Comment by geokon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geokon | Hacker News Reader

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I only really enjoyed Emacs once I learned some ELisp (I think I had tried is 2 or 3 times before that). Honestly I find these guides pretty useless b/c you can copy configs and hack together something without really understanding what you're doing but you'll eventually end up extremely frustrated and unable to work around the quirks and conflicts between configurations.

I know the people behind Emacs like to think the system as usable out-of-the-box but I think selling it like that is ultimately a disservice b/c people end up underwhelmed and frustrated - never taking the time to learn ELisp. (the Emacs intro/tutorial is just a "welcome to this nano with annoying keybindings") I actually would challenge anyone to find someone who loves emacs and doesn't know a bit of ELisp :)

Ultimately ELisp is really not that much work to learn - but the root issue seems to me that ELisp isn't really a general purpose programming language and who wants to invest in learning a language you can't use outside of your editor? It's basically a DSL for a managing text and buffers.. It'd be way sexier to learn if it was a Racket or something

I also wrote a little annotated config intro (these are kinda more personal notes for my org/git/C++ workflow). It's a little terse and to the point and isn't trying to sell Emacs, but unlike most guides I tried to document what each lines in the config really means and help the reader learn how Emacs helps you discover more of Elisp as you go. https://geokon-gh.github.io/.emacs.d/ Maybe someone will find it useful! (I'm by no means an emacs expert or Lisp guru.. so if there are problems, let me know please :) )

Back in the day our teaching assistance got pissed off that most people were using Emacs as if it was Notepad, and spent the rest of the programming lecture teaching how to use Emacs instead (about 1h).

Which then became my to go editor in UNIX systems, until IDEs finally became a thing on UNIX.

I'm especially saddened when I see a lisp/clojure talk where the user navigate through emacs using arrows and the likes.

A lisper not leveraging sexp ala paredit/parinfer is odd.

Common Lisp is my main language outside work (and I manage to use it for work now and then as well) and I use it with Emacs + Slime. I've been trying to get into Paredit and similar modes but they just annoy the fsck out of me.

Mind, I do use Evil so I'm getting some 'structured editing'-lite from that already.

Even without paredit, Emacs has had forward-sexp, kill-sexp, etc, since the beginning.

I would love it if guile-based emacs ever gets off the ground, and the ecosystem gradually moves to scheme for more and more things, and away from elisp.

It's true that you MUST learn Elisp to use Emacs effectively. That said, the thing with Lisp is it's a pretty simple language, and once you know one Lisp dialect learning another one isn't a big deal. As far as Elisp is concerned, you don't need to learn a vast library either. Most of the time you'll be setting variables, hooks and occasionally writing some small function.

right, that's very true - it's in a lot of ways just a mental block. Though it's not likely, I still want to keep the option to reuse my code in a different context and a DSL precludes that

I dunno. Once I took the time to learn the basic keybindings, even before I even knew what .emacs was, I was already pretty impressed with the auto-indent functionality that seemed to work regardless of the language.

It was the lack of basic keybindings that resulted in me never getting going with it. Everytime I wanted to do "trivial thing" I was expected to write a script. Too much yak shaving.

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