5 Minutes of Emacs | Hacker News Reader

5 Minutes of Emacs

nubyonrails.com

15 pointsdefunkt8 comments

as someone already commented get aquamacs! I started out programming using emacs because all the cool kids on slashdot did as time moved on I starting using vi/vim as "its everywhere" but I have started used aquamacs at home and I love it! It's like meeting up with an old friend after a few years apart and everything just clicking again (it probably helps I've learned lisp in the interim)

re: crashing on change of color themes. he's probably using the new-ish cocoa-fied emacs in the 24 branch. It's still a bit buggy. Use the carbon build from 23 or just look for a diff if you really want to use 24.

What's wrong with Aquamacs? I've used both, but Aquamacs has been more stable, is easier to install, and seems to be updated more oftne.

I like using GNU Emacs for portability. There are rock-solid nightly .dmgs on the Aquamacs development page.

Actually, Cocoa Emacs is in the 23 (development) branch and Carbon is in 22. Cocoa Emacs definitely has some rough edges. Personally, I use Carbon/GNU Emacs from:

http://aquamacs.org/nightlies.shtml

I'm more interested in why people insist on GUI Emacs.

Way back when I decided to first try out Linux (and then ended up using it for most of this millennium before taking a job which provided me with a Mac laptop), it took me a bit to get accustomed to doing most things from a terminal window (and I was fortunate in that the all-singing, all-dancing GUI automation stuff of modern Linux distros didn't exist yet), but once I was comfortable with it I couldn't imagine going back to anything else.

But then I also laughed when I saw the fad for "full-screen" text editing on the Mac a while back; when I want to hack or write I don't have to tune out, say, IRC or email because Emacs is running in one window of my screen session and IRC and email are running in others where I don't see them unless I'm actually using them :)

I like GUI Emacs because keys like C-/ work, even if they have no ASCII code, and I don't have to wonder if I'm going to get random backslashes if I try to copy and paste into another window. There really isn't that much difference between switching between Emacs and, say, IRC, by using Alt-Tab or ^A ^A.

ruby gets more and more hard core every day... this is awesome.

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