Emacs, how it all started for me | Hacker News Reader

Emacs, how it all started for me

xvw.lol

157 pointsnukifw78 comments

A bit of advice to people that have the urge to try Emacs.

Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed.

Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Always a distro. It never worked out. Now over the last year I was trying Emacs with a vanilla setup and configured everything from scratch. With the AIs this is super simple because they can help you get out of config trouble.

The experience was way better than before. After my one year experience I have switched back to neovim but I still have become a fan of Emacs and I have adapted my nvim config. Stuff like dired, magit, compile-mode I have found equivalent nvim plugins and use them now.

Seconded. If you want to learn doing things the Emacs way, I recommend the Mastering Emacs book by Mickey Petersen who roams among these threads. It is excellent.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

This provides an excellent base and exploration of the builtin packages, then you can customize your experience on top and make it your own.

I bought a copy of Mickey's book, and it's great, but "read about the inner workings of an editor before you use it" is horrible UX.

Better to just start using it, and ask your friendly local LLM when you need help. Back in the early 2000s, I think I used emacs for 3 or 4 years knowing only how to open/save/close files, switch buffers, undo, and quit.

> but "read about the inner workings of an editor before you use it" is horrible UX.

You can start using it without reading, but the UX does not follow common patterns like found in Notepad or VSCode. It is its own thing and reading the tutorial, Mickey's book, or the official manual is way faster than fumbling around. Even my bluetooth speakers came with a manual.

>the UX does not follow common patterns like found in Notepad or VSCode. It is its own thing

I know. Emacs is my daily driver.

>reading the tutorial, Mickey's book, or the official manual is way faster than fumbling around.

Hard disagree. It may be more efficient in terms of total time spent, but you can learn 5 commands and start using emacs immediately.

Compared to spending multiple hours reading a book or, worse, the manual, I know which one I'd choose.

> Compared to spending multiple hours reading a book or, worse, the manual, I know which one I'd choose.

Why multiple hours? You can always skim it.

Agreed. Work through the Emacs tutorial to find out how vanilla editing works. Then look at buffer management, window management (Emacs 'windows' are actually more like frames in other apps) and simple tooling like search. Then start to tweak some settings in your config, find the bare minimum of packages you need to scratch your worst itches (for me: Vertico, Corfu, Avy and Dumb Jump). Finally, figure out tree-sitter modes, project/projectile mode and a couple of other foundations.

It will be a struggle. It was around 2 months before I felt remotely comfortable in Emacs. And nearly a year before I really felt at home. It's a long road, but gradually you mold the editor to yourself so tightly that you'll never be able to go back. The remarkable thing is that the progression never stops. The tool just keeps getting sharper and sharper.

Yep. I also forgot one important point. If you come from vim, like myself, you should probably use evil-mode right from the start and then just get used to a few important Emacs shortcuts over time and use them additionally to your evil keymaps.

No one will ever convince me that there is something better than vim mode for editing text (or comparable modal editors).

I was a huge skeptic of evil-mode/modal editing for about a decade and a half. Then I bit the bullet when I switched to Spacemacs in ~2017 and I am a full convert. The "change-in-<delimiters>" functionality alone is worth the price of admission/climbing the learning curve; the rest is a huge bonus!

>(Emacs 'windows' are actually more like frames in other apps)

I dont use your "other apps" enough to know exactly what you mean, but it gives me the urge to point out, "Emacs 'frames' are actually more like windows in other apps" :)

There is a middle ground -- https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock or minimal starter kits like it.

Especially if you don't want to use an agent to help you get started. If you're using an agent, starting from vanilla is much more feasible.

There are some good tutorials on youtube to start from zero. E.g. "Emacs from scratch" by System Crafters.

I only started using an AI to help fix issues or understand configuration problems when my config was already >1000 lines.

But yea there are several ways to approach this :)

Yikes, that's over 12 hours of videos in that series. Stuff like that scares me away from trying it out.

I understand that. It's very slow pace. I did it bit by bit over several days. But I was also often skipping ahead.

Good recommendation, you (the reader) may also like https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d

Interesting. I started on spacemacs and never left. My spacemacs is super pimped for the things I want. It feels like if I rolled my own I would end up with something like spacemacs, but not as good.

So I guess you and others here have had the experience of building something that was your own that felt better than the distro?

For me it was mostly that these distros overwhelmed me and I could not get into their code. I had to "start small" if you want. Also I encountered troubles regularly because some things did not feed my needs.

I am not saying they are bad, just not for me.

And I think they make it somehow harder to discover the true power of emacs: bending it to your will & basically forging your own custom environment, not only for editing but so much more (git, mails, pdfs,...).

Emacs guy since '97, strongly agree. If you build your own config, the Ikea effect takes hold and you feel like you've made something that's "yours", even if it's mostly cutting and pasting (or using AI) to cobble things together.

I think bedrock is reasonable, and so is Prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude). I used to have a sprawling init.el, but these days is pretty compact (236 lines), mostly using straight to install packages and then configuration for gptel, agent-shell, and various hydras (https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra) to quickly execute various functions.

I have been using an unstraigtened version of Doom Emacs, and had a lot of issues with the behavior on wake. It turned out the underlying rendering technology was faulty and changing to pgtk fixed it. Sometimes going back to basics forces discovery that is transferrable, like distro-hopping tor DAW switching.

GNU Emacs from gnu.org is usable without an init.el or any other customization.

Every line in init.el is something that you have to maintain and move with you.

And when you're using someone else's computer, their init.el won't be what you expect.

If you find yourself wanting to try out Emacs but are (understandably) turned off by some of its archaic defaults, I encourage you to check out my Emacs Bedrock [1] project. It is not a framework like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs. Instead, it's just a bunch of better defaults, plus some example configuration for some of the most popular packages. It's meant to just be a starting point, and not a framework to keep up-to-date in the long run.

Emacs has come a long way in terms of in-built features. The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained. Just a little bit of simple config (either from Bedrock or, heck, even an LLM) will get you very far.

I'm working on a new version of Bedrock for Emacs 31. If you're using the release candidate (which, because it's Emacs, is more stable than most other operating systems) then check out the `emacs31` branch.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

> The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained.

As a user since '97, I've often felt that this philosophy is entirely, well, backwards. I know how to read the release notes to learn of such changes and how to edit my personal init.el file to revert a setting if I don't like the new default. As long as no one takes away the option, the default doesn't really matter too much to me. But newcomers who might not yet be comfortable with editing their init.el files could really benefit from a more optimal out-of-box experience.

(And besides that, often the newer option is something that I've already moved on to, so making it the new default means I can now remove it from my init.el. I always enjoy when I discover that I can cut something from my init.el because it's now in base Emacs.)

One solution that I really like for that is having the user configuration carry some kind of version number.

Then, to change a default from `old` to `new`, you instead change it to `configVersion >= x ? new : old`, and add some kind of non-fatal warning in the else case instructing users to set their config to `old` explicitly.

You don't break people's setups, they become aware of new defaults without reading release notes, and new users get the new defaults.

I do like that general idea. I bet it would be possible wrap in a handy elisp macro.

Bedrock is the only Emacs "customization" project I've actually tried out since my GNU Emacs journey started in the Nineties. I am very simple in my setup and it was only in 2018 I started trying packages that I never used before to create some modes to manage tasks at work that dealt with commercial testing tools. It forced me to evaluate my init.el in ways I never imagined (which was, to be fair, getting unmanageable from decades of use). It was only this year I jumped onto System Crafters and saw the great work being done there by Guix hackers whose work I follow, and discovered Bedrock in the process. I'm still trying to navigate how it will best serve me but it has definitely changed my perspective from blindly updating a single file for all my many custom .el hacks and thinking more responsibly about how I code and how I manage my work environment. I highly recommend Bedrock to first-time or new-ish Emacs users who feel overwhelmed or who need a little organization in their environment. I particularly like the UI enhancements and have been using Avy for the first time. I'm already writing some code around Avy for a new mode and it seems to be the package I've been looking for. Even if you're a greybeard hacker like me Bedrock will be a great addition to your toolkit.

It all started in the early eighties. Just got into the university and the machine was a PDP-10 (tops20) and the only option as I remember was Emacs. Has been using it since. Not so much after the introduction of IDEs. But will totally lost for general file editing if there was no Emacs in Linux distrubtions. Hard to grasp? Maybe but for me it was the first thing I learnt and most likely will end with.

And Brian Reid's Scribe formatter [0] — so much nicer than roff, troff, etc. (descendants of Runoff). In 1981-82 I wrote a user manual and taught my fellow law-review editors — none of whom were computer people — how to use both Emacs and Scribe (PDP-11 / TOPS20). It was a real boon, freeing up our paid secretary from having to repeatedly retype manuscripts after we'd edited them, and cutting down on printer errors that had to be hand-corrected on galley proofs.

[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf (Brian Reid's CMU Ph.D dissertation a.k.a. a manual for Scribe).

I love the way this starts with using emacs badly since 2008. I start my own shorter emacs story similarly: “I’ve been using emacs for 10 years, so I’m only a beginner“.

emacs'so large, beside core devs, we're all beginners

As someone who’s only used Emacs for around 5 years, Emacs is awesome even if you haven’t been using it since 1987. I used to get intimidated by the fact that every single Emacs user has been using it for decades. System Crafters was fantastic for getting a handle on things. It’s one of the coolest programs ever.

That said, I’m usually in vim. Emacs is a neverending rabbit hole of a hobby that begs to be tinkered with forever. I find it easier to just do useful stuff in vim and I’m always trying to add a new efficient keybinding or function to my Emacs config.

LOL. 1987 is just about when I stopped using emacs. Suddenly, I feel really old...

I really, really wish we can focus on schemacs so we have a scheme based emacs. 1. Scheme is much much nicer and more powerful than elisp 2. More speed and multi threading 3. (i think) better extensibility

https://codeberg.org/ramin_hal9001/schemacs

I moved to nvim from vim and it's seems me to easy and handy for everyday use. While emacs like rocket since :D

Emacs is most definitely not a rocket science. The problem with people trying Emacs is that they approach it just like any other text editor, instead of understanding the grand, core principle of it - Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around. Therefore it makes much better sense if you approach it from a Lisp perspective. Alas, many, perhaps most, beginners try it after hearing how "powerful this Emacs thingy is", and try to learn "editor features", instead of focusing on the Lisp side of things. Some even admit that they don't like Lisp and don't understand it and plan to never deal with it. Most posts of "abandonment" and "I switch to VSCode after decades of Emacs use", after closer examination, reveal that the person perhaps never even written any elisp code - at most, they'd just [almost] blindly copy&paste existing snippets into their configs.

No one, including yourself, approached emacs from a Lisp perspective.

I did.

After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to write my thesis in electrical engineering.

The tool was parsing my matlab files and generated latex, which i then made into the final pdf, complete with formulaes and calculations.

So instead of writing a decent thesis, i learned about makefiles, latex, emacs lisp and the fact that parsers are very interesting.

Also, Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp.

Surely, i did not work a single day as an electric engineer.

PS I keep looking for this book to this very day

GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. In other words, it does a neophyte no good to see the matrix without having lived in it first. It's all one can manage learning emacs's editing primitives if you've never seen it before. Reminding them some (but not all!) of these primitives are in fact elisp expressions is just annoying.

I have not forgotten my own "beginner's journey" - au contraire - I vividly remember it, and thus I'm sharing an admonition - so people wouldn't waste their time. Because I did. Besides, I have successfully mentored people from zero-to-hero and helped them learn Emacs.

My suggestion to focus on Elisp is not like tech-splaining monads, and Lisp is not that difficult. Definitely not even in the same league of difficulty as Haskell. It is an astoundingly simple language. And yet people just ignore it for years, clueless of what they're missing.

How did you approach emacs onboarding? In my case it wad sheer enthusiasm of 20 year old who want to do cool things, no matter the amount of effort.

So if it takes learning a language, language it was.

But i gave up on teaching Emacs. My current stance is: if you want emacs then you know how to do it.

> How did you approach emacs onboarding

I'd typically would start by showcasing a single (albeit enormously important) aspect of it, like search. When someone sees the countless ways to search for things in Emacs:

- isearch, query-replace, occur, multi-occur, project-search, find-file (with wildcards), ffap, apropos, xref-find-definitions/find-references, consult-line, consult-ripgrep, consult-fd, consult-hn, consult-omni, browser-hist-search, magit-find-file, magit-dired-log, etc.

That typically, already is enough for them to say - "darn, I want this...". Then next step is to show them that there's nothing to fear - everything is documented, described and can be inspected on the go.

In teams where pair-programming is a normal practice, I would typically watch their efforts with something in VSCode, IntelliJ, or even Vim and ask them if they'd want to see how I'd do the same/similar thing in Emacs. If the person is not interested, I won't push for it, but at that point, someone who worked with me on the same team knows that I can show them something entertaining and interesting to see, even if they don't get the immediate urge to dive into it.

I did - I first came to emacs during my lisp phase. I didn't stay with lisp, but I did stay with functional programming, and in those days emacs was the best environment for a number of functional programming languages (maybe still is).

GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. GGP's critique is typical of poor exposition. Read the first chapter of any maths textbook from the 1970s. It doesn't make any sense because the author already knows where everything leads and lest he appear a fool to his peers, will insist the reader does too.

And that's why it cost me two-three years of wasted experience. Looking back, I wish I had focused more on understanding Elisp, learning edebug and the built-in profiler. My bona fide Emacs journey began only after I started writing Elisp without fear.

I guess if one's hobby is fiddling with emacs, then I could see why learning edebug and the profiler are valuable first steps. But I view emacs as merely a tool to get vastly more important work done. I just want it to stay out of my way.

I have been using emacs for 20 years and never heard of edebug before today, and have never used the profiler. If I install some new package and it doesn't immediately work, I usually uninstall it right away. I don't have time to fuck around. I would rather chew glass than debug breaking changes in my init.el so I make changes rarely, and deliberately. To each their own, I suppose.

> I would rather chew glass

So, you're making assumptions even without ever trying? You just decided it's hard/time consuming/worthless even though you have "never heard" about it?

> I have been using emacs for 20 years

Yeah, well. Like I said: Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter, "using Emacs" actually means dealing with Lisp. To what extent - it's everyone's own choice. I have seen too many stories of people like you - "using" it for decades and then abandoning it for VSCode or other things, without even realizing what they've given up.

It only takes just a bit of knowing the basics of Elisp to get the genuine Emacs experience, otherwise, you're just riding the car, not driving it.

> I don't have time to fuck around

That is a big misconception. Prolific Emacs users don't waste time ricing their setup just for the sake of it. They apply Lisp to meet their needs. My own work demands certain changes every single day - I have to move between different projects, in different PLs, dissimilar teams; I poke into various APIs; consume data in all sorts of formats; build prototypes, every time with different scope and requirements; analyze huge sets of data; search through documents, hop between different hosts, etc. I can only imagine how miserable my life would've been without my Lisp tools, where Emacs invariably takes the center stage.

It seems like you lack the notion of what it's like to literally shape your tools for your needs as they evolve. It's like having an entire pottery workshop at your disposal, but choosing to only pick up the already finished, dried pieces. Seriously, don't be daft - hook up an AI assistant to your config, the possibilities are virtually endless. It could be just about anything - any small annoyance that you may decide to improve in your workflow. I wish I had developed this "emacs/hacker mindset" where I don't even think twice, if something feels suboptimal - I'd try to automate it. I'd just start typing some Elisp in my scratch buffer. These days, it has gotten even simpler than that - I'd just type a prompt.

>You just decided it's hard/time consuming/worthless even though you have "never heard" about it?

You must mave misread what I wrote, because you're conflating two different statements.

>I have to move between different projects, in different PLs, dissimilar teams; I poke into various APIs; consume data in all sorts of formats

None of this requires elisp beyond the use-package incantations to install a given mode, which is only done a single time.

>It seems like you lack the notion of what it's like to literally shape your tools for your needs as they evolve.

My needs are already mostly satisfied by emacs. It is excellent at editing and composing text out of the box already. I have language servers for auto-completion. I have syntax highlighting. If I am mangling a text file I use the build in transient macro recording feature.

The editor itself is almost never the bottleneck in my work. Elisp is so unpleasant that I have zero desire to hack around in it for fun.

> I have zero desire to hack around in it for fun

You just sit here stiff-necked without even the slightest clue of what I'm talking about. I don't hack for "fun", I hack with a purpose. Here's a practical anecdote. I was pair programming with Matthew over Zoom and he was showing me certain things. He would navigate to different sites, switch between terminal and his editor, run some scripts etc. I just couldn't bear interrupting him all the time saying, "hey, hey, hey, slow down, please. I'm trying to take notes here... Hey, can you share this link?...", etc. So that bothered me for a minute. I sacrificed my lunch break, sat down and figured that out. I wrote a tiny function that checks if the last thing in the clipboard is an image and sends it to tesseract CLI for OCRing. Took me not even fifteen minutes. Now I can just select an area of my screen (with Flameshot), and the text pops into an Emacs buffer.

This feature never existed - not in a package, not in anyone's config on GitHub. It's a specific problem that I quickly solved for my own needs. Could I have done this with Python, Bash, or AWK? Sure, why not? The thing is - before Emacs distilled this mindset into me, I wouldn't even have bothered about it. It wouldn't be a bottleneck I would ever think of noticing. And that is just a single example of hundreds of different things Emacs helps me with. Anything text-related invariably ends up being routed through Emacs, and majority of programmers have little idea how empowering this could be. I consume much of the content through Emacs - I read HN threads in Emacs. Also Slack, Reddit, Jira, my browser history and other things. This very comment is being typed in Emacs.

I have seen both of these worlds. You are sharing just one side of it, of which I am very familiar. So why don't you take my word for it and give it a try, instead of arguing that the side (you have never even experienced) is not worth your attention? What do you have to lose anyway?

>So why don't you take my word for it and give it a try, instead of arguing that the side (you have never even experienced) is not worth your attention?

Because you're being too aggressive and unpleasant

>What do you have to lose anyway?

Time spent on more important things

> Because you're being too aggressive and unpleasant

Huh. Well, I guess, fair enough. Would be weird for me to assert that I don't feel like it. What could I say in my defense? Jesus tried to spread the word nicely, have you heard what happened to him later? :)

> Time spent on more important things

There are a bunch of things I had to learn over the years. Three things I have never, not once, ever regretted spending some time getting familiar with - Linux, Vim-navigation and Lisp. All three grand ideas have a profound compounding effect on my workflow. Turns out, later you'd carry regret not for trying random things, but for things you have never tried. I do to a certain degree regret chasing things that turned out to be ephemeral, but that time doesn't feel exactly wasted. The only genuine regret I still carry - I wish I had someone in my life to urge me to try learning these things sooner. I do absolutely regret the time wasted. All three taught me a great deal of wisdom, and I wish I did it when I was much younger.

>Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around.

I've been using emacs as my primary editor since about 2002 and I hate this take. Emacs Lisp is by far the worst part of emacs. It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used, unless at the uttermost end of need.

My config, after more than two decades, is about 400 lines, and I consider that excessive.

> Emacs Lisp is by far the worst part of emacs

Say what you want, but I wouldn't trade it for any other (non-homoiconic) language. Sure, it won't win the contest of the "nicest Lisp", nevertheless - it's a Lisp, and therefore far better suited for the things Emacs is designed to do.

Have you ever thought why Org-mode, developed and maintained by a handful of people (perhaps fewer people than the React.js core team has) is capable of carrying features that (despite so many brilliant minds) never appeared in any similar products? Like for example, executable source code blocks in different PLs that can pipe data into one another. Even Jupyter can't do polyglot execution with data passing between the languages. That shit doesn't exist in Neovim, or VSCode (where MSFT poured millions of $), or IntelliJ. It exists because Lisp makes it much simpler to design and build such things.

As someone who's been "using" Emacs just like you (without ever writing much Elisp), and also "properly using" it for a long time and having to see both sides, I can assure you - it's absolutely worthwhile to spend some time grokking Elisp. It's not a horrible language. For what it is - it is incredibly flexible. You just don't know what you're missing.

Some of us like Emacs Lisp fine.

Its documentation (the manual in Info and M-x describe-function, etc) is exceptionally good. I don't need to be connected to the net when I'm writing something in Emacs Lisp. Try that with Javascript!

To each their own, but I don't really understand the sheer hatred elisp puts in some people. As far as scripting languages go, it's pretty good. I haven't seen a scripting language alternative I'd really prefer for this - maybe Clojure or some other modernized lisp.

It's not just Elisp, I think, just any Lisp dialect gets this reaction. Which, honestly, I can't fully comprehend. Wait, how do even people use Emacs while at the same time hating Lisp? Isn't that kind of a painful way to deal with it in general? Sounds like having extreme motion sickness but still loving cars, puking all the way while driving them.

I think there is a crowd, maybe less common than the others, that just want less warts. I can understand that, though I'm not sure the usual dialects that get thrown around are much better.

What I don't understand is wanting to replace elisp with a mainstream scripting language. None of them are really functional-style languages; it's just a completely different world.

(Non-scripting languages are a different story, but fundamentally a different use case.)

> I don't understand is wanting to replace elisp with a mainstream scripting language

That typically comes from people without any experience in any Lisps. They don't know "REPL-driven development", they haven't heard about "structural editing", Lisp looks like a parenthesized mess to them. I looked at it the same way until I learned. Now I don't even notice parens - I see structure, beauty and reason.

Heh. In the early 1990s, I got initiated to the basic Emacs key bindings and editing UI via JOVE for a Scheme programming class. JOVE didn't have elisp behind it, instead being light enough that scores of students could all be running their own editor session and Scheme interpreter processes on the same memory-starved, multi-user server.

I'd already known Common Lisp from a prior class, which mostly used some Mac based REPL. Shortly after, I had real Emacs and various CL and Scheme runtimes on my Linux PC. Scheme was my obsession at the time. A lot of my pathway into CS was puzzling over what it would take to implement a Scheme runtime. But, I felt no desire to get into the bizarre-to-me elisp dialect. It just felt gross.

Probably because of early years using shared terminal server rooms and hosts, I also learned that over-customization just became a pain when I had to move between environments. I ran the Emacs that came bundled with my Linux distro, with the extensions that came packaged along with it. Mostly I just tried to have Xresources to get my preferred color scheme and text fonts.

From all of this, I'm nearly some kind of old school Unix fundamentalist. I've never wanted an IDE. Or rather, my IDE has always been the host OS, shell prompt, filesystem state, and other terminals. I use adjacent shells to run builds, tests, debuggers, version control, etc. Emacs is just my editor. I've never, ever wanted any editor to subsume my OS, window management, and these other tools.

My favorite interface feature is creating several "frames" (separate X windows) viewing into the same buffers. Sometimes several files side by side, and sometimes several editing viewports on the same file. I also use the X based menus to find many esoteric features or session settings for which I would never memorize the command names.

But, when I am forced to run Emacs in text terminal mode, I revert to thinking of it like JOVE. I'd rather open multiple terminals (and SSH connections, when remote) and have each one run its own ephemeral Emacs instance with one buffer for a brief foray into one file. Somehow, I've never had the urge to fire up an Emacs server to share state between these. I just find my way back to a proper graphical Emacs when I want that kind of complex editing session.

The only Emacs modes I use are for syntax highlighting and auto-indentation. I also never wanted Emacs "windowing", i.e. text terminal muxing. For me, learning to kill accidental window splits was roughly the same need as learning how to exit/abort out of accidentally launched vi. Repulsed, I head for the exit!

My favorite editing features are just search, find-replace, and find-replace-regexp. But search is mostly just a fast-scroll to me, jumping forward or back to text I know is there. If I'm really searching, I more likely mouse over to a terminal window and run find and/or grep from a shell. My favorite advanced editing feature is buffer-compare (Ediff), which I use for merging changes between two files in side-by-side frames.

Oh, and I despise the GNU infos-style help system too. I much prefer manpages, or secondarily reading docs in a web browser.

> Or rather, my IDE has always been the host OS, shell prompt, filesystem state, and other terminals.

As described by its creators: The Unix Programming Environment <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Unix_Programm...>

How to get started with nvim?

I've been trying emacs for a while. People keep saying it's self-discovering and I have no idea what they mean. Am I missing part of the manual? I google stuff when I don't understand, like any other piece of software. I've never managed to successfully use the help system to find anything.

The neat thing with Emacs is that the core concepts of the system are all first-class programming entities with their own documentation. So if you want to know what your current mode does, you can use C-h m to get a bunch of information including commands, key-bindings and links to code. If you have a key command, you can use C-h k, enter the keys, and you'll see exactly what function that command runs. You can get info about functions with C-h f and variables with C-h v; coupled with some kind of fuzzy-find-autocomplete (which, unfortunately, isn't set up by default), it's usually pretty quick to find the functions and config options that are relevant to whatever you're trying to do.

I still use web searches to look up Emacs things occasionally, but the built-in help commands are still useful because they're naturally tied to (and organized by) the core code entities that power Emacs.

Yep. `C-h k` to look up what a key does, `C-h f` to look up a function, and `C-h v` to look up a variable/setting will get you pretty far.

I'd also add `C-h b` to show you the key bindings. (And `C-h` after a prefix key will usually show you the bindings that start with that prefix.) `C-h a` for apropos to search commands by substring can also be useful.

The thing that makes it really "self documenting" is that these help commands reflect the live environment at the moment you use it. If you've added a new binding in your init.el, `C-h b` and `C-h k` will show it. If you've added a new function in your init.el, or loaded a custom package, all those functions can now be found via `C-h f`. The help system will show you the doc strings for them and provide hyperlinks right to the source.

Moreover, this works for anything that you define on the fly. Open an Emacs lisp buffer, type some elisp code to define a function or variable, execute the definition, and now it'll appear under the above in the help system the next time you invoke help.

> I have no idea what they mean

Emacs can "describe" anything contextually. Describe current mode, character at point, specific command, any variable, etc. With Wilfred/helpful it gives you even more stuff. If you're not sure what's the exact symbol/command/mode name you're looking for, there are 'apropos' set of commands. Also, absolutely learn Info and how to navigate it - it's enormously descriptive and very useful - it beats googling stuff up, because a) it works offline b) it gives you more accurate info about your current system.

It's crazy man, you can get full text search for any concept you want. Here goes:

    C-h r (open Emacs manual)
    C-s "line numbers"

That's it. Just keep pressing C-s and it will search through every section of the entire manual for the keyword you mentioned. After 5 tries, it lands on "16.24 Customization of Display", and you can read how that works.

Also apropos works.

Some distros used to (still do?) drop some of the manuals, it was really annoying to discover this on Ubuntu a few years back. As someone who knew the manuals should be there it was easy to get the right google search to find out how to install them, someone new or inexperienced with emacs would likely not recognize that anything was missing in the first place.

I was mildly disappointed the other day when I did a <C-h a>, and instead of "apropos" I saw "search for command". Apropos was one of those killer features that was, as far as I know, unique to emacs (until the "command palette" appeared in one of the newer editors).

Having a good completion package (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`) goes a long way to finding stuff. I regularly find new functions and variables by calling describe-function and describe-command and just searching/auto-completing my way to what I need. It gets even better with the `helpful` package which improves the layout/features of help pages a lot.

> (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`)

I assume you meant orderless?

I learned Emacs before search engines and can develop Emacs software while disconnected from the internet. My point is that Emacs is more self-documenting than most things.

It's self discovering... once you figure out how to use its very eclectic by modern standards mechanisms for discovery. No sarcasm. Learning how to use it is a skill you have to actively acquire. This is more a criticism of emacs than of you.

That said, I've been using it for... uhh... about 30 years now, and I've honestly never picked this skill up myself very much. I can only use it minimally. Just googling is fine, and as others have commented today (although maybe in that other thread about emacs), AI makes it even easier because it can just straight up write the modifications for you if you need them.

It was always like that before about 10 years ago. You're getting your feet wet in programming, learning about free alternatives, and you learn that all the world's legendary hackers become proficient in one of either vi (vim) or Emacs. So you dig in and you find that, as your awareness of programming languages grows, Emacs is a "good-enough" solution for working in nearly all of them. (Vim is too, but maybe a bit less so in 1995 when I was starting out.) And if you want to program effectively cross-language, there's nothing you can do but lock the fuck in and learn your editor's idiosyncrasies, shortcuts, and programming/customization features.

These days we're all spoiled by Visual Studio Code, Zed, even things like Geany and Notepad++. So it makes less sense for neophytes to start with something as ancient and idiosyncratic as Emacs, and Emacs does not enjoy nearly the prominence or mindshare it had decades ago. (Though I understand its absolute user base has grown.)

For me what I found was that on early 90s telnet-accessible Unix systems the only pre-installed or easily installed editor that actually let me use... luxuries... like arrow keys and backspace was emacs. Vi was always there but modal editing repulses me and it also didn't work with arrow keys and the like. (I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on.)

Emacs was literally the sanest option unless you could bribe the sysadmin into installing "joe" or similar. ("pico" and "nano" came later).

The other thing is back in the day emacs was often a good option for running clients to connect to things like IRC or MUDs or MOOs, and even Gopher and the early web. It was also an excellent news and mail reader!

And so I used emacs as a general text editor and MOO and IRC client long before I ever used it for writing source code really (for which it was also obviously very good).

> I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on.

It's a holdover from the days when people used to type without looking at their keyboards or waste time and effort taking their fingers off the home row to find and stab around with some kind of multi-axis valuator device sitting on their desk somewhere.

I've never had a problem hitting my arrow keys on the fly.

I trained in touch typing in the 80s/early 90s in typing classes, on Selectric typewriters. Beautiful keyboards.

I used vim for about 15 years and emacs for the last 6 or 7 and never has it been easier to emacs. For years it was searching Google, blog posts and manuals for "how do I do X in emacs?" and now it's trivial to ask AI. I always have a Copilot session open in my emacs config so it can tell me how my emacs does something and can update my config for me.

> I always have a Copilot session open in my emacs config

Using gptel? Or something else?

Don’t know about GP, but I’m reasonably happy with chatgpt-shell.

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