How to Learn Emacs (2012) | Hacker News Reader

How to Learn Emacs (2012)

david.rothlis.net

80 pointsadm_46 comments

This tutorial is painfully out of date, and I would argue a very bad way to learn emacs today. As an example, don't learn to use ETags unless you are going to specifically be working with a C project where other developers use them. You would be better served these days learning LSP and treesitter, which is now built-in. I would also strongly suggest using Doom Emacs, and working your way backward to a minimalist configuration once you are comfortable. There are so many useful packages excluded from default emacs that any beginner learning emacs would walk away with the impression that emacs is old outdated software, and not useful for real work. That couldn't be farther from the truth, but if you follow tutorials from 2012 you wouldn't necessarily figure it out.

> don't learn to use ETags

> You would be better served these days using LSP and treesitter

Could you elaborate? How do I transition from etags to treesitter? Suppose I'm working on a dynamic C or C++ project where I might need to regenerate the tags daily.

With lsp you don't need tags. You essentially have a lsp server like clangd [0] running in the background for finding references, definitions, code completion etc.

With the latest release 29.1, emacs comes with an in-built lsp client - eglot[1]. So you need to (a) Set up clangd or some other lsp server for c++. Make sure it's accessible from emacs (use something like exec-path-from-shell to get your shell paths into emacs) (b) Set up your project for clangd - this involves generating a compile_commands.json which basically lists the full compilation invocation of each and every file in your project. CMake has options to do that and likely many other build tools or maybe use something like bear[2]. (c) Enable eglot (install the package if needed on older versions of emacs) and configure appropriately.

I also use projectile for project mgmt though emacs now has something in built for that too.

I can post my configs if that helps.

[0] https://clangd.llvm.org/ [1] https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot [2] https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear

> How do I transition from etags to treesitter?

… to LSP: You don’t throw your tags away. If you run an LSP client it will add an “xref-backend” transparently, so Emacs will get all references and definitions from the LSP server. If you turn off LSP mode, Emacs will fall back to the etags backend. I don’t think you need any configuration for this to work.

Treesitter modes do not implement an “xref-backend” AFAIK.

They could and should, though.

LSP refers to the Language Server Protocol, a standardized protocol designed to provide real time source code information for a given code base; tree-sitter is parser design to create a real time syntax tree for a given source file. No doubt the OP is suggesting the use of an Emacs plug-in based on those newer technologies.

I meant to say "learning", not "using", that's my mistake.

> Suppose I'm working on a dynamic C or C++ project

Most beginners are not, that's my point. Those technologies are fine if you need them, but the vast majority of beginners are working in dynamic languages like JavaScript and Python. Any modern tutorial using Emacs for code should be about programming in those languages (and elisp).

Honestly the best way to learn to use Emacs today is probably not using it for code at all, but org-mode and plaintext editing. That way you can learn the editor and not get bogged down in creating/configuring IDE features.

I've been using emacs for years, and I use org to write latex documents because writing actual latex is awful, but I don't really see what drives such org mode fanaticism.

You're at a bbq and someone invites you to a ski trip in 5 months, you need to check your schedule so you whip out your laptop to check the org calendar?

I just don't get how people can function putting "everything" into org.

I don't use org-agenda or calendar or anything. I also find them inconvenient. I just use org-mode for writing and organizing documents. Lecture notes, programming exercises, book notes, README's, daily TODO lists, journaling, and writing a blog (exporting to Hugo), and of course writing my emacs config in a literate style with org-babel-tangle. It's a super versatile format with great ergonomic commands and a large community.

You can nicely suggest that you will check your calendar and not answer on the spot.

If you didn't have the flexibility to move your work anyway you probably should not go.

To be honest, as a sometime Emacs user, I'm not sure it's that compelling to learn emacs at all these days if you don't already know it.

Its great that Emacs is still with us and long may it last. Its incredibly powerful and flexible, but it also really hard trying to sell it to a new user. Most of them will just download and use VS Code. Is is still possible to popularise its use? Most people just want to get up and running straight away, something which Code lets them do, they dont have the time or patience to learn how to use Emacs. It comes from that RTFM era where you were expected to learn to use something however steep the learning curve, and people will just give software like that a miss.

I dont want to see it die out an I really hope someone does come up with a tutorial that can draw novices in or at least can show them the real power of Emacs and get them excited enough to want to learn to use it.

Spacemacs tries to be pretty close to that. Unless you want a lot of custom integrations, spacemacs gives me everything I want out of the box.

https://spacemacs.org

My learning path was 1) use vim/nvim for a couple years 2) use Doom Emacs. I was shocked at how intuitive Doom is for me. Of course not everyone would agree but it’s worth checking out

Looking back, the main value of super-customized Emacs distros (really) was to show me what's possible. Spacemacs blew me away, yet overwhelmed me when I tried to customize it; so I started with vanilla Emacs and then added things, package by package; magit is every bit as good as I'd heard, and Treemacs makes exploring a big source tree pleasant.

More recently I've been reading the Org manual (1), which like Spacemacs opened my eyes to Org mode's capabilities: literate programming and code blocks that modify the source document captured my interest, along with table and spreadsheet capabilities.

I still use nvim all the time in the terminal; vi knowledge is essential, as it's the best editor you can be sure to have on a UNIX-like system. Case in point: Today I used vi in kterm on my jailbroken Kindle Touch to edit usbnet's SSHD config (2) and I can't imagine a more efficient editor (3) for an eInk device.

P.S. My favorite thing about Emacs is the help system. Being able to look up a function or what a key does with a few keypresses is fantastic!

1: https://orgmode.org/org.pdf

2: Now I can use `scp` or SFTP from my laptop and or iPhone to add books to my Kindle while it's connected to my iPhone hotspot

3: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/k5-kterm-and-vi.jpeg

I used 'joe' for years. I swapped C-x with C-k and I've been thrilled with Emacs ever since.

Legitimately asking, not trying to start a holy war - what did you find lacking in vim that you found in emacs? I've been using vim for barely a year, and have yet to find anything I can't do in it that I want to do.

Org mode was the biggest draw. Magit is amazing, lisp is much better than vimscript, and everything is easy to inspect and modify.

At the time I much preferred vim’s approach of being an excellent IDE. I didn’t like Emacs’ approach of being… everything. However, being able to browse the web, check email, read ebooks, use the terminal, interact with JIRA or GitHub or Notion etc etc, all within my IDE really does have its appeal.

But I’ll always love vim and nvim, I think every software developer should learn it

If you're legitimately trying to understand, try to flip the question.

What is better about vim? Evil mode in emacs has the same keybinds you're used to. Extensibility and customization is 100x better since everything is lua, instead of trying to twist viml to do what it wasn't meant to do. Unless you just want to use base vi on every machine you ssh into, it's hard to find ways vim is better.

Tbf when I said vim, in my head I meant neovim, which supports Lua. I'm aware they're quite different, and that's on me for not being specific.

My main reasoning is precisely the opposite reason as your sibling comment mentions - I have no interest in my editor supporting barely tangential things like web browsing, email, etc. The ability to spawn a terminal is nice (and mine can do so), but my terminal (Kitty) can also easily split itself and switch context between nvim/terminal so it's not critical.

You can ignore the capabilities that you don't need. But overall as a vim lover, I find the emacs program and configuration to be far superior to [neo]vi[m]

A coworker turned me on to emacs a long time ago but it wasn't until I found Spacemacs that I really started to use it heavily. Now I basically live in emacs and I love it!

I learned emacs the same way.

The install section is out of date, at least for macos homebrew. The emacs-plus package on homebrew (https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus) is the best for macos.

I use MacPorts, but I recall hearing the alternative Homebrew Emacs packages apply lots of patches onto the Emacs codebase itself and may cause stability issues. Users should be aware of this before deciding to use emacs-plus over the regular emacs package on Homebrew.

So rather than the install section being "out of date", I would say it is more conservative and may reduce the probability of users' first Emacs experience being buggy.

Long time Emacs plus user here. It’s been solid. Great maintainer.

Lately been using it with native comp. Also solid.

Written about it a few times:

https://xenodium.com/emacs-plus-with-native-comp

https://xenodium.com/my-emacs-eye-candy

https://xenodium.com/no-emacs-frame-refocus-on-macos

It has been my daily driver for a few years. I don't notice any instability. It appears to only apply 4 patches, includes lots of extra app icons, and the remainder is just setting sane default compile options.

Also it appears --cocoa is no longer a valid option even on the default HB emacs, so it is out of date anyway.

https://github.com/d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus/blob/maste...

How does that dist compare to https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport ?

From upgrading today from 28.2 to 29.1 on my Intel 2019 Macbook Pro on Ventura, the macport one you linked felt snappier and far less stuttery than emacs-plus installed with the --with-native-comp flag enabled.

The Yamamoto ("railwaycat") fork is far superior.

That fork doesn’t support running as daemon, does it?

It works for me on my M2 machine

I disagree! It's railwaycats emacs because of the SVG support, unless I'm out of date.

Does anybody know what would it be the best way to install emacs on Mac for NIX users?

I picked up Emacs this summer (together with neovim). The motivation was simple, I was an early adopter of VSCode and SSH remote, but I noticed that sometimes, the session history (bash history, etc.) was not restored after network issue. I don't get along well with tmux thus I need a solution.

I found Emacsclient is a perfect match to my situation and I simply started from empty init.el. It was annoying in the first a few days to set up LSP, counsel, org-mode. But after about 3 days, everything became very natural and I have been using Emacs ever since. I made a lot of elisp in my init.el to set layout, do automatic actions, etc.

I am not a long time user yet so I can speak for the "learn" part: just use it and you will pick the skill up.

What is the coolest thing you can do with emacs?

I tried emacs a few years ago, but I didn't stick with emacs for more than a couple weeks, if even. I had already been using vim for many years before that without pain, so I could not find a compelling reason to switch.

Customisability is the biggest selling point of emacs. I tried it many years ago as a user of Visual Studio. This way way before LSPs became a thing. I decided I much prefered Visual Studio at that time.

Then I transitioned to doing a lot less in C/C++ and more in Python, Java and shell scripting. I used Pycharm and Idea for a while as I got the licenses at work, eventually I tried Vscode with all the plugins, LSPs etc. I tried emacs again at the time. I liked the much better customisability, but I hated the fact Emacs was no faster than vscode on large codebases with lsp.

Eventually neovim with treesitter showed up and I embraced it as a nice quick editor. Then I heard emacs 29 has treesitter too so I decided to give it a try. Why? I was relatively happy with neovim, but certain things bugged me. I wanted ability to have different fonts and font sizes and other things.

So I started looking into emacs again. I wanted to learn the "emacs way" as opposed to the evil mode so I stayed away from distros like doom emacs. I set up treesitter (including for extra languages like hcl) an extra color theme and I'm happy enough to pursue it further this time.

I am programming SQL exploratorily in org mode. It renders server responses using org mode’s built-in spreadsheet engine. At the end of the day I mark the better queries for „tangling“ to create the schema changeset for me. In find that quite convenient.

Last time I was really impressed I had two remote dired buffers open (using tramp mode: „C-x f“: ssh:user@server.com:/foo/bar), one on server A and one on server B. Then I selected some files to copy (using „m“) and then hit „C“. Emacs then recommended the server B location automatically, I hit enter and it copied the files from A to B. Nice. You need „ dired-dwim-target“ (Do What I Mean target) set to true for this to work. But I use this trick regularly two run test queries on production machines.

What I also love is the built-in „compilation mode“. I‘ve bound „C-c l“ to „compile“ and „C-c r“ to „recompile“. We have different tests in different directories so I‘ve sprinkled a couple of “.dir-locals.el” in all the relevant places populating all the right default “compilation commands” for me. So when I want to run or create a new test I hit “C-c l” once, select the right default and then recompile after every iteration using “C-c r”. This boosts my turn over so much as any errors are also captured in separate buffer. The tests may even run remotely transparently by leveraging “ssh”.

So you don’t even need a complex configuration for easing many of your daily routines.

In the menubar I can click on Help->Describe->Describe Key or Mouse Operation... and then click on Tools->Compile Project to get information about what Tools->Compile Project does. It's easy to learn about the various tools available to me in a way that I find severely lacking elsewhere. Is it the coolest thing you can do in Emacs? Probably not, but it's something I really appreciate.

How to learn Emacs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3821531 - April 2012 (7 comments)

I wish I had read this article in 2012. Unfortunately, I was introduced to Emacs in 2016 and only started using it in 2021. I lost 9 years! It is my favorite piece of software :)

This article has an interesting perspective. But, beyond Emacs built-in documentation, my favorite content to learn Emacs is the book Mastering Emacs and the System Crafters' YouTube Channel.

>System Crafters' YouTube Channel.

Oh my. I really genuinely tried to watch it... But it's impossible for me to not fall asleep after 20min. The guy on the channel really should invest in some person that could cut 10 min of content out of each of his 2h live shows and make a short snappy video. Like what the primagen is doing. I think he would get 10x the audience.

The actual content he has is very interesting, but the barrier is the length of it.

In vi (which apparently is vim by default I was told?) I know open, save, quit, go to line, go to begin/end of line, find, insert, delete line.

We used emacs in college and that was the last time I used any text editor serverside besides vi. Am I missing out?

If you only care about the features you listed - no, you're not missing out on anything.

Emacs is a great extensible platform for writing textual applications that happens to come with a mediocre text editor. If you like automating things or enjoy having development environments that fit you like a glove, you'll want to learn Emacs - it'll pay off in a few years. (this describes me)

But not everyone fits that description, and that's totally fine. I know many software engineers who have been working for decades in vanilla vim, and they're still incredibly productive. VSCode, too, comes with sane out of the box defaults and a large extension ecosystem.

There's probably an analogy to be made here between flexible languages (Lisp, Haskell, C++ kind-of) and inflexible languages (Python, Java) - some people really want to develop DSLs to perfectly express their problem, but others are ok with a slightly awkward mismatch due to a rigid language, and are still incredibly productive and happy.

(however, aside from practical use, I find the design of Emacs to be quite beautiful and inspiring, and encourage you to take a look at it anyway when you have some time)

I think Emacs is appealing to those who want to quickly write customizations to their text editor.

When working on certain projects, I'll sometimes write a code snippet of elisp to handle some task I find myself doing a lot (things like "fold all fragments of this bespoke file format which includes some string"). The fact that Emacs Lisp is a "real programming language" is nice, and the way that it's very easy to inspect what a certain key command does means that you can very quickly set something up.

This lower barrier to entry is nice for people who really want to make things very close to right. Things like "set up a custom error checker based on this validator command and add highlighting to the text based on it" is as simple as setting up something in flycheck and setting up some regular expressions.

So I think it's interesting for people who like IDEs but want it to be easier to mold and understand, more than people who have a simple text editor but want "more".

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