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Whenever I find myself learning about something where I know that I will not use it frequently enough to actually remember its keystrokes/commands/etc. I create
by phforms 2y ago
Whenever I find myself learning about something where I know that I will not use it frequently enough to actually remember its keystrokes/commands/etc. I create a new “personal documentation” for it as an .org file (I have a central folder and a git repo for all of them). Here I’ll write all the information (like keybindings, details of commands, common procedures, concepts, etc.) down that is specific to my own use-cases and organize it in a way that makes sense to me.
It takes some time and effort and may seem redundant when there is good documentation out there already (as with most of Emacs). But still I find myself wasting a lot of time looking for that one piece of information in the docs where I forgot how to even search for it. Maybe it works so well for me because I kind-of enjoy the process of writing it (which many people might not). But I feel much less frustrated afterwards when I come back to some tool or language after years of not using it and find it really easy to remember what was important to me at the time and how to do X.
Tools like Casual Calc are great because they reduce the need to do that manual work of going through the docs and writing down what one want to remember in a (for them) more clear/concise/practical way. However, the way they select and organize knowledge/commands only reflect the common use cases, so there may still be a need to write stuff down.
As a more general helper, I really like to use Emacs Calc with `which-key`, which provides a similar interface to see what keybindings are available under a specific prefix-key. What also helps is if you press `h` and then search for a specific function (`h f`), key (`h k`), etc. or just type `x` to enter a function name directly (or by keyword using text-completion).
- bowmessage 2y agoYou might like (contributing to) https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr, I'm sure your notes would be helpful to me and others! Not sure if they've got a section for specific editor packages, yet.
- BeetleB 2y agoI used to do the same (self document in an org file). With Emacs, though, I've found creating hydras[1] to be a better approach. It looks a lot more complicated than it is. The first time I wrote hydras, it was hard. After that, it's been trivial. Of course, magit like menus are mildly superior to hydras, but I don't know if they are as easy to generate. [1] https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra
- phforms 2y agoI am also a big fan of hydras, but I use them more for workflow things like window movement, editing org tables or quicker navigation in org headings/trees and it complements my keybinding system in `meow`[1] (similar to Evil or the Kakoune/Helix text editing scheme). [1]: https://github.com/meow-edit/meow https://github.com/meow-edit/meow
- BeetleB 2y agoThat's one use case, but you can use them to execute any elisp code. So when I encounter a new major mode I plan to use, while going through its docs I make hydras for keystrokes/commands I plan to use. This way I don't need to look up my notes, nor do I need to memorize keystrokes.
- skydhash 2y agoI create ad-hoc shell scripts or alias anytime the commands get complex. If I find myself reusing them in other contexts, I add them to my bashrc files or create proper scripts to add to my home bin. That’s why I dislike macOS these days. Not many software bother with scripting interface and the increasing IOS-ication makes it a chores for power users (still great if your usage is confined to a few apps).