6 ms·

I'm a comparative youngin to most of the people here, and I've never tried emacs. I'd like to learn my way around it someday, but I don't know how high of a pri

by CDRdude 12y ago

I'm a comparative youngin to most of the people here, and I've never tried emacs. I'd like to learn my way around it someday, but I don't know how high of a priority I should place on it. I've managed to pick up enough vim to make my life easier, would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost? How good is evil mode?

viksit 12y ago
I found out about evil mode two days ago from the 24.4rc1 post, and so far, it feels like vim but a little wonky. The great thing is pressing C-z in evil mode toggles between vim/emacs modes and is very convenient.
- hello_asdf 12y ago
  Seriously? I played around with emacs this weekend, and used it exclusively at work today.. I kept restarting it because I thought evil was bugging out. I'd agree that evil mode is quite nice, and emacs seems like something useful to know. It really depends what you prefer. I'm trying out emacs specifically for the formatting plugins as vim seems to fall behind in that regard.
VLM 12y ago
"would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost?" No. Although I first used emacs roughly 22 years ago so my memory might be rusty, the learning curve was extremely steep. Its not a GUI app with low maximum performance but very short learning curve, its more like something you'll have to mess with for a month to year to wrap your brain around. Its like learning dwarf fortress vs angry birds. In the very long run you'll probably like DF more, but not for the first day / week / month.
- elwell 12y ago
  I feel like it took me about a month to get to the point where I was glad I had invested the time to learn.
- chetanahuja 12y ago
  "the learning curve was extremely steep" I beg to disagree. I learned me an emacs around the same time period (mid 90's). I don't remember the learning curve to be that steep. I started by doing the tutorial. If you download a GUI emacs (e.g. from http://emacsformacosx.com/ http://emacsformacosx.com/ ), and open the program, you'll see a mouse clickable invitation to take a tutorial. Do this. Don't take shortcuts. Just spend the one or two hours and go through the entire tutorial complete with practice exercises. Or if that's intimidating, start by reading this gist: https://gist.github.com/ChetanAhuja/42ee8321c906466b601c https://gist.github.com/ChetanAhuja/42ee8321c906466b601c
  - VLM 12y ago
    Sorry for responding late, but completing the tutorial merely brings you up to the level of using vim. Like, OK, hit C-x C-s to save instead of esc :w to save. That doesn't really help, it just teaches equally productive keystrokes. You can "rise above" by using emacs but its going to take a lot more than learning a different keystroke to scroll the screen. Learning all the features of your language mode, its debugger integration, integrated refactoring tools, project tool integration, it all takes time, and those are the areas where you get huge productivity gains when you put in the time. I agree you are correct that the FIRST step is the tutorial but that won't provide any performance gains over any other bare text editor.
cies 12y ago
Coming from Vim, Evil is awesome to me. I can simply have "both" :)
lee 12y ago
I would say that learning your IDE or editor well is a worthwhile investment, whether that is emacs, vim, or a more rich IDE like Eclipse. Vim or Emacs are really powerful tools that will serve you well over your entire career, so getting adept at them will pay dividends. It's similar to learning how to touch-type, or typing with a faster WPM, in that it's not a pre-requisite to becoming a good and productive developer but it certainly helps. Emacs is my personal favorite editor, and I've found that the more adept I get at using it, the easier it is for me to get into "flow" and be productive. I don't use my brain's CPU cycles to fumble around trying to manipulate text as much, since through repetition and muscle memory I can work at it effortlessly (compare that to someone who has to two-finger peck while programming). Similar to other powerful tools though, becoming good takes practice and a time investment. But I would argue that the initial upfront investment will pay off in the long run. TL;DR: Yes, absolutely. Learning Emacs (or Vim/SublimeText/Eclipse if that's your choice) well will definitely boost your productivity in the long run.
- eitland 12y ago
  Happy to see others mentioning eclipse. I'm learning emacs now and it impresses me a lot but I also have happy memories from both Eclipse and NetBeans. The way you can refactor whole projects at once etc is amazing. (This is partly related to Java being static and uncool as well. : )
  - Dewie 12y ago
    Sir, there is nothing uncool about static typing. :) (verbose typing is uncool, though)
  - lee 12y ago
    The beauty of learning emacs keybindings is that most IDE's will have an "emacs mode". So you don't have to relearn things. But it's also useful for things like bash or OSX interfaces too, since they use the same common keybinding scheme.
    - acomjean 12y ago
babarock 12y ago
I spent a couple of years using vim before switching to emacs around 3 years ago. I'll write about my own experience with both editors. Learning emacs won't automatically give you a huge productivity boost the way learning vim does. Vim is this blazing fast editor; it's been designed from the ground up to be good at editing text. If your goal is to increase your productivity, I'd say invest time learning vim advanced features, like jumps, macros, registers, and the plethora of other things I don't know about. Emacs is not about speed. It's about control. It's a fully customizable environment to manipulate text. You can use it to edit prose, code, scientific formulas, but also emails, IRC/Jabber clients, clients for virtually anything with a REST API. Here are some of the use cases that make my work easier using emacs: + Evaluating pieces of code at once. I write a lot of Python. Most REPLs out there allow editing of one line at a time. emacs allows me to fire a python interpreter and evaluate regions (multiline function definition, or data structure) at once. Similar features exist for other "dynamic" languages. + Better code review workflow. I receive code review requests via email immediately inside emacs. I can play with the diff files, the source files. I can make modifs or run the code without leaving my editor. And since the code review system has an HTTP API, I can even post my comments and votes back. + Org-mode (http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/). I would use emacs for this module alone. It's a note taking system that can easily transform into an agenda, todo lists, memo, document markup, tables (oh, the org-mode tables!), ... Basically, to answer your question: I think you'll get a lot of benefits from emacs if you enjoy customizing it and integrating it to your workflow. If you don't like spending time customizing and prefer something that will just make you write text (well, code and configuration files) faster, stick to vim and spend this time learning advanced commands.
- viksit 12y ago
  What do you use to evaluate python? Does it work with ipython under some sort of inferior mode? And what do you use for code review workflows?
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    M-x apropos python send
- 12y ago
Dewie 12y ago
You could just try it. It won't take long to adjust to, and you can stick to basic things so that you will be no less productive compared to working in any basic text editor. There are some things that you will have get used to in order to be able to use it at all, such as the seemingly archaic kill/yank functionality that is used instead of copy/cut/paste. And of course you want to test drive some of the more advanced features, to get a feel for what is possible in Emacs. But the point is that you can ease into these things; you won't get easily lost or overwhelmed. What you should perhaps be more concerned about is whether you will be able to go back to a plain text editor, once and if you choose to go down this rabbit hole..
grayclhn 12y ago
For some (usually specialized) languages, emacs is easily the best IDE/editor, so if you want to use one of them, give it a try. Its key combinations are less ergonomic than vim's, so you should definitely spend some time configuring your keyboard if you're going to try it. (I'm being serious.)
evanspa 12y ago
For what it's worth, I learned Emacs out of my desire to learn Clojure. It didn't take too long to develop the muscle memory (a few months of forcing myself to use it). Now, 6 or so years later, I use Emacs for essentially all ad-hoc text editing jobs, and of course Clojure dev. I love using it for my shell (M-x shell) - being able to move about the shell buffer w/out limit is very liberating. I also do a lot of iOS development, and, I do 95% of editing in Xcode, and 5% in Emacs. A nice thing about Emacs is, if you're on a Mac, is that Mac OS uses most of Emacs' movement keybindings, so even when I'm in Xcode (or any other app for that matter), I can still use my Emacs muscle memory. I'm not that young; 6 years ago I was 30, and I'm very happy I decided to learn Emacs; no regrets. It's still paying dividends today and will continue to for the foreseeable future.
- Derbasti 12y ago
  There is this incredible tool called Karabiner (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/). Among the many things it can do are Emacs key bindings. I used it to enable more Emacs key bindings in OSX, for example M-f and M-b.
tuhdo 12y ago
You can check my mini manual to quickly be productive with Emacs: http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html Also check my other guides, even just to see Emacs's awesomeness: http://tuhdo.github.io/ http://tuhdo.github.io/
- zafiro17 12y ago
  A slightly different target audience, but here is my Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers (not Coders). It will get you used to the editor, at least. I use Firefox plus the "It's all text" extension (configured to call emacs as its editor) for happy times on forums like this one. http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/197-Woodnotes-Guide-to-Emacs-for-Writers.html http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/197-Woodnotes-Gui...
  - tuhdo 12y ago
    Thanks. Look interesting.

by CDRdude 12y ago

viksit 12y ago

I found out about evil mode two days ago from the 24.4rc1 post, and so far, it feels like vim but a little wonky. The great thing is pressing C-z in evil mode toggles between vim/emacs modes and is very convenient.

hello_asdf 12y ago
Seriously? I played around with emacs this weekend, and used it exclusively at work today.. I kept restarting it because I thought evil was bugging out. I'd agree that evil mode is quite nice, and emacs seems like something useful to know. It really depends what you prefer. I'm trying out emacs specifically for the formatting plugins as vim seems to fall behind in that regard.

VLM 12y ago

"would learning my way around emacs also get me a productivity boost?" No. Although I first used emacs roughly 22 years ago so my memory might be rusty, the learning curve was extremely steep. Its not a GUI app with low maximum performance but very short learning curve, its more like something you'll have to mess with for a month to year to wrap your brain around. Its like learning dwarf fortress vs angry birds. In the very long run you'll probably like DF more, but not for the first day / week / month.

elwell 12y ago
I feel like it took me about a month to get to the point where I was glad I had invested the time to learn.
chetanahuja 12y ago
"the learning curve was extremely steep" I beg to disagree. I learned me an emacs around the same time period (mid 90's). I don't remember the learning curve to be that steep. I started by doing the tutorial. If you download a GUI emacs (e.g. from http://emacsformacosx.com/ http://emacsformacosx.com/ ), and open the program, you'll see a mouse clickable invitation to take a tutorial. Do this. Don't take shortcuts. Just spend the one or two hours and go through the entire tutorial complete with practice exercises. Or if that's intimidating, start by reading this gist: https://gist.github.com/ChetanAhuja/42ee8321c906466b601c https://gist.github.com/ChetanAhuja/42ee8321c906466b601c
- VLM 12y ago
  Sorry for responding late, but completing the tutorial merely brings you up to the level of using vim. Like, OK, hit C-x C-s to save instead of esc :w to save. That doesn't really help, it just teaches equally productive keystrokes. You can "rise above" by using emacs but its going to take a lot more than learning a different keystroke to scroll the screen. Learning all the features of your language mode, its debugger integration, integrated refactoring tools, project tool integration, it all takes time, and those are the areas where you get huge productivity gains when you put in the time. I agree you are correct that the FIRST step is the tutorial but that won't provide any performance gains over any other bare text editor.

cies 12y ago

Coming from Vim, Evil is awesome to me. I can simply have "both" :)

lee 12y ago

I would say that learning your IDE or editor well is a worthwhile investment, whether that is emacs, vim, or a more rich IDE like Eclipse. Vim or Emacs are really powerful tools that will serve you well over your entire career, so getting adept at them will pay dividends. It's similar to learning how to touch-type, or typing with a faster WPM, in that it's not a pre-requisite to becoming a good and productive developer but it certainly helps. Emacs is my personal favorite editor, and I've found that the more adept I get at using it, the easier it is for me to get into "flow" and be productive. I don't use my brain's CPU cycles to fumble around trying to manipulate text as much, since through repetition and muscle memory I can work at it effortlessly (compare that to someone who has to two-finger peck while programming). Similar to other powerful tools though, becoming good takes practice and a time investment. But I would argue that the initial upfront investment will pay off in the long run. TL;DR: Yes, absolutely. Learning Emacs (or Vim/SublimeText/Eclipse if that's your choice) well will definitely boost your productivity in the long run.

eitland 12y ago
Happy to see others mentioning eclipse. I'm learning emacs now and it impresses me a lot but I also have happy memories from both Eclipse and NetBeans. The way you can refactor whole projects at once etc is amazing. (This is partly related to Java being static and uncool as well. : )
- Dewie 12y ago
  Sir, there is nothing uncool about static typing. :) (verbose typing is uncool, though)
- lee 12y ago
  The beauty of learning emacs keybindings is that most IDE's will have an "emacs mode". So you don't have to relearn things. But it's also useful for things like bash or OSX interfaces too, since they use the same common keybinding scheme.
  - acomjean 12y ago

babarock 12y ago

I spent a couple of years using vim before switching to emacs around 3 years ago. I'll write about my own experience with both editors. Learning emacs won't automatically give you a huge productivity boost the way learning vim does. Vim is this blazing fast editor; it's been designed from the ground up to be good at editing text. If your goal is to increase your productivity, I'd say invest time learning vim advanced features, like jumps, macros, registers, and the plethora of other things I don't know about. Emacs is not about speed. It's about control. It's a fully customizable environment to manipulate text. You can use it to edit prose, code, scientific formulas, but also emails, IRC/Jabber clients, clients for virtually anything with a REST API. Here are some of the use cases that make my work easier using emacs: + Evaluating pieces of code at once. I write a lot of Python. Most REPLs out there allow editing of one line at a time. emacs allows me to fire a python interpreter and evaluate regions (multiline function definition, or data structure) at once. Similar features exist for other "dynamic" languages. + Better code review workflow. I receive code review requests via email immediately inside emacs. I can play with the diff files, the source files. I can make modifs or run the code without leaving my editor. And since the code review system has an HTTP API, I can even post my comments and votes back. + Org-mode (http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/). I would use emacs for this module alone. It's a note taking system that can easily transform into an agenda, todo lists, memo, document markup, tables (oh, the org-mode tables!), ... Basically, to answer your question: I think you'll get a lot of benefits from emacs if you enjoy customizing it and integrating it to your workflow. If you don't like spending time customizing and prefer something that will just make you write text (well, code and configuration files) faster, stick to vim and spend this time learning advanced commands.

viksit 12y ago
What do you use to evaluate python? Does it work with ipython under some sort of inferior mode? And what do you use for code review workflows?
- foobarqux 12y ago
  M-x apropos python send
12y ago

Dewie 12y ago

You could just try it. It won't take long to adjust to, and you can stick to basic things so that you will be no less productive compared to working in any basic text editor. There are some things that you will have get used to in order to be able to use it at all, such as the seemingly archaic kill/yank functionality that is used instead of copy/cut/paste. And of course you want to test drive some of the more advanced features, to get a feel for what is possible in Emacs. But the point is that you can ease into these things; you won't get easily lost or overwhelmed. What you should perhaps be more concerned about is whether you will be able to go back to a plain text editor, once and if you choose to go down this rabbit hole..

grayclhn 12y ago

For some (usually specialized) languages, emacs is easily the best IDE/editor, so if you want to use one of them, give it a try. Its key combinations are less ergonomic than vim's, so you should definitely spend some time configuring your keyboard if you're going to try it. (I'm being serious.)

evanspa 12y ago

For what it's worth, I learned Emacs out of my desire to learn Clojure. It didn't take too long to develop the muscle memory (a few months of forcing myself to use it). Now, 6 or so years later, I use Emacs for essentially all ad-hoc text editing jobs, and of course Clojure dev. I love using it for my shell (M-x shell) - being able to move about the shell buffer w/out limit is very liberating. I also do a lot of iOS development, and, I do 95% of editing in Xcode, and 5% in Emacs. A nice thing about Emacs is, if you're on a Mac, is that Mac OS uses most of Emacs' movement keybindings, so even when I'm in Xcode (or any other app for that matter), I can still use my Emacs muscle memory. I'm not that young; 6 years ago I was 30, and I'm very happy I decided to learn Emacs; no regrets. It's still paying dividends today and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

Derbasti 12y ago
There is this incredible tool called Karabiner (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/). Among the many things it can do are Emacs key bindings. I used it to enable more Emacs key bindings in OSX, for example M-f and M-b.

tuhdo 12y ago

You can check my mini manual to quickly be productive with Emacs: http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html Also check my other guides, even just to see Emacs's awesomeness: http://tuhdo.github.io/ http://tuhdo.github.io/

zafiro17 12y ago
A slightly different target audience, but here is my Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers (not Coders). It will get you used to the editor, at least. I use Firefox plus the "It's all text" extension (configured to call emacs as its editor) for happy times on forums like this one. http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/197-Woodnotes-Guide-to-Emacs-for-Writers.html http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/197-Woodnotes-Gui...
- tuhdo 12y ago
  Thanks. Look interesting.