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Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to start an editor war, but I've been trying to learn Emacs for the past week. The learning curve is still at the point of being frustrating/painful. Should I stick with it or download Atom? (Anyone have a solid opinion between the two?)

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You probably do want an editor that is free, can be used for the rest of your life, works perfectly in a terminal, and is completely programmable.

I suggest you continue on with your ascent to emacs understanding! Be sure to use something like prelude, i.e. something with 'sane defaults', and checkout this slideshow by emacs enthusiast (and chief designer of ruby) Yukihiro Matsumoto. (http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed-my...)

It took me 3 weeks to become proficient, and I moved from Sublime Text 2.

I'll check out Prelude; I have better-defaults installed, but this seems to be much more radical. Just curious, how did you find out about Prelude? I'm a freelancer so I don't have any in-person exposure to model/mentor programmers outside of the web, and I'm thus finding it difficult to even know if I'm using Emacs in a sane way. For example of the type of things I wonder about: do most Emacs users keep the basic keymapping the same (C-n, C-p, C-f, C-b etc.) or do many switch to a non-conflicting but more ergonomic alternative. (The idea that such an important keymapping is decided by the first letter of an action rather than ergonomic sensibility is insane to me.)

also don't forget to take a look at technomancy's emacs starter kit, which was very helpful to me when I got started using emacs:

https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

Almost every Emacs user uses the standard keybindings for most stuff (though many change the odd binding or two for personal reasons). They work really well once you get used to them, and they tend to form a system: C-f goes forward a character, M-f goes forward a word, C-M-f goes forward an "expression", and those same modifier keys have similar relationships for other commands.

As for ergonomics... Emacs bindings feel far more natural and comfortable than any other editor bindings I've ever used, but then I've used Emacs for a long time and am well used to them. I suspect that the same is true for most people: what feels/works best will have more to with what you're used to than any inherent superiority. [And probably no keyboard-oriented editor that's been successful for any length of time will have a truly un-ergonomic design, because it couldn't have succeeded with such.]

Probably the closest thing to what you're describing is the various editor emulation packages, which often remap many basic bindings... Of these, vi/vim emulation is probably the most popular these days, and there are like 4-5 vi/vim emulation packages, of varying degrees of sophistication (and age), although I'm not sure which is the current favorite (maybe "evil"? http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil ).

    I use ST because it just works.
    
    Let me tell you.. Atom will probably never come 
    close to Emacs programmability and extensibility. 
    Its by far the most beautiful software 
    environment. Its a living thing.

    In Emacs you're constantly reminded of the love of 
    generations of hackers in improving it. The 
    C-core-and-Lisp-scripting pattern was a perfect
    match. Emacs has the quality without a name.
    
    But Atom is modern. Emacs is single threaded (IIRC)
    and a single evil elisp snippet takes it to its knees.
    
    Those thousands of elisp mdoules (mostly) work together,
    without any kind of sandboxing. I think this is also
    notable and beautiful. It was achieved by a lot of 
    hackers who cared a lot.

This is MY little list of people who wrote emacs philosophy or code that I loved, off the top of my head:

    erik naggum (rip,  most people hated him, but he loved 
                 and understood lisp and I want back to old usenet
                 posts for insights many times 
                 those insights now lost somewhere)
    luke gorrie (slime originator iiuc, mind blown w/ his demos. 
                 also erlang guy and hacker at heart
    steve yegge (js2, explained emacs qwan in many posts)
    sacha chua
    TamasPatrovics (anything!)
    Eduardo Ochs (eev, built his own little world inside emacs)
    David O'Toole (linkd.el, many other intersting packages)
    rubikitch (!!! so many useful emacswiki snippets)
    alex schroeder (emacswiki master iirc)
    Matsushita Akihisa (moccur-edit.el, still miss this in Sublime)
    dr qubit
    Nikolaj Schumacher (beautiful auto completion packages)
    xahlee
    magnars sveen

Using emacs feels like being immersed in the rich culture of a past civilization.

Once I wrote an add-on to rcirc, the second emacs irc client. One guy tried and liked it. That made me very, very happy.

This was my only contribution to open source and I wish someday I can feel useful in that way again.

Have you tried LightTable yet?

Yes, I really like its philosophy, but it had some rendering issues when I tried.

Also, I've yet to accept that javascript is taking over (Atom, Lighttable..)

Yeah, that's been my experience, too (on both counts).

Emacs ftw!

Unless you have a specific reason not to, you definitely should look at vi if you find Emacs' learning curve frustrating. Adhering to the Unix philosophy, vi lets you combine simple commands to achieve more complex goals, which makes the learning curve way more pleasant. For example, if you know how to jump to the next occurence of character x (fx), you already know how to delete from cursor to character x (dfx).

Vim is a very feature-rich editor, which can be distracting while learning the more basic steps. I started with nvi (the vi clone that ships with OpenBSD). Used copys of the 6th edition of O'Reilly's "Learning the vi Editor" (1998) are available practically for free. You don't have to read every single sentence ("remember that you must press ENTER to tell Unix that you are finished issuing your command"), but I found the structure very sensible.

If you don't think distraction is a problem for you, start with Vim and try the vimtutor.

I tried and it didn't make sense to me. Having to switch modes is silly to me.

> For example, if you know how to jump to the next occurence of character x (fx), you already know how to delete from cursor to character x (dfx).

Yes but if I have to start typing I have to press some key to switch modes (i?). That is a no-go for me.

Well, there's no perfect solution. Either it's a modal system like vi, or you have to use modifier keys whenever you want to do something that isn't enter text.

That said, there are tricks to make modal editing less annoying. For example, mapping your CAPS LOCK key to ESC makes switching out of insert mode much easier.

Some commands perform actions and then switch modes all at once for you. To extend the grandparent comment's example, you can use the substitute command, s, instead of the delete command, d, to perform the "delete and switch into insert mode" action with sfx (rather than dfx).

Minor nitpick: c is delete and switch into insert mode, so it would be cfx.

When you say "trying to learn", what do you mean? If you are trying to dive into everything that emacs can do, I'd imagine you will be in a world of pain for quite a while.

Instead, just use it to edit files. After a while, if there is something you are finding would be convenient, search for and or build it.

That said, some obvious points that you will find nice do come by default if you start out with something like prelude. Though, again, just use it to edit files and don't worry about using the keyboard shortcuts that heavily.

If you are highly motivated by the shortcuts, then I would set a pace for learning a few at a time and really get them down first.

For that matter, whether in emacs or atom (or vim/sublime/acme/whatever), it would be rather instructive to see what features are used heavily by folks. Even better if there was a nice listing for what features were discovered, in order and frequency of use.

Is there already a trend/meme for doing something like this? "What I use in my editor?"

I'm still an emacs rookie, but I've already been 'converted' to the point that I try to use emacs every time I need to write text - programming (at least if no IDE is available), text files, LaTeX (what little I've written of it, anyway), word processing if it is feasible to write the text in the editor and then copy paste into a word processor to do the formatting later, editing text boxes in web browsers via a Firefox plugin (`It's All Text!').

The primary reason, at least for non-code text, is that I find it annoying to go back to using stuff like the arrow keys for navigating now that I'm kind of used to the arguably more ergonomic C-f, C-b and friends. So I can echo the sentiment that sticking to the basics of emacs at first can be well worth it.

Keep up with emacs. It has has been around for long. Every operating system has it. It has a lot of support and tooling around it. Works great over ssh or just on a plain console. Has good syntax highlighting.

My advice is to just learn 5-10 basic commands. Movement, copy paste, exit, save and open file. Then see how you like it.

Emacs is the One True Editor.

Maybe, but ed is the standard text editor.

You are all old, nano is the future!

Other than /s, I wanted to say I am also learning emacs after some years of both vim and st2-3 and I really like it. I have still to stick to a cheat sheet to remember common commands but I am on my way to the Stallmanmination

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