Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

The basics of Emacs are not that hard. One of my introductory freshman courses taught us XEmacs in parallel, as we went through Lex & Yacc.

Basically you need to learn a few basic movements, which are also really useful on any terminal thanks to GNU Readline, and a some basic concepts like the minibuffer, interactive commands, etc. From there onward, things are quite easy to discover little by little, especially with newer packages like vertico, marginalia or which-key.

Obviously, its much harder than VSCode, but investing on Emacs is IMHO worth the effort if one values stability. It will be probably still relevant when most competing solutions are gone. Plus, it offers great support for lots of niche languages and workflows, like Org.

View on HN

> Basically you need to learn a few basic movements, which are also really useful on any terminal thanks to GNU Readline

This is one of the biggest reasons why I’m slowly switching to Emacs for most of my editing needs. Those movement keyboard shortcuts are ubiquitous on UNIX family operating systems. They even work in most native text editing fields in macOS and iOS.

I agree, having a subset of Emacs/Readline keybindings available everywhere on macOS is really convenient and made Emacs quite natural to use for me.

GNOME used to have an Emacs GTK key theme, but it is no longer available as of GTK 4.0?

> They even work in most native text editing fields in macOS and iOS.

Some of them work, e.g. C-a/C-e, which is nice. However, after hearing about that "Readline keybindings work everywhere in MacOS", I was quite disappointed when I finally bought a Mac and the more useful Emacs/Readline bindings like M-f/M-b/M-d were all missing. I'm still happy with my Mac overall, but I wish they went further in this regard.

I think that’s because the Meta key is the Option key on Macs which conflicts with some traditional keyboard shortcuts for other things in the OS.

There are conflicting systems in macOS at play here as a result of choosing the "Option" key as your "Meta" key. The basics of the Cocoa Emacs Keybindings (DefaultKeyBinding.dict) do allow for M-f/M-b/M-d to work as us Emacs users expect, however there is a conflict with the default US Keyboard Layout, which hijack these useful Option key sequences to allow for the easy input of letters with various diacritic markings. If you want to undo this, you can use a Keyboard Layout Editor like Ukelele[0] to make a custom layout that allows these key sequences to arrive unmolested at the Cocoa input system.

[0]: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

Lol. Geez, we gotta do something about key sequences getting 'molested'...

For M-b and M-f, the equivalents are M-<left> and M-<right>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com