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Comment by tra3 | Hacker News Reader

Overall, I think it's a pretty fair assessment. Emacs is dense, obscure and what is these days called "opinionated". You gotta remember though, that Emacs is from mid 70s. There's a lot of legacy there, but also a lot of refinement. Lots of brilliant people have spent a lot of time improving it over the years.

You shouldn't think of Emacs as an editor; it's a text processing system. In other words it supports lots of workflows of which IDE is only one.

I also use it as a knowledge management system (org-brain) and task tracker (org-mode). It helps me manage my days because it hooks into google calendar. I manage my bugs via a JIRA integration, read my mail through it and now I'm gonna check out the IM mode :)

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> "opinionated"

I feel this term might need to be officially dead and buried. If something as customizable as emacs is deemed opinionated what does this even mean? For chrissakes there are people that consider emacs to be a better vi implementation than vim.

Well, there are lots of customizations doable (I’m still rocking my .emacs from the 1990’s going through several platforms, Linux→MacOS→Linux, refined over the years with custom functions etc.) but to name a single example: my keyboard does have a Find key, and I tried mapping isearch-forward to it instead of the default CTRL+S. That’s trivial, but then, you know how you can press CTRL+S again to go to the next result? Well, that key combo is hardcoded in LISP. So yes, you technically can remap isearch-forward, but in a useless way.

> that key combo is hardcoded in LISP

isearch-forward turns on a minor mode that has it's own keymap

a snippet from isearch.el:

  (defvar isearch-mode-map
    ...
    ;; Several non-printing chars change the searching behavior.
    (define-key map "\C-s" 'isearch-repeat-forward)
    (define-key map "\C-r" 'isearch-repeat-backward)

hence to redefine C-s, to, say F12:

  (global-set-key [f12] 'isearch-forward)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map [f12] 'isearch-repeat-forward)

& so on

I don't see what is the problem here

I see, thanks for the correction.

What HNer henry_flower neglected to state explicitly in his helpful comment is that it is false that pressing C-s to go to the next result is hardcoded in some Emacs Lisp function. I just wanted to say that in case non-Emacsers don't know it's implied by what Henry did say. (What he said is much better than just "that's not true!", he also tells you how to change the C-s key that goes to the next match.)

I realize now that I misused the term “hardcoded”, thanks.

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