.
cema 17y ago
The article should more properly be titled "Learn anything in ten years". One thing about Emacs (mentioned in another comment in this thread) is that it is more than an editor but mostly used as an editor. It does not take 10 years to learn to use it as a better notepad (I mean, better pico... whatever), but mastering its existing (elisp) code base and adding to it (more than the trivial customization) takes a while indeed. The article mentions some of the general reasons why it takes a while. Another one is that few people actually set out to "learn Emacs" as such, they just do it as an afterthought while working on other projects, and therefore not in a consistent and steady manner. So there may be months between "lessons" and, therefore, 10 years to complete a course, so to speak.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  The name is a a reference to Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years" (http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html), which is linked in the essay. The part of Emacs that takes years to learn is integrating it with everything else. The core editor doesn't take long.
fogus 17y ago
I've been using it for only 2 years and feel like such a loser when I pair with the true veterans. Watching a true Emacs master is an amazing thing.
- kentosi 17y ago
  Are there any websites/screencasts that show such "masters" in action? I really can't see where the fuss is. And I particularly agree with the following comment on the page: "Wow, you spent ten years learning how to use emacs. In the same period of time you have earned a PhD, learned a few foreign languages, scaled a few mountains, learned several other computer languages like F#, Ruby, Scala, C# 4.0, started your own dot com, and gotten into great physical shape..." I know I'm being pessimistic here, but it's not without reason. Back when I was a teenager I spend hours, weeks, months tweaking with linux kernels and the OS in general to make it run as smoothly as possible. Back then it was my passion, and I did learn a lot. But at the end of the road I realised that I could have done so much with my time because all that knowledge is now either lost or obsolete due to newer versions of linux software coming out fixing old bugs. I went down the path of trying to master vi. This was more for the sake of looking "l33t" in the linux community than any job prospects/etc. It was painful and made me appreciate eclipse and other IDEs a lot more. There seems to be a perception out there that being able to code an entire stand-alone application using vi or emacs is really awesome and cool. This inspires beginners to want to be just as cool and elite. And when they find out it's gonna take years they see it as even more of a challenge (and some sort of ego-boost), without actually thinking of the return on investment.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    I started using Emacs because I was interested in learning Lisp (and had been using vim for several years, so I figured it would shake things up). The thing I've seen that best captures how full-on Emacs wizardry looks is Marco Baringer's Slime screencast (http://common-lisp.net/project/movies/movies/slime.mov http://common-lisp.net/project/movies/movies/slime.mov). It's a sort of IDE for Common Lisp. (Edit: Better link, thanks kirubakaran.) While really learning the nooks and crannies of Emacs's functionality can suck up a lot of time, it's also not going anywhere. I've only been using Emacs for about three years now, FWIW, but I'm a bit of a toolsmith, and I've learned enough to teach others. (FWIW, I'd also jump ship if a better editor comes around, but Emacs and Vim are each good enough that getting sufficient momentum with a new editor to displace them would be incredibly difficult. The most interesting alternative I've seen is Acme / Wily from Plan9, but I don't like its mouse-y interface.) The best way to learn Emacs is to start with the tutorial (start Emacs, then press Control-h and then t), and then learn how to use the built-in help system. Everything is meticulously documented, though sometimes with unfamiliar terminology. It helps if you have a focus, like learning how to run make, a Python interpreter, etc. inside it. The Emacs Wiki (http://emacswiki.org http://emacswiki.org) has quite a bit of good advice, as well. Don't forget to keep your Emacs config under VC. :) Extension recommendations - pabbrev, tagging.el, uniquify, saveplace, recentf, remember, midnight, anything, and emacs-w3m if you're using Unix.
bayareaguy 17y ago
Apart from rudimentary key bindings, the two features I immediately miss whenever I use another editor are query-replace-regexp and dabbrev-expand. Oh and display-time also earns honorable mention.
igrekel 17y ago
I know how to do basic editing in emacs, I use it when I need to edit files from the command line, I don't use it for long programming sessions or reading a lot of code tough. I tried to become better in emacs and to use it a few times for programming sessions; I am still puzzled by posts like this. Maybe it is because we were using Eclipse at my day job and I kept forgetting all the emacs commands, kept having the reflex to use the common key shortcuts for copy, paste undo etc. from the other applications I use. Maybe it was how slime would go crazy when doing scheme. Or maybe the fact that finding the keys for emacs sometimes proved problematic (when using cygwin outside of xwindows for example). Or the fact that aquamacs was slow to open on my mac, or that its default configuration was slow to open from the command line on my linux machine when I wanted to edit a line in a config file. How jumping around or scrolling a file was slow when you didn't know exactly what you were looking for. There were tons of small things that eventually added up and I always abandoned after a few weeks because I was losing productivity, was wasting time configuring or customizing it and the actual gains in productivity or features weren't that big compared to Eclipse, NetBeans, TextMate, XCode or other IDEs or editors. Most of the comments raving about emacs (or at least the people I have met raving about emacs in real life) somehow seem to believe other editors are like notepad and lack search and other useful things. So I naïvely ask, is it really worth it?

76 points by pw 17y ago

I recommend trying Gnus. The several weeks you waste trying to figure out how to point Gnus at your mail server more than pays for itself by the amount you learn while driving yourself mad. I have a hard time agreeing with this statement, especially since I experienced just that. The only thing I learned was that the documentation for the process was awful. Furthermore, the statement is some curious attempt at irony that undermines his argument. I don't want to spend 10 years setting up a development environment, I want to spend 10 years learning a development environment. Such a line can be very fine, indeed. (This being said as a regular Emacs user.)

silentbicycle 17y ago
Data point: I can't stand gnus. It was a paon to config, and I never got RSS working. (mh-e is nice, though.) Building a mail system into a single-threaded text editor seems a bit silly to me...
- asjo 17y ago
  Building a mail system into a single-threaded text editor seems a bit silly to me... I have never encountered a system that could replace Gnus, though. What do you use to read nntp, email and rss in a coherent interface?
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    Firefox, actually. (Which is the new program-with-a-million-extensions.) I just use gmail for mail these days, though I would probably go back to mh or mutt if I started using a client program again. I've never found an RSS reader I've been satisfied with, though. I was working on one at one point that had an interface like mh, but I haven't gotten back to it in a while.
- sielskr 17y ago
  Building a mail system into a single-threaded text editor seems a bit silly to me... Why's that? The (not gnus) mail system I use on Emacs will hang the Emacs process for a few seconds sometimes when I hit send while the Emacs process talks to my ISP's mail server, but that is the only way the mail system's single-threadedness ever really bites. When I check for new mail on my ancient Pentium III system, the Emacs process hangs for less than a second or 2 usually. Those delays are nothing compared to the time I waste waiting for Firefox to do something.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    I prefer the Unix (and Erlang!) model of having lots of independent processes communicating, and individually serving a specific function. While I really like using Emacs's buffer-based environment as the common interface (such as working in a shell buffer and being able to edit results), I'm not convinced that adding more and more functionality to the same process is a good idea from an architectural standpoint. (And unlike Firefox, GNU Emacs doesn't even have good namespacing / isolation for its extensions, hence all of the variables with package-variable-name-with-several-parts names.) Plan9's ACME preserves most of what I like about Emacs, but it's mouse-chord-based UI is a dealbreaker for me.

Ben65 17y ago

Cool, nothing better than a discussion about which editor to use. Of course you could learn vi in five years.

kirubakaran 17y ago
'Editing' is just one tiny subset of what Emacs does[1] and vi competes with that part well. But why is vi brought up whenever Emacs is discussed? [1] Or rather, "empowers you to do"
- igorgue 17y ago
  because they're both awesome and we always want to know which one is awesomer!, now please lets not include TextMate in this conversation :) I'm a VIM user and I always like the cool things Emacs users can do, even though I'll never use Emacs.
  - yters 17y ago
    The only editor anyone should ever need is that which the blessed pg provides in these little text boxes.
- biotech 17y ago
  "But why is vi brought up whenever Emacs is discussed?" Because emacs users and vim users are disjoint, despite having almost everything else in common!
dabeeeenster 17y ago
Yes, but you'd only be doing it for Escape.

wglb 17y ago

I like the ten year rule. I have a similar rule for cars--it takes about one year for a driver to completely master the peculiarities of a new car--its handling, judging exactly where the tires are relative to curves, potholes, how well the mirrors tell you when to stop backing up. But I have been using emacs for way more than ten years daily and still have much to learn. Yes, I can imagine that you can learn vi in a shorter time, but I know very little about it. I actually know more about 'ed' than I do vi. One (strenuous) exercise is to write a full, complete tutorial for a language. Explain it to your grandmother, for example. That will get you there quicker. And you will learn things about the product that you would not otherwise know. Another exercise to completely learn a language is to write a compiler for it. This will flush out the corners of the language for you. But these are admittedly a bit extreme methods. I agree that it is worthwhile to master your tools.

mahmud 17y ago
Another exercise to completely learn a language is to write a compiler for it. This will flush out the corners of the language for you. Warning, there is a strong tendency to write a compiler for the language as you understand it, not as it is. The surface structure of the language, it's syntax, can be mastered by reading its grammar, and the kinks ironed out by actually implementing a lexer/parser for it. However, it's deep structure, the semantics and evaluation are only understood through rigorous mathematical semantic models, or at least through implicit understanding after 10 years of use. At least for sophisticated languages. A previous knowledge of other superior languages will corrupt your current attempt to understand an inferiour language. To give you an example, I think any Scheme programmer will have a difficult time implementing Pascal as it's specified. He will see the language lacking in drastic ways that can improved with little effort.
- wglb 17y ago
  Well, not sure how to write a compiler that generates machine code without fully understanding the semantics and evolution. I have done two of them and did not do rigorous mathematical semantic models. One was an implementation language targeting 8085 with the compiler written in Bliss 36, which had clearly superior semantics, and there was no hint of the corruption that you suggest. I think it would be a fun project to write a pascal compiler in scheme. I argue that there are things that you are likely to run across in generating code that you might not see in mastering the language. See, there are two kinds of study going on here. One is the study that I have done of emacs, which is what I think the article was talking about and that is starting with a small set of knowledge and expanding bit by bit as you use it in daily life. The other kind of study, which I was trying to illustrate (and apparently failed) is a thorough, directed study (e. g., reading the User Manual and Report until it is about ready to fall apart), or reading the spec for the target language and working with the users closely. In the second case, we (three of us) wrote the compiler in a year, and just about replaced the use of assembler language in the OS project.

cema 17y ago

The article should more properly be titled "Learn anything in ten years". One thing about Emacs (mentioned in another comment in this thread) is that it is more than an editor but mostly used as an editor. It does not take 10 years to learn to use it as a better notepad (I mean, better pico... whatever), but mastering its existing (elisp) code base and adding to it (more than the trivial customization) takes a while indeed. The article mentions some of the general reasons why it takes a while. Another one is that few people actually set out to "learn Emacs" as such, they just do it as an afterthought while working on other projects, and therefore not in a consistent and steady manner. So there may be months between "lessons" and, therefore, 10 years to complete a course, so to speak.

silentbicycle 17y ago
The name is a a reference to Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years" (http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html), which is linked in the essay. The part of Emacs that takes years to learn is integrating it with everything else. The core editor doesn't take long.

fogus 17y ago

I've been using it for only 2 years and feel like such a loser when I pair with the true veterans. Watching a true Emacs master is an amazing thing.

kentosi 17y ago
Are there any websites/screencasts that show such "masters" in action? I really can't see where the fuss is. And I particularly agree with the following comment on the page: "Wow, you spent ten years learning how to use emacs. In the same period of time you have earned a PhD, learned a few foreign languages, scaled a few mountains, learned several other computer languages like F#, Ruby, Scala, C# 4.0, started your own dot com, and gotten into great physical shape..." I know I'm being pessimistic here, but it's not without reason. Back when I was a teenager I spend hours, weeks, months tweaking with linux kernels and the OS in general to make it run as smoothly as possible. Back then it was my passion, and I did learn a lot. But at the end of the road I realised that I could have done so much with my time because all that knowledge is now either lost or obsolete due to newer versions of linux software coming out fixing old bugs. I went down the path of trying to master vi. This was more for the sake of looking "l33t" in the linux community than any job prospects/etc. It was painful and made me appreciate eclipse and other IDEs a lot more. There seems to be a perception out there that being able to code an entire stand-alone application using vi or emacs is really awesome and cool. This inspires beginners to want to be just as cool and elite. And when they find out it's gonna take years they see it as even more of a challenge (and some sort of ego-boost), without actually thinking of the return on investment.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  I started using Emacs because I was interested in learning Lisp (and had been using vim for several years, so I figured it would shake things up). The thing I've seen that best captures how full-on Emacs wizardry looks is Marco Baringer's Slime screencast (http://common-lisp.net/project/movies/movies/slime.mov http://common-lisp.net/project/movies/movies/slime.mov). It's a sort of IDE for Common Lisp. (Edit: Better link, thanks kirubakaran.) While really learning the nooks and crannies of Emacs's functionality can suck up a lot of time, it's also not going anywhere. I've only been using Emacs for about three years now, FWIW, but I'm a bit of a toolsmith, and I've learned enough to teach others. (FWIW, I'd also jump ship if a better editor comes around, but Emacs and Vim are each good enough that getting sufficient momentum with a new editor to displace them would be incredibly difficult. The most interesting alternative I've seen is Acme / Wily from Plan9, but I don't like its mouse-y interface.) The best way to learn Emacs is to start with the tutorial (start Emacs, then press Control-h and then t), and then learn how to use the built-in help system. Everything is meticulously documented, though sometimes with unfamiliar terminology. It helps if you have a focus, like learning how to run make, a Python interpreter, etc. inside it. The Emacs Wiki (http://emacswiki.org http://emacswiki.org) has quite a bit of good advice, as well. Don't forget to keep your Emacs config under VC. :) Extension recommendations - pabbrev, tagging.el, uniquify, saveplace, recentf, remember, midnight, anything, and emacs-w3m if you're using Unix.

bayareaguy 17y ago

Apart from rudimentary key bindings, the two features I immediately miss whenever I use another editor are query-replace-regexp and dabbrev-expand. Oh and display-time also earns honorable mention.

igrekel 17y ago

I know how to do basic editing in emacs, I use it when I need to edit files from the command line, I don't use it for long programming sessions or reading a lot of code tough. I tried to become better in emacs and to use it a few times for programming sessions; I am still puzzled by posts like this. Maybe it is because we were using Eclipse at my day job and I kept forgetting all the emacs commands, kept having the reflex to use the common key shortcuts for copy, paste undo etc. from the other applications I use. Maybe it was how slime would go crazy when doing scheme. Or maybe the fact that finding the keys for emacs sometimes proved problematic (when using cygwin outside of xwindows for example). Or the fact that aquamacs was slow to open on my mac, or that its default configuration was slow to open from the command line on my linux machine when I wanted to edit a line in a config file. How jumping around or scrolling a file was slow when you didn't know exactly what you were looking for. There were tons of small things that eventually added up and I always abandoned after a few weeks because I was losing productivity, was wasting time configuring or customizing it and the actual gains in productivity or features weren't that big compared to Eclipse, NetBeans, TextMate, XCode or other IDEs or editors. Most of the comments raving about emacs (or at least the people I have met raving about emacs in real life) somehow seem to believe other editors are like notepad and lack search and other useful things. So I naïvely ask, is it really worth it?