Emacs isn't for everyone

http://briancarper.net/blog/emacs-isnt-for-everyone

by twism • 16 years ago

160 133 16 years ago

maximilian• 16 years ago

One thing that always gets me about blog posts like these, is that they never fill in the details in the post. He goes on about things he's struggled with, solutions he's found, etc, but never actually says what they are. I'm an Emacs novice, and I love to get little tips from articles like this one, but so often they just allude to it all.

Xurinos2• 16 years ago

That is interesting... When I read the post, I understood his references, having had similar experiences. Now that you mention it, you are right: the audience of this post is not the new users. It is the people who are trying to push emacs as Clojure's choice development environment.

As a vim user, I am definitely open to good vim environment options for my lisp experiences. My attempts to use current solutions have so far been poor, for what it's worth; every solution seems frail, to break when I use just the wrong key. Suddenly vim is screaming at me, and some background process that handled the connection to a lisp has died or is unreachable by vim.

I use slime.vim (yay for vim and screen), but there is something to be said for being able to have what amounts to intellisense for dynamically declared functions, to have the experience of working actively with symbols within packages.

As the author of the article points out, the key sequences for working with lisp are ugly (long). And I would point out that in emacs, almost all key sequences are ugly.

reflexer• 16 years ago

I've found slimv.vim not bad for CL after all http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531

jerf• 16 years ago

From the "feed a man for life" department: http://www.emacswiki.org/ (That is, I recognize I am not pointing to specific issues, but this site is full of this sort of information. Sometimes hard to know if any given tidbit is up-to-date, emacs has been on the move lately.)

briancarper• 16 years ago

I linked to other posts in that post, in which you can see some of the things I struggled with (written while I was struggling). For example:

1. Windows opening and closing seemingly at random when using SLIME 2. Horrible default fonts 3. Unfamiliar keybindings, some of which are awfully long keystrokes to do very common actions, e.g. C-x C-f to visit a file, C-x C-s to save a file. 4. Struggling with Emacs jargon and navigating the help system

There was a lot more. Part of the problem is that none of these things bother me any more, because I've drilled them into my brain over the past two years. So I don't remember everything I struggled with. I just remember being extremely frustrated.

For the most part I never found solutions other than getting used to the Emacs way of doing things, and changing my habits.

teamonkey• 16 years ago

> For the most part I never found solutions other than getting used to the Emacs way of doing things, and changing my habits.

A (true) anecdote.

I use a piece of custom software at work. Parts of it are horrible to use, truly awful, unintuitive, time-wasting.

For those of us who've used it for a year or more we ignore the rough edges. We know that when you perform a certain action a pointless warning box appears so you immediately hit 'Enter' to dismiss it before it even appears. Obviously we know what the menu entries do, even the ones with no text label.

We were forced to use this software at a point where we couldn't fix it. Now we have the ability to fix it but we've changed our habits to fit it so we don't bother even filing bug reports. New users, however, are going completely crazy trying to learn it.

brehaut2• 16 years ago

I've noticed a curious situation with learning (and configuring) emacs that once i've got it to be mostly[1] working i can remember all the little details that were causing me grief prior but cannot remember how I achieved the current workable state, and as a result I've never been able to pass on any of my own successes to another user.

My opinion of emacs configurations[2] is that they are incredibly elaborate jenga towers; 30 or 40 odd years of scripts balanced with utmost care on top of each other. As i mentioned in a previous comment ive stopped trying to maintain my own clumsy pile of jenga blocks and have used technomancy's emacs-starter-kit. So far i'm happier than i've ever been with an emacs install[3].

so, in an attempt to avoid letting the success i had on monday evaporate.

0) grabbed a recent emacs 23 for mac os x (not aquamacs at various suggestions).

1) grab the emacs start kit; its targeted at dynamic languages in general, not just clojure. It is a replacement for your ~/.emacs.d/. It includes elpa, the package manager thing. M-x package[tab] will list all the functions in the package manager.

2) grab a cheat sheet and attach it to a surface near your screen. refer to it often.

3) i have not even tried to use slime and swank. emacs and paredit are enough of a learning curve for me at the moment. I use lein from the shell to access my repl, git from the shell for managing my repo.

4) install clojure-mode via elpa if you are dabbling in clojure. apparently its not part of the default starter kit. M-x package-install [enter] clojure-mode [enter] i believe.

I'm happy with his because im learning the keybindings for emacs and paredit without having to worry about futzing with the emacs setup. paredit is already proving to be a great mode for editing clojure (or lisp in general i guess) code that its improved my life vs textmate. maybe in 6 months i'll look at tinkering with things some more.

[1] I used emacs at uni for about 5 years, and later at a job for a couple. At no time was I happy with my emacs set up, merely content that it was working. [2] bound to be hated by those who are fluent emacsians; sorry guys its just how it looks from where im sitting. [3] I'd still be using textmate for clojure if i hadn't heard about paredit. Maybe when counter clockwise gets a bit more love i'll have another look at using eclipse for my clojure code.

[edited:formatting]

icey2• 16 years ago

Here's what I don't get: People don't seem to have any problems with learning entirely new programming languages every year, but if you ask them to learn a new editor they get up in arms about it.

I think if people spent half the effort on learning emacs as they do learning the languages that emacs works well with (lisps, mainly) they'd pick it up just fine.

(I'm not advocating forcing anyone to use emacs, fortunately there are a lot of other options. I just don't get the hand-wringing around saying it works the best for a given language.)

rdouble• 16 years ago

The people who learn entirely new programming languages every year already use emacs.

albemuth• 16 years ago

that's a pretty ridiculous generalization to make...

kiba2• 16 years ago

You mean C-like programming languages? It's pretty easy to learn a language shallowly when it is similar to everything else.

icey2• 16 years ago

I don't know, I don't try to learn a new language every year. It seems like a lot of people who do make their way through Ruby, Python, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Scala; they all seem pretty dissimilar to me.

cemerick4• 16 years ago

The language I use to build software with is precious to me. It's capabilities are often key to what I can do, how I can express myself.

The editor I use to write code is a commodity. Will switching to emacs help me write better software? Solve harder problems? No, it'll help me sling text faster -- which, unless you're doing fairly pedestrian things, is the least interesting, least common thing you should be doing each day.

Rayne• 16 years ago

"Will switching to emacs help me write better software? Solve harder problems?"

It will HELP you write better software, yes. Solve harder problems? It will help you solve harder problems FASTER maybe.

twism• 16 years ago

Emacs is more than just slinging text. If you spend time in emacs you probably have it configured so that you rarely ever need to get out of emacs to get almost anything done. This doesn't happen over night though, your emacs config slowly evolves into something better than just a text editor.

sanderjd• 16 years ago

It isn't really about slinging text faster, it is about editing code faster, freeing up more cycles for thinking. A great editor experience, whatever that means for you, can certainly help you write better software, and can give you more time to think about those harder problems. It reminds me of that tired old adage that you spend a third of your life asleep so you should have a comfy bed - you spend a lot of time in your editor, so it should be comfy. This isn't an argument for emacs or any other specific editor, but against the idea that your editor is a commodity not worth consideration.

calibraxis• 16 years ago

Emacs is important in expressing myself. I use it more than any programming language, and also outside the context of programming. It's a rich computer in its own right, in many ways better than the underlying one.

Like Clojure, it's a friendly parasite on the underlying platform. Both are part of my programming experience; and both are invisible for most of my software's users.

But I agree, Emacs is tough to learn (especially if there isn't other emacs user nearby) and is a barrier to entry for anything which depends on it. And the emacs experience could be much improved. I don't know why it hasn't been far exceeded in nearly all ways.

Naga2• 16 years ago

I'm not the standard user of emacs, but as an arts student in university, I have to write a lot of papers. I write, using LaTeX in emacs, and it has dramatically increased the speed in which I can write. More important is probably the editing portion of it. I don't have to worry about fooling around with font sizes and formatting, that if I make this bold it might make the rest, etc. all those little annoyances that come with a large word processor. I just want to write. Emacs lets me do that.

Of course, I'm not comparing emacs to vim, but to something like Word. I plan to learn vim in the next few months.

jseliger2• 16 years ago

The problem is that it takes ten years to learn emacs. Don't take my word for it, because I haven't: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2009/07/learn-emacs-in-ten-years .

reader5000• 16 years ago

His point is correct. There are better time investments than the editor. It actually took me a while to get into clojure because of editor issues. Eventually I settled on notepad++ (which unfortunately does not yet support clojure syntax highlighting; I use its lisp option) and the commandline. Works well enough for my purposes.

troutwine• 16 years ago

Clojure tool support is pretty rough, even when your main editor is Emacs. Not infrequently I have issues with swank/slime whereby I cannot load libraries correctly, maintain a proper connection or correctly eval a buffer (possibly related to the first issue mentioned). I hope that after 1.2 the community will stop changing the language, fix their infrastructure and let a set of libraries stabilize. Right now, half of the really nifty libraries are on 1.2, the other half on 1.1.

kiba2• 16 years ago

Well, emacs is not just another text editor, it's a whole operating system. The ability to port your emacs skills to other uses, such as reading emails, IRCing, and organizing means emacs is a powerful force multiplier.

You don't have to learn emacs for hours each day. You could do ten minute learning each day tops. Scrap together a few editing shortcut there and there, learning a new feature of emacs, add a new a program, and practicing your editing your skills.

All of these will eventually add up. By the time you're an old fart(Says 50 years old), you could laugh at children with the new fanged badly reinvented versions of emacs and their slow-ass editing workflow.

However, I am just 19 years old who get a little bit of thrill every time he spend a fraction of time each day learning emacs and optimizing his workflow. I got ways before I accumulated several unusual but extremely efficient habits.(Batch web browsing anyone?)

napierzaza• 16 years ago

Really? But everyone uses it right?

digitallogic• 16 years ago

Any sufficiently complex system (whether it's a text editor, biological ecosystem, or vehicle) is going to be difficult to interact with for a new user. Emacs is hard to do, well anything, the first time you fire it up, you're probably going to die in the Amazon if without a knowledgeable guide, and you're not going to be able to sit down at the controls of a fighter jet and just take off.

The trade of for this (is supposed to be) increased flexibility and power for the person interacting with the system once they are familiar with it. You can write elisp to automate tasks you do frequently, see animals in the rain forest not found in zoos, and do maneuvers that can't be approached with a Cessna.

Increased complexity of a system increases the possibilities for the user but also increases the difficulty of acclimation. This is a part of life and not specific to a text editor.

dpritchett4• 16 years ago

Clojure's ecosystem is more tightly coupled with emacs than it has to be. In my experience if you want to use the bleeding edge Clojure jars and tools you're best off sticking to emacs. This is an extra training burden for anyone who just wants to poke around in a REPL with some code completion and syntax highlighting capability.

Here's my latest (failed) attempt to get VimClojure working with Clojure 1.2 (search for dpritchett): http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/2010-05-13.html

cemerick4• 16 years ago

Both enclojure (for NetBeans) and counterclockwise (Eclipse) are solid environments that are being used full-time by a bunch of people. I've used the former for a long time, and am on the bleeding edge most of the time. Check 'em out. :-)

swannodette• 16 years ago

Sigh, Clojure isn't tied to Emacs at all. The problem is rather how many people are on the mailing list or IRC channel who can help you with your less popular setup. You could of course save yourself oodles of time by sticking with one of the IDEs which are positively simple to setup or just using your favorite text editor and a regular REPL.

briansmith4• 16 years ago

> Any sufficiently complex system (whether it's a text editor, biological ecosystem, or vehicle) is going to be difficult to interact with for a new user.

Counterexamples: MS Visual Studio. MS Word 2010. MS Excel 2010.

smhinsey• 16 years ago

I say this as someone who has been working with MS technology for over a decade; once you get past the narrow confines of the sexy demo, VS is not all that friendly to the new user. This characteristic has always been one of my main gripes with VS. (Incidently, I often daydream about a parallel universe where instead of creating VS they decided to invest the same resources into emacs or vim.)

Office is a much better example in my experience, particularly Excel.

brlewis2• 16 years ago

Those are not counterexamples. Any new user who could fire up those programs and do something useful could also fire up emacs and do something useful. Emacs does have menus at the top, you know.

JoachimSchipper3• 16 years ago

Counter-counter-example: the ribbon.

(No, I don't personally care. I don't use Word.)

simonista• 16 years ago

I don't think those are completely valid counter examples. Sure you can fire any one of them up and start using them for the most basic task for which they're suited, but to really interact with them takes time and learning.

Just an anecdote: I work in a computer lab for these type of new users, and after being trained for many years to go to a file menu, the round button that serves as a menu access in Word 2010 trips a lot of people up. I get tons of "Where's the print button?" questions.

rbanffy6• 16 years ago

I have used Visual Studio from 6 to 2005 and I never perceived it as simple. The editors may be easy to learn because they follow CUA conventions, as are the menus.

But dig any deeper into the build system and you will quickly realize that the editor is the easy part of the job. You mistake the whole job for the easy part. Visual Studio (and Word, and Excel) are enormous tools with vast functionality.

Yes, I am an Emacs user. Today I decided to add two more mouse gesture bindings to my init.el - scroll-wheel action when the pointer is in the mode line - in addition to the bunch I already have that make my life easier. And the kind of Lisp you have to master to do that is material for a 5 minute tutorial - in the end, two lines were added to the init.el file. They are very easy to understand, BTW:

  (global-set-key [mode-line mouse-4] 'next-buffer)
  (global-set-key [mode-line mouse-5] 'previous-buffer)

shadowsun7• 16 years ago

You may want to look at the learning curves for most editors: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3109/3251176498_c3485a55fb.jp...

joe_the_user3• 16 years ago

Really?

I think a human being qualifies as a complex biological system. Oddly enough, I think a new user would rather interact with to a human than a cricket, a mouse trap or an old DOS machine (to name some simpler systems).

Indeed, humans are rather clearly adapted to interact with other humans. So it's clearly possible to systems which are both extremely powerful and very easy to "use". We human clearly aren't yet at the point of easily constructing artifacts with this combination of power and usability but we shouldn't take that as proof of anything but our inability.

radu_floricica• 16 years ago

I'm sorry, but this simply doesn't apply here. The first rule of good UI design is to always go for the least surprising path. Emacs is anything but familiar for a first time user. Everything about it is different, including a huge number of things that don't need to be, like the basic shortcuts: copy/paste, save, search etc.

I'd be _really_ interested in a .emacs with enough balls to break completely with tradition, even if it would sacrifice some of the most used current shortcuts. My meager attempts made it a lot easier in the beginning, because I could at least use instinctive shortcuts for save/load/compile etc. But I cheated: I used the old Borland standard (F2 save F3 load F9 compile). For the real deal you'd have to do something about the all-mighty C- shortcuts.

regularfry• 16 years ago

There are projects around to do this sort of thing. EmacsW32 is one, but I don't know how much traction it has.

avar• 16 years ago

I still remember learning Emacs for the first time, it was easy, Just time consuming.

Sure I'm still learning it (that's the nature of Emacs), but getting started is easy. Just read the tutorial to get a grasp of the basic commands and concepts, and as soon as you read about the built-in help system you're good to go.

If you don't know what a key does you just prefix it with do `C-h k` to get help. If you can't recall the keybindings do `C-h b`, and if you've forgotten all of this do `C-h ?`. The entire manual is just a `C-h r` away.

The built-in documentation makes it really easy to learn more, it just takes patience.

silentbicycle2• 16 years ago

The trick with using the help system is that Emacs uses very different terminology than many people expect. (He touches upon this in the article.) You get used to it, eventually, but it does add extra work upfront.

The easiest way for me to pick up the terminology was to skim through the info page for Emacs (C-h i takes you to the info pages). After that, apropos became quite a bit more useful.

mattrepl• 16 years ago

There was an article a few years ago on how the time investment of learning new programming tools is often worthwhile. I believe awk was included as an example.

Anyone recall it?

silentbicycle2• 16 years ago

You might find similar articles searching for "sharpen your saw" - that's the phrase the Pragmatic Programmer uses.

Awk has a pretty high utility : time-to-learn ratio. It helps that the language is so small.

dpritchett4• 16 years ago

It's usually easier to learn one new thing at a time. If you're a C# programmer interested in Clojure, you need to consider transitioning from Windows to Linux, Imperative OO to FP, .NET to Java, and Visual Studio to Emacs/Vim/Eclipse/Netbeans all at once.

I'm reading books on both F# and Clojure in an effort to get comfortable with functional programming. Plenty of it is sticking but the Clojure toolchain occupies a lot more of my mental bandwidth than the F# toolchain since I can work comfortably in Visual Studio.

I am learning on all of these fronts simultaneously but it still detracts from my ability to isolate Clojure and learn it without additional effort: I run Windows on a daily basis but I play in Ubuntu VMs regularly to facilitate my programming exploration. I am happiest in Notepad++ but I've recently learned Vim to help me code in Linux. I am honestly not particularly familiar with the ins and outs of .NET but Java is a completely new world to me, particularly the build system.

gfodor• 16 years ago

Note that his original reason for learning emacs, namely, that there's not a good Clojure REPL for Vim, is no longer true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqweCwAMan0 http://kotka.de/projects/clojure/vimclojure.html Works great, no paredit mode tho.

And then theres this one, which I haven't used:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531

dpritchett4• 16 years ago

VimClojure is fine until you want to play with something linked against a 1.2.x version of Clojure. Then VimClojure falls down and you have to fall back to emacs (or a standalone REPL) for compatibility.

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

The next major release of VimClojure should solve this dependability issue but it doesn't seem to be a high priority to its maintainer (last release was nearly a year ago).

ihodes• 16 years ago

It seems to me as though people aren't reading the whole post.

Brian loves Emacs (and Vim), and will continue to use them for developing in Clojure.

Right now much of the Clojure user base is rather avant-garde, but if we want newcomers to the language, it needs to be easier to get into.

Setting up a development environment can be a pain in the ass for the experienced user; imagine the impossible hell it could be for the newbie.

I think that's his point: it's a little more complex than "emacs is hard".

devonrt3• 16 years ago

I can attest to the fact that setting up a Clojure/Emacs/Slime/Leiningen environment is a huge PITA. Something like Clojure Box helps, but it sacrifices flexibility in favor of ease of use and hides a lot of underlying configuration from a new user. A big part of the problem is a lack of a "canonical" setup; if you Google around for Clojure and Slime most directions you find will be out of date, highly personalized, or both. They will probably involve checking projects out of a multitude of repos (be they CVS, SVN, or Joe Blow's GitHub branch) and copying mystifying emacs configuration without really understanding what it all does. And then, after all of that, it still might not work. God help you if you want to get it all to work under Windows.

Don't get me wrong, I love Clojure and I... well, I don't hate Emacs, but it's frustrating to have to deal with a lot of setup when one just wants to hack in a new language.

jrockway7• 16 years ago

I can attest to the fact that setting up a Clojure/Emacs/Slime/Leiningen environment

I can't. apt-get install emacs slime sbcl. emacs. M-x slime. Hack away.

gcv• 16 years ago

swank-clojure 1.2.0 made the setup process much less painful. Yes, you still need to install Leiningen and Emacs manually. After that, (1) an experienced Emacs user can install clojure-mode and SLIME manually, or (2) anyone can use ELPA to install those two modes. Those are fairly easy tasks, and don't require much tweaking.

swank-clojure 1.2.0, which was always the hardest part, does not need to be installed manually. It just gets listed as a dependency in project.clj, and after that "lein swank" on the command line does magic.

brehaut2• 16 years ago

Another possible 'canonical' solution is Technomancy (of leiningen fame)'s http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit. Removed a lot of the futz of installing emacs for me. I still haven't worried about slime or swank yet, and i had to use elpa's installer to install a simple clojure-mode (M-x packages-install [enter] clojure-mode [enter] i think) but its got a basic solid seeming emacs with paredit and clojure stuff going for me.

caveat: github was being weird and i couldnt clone the repo so i had to visit the downloads page and get it to package up a snapshot for me.

anyways, its the least painful experience setting up emacs ive had. ymmv?

joe_the_user3• 16 years ago

You have his point right. I just strongly disagree with it.

"I strongly believe that when it comes to computers, there's no such thing as 'intuitive'. There's stuff you've already spent a lot of time getting used to, and there's stuff you haven't."

I'll assume that idea serves him well. It's just clearly false. Some environment are inherently more intuitive than others. A GUI is earier to deal with than an unresponsive terminal just Spanish is easier to learn than Chinese.

Html has been a blessing since it's stopped many programmers like him from having a hand in interface design.

ekiru• 16 years ago

"A GUI is earier to deal with than an unresponsive terminal just Spanish is easier to learn than Chinese."

I don't think you're making the point you want to here. Spanish is easier to learn than Chinese for English speakers, certainly, but it's not inherently more intuitive than Chinese. Spanish is easier to learn for English speakers because it is more similar to what they have already become familiar to. For a speaker of Japanese, Chinese is probably easier to learn than Spanish.

arthur_debert• 16 years ago

The problem is that today, getting started often means: correct syntax highlighting, indentation, auto-complete (intelisense), build integration and scm integration. And for a few languages at least(e.g javascript, python, ruby, html, css, xml, shell scripts).

This is the problem. Going through the emacs tutorial is not enough. It's not that people have trouble getting started, they just don't want to experience the sudden drop in productivity once those things go away (at least for a while until you learn how to do them).

I've switched to emacs lately, and it was worth it. But it's hard to justify, to a newcomer, why the default javascript mode sucks with common idioms (no indentation, tags - and let's not even get started on intelisense).

When emacs and vi were kings, very few environments where that capable. So all you had to learn was basic editing. Everything else was a surplus. In the last few years, with the rise of eclipse, visual studio, netbeans and others, it's a harder battle.

In my dream world the emacs community would do a gentle fork, that would have ide like capabilities for common setups (python, js, ruby, c, perl, html, java, etc) + editing as expected (like hungry-delete) + more common key bindings (like the command key as meta on mac). Bonus point for a s/frame/window/ , s/buffer/file/ and so on on the documentation.

This way, newbies would be almost at home from the start (some commands to learn, plus the odd keybindings). But with time, they would customize more, and learn to drop the training wheels if necessary. The problem is learning everything at once (terminology, key bindings, elisp, editing) is too much burden for most folks.

jseliger2• 16 years ago

This, by the way, is why I tend to use Textmate for the (very) minor programming-related stuff I do on OS X: the bundles make it exceedingly easy to do stuff fast.

programnature• 16 years ago

amen

bonsaitree• 16 years ago

NS. Emacs shouldn't be anyone's first text editor, but if experience is any guide, it will be many's last text editor.

TheBurningOr• 16 years ago

Good timing on this Tweet. I had just downloaded Emacs with the hope of trying it out as a Notepad++ replacement. Think I'll save it for when I have more time to play around with it.

Naga2• 16 years ago

It is worth it. It takes time, but it really is worth it.

ericb2• 16 years ago

Is there a decent editor I can extend using ruby?

I keep trying to tackle emacs or vim and getting thwarted. I'm not fully convinced they're what I want, and I feel like I won't know until I spend a year learning one, and by then I'll be wondering if I like it because it is awesome or because I have Stockholm syndrome.

davidw• 16 years ago

I started my career doing Perl CGI stuff, and have used, at various points, C, Python, Tcl, PHP, Erlang, Javascript and Ruby in addition to Java, Docbook, LaTeX, HTML (of course), CSS and various and sundry other things.

Emacs has handled them all with aplomb.

sqrt173• 16 years ago

I think he's going in the other direction: All he knows is Ruby, yet he wants to extend his editor with additional functionality. (Which is less than useful IMO, because most of the time you don't really want to extend your editor in the sense of programming new things. My .emacs invariably has 40-50 lines, but none of them should be called programming).

JoachimSchipper3• 16 years ago

Vim? See http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/if_ruby.html. (This, of course, depends on the level of integration you want. The above interface does require you to drop down to (generated) vimscript for many things.)

iron_ball3• 16 years ago

Not with Ruby, but I recommend jEdit -- it has 80% of the power of emacs/vi with 20% of the learning curve, and you can write macros and plugins in Beanshell, a lightweight scripting language that feels somewhere between Java and JavaScript. Though honestly I've never even needed to -- the built-in commands, easily-recordable macros, and decent plugin selection have always done the job.

fakeempire2• 16 years ago

80% of the power? You're missing the point.

magit, org, dired, killring, ido, mingus, tramp, (can jedit use pyflakes or similar), shell, term, gnus, vcs-mode, etc etc etc.

the only thing i have to leave emacs for is a decent browser. pretty sure jedit couldn't provide me with the same. and i just do python programming. million more modes for different tasks?

ptomato• 16 years ago

You could try http://purepistos.net/diakonos/

draegtun2• 16 years ago

Have a look at Redcar: http://github.com/danlucraft/redcar

Also try Textmate. Can't be extended (directly) with Ruby but it does rely heavily on Unix shell for lots of its stuff (usually Ruby scripts).

grandalf• 16 years ago

I've been pleasantly shocked at how helpful the people in #emacs have been. Thank you!

erlanger• 16 years ago

  > It is however extremely painful to learn.

I can attest to that, physically.

lelele2• 16 years ago

Worst thing about learning Emacs is that newbies follow the wrong path, albeit you can't criticize them for not knowing better. Absolute newbies should start with an Emacs customized to follow common conventions of editors (CUA, etc.); Vi users should start with Viper mode (+ Vimpulse). And so on.

jrockway7• 16 years ago

I disagree completely. New users should follow the tutorial. Eventually, to use Emacs as Emacs, you are going to have to understand its model and its terminology. Pretending that doesn't exist until you have learned how to use Emacs as a very bloated Notepad clone will leave you thinking that Emacs is a very bloated Notepad clone.

I learned Emacs when I was in middle school. If I could figure it out then, from the interactive docs, any adult should be able to figure it out. If they don't want to, though, that's a whole other issue entirely, and is not something software can solve. Emacs is different. Learn it or don't.

Now, once you understand Emacs, then sure, use Viper. It's a great tool. But if you don't understand Emacs, then Viper is just going to make you mad. (No experienced Emacs user would use the CUA keybindings, though.)

lelele2• 16 years ago

Come on, Ctrl+ZXCV are so ingrained into the fingers of people who type a lot that having to learn a whole new set of shortcuts does not seem an efficient route. You are not likely to keep them, anyway (since it's way easier to customize Emacs to a common set than other apps). I remember resorting to use my mouse almost always. Nowadays, after having customized Emacs, I'm a keyboard junkie.

jluxenberg• 16 years ago

"But how long is it going to take you to figure out that tab-completion is called hippie-expand in Emacs?"

I figured he must be joking, so I alt-tabed over to my Emacs session. To my surprise, there is actually a command called hippie-expand in Emacs!

Ben65• 16 years ago

I think since Clojure is a lisp there will always be a lot of people using Emacs to develop it. Emacs itself is an outstanding lisp environment, too bad the editor is so quirky. :)

Yes it takes some time learning, but it is worth it, if you like lisp programming.

PLT Scheme is a great environment, yet there are people who would rather use Emacs. I guess once you conquer the beast you it's hard to get away from it.

samatman• 16 years ago

The best thing Clojure could do for widespread adoption, IMHO, is to build a Clojure native IDE, extended from the NetBeans Enclojure plugins and REPL.

This would provide neatly for the programme suggested here:

http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/The+Ideal+Cloj...

A language like Clojure deserves an IDE which is extensible in the native idiom. Building one, with the explicit intention of making it the environment for learning and using Clojure, would do more for adoption than any other single move.

docgnome2• 16 years ago

I realize it's a flawed analogy, but the thing about learning emacs is that it isn't learning a single tool. It's learning the toolbox you can use to build the wood shop. The toolbox that keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's been years since I "learned" emacs and I'm constantly learning new things. If you go into it expecting instant gratification, you're gonna be dissapointed. That said, I've still never gotten CEDET "intellisense" thing to work in anything other than C++. And that's part of emacs now!

delackner• 16 years ago

This was the dealbreaker for me when I last tried to pick up Emacs (albeit at this point that is about 8-9 years ago) there was just nothing at all that could compare to intellisense, for any language.

How's that going today? XCode has fantastic intellisense for C and Objective-C along with jump to declaration / jump to definition.

docgnome2• 16 years ago

Every once and a while I try to set it up, but I also don't really care that much. I've gotten it to work great for C++ but haven't really bothered with anything else.

surki2• 16 years ago

Did you try Gnu Global? I mostly use it for C/C++, but it claims to support "C, C++, Yacc, Java and PHP4".

donaq• 16 years ago

I don't really understand the fuss. You can edit Clojure with any text editor, right? Syntax highlighting, auto-complete, auto-indent, etc are nice features to have, and I do use them, but not really necessary for learning a language. If the language is interesting, I will learn to edit it in vim regardless of whether it's well supported.

Then again, I am probably not a good sample, since I eschewed Eclipse for notepad back when I was learning Java before I discovered linux and vim. Regardless, I still hold the opinion that it is a good mental exercise to occasionally hack the raw text without all the bells and whistles of an advanced text editor/IDE in order to internalize the language structure.

rbanffy6• 16 years ago

As for installing Slime, Clojure and swank, I love ELPA

http://tromey.com/elpa/

Very easy, almost single step.

A Leiningen hook seems absent, however. But I never really used Clojure for anything serious.

edanm• 16 years ago

When I decided to learn Lisp a few years ago, I realized that I had to learn Emacs (something I'd wanted to do for a while anyways). I ended up messing around with Emacs for a few months, and never did learn Lisp.

And that perfectly sums up, for me, the problem with Emacs. It's a great editor, and it's loads of fun to mess around with it and learn it. But at the end of the day, when I actually want to get stuff done, it tends to get in the way more than it helps, so I always end up going for another editor.

suraj3• 16 years ago

I was trying out racket yesterday and I couldn't figure out how to get the previous line in DrRacket. I tried all sorts of combinations and finally pursuing documentation came up with Esc-P shortcut. You can argue that this feature was first implemented in scheme before arrow keys were there but looking at it now it is different than everything else.

For me switching from Windows to OS X was easier (just use Command instead of Ctrl) than switching from "a generic editor" to emacs/vim. The point here is not that learning emacs is hard but that there are now a significant number of developers who expect standard shortcuts from the programs they use.

soegaard• 16 years ago

Hi Suraj,

Consider filing a feature request. Once upon a time you could use ctrl+uparrow to get the previous expression in the interaction windows. I don't know, why that keybinding disappeared. Perhaps it was just an oversight?

suraj3• 16 years ago

Soegaard, I was thinking of submitting a patch over the weekend. That way I get to see how a large lisp app is designed :)

suraj3• 16 years ago

Err Ctrl+up seems to be working OK. PBKAC

c00p3r• 16 years ago

First of all: Emacs (and vim) are perfectly usable on (and originally developed for) a dumb terminal, or so-called console. This is the main difference with modern IDEs such as eclipse, and Gnome or KDE-based ones.

The key-sequences in vi (the true masterpiece) and long sequences in emacs are designed and evolved to be useful on terminals, and they definitely are.

Vim and emacs both were text editors based on original concepts and then evolved as source code editors, rather than IDEs which were created to imitate Visual studio. =)

JulianMorrison• 16 years ago

"lein repl" and gedit open in another window. These complicated Clojure setups with slime and so forth are unnecessary.

grogers• 16 years ago

I can understand that interacting with the REPL inside an emacs session might be better than what you can get in vim (haven't tried either yet - I just use a separate REPL session). But is there anything particular about emacs the editor that makes it particularly good for editing lisp code? For example, the text object selection in vim (:help object-select) has been great for interacting with paired () [], auto-indenting blocks, etc.

ahk• 16 years ago

Yup. And what's the deal with it not having an horizontal scroll bar?

Emacs isn't for everyone

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