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Comment by cmehdy | Hacker News Reader

Any suggestions to pick it up without wanting to give up due to convoluted shortcuts?

1. Swap your control and caps lock keys, or if you never use caps lock set it to an additional control key. I think this is useful regardless of whether you use Emacs or not.

It's also a good idea to use opposing hands when using modifier keys. To press control-H, you would use the left control with your left hand, and the H with your right hand. Again, this is true regardless of using Emacs (it applies just the same to typing capital letters with the shift keys).

2. Load Emacs.

3. Press Control-H, then press T. This loads the Emacs tutorial. It should take about 10-15 minutes to run though.

If you use Bash/Zsh or Mac OS, the basic cursor movement in the very first section of the tutorial can also be used in the Bash/Zsh shell, and in many Mac OS textboxes as alternatives to the Home/End/PgUp keys etc.

4. Read the manual section on macros [1]. I don't know so many emacs-level-10-wizard level commands, but making a macro saves me a lot of time and thought at least once a week.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ke...

Thank you for the macro suggestion, I just gave it a try and I was surprised that it was so simple and practical as define: F3 keys/text F4 then run: F4

If you're already familiar with vim, I've heard good things about Spacemacs: http://spacemacs.org/

I installed spacemacs a couple of weeks ago. I’m enjoying it but I have to keep switching back to sublime to get things done quickly then switching back when I can afford to take time doing things.

same here. I'm totally fluid in org, but navigating files, a simple search and replace, finding the spell check suggestions: all still hard

Basically just start flyspell mode in the modes you prefer including only for comments with flyspell-prog-mode and configure as desired.

    (use-package flyspell
        :config
        (setq ispell-program-name "/usr/sbin/aspell")
        (setq flyspell-consider-dash-as-word-delimiter-flag t)
        (define-key flyspell-mode-map (kbd "C-:") 'flyspell-correct-wrapper)
    )
    (use-package flyspell-correct)
    (use-package flyspell-correct-ivy)

you may want a binding to add the word at point to your dictionary I swiped this function for somewhere

    (defun my-save-word ()
    (interactive)
    (let ((current-location (point))
            (word (flyspell-get-word)))
        (when (consp word)    
        (flyspell-do-correct 'save nil (car word) current-location (cadr word) (caddr word) current-location))))

I'm not really crazy about Spacemacs because there's so much happening and I like to slowly build my config over time so I know what each piece does, so I can quickly make changes if there's something causing friction.

A nice happy medium is Prelude -- https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

It's big, but probably not too big to understand and jump in and tweak.

I still prefer my own hand-rolled config though.

Or just install Evil in plain Emacs.

I have used Spacemacs for a while (ex vi/vim user). It is a good gateway drug, but it is also buggy and slow.

After a few months, I started to build up my configuration bit by bit with use-package, evil, and general.el. I largely use the same keybindings as Spacemacs, but it's much leaner and faster.

Had the same experience, spacemacs has nice defaults and it's gorgeous, but the lag bothered me so much that I was using vim a lot of time to get things to work.

Changed to a clean configuration and built it slowly, everytime I hit an annoyance I fixed and learned something new, now it works better than spacemacs for my workflow and still is way snappier.

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