5 ms·

Thoughts on Learning Emacs

54 points by codeup 15y ago

shuaib 15y ago
Oo boy! I hope no one brings up the comparison to Vi now. (Ooops!) Let the holy war begin.
- michaelcampbell 15y ago
  Or brace styles in C-ish languages. I miss those. And then, tabs or spaces.
- jerrya 15y ago
  How times have changed. I have discovered that we are friends with vi & Klingons, and we are at war with eclipse, netbeans, and the borg.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - brendoncrawford 15y ago
    Eclipse has an emacs mode built in.
    - alayne 15y ago
      Eclipse has a set of Emacs key bindings, but it's hard for me to use because I have muscle memory of features that don't exist in Eclipse (prefix arguments, buffer manipulation, and so on). The Emacs+ plugin is better, but I honestly prefer to use the normal bindings rather then get tripped up repeatedly by fake Emacs.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- danh 15y ago
  That would be one of the cases of "not pre-installed on".
  - IvarTJ 15y ago
    Darn, misread.
mrspeaker 15y ago
The hardest thing about getting started with emacs is finding information about getting started with emacs. You get the "learn emacs in 10 minute" guides that show you how to open a file, and move up a line, and then after that everything goes off a cliff into installing packages and writing lisp. It's hard to get a sense for the "overview" of what emacs is about - what you should learn first, how to customize your setup, and where you should go next. It feels like walking in to a party full of really really really smart strangers. Like a party full of smart strangers, once you get going it's fine... but most people don't stick around that long.
- airfoil 15y ago
  One great source of Emacs knowledge: http://www.emacswiki.org/ http://www.emacswiki.org/ I'm sure there are other info sources, but the wiki has proven to be incredibly helpful for me over the years.
- mnutt 15y ago
  I found that Meet Emacs from the PeepCode series was pretty good, and takes you a bit further than just the absolute basics. He also has a nice fork of emacs-starter-kit on Github. http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs
- sayemm 15y ago
  I learned Emacs last year from the O'Reilly book, "Learning GNU Emacs" - http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Emacs-Third-Debra-Cameron/dp/0596006489/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305387505&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Emacs-Third-Debra-Cameron/dp/... It's an excellent reference and introduction. I also blindly followed Steve Yegge's advice here too, which turned out to be great: http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs
- abhiyerra 15y ago
  I learned Emacs about 7 months ago. I would say that spending a little bit of time experimenting everyday with it is probably the way to learn new functionality. But I think learning Elisp definitely improved my usage of Emacs because it lets you understand why Emacs does what it does.
gvnonor 15y ago
The single best thing I did to become proficient using Emacs was to switch my CapsLock key to Ctrl. Learning to touch type comes a close second.
- angus77 15y ago
  I would've thought it'd be the other way around. Why would you bother with a text editor if you're not motivated enough to learn how to type?
  - gvnonor 15y ago
    Learning to use a text editor(or atleast trying) is easier than learning to touch type but anyway people kept touting the power of Emacs and how extensible it was and I decided to give it a shot. On trying Emacs, I loved features such as being able to run a shell, a really good python mode and the extensibility using .emacs files. However since Emacs has a lot of key sequences for navigating between text, modifying text and doing pretty much anything involves not using the mouse, it got really frustrating looking at the keyboard every 2 seconds courtesy my typing illiteracy. So I decided to learn touch typing just so that I could use Emacs properly. One interesting little tidbit.. I had tried around 3 or 4 times previously to learn touch typing but failed. However after I started learning both Emacs and touch typing simultaneously, I succeeded. So I guess the relation is somewhat symbiotic, learning to touch type helped me learn emacs and vice versa.
- evanhanson 15y ago
  Funny, one of the best things one can do to get faster with Vim is to switch CapsLock and Escape (though I know people who are still reaching all the way to that top left corner even after years of using it).
officemonkey 15y ago
There were thoughts, but they weren't about learning Emacs. IMO, it was just another Emacs advocacy article. The only thing I learned is that there is an org-mode iPhone app.
robinramael 15y ago
I started out with technomancy's emacs-starter kit, but I started to roll my own (complete rm -rf .emacs.d) when I tried to then add functionality myself, ran in to trouble and got yelled at in #emacs for using the starter kit. Installed package.el and everytime I missed something from the kit, I'd install it myself (paredit, winner, ido, ...). I would still recommend the starter kit for absolute beginners because it gives you a running start and a good idea of what kind of stuff is out there.

54 points by codeup 15y ago

shuaib 15y ago

Oo boy! I hope no one brings up the comparison to Vi now. (Ooops!) Let the holy war begin.

michaelcampbell 15y ago
Or brace styles in C-ish languages. I miss those. And then, tabs or spaces.
jerrya 15y ago
How times have changed. I have discovered that we are friends with vi & Klingons, and we are at war with eclipse, netbeans, and the borg.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- brendoncrawford 15y ago
  Eclipse has an emacs mode built in.
  - alayne 15y ago
    Eclipse has a set of Emacs key bindings, but it's hard for me to use because I have muscle memory of features that don't exist in Eclipse (prefix arguments, buffer manipulation, and so on). The Emacs+ plugin is better, but I honestly prefer to use the normal bindings rather then get tripped up repeatedly by fake Emacs.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

danh 15y ago
That would be one of the cases of "not pre-installed on".
- IvarTJ 15y ago
  Darn, misread.

mrspeaker 15y ago

The hardest thing about getting started with emacs is finding information about getting started with emacs. You get the "learn emacs in 10 minute" guides that show you how to open a file, and move up a line, and then after that everything goes off a cliff into installing packages and writing lisp. It's hard to get a sense for the "overview" of what emacs is about - what you should learn first, how to customize your setup, and where you should go next. It feels like walking in to a party full of really really really smart strangers. Like a party full of smart strangers, once you get going it's fine... but most people don't stick around that long.

airfoil 15y ago
One great source of Emacs knowledge: http://www.emacswiki.org/ http://www.emacswiki.org/ I'm sure there are other info sources, but the wiki has proven to be incredibly helpful for me over the years.
mnutt 15y ago
I found that Meet Emacs from the PeepCode series was pretty good, and takes you a bit further than just the absolute basics. He also has a nice fork of emacs-starter-kit on Github. http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs
sayemm 15y ago
I learned Emacs last year from the O'Reilly book, "Learning GNU Emacs" - http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Emacs-Third-Debra-Cameron/dp/0596006489/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305387505&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Emacs-Third-Debra-Cameron/dp/... It's an excellent reference and introduction. I also blindly followed Steve Yegge's advice here too, which turned out to be great: http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs
abhiyerra 15y ago
I learned Emacs about 7 months ago. I would say that spending a little bit of time experimenting everyday with it is probably the way to learn new functionality. But I think learning Elisp definitely improved my usage of Emacs because it lets you understand why Emacs does what it does.

gvnonor 15y ago

The single best thing I did to become proficient using Emacs was to switch my CapsLock key to Ctrl. Learning to touch type comes a close second.

angus77 15y ago
I would've thought it'd be the other way around. Why would you bother with a text editor if you're not motivated enough to learn how to type?
- gvnonor 15y ago
  Learning to use a text editor(or atleast trying) is easier than learning to touch type but anyway people kept touting the power of Emacs and how extensible it was and I decided to give it a shot. On trying Emacs, I loved features such as being able to run a shell, a really good python mode and the extensibility using .emacs files. However since Emacs has a lot of key sequences for navigating between text, modifying text and doing pretty much anything involves not using the mouse, it got really frustrating looking at the keyboard every 2 seconds courtesy my typing illiteracy. So I decided to learn touch typing just so that I could use Emacs properly. One interesting little tidbit.. I had tried around 3 or 4 times previously to learn touch typing but failed. However after I started learning both Emacs and touch typing simultaneously, I succeeded. So I guess the relation is somewhat symbiotic, learning to touch type helped me learn emacs and vice versa.
evanhanson 15y ago
Funny, one of the best things one can do to get faster with Vim is to switch CapsLock and Escape (though I know people who are still reaching all the way to that top left corner even after years of using it).

officemonkey 15y ago

There were thoughts, but they weren't about learning Emacs. IMO, it was just another Emacs advocacy article. The only thing I learned is that there is an org-mode iPhone app.

robinramael 15y ago

I started out with technomancy's emacs-starter kit, but I started to roll my own (complete rm -rf .emacs.d) when I tried to then add functionality myself, ran in to trouble and got yelled at in #emacs for using the starter kit. Installed package.el and everytime I missed something from the kit, I'd install it myself (paredit, winner, ido, ...). I would still recommend the starter kit for absolute beginners because it gives you a running start and a good idea of what kind of stuff is out there.