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Comment by mssundaram | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is a good opportunity to ask some related questions. I'm a Vim (now Neovim) user for most of my life but I'm finally interested in trying org-mode.

1. What's the best way to get Emacs on Mac? I heard that [1] is not a good solution, but I don't know why that is. So far I've used the d12frosted emacs-plus brew tap.

2. Further, does anyone have any resources for learning org-mode using Evil mode? I have Doom installed and it seems to use Evil by default.

[1] https://emacsformacosx.com/

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I've never heard that about [1], and would be interested in hearing people's reasons as well. I've used it for many years now and have had few problems. The only other version I've used is Mitsuharu Yamamoto's emacs-mac (https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/). For my use case (except for tasks requiring a web browser, I spend almost all my time in Emacs, but I don't use many gui features) the two are essentially equivalent.

I tried emacsformacosx and Yamamoto's port when I first started using Emacs on Mac OS, but since version 25 I've found the standard distribution compiled with --with-ns serves my purposes just fine. (I always build my own since I've found neither X toolkits nor distro packagers to reliably produce a stable Emacs, but if you're thinking about Yamamoto's port, building your own is already on the table. Besides, it's not any harder than building any other software, it just takes a while.)

Make sure you check out magit[1] while your here. I think its my favorite piece of software that exists. I've used it for nearly 10 years.

I basically use it as the interface to my projects. It helped me become way more effective in git than I ever was with the command line.

[1] https://magit.vc/

I use emacsforosx and am perfectly happy with it. Seriously man, don’t worry about it just go for it. If you find out that you really need something that doesn’t have then you can always compile yourself. It’ll be trivial to transfer your set up, so don’t succumb to analysis paralysis.

I've had the most success with emacs-plus [1]. It's the most optimized for mac specifically with some good flags that you can make a custom build if there are features you do or don't want.

[1] https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plusa

The best emacs for Macs might be Aquamacs (https://aquamacs.org/) as it has been adapted to work with standard Mac keyboard shortcuts among other things. I use it on a daily basis, not the least for keeping notes and clips in org-mode (of course ;-)

Cf https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AquamacsFAQ too.

Another vim user here. I haven't decided to switch, but I've been thinking about it for a while. Like many others, I wouldn't be switching from vim, which is just my text editor, but from from an assortment of CLI tools that make up my "IDE" (perhaps just "DE" would be more accurate).

In theory, I don't like the idea of my text editor being my OS; I prefer the unix philosophy for tools, which interoperate via standards and are widely portable.

But, having recently attempted to write a bunch of posix-compliant shell scripts... I think practically emacs might just be a better OS. Particularly in the sense of everything being more uniform.

For 1, I generally recommend whatever Doom is recommending[0], which is currently the tap you mentioned.

For 2, evil is indeed available by default in Doom and works normally with org-mode. For the most part, everything works just like in vim, including splitting panes (windows in emacs), switching tabs if you've enabled them, and so on. So, writing notes in org-mode should essentially be just like writing nodes in any other editor with vim keybindings. You've also got by default nice stuff corresponding to some of the popular vim plugins, including vim-surround and commenting (via `g c <motion>` or selecting a range and then `g c`). There was also this post I saw recently exploring `evil-snipe`, `evil-easymotion`, and a few other plugins available by default that was quite helpful[1]. There are also a number of useful org-mode specific functions available when you're editing an org file behind the "local leader" `spc m`, like ticking off checkboxes (`spc m x`), storing links (`spc m n`) inserting links (`spc m l`), toggling todos, setting priority, scheduling dates, and so on. `TAB` cycles folding of headlines, `shift+TAB` cycles headlines throughout the document.

In general, one of the nicest things about emacs is the ability to introspect everything at runtime. `spc h v` allows you to search for, check (and change) the value of any variable, and you can often do some exploration in the fuzzy finder to figure out what settings are available for whatever editor feature you're using. `spc h k` lets you type a keybinding and gives you the documentation for whatever function it's mapped to. `spc :` or `M-x` opens up a fuzzy finder for all the functions available in the editor. You can search through these to find stuff you might like to do, and see inline which keybinding the function is bound to, if any. `spc h a` searches all functions, variables, etc., in a similar way. `spc h i` opens up an info browser, which is like man pages on steroids. Many emacs plugins have documentation here, as well as many system utilities. Last but not least, the help for Doom itself is quite nice, which you can get to via `spc h d m` (help for doom modules), `spc h d h` (general doom help), and so on.

For org-mode, you can learn a lot of what's available by typing `spc :` and then just reading through all the functions that start with `org-`.

[0]: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/develop/docs/get...

[1]: https://medium.com/@aria_39488/the-niceties-of-evil-in-doom-...

Thanks very much, this is really helpful!

emacsformacosx Its a fine solution, for the most part. I did have to fiddle around with terminal aliases so that I can control whether i get emacs in my terminal or in its own app window.

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