Emacs in fifty keystrokes

enzuru.medium.com

31 pointsducktective5 comments

One should learn Emacs because the bash readline editor uses Emacs key bindings by default. You will be more efficient on every computer you ever ssh into if you know ctrl-a, ctrl-k, ctrl-y etc etc.

If you are uninterested in doing the work necessary to get the other benefits that Emacs can give you, you can stop at the tutorial and use VS Code for programming.

I use Emacs as my main editor, but its keybindings are not something I would suggest learning it for. Most shells and Readline programs also support Vi mode, and I would argue that its modal keybindings are much more intuitive and powerful than a random combination of keys. In fact, I would probably not use Emacs at all if evil-mode didn't exist.

I don't feel this is a very good argument to use Emacs. On any bash prompt you ever encounter you can simply `set -o vi` and be on your way.

I use "set -o vi" in my bash prompt and use Emacs in evil mode for the best of all worlds

This is great stuff, good article that covers useful information.

The temptation now is to compare their config with my own, but I'm trying to avoid Emacs Yak Shaving lately. It's all too easy to get sucked in!

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