Concepts The Emacs Newbie Should Master | Hacker News Reader

Concepts The Emacs Newbie Should Master

benjisimon.blogspot.com

122 pointspdelgallego48 comments

If you're using Emacs and git, you might want to look into magit, which allows you to touch-type through common git operations. If you commit a lot, this will speed you up significantly.

http://philjackson.github.com/magit/

I use custom Elisp to combine magit, git-blame, and other commands into a unified git environment:

https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee76... https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee76... https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee76...

It's especially handy to be able to pull up git-blame information for the current buffer with just a few keystrokes. This turns your git commit messages into a layer of hidden code comments.

But vc works really well too, when committing single file changes.

I love Magit, but don't miss git blame: vc-annotate works really well. P and N navigate the git history of the buffer.

Yeah, magit isn't meant to replace vc; it just supplements it for the operations for which vc is awful.

I've got to say though; seeing that article explain how Emacs helped him use RCS and how it also has support for CVS and SVN really does _not_ help the "Emacs is from the 80s" stereotype. Especially ironic since magit is the best git UI I've seen anywhere.

I think Egg (Emacs Got Git) is really slick: https://github.com/byplayer/egg

The post has many good suggestions! To them, I would add:

The mark ring. Whenever you place a mark (highlighting a region), its place is also added to a ring, and you can jump between them by pressing "C-u space" (or "C-x space" for pop-global-mark, which will jump between buffers). Many commands that move a long way add an implicit mark, so this works quite well as a "where was I..." command.

For "dynamic abbreviations", I recommend pabbrev (http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/download/emacs/pa...) - when Emacs is otherwise idle, it starts building a lookup trie of prefixes to frequently used words, so it will suggest completions under the cursor as you type. I love it.

I much prefer iswitchb to the default buffer switching system. YMMV.

Don't forget about learning Emacs lisp, either! It adds quite a bit of flexibility to Emacs. It's kind of a crappy, backward Lisp dialect, but still tremendously useful.

Finally, learn to use the help system. Emacs's naming is really idiosyncratic, but it gives you several powerful ways to look things up, so you don't have to memorize everything.

Thanks for the pabbrev hint. Sometimes, Emacs reminds me of games like Diablo. Half the fun is in finding new pieces of equipment and trying them out.

Like image-dired, ibuffer, yasnippet, ...

Missing examples:

C-x z, the command that repeat the last command for every 'z' you type. This is in my opinion one of the most important feature of Emacs

M-s o, the 'occur' command that show all the lines that match a specified regexp

File variables: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Spe...

C-x z is definitely useful, thanks!

First one you need to know is C-x C-c... then you are free to experiment and learn to you hearts content...

2 concepts I think are missing from this list:

* Tramp for remote/sudo editing: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/TrampMode

* emacsclient if you want emacs everywhere all the time: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient

This thread is hilarious.

The Universal Principles of Design (among other places) talks about the 80/20 rule — but Emacs is so powerful and customizable that no two people ever agree on which 20% is the most important!

Well, Emacs is very much "a day to learn, a lifetime to master". I've been using it for years, have led sessions teaching other developers, and just yesterday I discovered rainbow-mode (http://julien.danjou.info/rainbow-mode.html). Before that, it was magit and halp.

I disagree with #2, now at least.

First rule of emacs: don't quit. Or, more specifically, don't shut it down.

I used to do this, but a few months ago I managed to really screw up a file I was working on, but didn't notice the problem until after I had saved it. And because I hadn't closed that emacs session for over a week, I couldn't even revert to a backup without losing a week's worth of work (emacs normally only creates a backup file when it closes). So for the last few months I close every session every day when I quit for the night.

As far as buffer switching, I never keep hundreds of files open because when I switch git branches it's hard to remember which buffers need to be reverted. Instead I usually close everything, change branches, and then open up files as needed. I find I can open files more quickly using IDO-mode than I could by switching buffers (plus I often forget the filenames).

If you use magit to switch branches it will automatically revert the buffers that were changed.

That's nice. Although I really like using git-emacs. https://github.com/tsgates/git-emacs

Doesn't (global-auto-revert-mode 1) do the trick?

I trade registers and the help system (especially hyper-apropos) for narrowing and spellchecking.

Didn't know about dynamic-abrevs, and haven't learned how the kill-ring works yet. Thanks

Even though setup is messy, you might want to also consider auto-complete/yas instead of dynamic-abrevs

Is there a way to kill something without putting it in the kill ring? It's probably my biggest pet peeve about emacs that there's no way to kill text without emacs assuming that you want it somewhere else.

M-x delete-region

M-x delete-region by default (although you can bind it to anything).

I use emacs every day, and don't think I've ever used it though. Just put the stuff you want to delete in the kill ring.

Why don't you want stuff in the kill ring? It takes some getting used to, but I've found it's generally a good thing. You can always yank back previous items in the ring with M-y too, so it isn't like your OS clipboard where 'cutting' something else means you lose access to the previous item on the clipboard.

Because sometimes I want to cut A, delete B, paste A where B used to be, and it's irritating to have to have that extra M-y in there.

Perhaps I should instead write a new command to kill a region, but then swap the last two things in the kill ring. That's actually a good idea...

I just kill A, yank A, then kill B...

kill A, select B, yank.

In addition to the other two solutions, you can also use registers: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Registers

For me, M-d, (which I remapped from C-d?) does not put the text into the ring.

Also see delete-selection-mode. If you have:

    (delete-selection-mode 1)
    (transient-mark-mode 1) ; enabled by default in emacs 23+

you can mark a region and press delete or backspace (or start typing replacement text) to delete the region without affecting the kill ring.

For the ruby people out there you guys should try xiki (xiki.org). It extends emacs with a bunch of cool commands via el4r.

viper-mode

Or even M-x terminal -> vim. :)

THIS IS MADNESS

Does eterm have all the capabilities needed to run a full-screen editor like Vim?

screen + irssi works OK. vim probably does too.

M-x ansi-term does colors, too

Do you use viper-mode? What are its benefits, over and above just using vi? I switched from vi to emacs many years ago and I never bothered with viper-mode; I just invested an awful lot of effort into learning Emacs's commands and keystrokes.

What are its benefits, over and above just using vi?

The benefit is that you have an editor that you can extend in Emacs Lisp. (I assume you mean "vim" instead of "vi". If you want a vi-like emacs, use mg. If you want a vim-like emacs, use Emacs.)

I tried to use Emacs lisp, several, times, which in my head is almost the same thing as using emacs, but was never able to warp my head around the weird functions naming. Writing the simplest macro seems to require tens of lines of code.

I'm an happy vimmer, but the excitement about emacs makes me jealous. All my tries to use it makes me feel like it's either an endless unintuitive shortcut list OR an editor with very little text control (which I know it isn't ) AND I fail at customizing it

Any suggestion ?

I tried to use Emacs lisp, several times, but was never able to warp my head around the weird functions naming.

Any suggestion?

Ignore the "weird function naming" until you get used to it. Read the docs to pick up advice on how to do things the Emacs way, so the simplest macros aren't "tens of lines of code". And finally, read the Emacs souce code to see how Emacs does it. Remember, Emacs is written in Emacs Lisp, too!

I personally use vim, and have gotten very used to the action+movement commands and the modal behavior.

However, I am very jealous of emacs' integration with other OS tools. Nothing in vim comes close to emacs integration with gdb and lisp REPLs (slime, etc). So I could see using emacs+viper if I was programming lisp, or doing a lot of debugging.

Also, I feel that vim is a very powerful text editor, but only a competent text creator. How do emacs users feel about the distinction?

I'm in the (seemingly small) group of people that has several years experience with both. I think that vi is a better editor (I prefer its compositional & modal keyboard interface to Emacs's modifier keys), but Emacs's multi-buffer model and extensibility make it a much better integrated environment. On the balance, Emacs wins, but I tend to use nvi or mg for very quick edits. (OpenBSD's default install has them both.)

vi and Emacs are both excellent, and I'd recommend picking one (or an equally sophisticated editor) and mastering it, rather than waffling back and forth. For any professional programmer, the time invested in learning a powerful editor will quickly pay for itself.

I find viper mode unsatisfying - few to no mode / extension writers provide alternative keybindings for it (shocker), so you end up having using Emacs keys anyway, only with more cognitive dissonance. Other people may feel otherwise, but that's my experience.

Do you program Lisp in Vim ever, or always Emacs? I'm a vim user, working through some Lisp books and wondering what the best workflow for Lisp in Vim is, or whether I should start learning Emacs for Lisp.

I do all my programming in Emacs and use vi or mg* for sysadmin-ing, basically. I started using Emacs when I was learning Common Lisp and was blown away by Marco Baringer's SLIME (http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/) video. I had been using vi/vim for 4-5 years before that.

* a mini-Emacs, basically core Emacs without the extensibility. If it wasn't installed on OpenBSD by default, I would probably just use nvi in its place.

That said, using vi(m) for Lisp is not that hard. Paul Graham says he uses vi in his programming FAQ (http://paulgraham.com/pfaq.html). Mainly, you just need a good setup for "copy this block of code to the repl", "reload the file I just saved", and the like. A bit of integration greatly reduces friction, and Lisp development is all about reducing friction for quick experimentation and testing. (Not so sure about doing Emacs Lisp in vi, though... ;) )

Thanks, that's exactly what I'm trying to figure out, how to reduce friction while programming Lisp in vim. Will keep googling and experimenting.

There are probably better people to ask; it's been asked many times before. The problem is one of skill set overlaps, as xach notes (http://www.xach.com/img/lisp-and-vim.png). Also, I actually program more in Lua, C, Erlang, and a few other languages than Lisp from day to day.

Starting points:

http://cybertiggyr.com/15-vim/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94792/using-vim-for-lisp-...

I use vim for developing in Lisp, using Nekthuth to connect to SBCL's REPL:

http://nekthuth.com

Nekthuth doesn't have anywhere near the number of features or intimate integration with Lisp that SLIME has, but it's good enough for me.

I had tried Emacs with vimpulse and viper mode. Although it did make using Emacs less painful, it still required way too much knowledge of Emacs to use effectively and configure than I had time to dedicate to learning it.

Emacs+SLIME+vimpulse+viper might be good enough for someone who already knows Emacs or who hasn't invested a lot of time in learning vim. But for someone fluent in vim, I just don't think huge time investment in learning Emacs well is worth it.

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