Thoughts on Learning Emacs | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on Learning Emacs

wideaperture.net

54 pointscodeup21 comments

The hardest thing about getting started with emacs is finding information about getting started with emacs. You get the "learn emacs in 10 minute" guides that show you how to open a file, and move up a line, and then after that everything goes off a cliff into installing packages and writing lisp.

It's hard to get a sense for the "overview" of what emacs is about - what you should learn first, how to customize your setup, and where you should go next. It feels like walking in to a party full of really really really smart strangers.

Like a party full of smart strangers, once you get going it's fine... but most people don't stick around that long.

One great source of Emacs knowledge: http://www.emacswiki.org/

I'm sure there are other info sources, but the wiki has proven to be incredibly helpful for me over the years.

I found that Meet Emacs from the PeepCode series was pretty good, and takes you a bit further than just the absolute basics. He also has a nice fork of emacs-starter-kit on Github.

http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs

I learned Emacs last year from the O'Reilly book, "Learning GNU Emacs" - http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Emacs-Third-Debra-Cameron/dp/...

It's an excellent reference and introduction. I also blindly followed Steve Yegge's advice here too, which turned out to be great: http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

I learned Emacs about 7 months ago. I would say that spending a little bit of time experimenting everyday with it is probably the way to learn new functionality. But I think learning Elisp definitely improved my usage of Emacs because it lets you understand why Emacs does what it does.

One way is to commit to using emacs for everything, now, and then slowly 'dig your way out'.

That is how I had to start. I just decided I would use it and be completely overwhelmed for a couple weeks. It also helps if you have a proficient Emacs use sitting nearby that so that you can constantly ask how do things.

This is how I learned Emacs, LaTeX and Linux. It works, but only if you enjoy the process of everything being broken always.

The single best thing I did to become proficient using Emacs was to switch my CapsLock key to Ctrl. Learning to touch type comes a close second.

I would've thought it'd be the other way around. Why would you bother with a text editor if you're not motivated enough to learn how to type?

Learning to use a text editor(or atleast trying) is easier than learning to touch type but anyway people kept touting the power of Emacs and how extensible it was and I decided to give it a shot. On trying Emacs, I loved features such as being able to run a shell, a really good python mode and the extensibility using .emacs files.

However since Emacs has a lot of key sequences for navigating between text, modifying text and doing pretty much anything involves not using the mouse, it got really frustrating looking at the keyboard every 2 seconds courtesy my typing illiteracy. So I decided to learn touch typing just so that I could use Emacs properly.

One interesting little tidbit.. I had tried around 3 or 4 times previously to learn touch typing but failed. However after I started learning both Emacs and touch typing simultaneously, I succeeded. So I guess the relation is somewhat symbiotic, learning to touch type helped me learn emacs and vice versa.

Funny, one of the best things one can do to get faster with Vim is to switch CapsLock and Escape (though I know people who are still reaching all the way to that top left corner even after years of using it).

I started out with technomancy's emacs-starter kit, but I started to roll my own (complete rm -rf .emacs.d) when I tried to then add functionality myself, ran in to trouble and got yelled at in #emacs for using the starter kit. Installed package.el and everytime I missed something from the kit, I'd install it myself (paredit, winner, ido, ...).

I would still recommend the starter kit for absolute beginners because it gives you a running start and a good idea of what kind of stuff is out there.

There were thoughts, but they weren't about learning Emacs.

IMO, it was just another Emacs advocacy article. The only thing I learned is that there is an org-mode iPhone app.

Oo boy! I hope no one brings up the comparison to Vi now. (Ooops!)

Let the holy war begin.

Or brace styles in C-ish languages. I miss those. And then, tabs or spaces.

How times have changed. I have discovered that we are friends with vi & Klingons, and we are at war with eclipse, netbeans, and the borg.

Eclipse has an emacs mode built in.

Eclipse has a set of Emacs key bindings, but it's hard for me to use because I have muscle memory of features that don't exist in Eclipse (prefix arguments, buffer manipulation, and so on). The Emacs+ plugin is better, but I honestly prefer to use the normal bindings rather then get tripped up repeatedly by fake Emacs.

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