Joining the Church of Emacs | Hacker News Reader

Joining the Church of Emacs

fuzzypixelz.com

132 pointszetaposter66 comments

With all the devotion on display from so many very clever people, it's hard not to be at least a little curious about Emacs. But I still have something holding me back. On the one hand, the entire environment that I've heard described might be very powerful. But at the same time, it is a whole new system to learn and get into, very specific to itself, on top of the operating system I'm already using. People say you will want to do everything in Emacs, and hold that idea up as a good thing, but I tend to be scared away instead. I don't like the idea of digging myself into a groove, even if it should be a comfy one. Powerful ecosystems can be hard to break out of, something I've found with Google and specific social media.

In my experience, this is one possible path for getting "into" Emacs:

1. Having a need for something where Emacs is one of the best. E.g. outline folding, git gui, etc.

2. learning the basic shortcuts and concepts; doing the basic config to remove any problems

3. deep customization and creation.

If you don't have the need (#1), I wouldn't worry about it. If you do and you try it out, I agree #2 can be a little discouraging, but not too much. You can also usually make it easier by learning only the concepts and then using the gui menus to navigate. You can skip #3, or at least delay it. At this point, it's still just a tool like most others, and that's fine. I think #3 is what you're thinking of. That's what tends to get written and blogged about.

Is all about muscular memory, so you need to repeat and repeat, and take your time to develop it. Is normal not to grasp it after a few hours using the program. Nobody expects taking one karate class and exit being a master of katas.

First emacs kata should include this very simple concepts

1.Opening a file (the easy way) -> extra simple. Type "emacs /path/to/my-file" in a terminal. If a file with this name does not exist in the directory, a file image in memory will be created for it.

2.Do something with the file. Edit the file, see the image, read the pdf that you opened or take a look to the pdf code. Just use the keyboard and type something.

3.Close your file. Type Control and X at the same time. Then type C (for close): "ctrl-x c"

> "Your buffer (image in memory of the file) has been modified. Do you want to save the changes?"

Not: type N.

Yes: type Y.

Take in mind that if you open an extant file and type N, the old file will not be modified (you have still a file with this name).

But if you open a new file and type N, the image in memory will be discarded without a trace. Don't look for an empty file with that name in your directory. Will materialize only after you save it once. You can save an empty file.

Congratulations you are using emacs now. Here is your white belt.

Any time invested on using the program will payback later generously

This is exactly how I learned Vim. Afterwards I bundled it all together into a book (shameless self promotion I know)

The book is a weekly practice schedule that takes ten minutes a day to build up muscle memory for variety of techniques on premade files. It starts with the absolute basics, but builds all the way to advanced regular expressions with lookahead and lookbehind. By the end it covers the management and editing of marks, registers and macros.

It's amazing what a difference it makes to have muscle memory with macros and registers. Of course one can devise their own katas from the docs, but I just did the legwork of manufacturing scenarios to practice them.

https://leanpub.com/deliberatevim

Yes, except the keystroke to "close a file" is C-x k (for kill buffer).

Like you said, muscle memory. It's not surprising that you didn't remember the exact name of the keystroke because normally, you just do it.

This is also related to one of those sharp edges of Emacs that can cut you. "C-x c" is pretty close to "C-x C-c", which is the shortcut to exit Emacs. If for some reason, you DID mean to type "C-x c", it's easy to let your Ctrl finger linger a little too long and hit "C-x C-c" instead. And since x and c are next to each other on a US keyboard, it's also very easy (for me) to hit x and c at the same time with a single finger motion. The odds go up since so many actions start with "C-x"

(setq confirm-kill-emacs 'y-or-n-p) is one of the most important configs to start with, IMO. Or if you don't want to learn/use elisp, the equivalent Customize setting:

Options > Customize Emacs > Top-Level Customization Groups > Convenience > Confirm Kill Emacs

Generally, if I have unsaved work Emacs prompts me to save, so I can C-g out then if I fat-finger kill-emacs.

I think that killing the entire app is jarring enough that it should never happen accidentally, regardless of unsaved work. It would be especially harmful for newer users, since they will find it harder to relax and feel comfortable with Emacs. But even for experienced users, Emacs state that you would want to preserve goes far beyond unsaved edits. Expensive startup computation, open buffers, window arrangement, ongoing rgrep operations, etc.

Ctl-x k when you have more than one file opened. Ctl-x C is faster and more easy in this particular case.

Hum, I see. I stand corrected. It seems that all this time I was typing Ctl-x Ctl-C instead. I never use copy in emacs

I learned the basics for org mode. I invested a bit of time to learn one small corner of the default emacs ecosystem, and every second was worth it. Since then, I've continued to explore its use as a text editor (and it keeps getting better and better). There's a bit of a learning curve for just the basics, and it's understandable that you don't want to deal with that. Just the basics can go a long way with org mode, though.

With org mode, everything is plain text. This should go a long way to easing your worries about getting stuck in a groove. Lots of folks take notes in markdown. It's the same kind of thing.

> But at the same time, it is a whole new system to learn and get into, very specific to itself

If you already know Vim keybindings, it is very easy to get into Emacs with evil-mode.[1]

Besides that, Emacs by default comes with a menu system that helps you discover keybindings, too. And there is also cua-mode which I haven’t tried.[2]

[1] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

[2] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode

I use cua-mode with a few key bindings and mouse modifications of my own to make it work the way I want. Its pretty easy jumping between windows apps and emacs for me

Hey,

> I don't like the idea of digging myself into a groove, even if it should be a comfy one. Powerful ecosystems can be hard to break out of, something I've found with Google and specific social media.

I had the exactly same thought holding me back, then I realized that Emacs doesn't really suffer from vendor lock-in/the walled garden effect: it's way older than most gardens, and bound to be around for as long as we use keyboards to interact with computers.

Come over to the Emacs side, frodetb, we have lambdas.

You do not have to doeverything in emacs. At the end of the day it is a tool and it should make your life easier. Do in it only the bits that actually help you, if any. With time you might do more and more stuff. Or not, that's fine.

For example I have been using emacs for more than 20 years and only recently I got into the habit of actually running shells from inside it (it is very convenient, but just opening another terminal is an habit that is very hard to shake).

Indeed, no one is telling you you have to or should do everything in Emacs.

But much like Linux itself was in the Windows 9x era, it is a gravity well for your attention, and you will want to do more and more with it if you can.

>but I tend to be scared away instead.

I think a lot of the myth-making around the power and the cleverness of long time emacs wizards paradoxically achieves exactly what happened to you, it makes Emacs seem more intimidating than it is. Also true for a lot of programming languages with that reputation.

Is emacs old, has weird keybindings and weird UI paradigms? Yes, but it's also just a piece of software and there's nothing in the way of learning it. It calls itself the self-documenting text editor for a reason, it has plenty of learning tools deliberately built in. Despite its reputation, from language support to help there's very few pieces of software that have put that much emphasis on being accessible.

You can still use other software, don't need to go all-in, etc, but I'd always recommend everyone to give it at least a shot.

Still, with emacs, it's open source and runs almost anywhere. If you happen to LIKE that grove, you can be confident that you can bring it along wherever you go.

I think the idea that learning emacs will suck all your brain power is a bit false. You can really just use it on the side from time to time and get a feel about it without investing much. It is a large (40+ years show) system, that even old users don't know fully ..

And in a way that's how I use vi, I'm emacs mostly but I play with vi regularly, I stay at the no-plugin level enjoy keyboard golfing :)

Emacs is great all-around, but I would use it if it literally only had org-mode as a feature. That thing has saved my bacon.

I have accomplished things in my life that literally would not have happened without it. Before org mode I had never been able to find a task management workflow that kept me particularly productive. Just the basic outline features of org mode (with the list functionality to spice things up) has allowed me to comfortably know I'm on top of the important tasks in my life. I'm learning more about TODOs, priorities, the agenda, etc., and it keeps getting better and better.

I’ve always been a vi/vim guy, it’s not a religious thing, it’s just a decently powerful editor available on most servers I managed to kind of get my head around enough to be productive. I find the weird holy war between the two strange and kind of a turn off.

I don’t think anyone actually thinks it’s anything other than a joke. Hell, many Emacs users use a very complete Vim emulation package called Evil. In fact, the two most popular “pre-configured setups” are designed around Vim keys.

After decades of using VIM, then NeoVim, I now use Emacs with Evil. The old joke that Emacs is a terrific OS but missing a decent text editor is truer today more than ever.

I get the feeling a lot of vi/vim users are folks who do sysadmin (whatever fun title that has this year) and vi/vim are installed on the box by default. You don't need a very deep knowledge of vi/vim to be productive. Its basically single page cheat-sheet to be productive enough for a lot of jobs, and it works ok over a low bandwidth connection.

I discovered GNU Emacs while at secondary school. Started out running it under OS/2 (using EMX), later switched to Linux. I spent countless hours studying in awe it’s gazillion features (and that was 25+ years ago now, the features have only multipled since.) It seemed more like a work of art than a kitchen sink. But I didn’t really use it in anger for much, because I didn’t have much to actually use it for.

Never got into vi, it seemed weak and unfriendly - until I got my first real job. I was primarily a developer, but did a bit of sysadmin on the side, and hung out with the sysadmins a lot. And all the Solaris boxes had vi, and trying to get emacs installed was too much work. And I became quite good friends with one of the sysadmins in particular, who was a big vim fan.

20 years later, I use MacVIM every day. And on the rare occasion I start emacs, I’m struggling to remember how to do anything.

I tend to think Vim is the best editor, and Emacs is the best OS. So I use Vim inside Emacs with Evil mode.

I think most people do. Spacemacs and Doom Emacs agree.

The war is indeed strange since emacs is not so much an editor as it is a customizable shell. It's better to compare emacs to bash or zsh.

Sigh, I am an alte kaker in the Temple of Emacs and what that has meant is early on I learned how to make a keyboard macro, and because of that I've never really memorized how to awk or sed. This has been a problem: I have to keep seeking out the info on awk and sed syntax.

I found it amusing his example of badly formatted code

  one = 1
  fortyTwo = 42
  elite = 1337

is exactly how most modern linters want to format my code.

In IDEs that support refactor-renaming (Emacs probably does?), the column-aligned formatting also has the drawback that it breaks (unless the refactoring also auto-realigns all affected code).

For example,

  one      = 1
  fortyTwo = 42
  elite    = 1337

might become:

  one      = 1
  ultimateAnswer = 42
  leet    = 1337

This made me stop column-aligning in most cases. An exception is array initializers for two-dimensional tables with many columns, where the benefit is important enough.

It also makes git blame a lot less useful in these scenarios.

You can pass git blame -w to ignore whitespace changes, though yes, in general it is annoying.

I wouldn't have made this comment if I knew that. Though I suppose this is still an annoyance for git web interfaces. Thanks for the info!

On GitHub you can add ?w=1 to diff URLs to get the same thing (there's a button for it too?)

I can't find the button. I guess it's a hidden feature

meow mode in linked article seems really well thought and effective, probably have to give it a try :)

Really glad to see more people switching to meow[0]. It felt extremely right after using and being frustrated by both standard emacs and evil.

I wrote the article [1] linked in the post, so that was really fun to see as well!

Tldr: simplicity, extensibility, kakoune grammar, less modifier usage, dvorak/keyboard compatibility, great multiedit system that obsoletes macros in daily usage

(Disclaimer, i work on meow)

[0] https://github.com/meow-edit/meow

[1] https://esrh.me/posts/2021-12-18-switching-to-meow.html

used to use emacs (with spacemacs then doom) a while back. turned out i don't really care what kind of editor i use as long as it has modal editing mode and doesn't get in my way of editing text. for terminal, i enjoy neither eshell nor any other integrated term. perhaps i just am not that motivated to have a one-editor-to-rule-them-all kind of software.

> as long as it has modal editing

That's what Henry Ford could say.

Just wondering is there a way to record macros (similar to vim) and replay them really quickly. I often use this to do batch processing for files, and evil is really slow due to slow rendering after each macro operation.

Yes you can do that in Emacs of course. Default key bindings are "C-x (" to start recording, "C-x )" to stop, and "C-x e" to play the macro — and then you can just press "e" to repeat it again and again.

This is one of the feature that I miss the most when I'm using another editor. So much that I spent some time this summer implementing keyboard macros in Kate, which is also a very nice text editor :). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585221

> and then you can just press "e" to repeat it again and again.

You can also pass C-x e a 0-prefix argument (M-0 C-x e) and it will repeat the macro until the bell rings, which usually happens when a movement command like forward-line, forward-sexp, etc. reaches the end of a buffer.

Another strategy is to record a macro that only operates on a single line, then mark the region you want to repeat it in for every line and then execute it on all these lines using C-x C-k r.

Since parent is using evil, they can just use q as in Vim (evil-record-macro) in place of kmacro. But the "rendering issues" would presumably apply either way.

Alternative default bindings are "F3" to start recording and "F4" to stop recording or replay a macro.

There's a painfully simple answer to this. Use evil-mode, and then just make your macro exactly as you would in vim. You can have the best of both worlds and it mystifies me when not everyone does this. (No accounting for taste etc.)

Imagine everyone around you argued about it was better to wear socks or to wear shoes, and you just have to wonder why they don't try doing both at once?

Now I wonder if there are people who use Emacs controls in vim and wear their socks outside their shoes.

But are you wearing shoes and socks or shoes + socks? [1]

1. https://media.gq.com/photos/55828bdde52bc4b477a97e03/master/...

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ke... ?

What scares me is trying to set up Emacs on Windows. I use Mac at home, iDevices everywhere, and Windows at work. I've heard too many stories about poor performance on Windows, as well as perceived difficulties (at least on my part) getting emacs and emacserver and all that set up on Windows. I want to like it; I just don't have the time or energy.

His alignment formatting example is harder for me to read than what he started with. I have an eye tracking issue so I'm not always the best person to judge this. Is it harder for everyone else?

Just to confirm that there are people who agree with the author: this tidbit actually kept me reading the article! It was the new eMacs thing I learned today. I thought it was much easier to read after aligning. As long as things stay within a reasonable width, that brand of consistency (read “columns”) makes it easier for me to read.

I like seeing assignments like this being aligned too but it's not great if you care about minimizing the number of lines that code reviewers will read when you make a change that introduces a new variable whose length is longer than any existing ones (or removing the longest one).

I also dislike that style, I appreciate it looks nicer, but I definitely find it harder to process/read. That example isn't that bad, because all the variable names are pretty close to the same length.

But once you start mixing reallyLongVariableNamesLikeThisOne and shortOnes, the distance between the short variable name and the value is long enough that there's a chance I'll look at the wrong value or something.

I'm glad that automated formatters/linters pretty much all remove/complain about that stuff now days.

I was a bit surprised that the numbers didn’t get right-aligned:

  one      =    1
  fortyTwo =   42
  elite    = 1337

To answer your question, I tend to agree that it gets harder to read the wider the horizontal spacing is, unless the relation between the values in the same column is very important.

I, for one, like a "table-most" arrangement of text in the source code.

This layout falls apart when there is an error and the readout is a disaster, but it just goes to show: there is no perfect answer.

So I sigh and run the formatter on the code.

Why does the author want to get rid of the modeline? This would be a major mistake.

I've been a Spacemacs devotee for years.

yeah but no... vim 4 layf

I never got into the eMacs cult.

Been always a vim/vi guy.

To me, using eMacs is like people in the cult of lisp: “Why isn’t lisp running the world?” (While the code in Java 8 every day)

I get it, a few friends of mine actually use eMacs and we remain friends.

But bruh, I’m a CLI guy and I like Vim. It’s literally everywhere.

Even on my all powerful Mac M1 laptop I still use Vim. No not Mac vim, not Visual Code, not NeoVim or some other bastardized version of Vim.

Just Vim. Or vi.

And my .vimrc is on all the computers and servers I use. No plugins.

To each his own. Right?

This is like a Scientologist criticizing Jehovahs Witness :)

Okay, since this is HN and not Reddit let me make this post a bit more useful: has anyone tried "mg"? It is an openbsd (?) project that is similar to Emacs on a first glance but even lighter than barebone vim. It is what I use for remote editing instead of vi and nano.

https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/mg.1

How does mg compare with MicroEMACS (famously used by Linus Torvalds [1])?

[1] https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds...

mg(1) user here, fwiw. I install it on VMs/containers. I find it quite nice, though I also use GNU Emacs, vi (often elvis), and Vim.

Nano drives me up the wall.

Is it a very different experience from `emacs -nw -Q`?

Why are you comparing a text editor with a computer?

> eMacs

"emacs"

iOS auto-corrects Emacs to eMacs, probably because of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMac

(Fond memories of that computer!)

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