Master Emacs in one year

github.com

17 points·hnzix··5 comments

Are people honestly faster with emacs? I can see learning it for understanding purposes.

I'd guess if you spent a year learning a tool, you'd be faster on that tool than anything else.

That wasn't my experience, actually. I've been a die-hard vi user now for a few decades, and one year I decided it was time to branch out, so I dedicated myself to using emacs for all of my text editing for a year. I'll tell you, that ended up being a painful year - I was so relieved when I returned to vi. I thought that, eventually, I'd get used to it, but emacs always felt like a round peg in a square hole to me.

It really depends what you're using it for, and what you're comparing it to.

For example, when I'm writing Java, I use Intellij -- but sometimes copy an argument list into Emacs to do quicker macro-driven editing.

For basic text editing (emails with no formatting, simple config edits, etc), I think the difference between Emacs and vim is a matter of taste.

But once you want to do complex things, Emacs becomes possibly the only option. It can be made into the best Git tool I've seen (Magit), a great outlining/scheduling/TODO tool (Org mode), multiple great Lisp interfaces (CIDER for Clojure, SLIME for Common Lisp), and even just running a shell inside Emacs makes for really nice integration for writing shell scripts.

I certainly won't argue that it's the perfect tool for everything, but it's a great malleable general-purpose tool.

Ever tried spacemacs? It combines the best of both worlds. Really worth giving it a shot, especially as vi advocate.

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