Bad Emacs Advice

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/bad-emacs-advice

by grep4master • 5 years ago

165 145 5 years ago

Yuioup• 5 years ago

  just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice.

I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious!

going_ham• 5 years ago

I think that pineapple topping on the pizza meme is designed by pizza elitist to fool normal people from trying it out. Once you try pizza with pineapple toppings, it gives this extraordinary taste. Sweet, sour and salty. All at same time!

bryanlarsen• 5 years ago

Just like a good salad, a pizza has 6 things: salt, crunch, fat (cheese), acid (tomatoes), sweet (pineapple/mango/fig or a stewed sweet tomato sauce) and umami (Parmigiano Reggiano/Grana Padano/etc or anchovy). But not all 6 in every bite.

Most Americans use a fairly sweet pizza sauce. Adding pineapple to that makes it too sweet. But I like my sauce with more tomato acid, so a little bit of fig or pineapple complements the flavours. The nice thing about pineapple is that you don't get it in every bite like you do with a sweet sauce.

Edit: and now I sound like the pizza snob. :) It should be 7 -- good pizza has both crisp and chew.

szszrk• 5 years ago

Tried pineapple pizza on multiple occasions and it never gave me a bad advice!

toyg3• 5 years ago

It's because it was not a thing in Italy, so accepting it was seen as the sign of being out of touch with "real pizza" traditions. Sadly, a natural reaction of disgusted rejection by Italians has been adopted by snobs all over the world.

Nowadays you'll find it even in Italy, because tourists demand it and they pay hard cash, so fuck it all anyway.

prussian• 5 years ago

It's because it was not a thing in Italy

I'm pretty sure even Tomatoes weren't. I hope this isn't the reason for the disdain.

leephillips4• 5 years ago

it was seen as the sign of being out of touch with "real pizza" traditions.

...by people who don’t know where what they think of as “Italian pizza” actually comes from. Look up “pizza effect.”

ycombinete3• 5 years ago

Also some of us just find the taste of things like pineapple on pizza and burgers, or maple syrup with bacon etc. disgusting

ravi-delia• 5 years ago

I feel like it's probably because a typical American pizza has savory toppings, and pineapple is unusual in that respect. At least, that's why people around me complain about it. The Italian pizza ship sailed a looong time ago.

krageon4• 5 years ago

snobs

I don't like fruit as part of a main course (i.e. not a dessert) or appetizer. That doesn't make me a snob, it just means I don't think fruit belongs there and don't appreciate when it is.

wiredfool4• 5 years ago

There are lots of things which are non traditional but good on pizza.

Fish and chips for one. Curry wurst. Apple, persimmon, pine nut and blue cheese. Halloumi, pea, and mint. Mushroom, goat cheese and chipotle. Cranberry and white pudding. (Or cranberry and goat cheese) Christmas dinner. (Turkey, stuffing, ham, cranberry). Pulled pork. Roast pineapple and mint. Bacon and egg. Berry and cream cheese. Salmon and cream cheese and wasabi.

I have been known to make specific dinners in order to have the leftovers to put on pizza.

hbn• 5 years ago

This is the first I've heard as it being some kind of "it's not traditional" argument

Everyone I've ever talked to that has an issue with it just think it's gross. And they're usually people that are not very big risk-takers with their tastes, and order the exact same item at a restaurant every time they go. And only want either cheese pizza or pepperoni.

jjice• 5 years ago

Some people don't like sweets with their acids/savory foods. Claiming it's an argument over traditional pizza is a bit overkill.

marcosdumay2• 5 years ago

Nah, It can not be because a lot of people just dislike pineapple mixed with their food. No way, it can't be.

black6• 5 years ago

OT: mango is another good topping.

Koshkin2• 5 years ago

As is emacs without the menu, the toolbar, and the scrollbar!

convolvatron• 5 years ago

I agree. when they added those things I immediately turned them off and never looked back. the author argues that they are just a couple lines..but they are a couple lines of useless noise

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

This meme is so popular because the overwhelming majority of people thinks pineapple on pizza is a disgusting abomination. I empathize with you, it's tough being the contrarian sometimes. I say that as someone who likes the Star Wars prequels :P

asciimov• 5 years ago

There is definitely a silent majority of people who love pineapple on their pizza. My local pizza guy tells me Hawaiian is one of his top selling pizzas.

Those that like pineapple on their pizza just don't speak up because they don't feel the need to be harassed over their pizza choices.

simiones• 5 years ago

Most people in Europe especially, and especially in Southern Europe (Eastern Europe as well, but that's less relevant to pizza), tend to dislike sweet-and-salty combinations, with some limited exceptions (such as carrots or peas).

euroderf• 5 years ago

But are you quite prepared for tuna on pizza ?

Naga• 5 years ago

Hawaiian pizza (cheese, ham and pineapple) is normalized here in Canada. I'm not personally a fan, but I have always had a hard time finding it unusual.

esclerofilo• 5 years ago

Despite the name, it originated in Canada, you'd expect it to be normal there.

mickeyp3• 5 years ago

OP here. I just like funny quips; it's just there to break up my rambling monologuing :-)

siver_john• 5 years ago

To be fair when I push the meme I do it because I personally dislike Pineapple, I sincerely don't care what people put on their personal pizza, just don't put it on mine. Counter, I have enjoyed Brussel Sprouts on pizza and I feel that is a much bigger sin.

retzkek• 5 years ago

Shaved Brussels sprouts, fried (or roasted), with a balsamic glaze? Sounds good to me!

memling• 5 years ago

I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious!

Arnold has an opinion.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKV74qkokmk

C4stor• 5 years ago

If think the joke is that author himself don't side with the (mostly pointless) debate about pizza and pineapple, so whatever your own opinion, you can see his point.

distantsounds• 5 years ago

so let me get this straight:

- read the manual - follow the tutorial - customize it to your liking

wow, what enlightening advice! this must be unique to emacs and not _any_other piece of software!

once again, all you need to get FP'd on hackernews is to put the word "emacs" in your title. zoom! to the front page!

alpaca128• 5 years ago

It would be great if every other software had documentation comparable to Emacs', but that's simply not the case.

fabianmg• 5 years ago

We have found the vim user...

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

Acessing manual, documentation, values, functions, and source code on Emacs is so easy that it would be hard to summarize all the ways you can do it. It's an integral part of your workflow, and literally unlike anything else. Unlike other programs, that really can and should be an integral part of your daily routine.

One thing I dislike about the manual is that it rarely presents examples, but commands like describe-variable and describe-function often help elucidate usage. Not to mention external packages that makes all that even easier.

drothlis3• 5 years ago

I suspect it's because so many Emacs tutorials out there cover the same material as the built-in tutorial. And so many pre-packaged Emacs configuration files disable the menu-bar for no good reason other than that's what everyone else seems to be doing.

e.g. "Emacs Prelude", one such configuration or "distribution" of Emacs, used to disable the menu-bar by default as recently as a year ago: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/commit/878cffb

bitwize• 5 years ago

I agree that the tool and menu bars are helpful for beginners. I disable mine to reclaim the vertical space (precious in a 16:9 world), to focus my attention on using the command keys, and because I'm a relatively experienced Emacs user! If keeping them helps you get your way around Emacs, by all means go nuts!

drothlis3• 5 years ago

Years ago I wrote the Emacs tutorial I wish had existed when I was learning Emacs: https://david.rothlis.net/emacs/tutorial.html

It follows a similar philosophy as the OP: Start by reading Emacs's built-in tutorial, and then my tutorial shows you how to leverage the built-in help system to figure out how to achieve what you want to do.

mickeyp3• 5 years ago

I'm the OP. That's a nice tutorial, and I agree with your sentiment that you should build on Emacs's ability to query it to figure out what to do. That's the main focus of my book, too, for the exact same reason.

NateEag• 5 years ago

When people ask me how to learn Emacs, I point them to your tutorial.

It was hugely helpful to me in learning Emacs.

Thank you so much for writing it!

drothlis3• 5 years ago

Thanks! I spent 3-4 months on it (getting up at 5am most days to spend 1-2 hours on it before my day job) so it's nice to know it was of some use! :-)

aww_dang• 5 years ago

Feels like these problems mostly relate to the tech-wizard elitism theme. By all means use the help features and GUI menus if that's what you need. I believe when you run these commands via GUI you also get feedback explaining the equivalent keystroke sequence.

Reminds me of the old days of IRC posturing, newbie bashing and RTFMing. Today most info can be obtained by a well crafted search query.

0xdky• 5 years ago

Another lesson I learned from almost 2+ decades of using Emacs:

Track your customizations in a version control. Using customize package and reading the diff in dot Emacs file has taught me quite a bit about certain aspects of the package.

Side note: It would be awesome if Emacs could do the versioning as part of saving the customizations - build Emacs with libgit2 and make it a native git client.

mickeyp3• 5 years ago

You could probably write it. Emacs is able to track which settings you've _applied_ but not yet saved; that could serve as the linchpin for generating versioned changes.

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

The customize interface is quite useful. It's probably more adequate if you don't have a huge intricate init. With time, custom.el (or init.el if you keep everything in the same file) can get difficult to manage. When that happen, a lot of people opt for something more readable and human friendly, like use-package or a distribution such as doom-emacs.

The author mentions that some things can be hard to do outside of the customize interface. That is true. When that happens, I just use the interface and then move the setting from custom.el to use-package. But that's rare, I can't remember the last time I did that.

TacticalCoder2• 5 years ago

for a reason I forgot my .emacs.d/ ("hidden" dir) is a symlink to emacsdotd/ (not hidden) and, yup, it's in git. Some are going to say: "why stop there!? version your entire user dir" and I can see the appeal (but haven't tried yet).

I'm one of those who track everything Emacs: including all the packages. When I upgrade packages, I first check that nothing broke then I commit "Bump avy to 20220114" or whatever. This way I can easily share the exact same config on several machines/several user accounts and I know I can easily roll back to a known fully working setup. YMMV.

oblio2• 5 years ago

If by "version your entire user dir" you mean "version all your manually edited configs", that can work.

Init a git repo in your $HOME, add a .gitignore that by default excludes everything then manually add just the files and folders you want to track.

Especially if you want to publish the repo, be careful, because it's <<extremely>> easy to accidentally expose confidential stuff.

tom_• 5 years ago

Yes. Also, don't put your own stuff in init.el. Put your own stuff in another file, and load it with load-file from init.el. This massively decreases the chances that Emacs will make a mess when it adds or updates its own stuff.

beepbooptheory3• 5 years ago

Just to add: the built-in "Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" is also really really great. I have been using emacs for a while, with one framework or another, but always hesitated actually learning lisp. I was too focused on learning the kinds of languages and systems that might get me a job, and it felt like too big of a venture in learning a whole language just for my development environment. Now, I have a given up on the employable thing, and have been enlightened by SICP and lispey languages, and in general, the simple beauty of Emacs itself, not just what I can make it do. It takes only a little time to get comfortable with the nested (), and weird vocabulary, and it just really will click with you at some point, how simple it all really is, how every function bears on the simple syntactic principles of the language as whole, its lists all the way down!

You can see the language work, by looking at the code.

It may not get me a fancy computer job, but I think I am happier on the whole anyway, giving myself to lisp. Something therapeutic about it.

TacticalCoder2• 5 years ago

... and have been enlightened by SICP and lispey languages,

Fun anecdote: I've got my copy of SICP signed by both authors for Sussman invited me to have tea in his office and when I arrived the next day, by sheer chance, Abelson was there too! They joked that had I been there 30 minutes early Sussman's wife, who proofread the book, would have signed it too! I've got a cool pic taken at that moment: me standing along these two legends and proudly holding the purple book... I'll post that pic and full story the day I have a blog.

Besides that I pretty much live inside Emacs. The occasional elisp (3000 lines of custom elisp hackery over the decades) and lots of Clojure/ClojureScript.

beepbooptheory3• 5 years ago

Wow so cool! I have been working through it with just the HTML version, but recently resolved to get the physical book, its just one those I gotta have.. Then, one day when I have the money, I will get the full volumes of The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth.

watersb• 5 years ago

had I been there 30 minutes early Sussman's wife, who proofread the book, would have signed it too!

I have thought that J Sussman not only proofread the book, but also came up with some of the problem sets and tested many of them: she worked through the book, not just a matter of spell-checking.

But I don't know.

In any event, SICP changed my world in a good way. Very cool that you got both authors to sign a copy!

gypsyharlot6• 5 years ago

How do you access the built-in "Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp"?

nanna• 5 years ago

C-h i m 'Emacs Lisp Intro'

JJMcJ2• 5 years ago

Using the menu bar, remember don't disable that,

    Help => More Manuals => Introduction to Emacs Lisp

ylee• 5 years ago

It may not get me a fancy computer job, but I think I am happier on the whole anyway, giving myself to lisp.

I am the same way. I have been using Emacs since 1995, but have never had a full-time programming/IT job (although my tech skills have always been integral to my career). Perhaps having the luxury of not having to write code for pay is what makes me want to instead slowly learn Elisp. I read email using VM on Emacs (also since 1995), and over the last few years I have broken out of just knowing enough to maintain Emacs' dotfiles to actually writing substantial routines that expand on/fix VM and Emacs's capabilities.

mynameismon2• 5 years ago

Maybe it's me, but starting out with Emacs the previous month, I tried using Doom Emacs the other week, and the number of packages it was being used frightened me. Building your own init.el is much much better, because you know your Emacs in and out, and dont have random keybindings triggering stuff. Maybe I'll never get the popularity of Doom

tharne• 5 years ago

I think doom is really good for inspiration. I used it for a while and it gave me a lot of good ideas on the kinds of things I could do with emacs and elisp.

I now use my own much simpler config, but I've borrowed heavily from the things I like about Doom.

clircle• 5 years ago

Yes, this is exactly how I use Doom. When I first found it, I transplanted its startup optimizations into my existing config, but left everything else alone. When I look to do something new in Emacs, one of my first instincts is "well, let's see how Doom is doing it."

It's works well because I fall into the Evil+Use-package Emacs hegemony with my custom config.

remedan• 5 years ago

I had a very similar experience when I decided to learn Emacs recently. The first thing I did was try Doom Emacs. It was nice but I felt that there is this big layer of stuff separating me from having complete control over my editor.

So I deleted my config. Went through the tutorial with vanilla setup. Then I continuously kept adding packages and tinkering with my config. After about two weeks, I felt that my productivity was on par with what it was previously in Neovim.

I've been using Emacs for a couple of months now and I'm happy I went this route. It is a tool I use almost daily and thus having a deep level of understanding and control is worth it.

lambdaba• 5 years ago

This is what I did (after brief stint with Spacemacs), only what I did is gradually break apart doom-emacs from inside it, as in remove abstractions and stuff I didn't use until it was a plain (single file) emacs config, then went the other direction with modularisation.

This was very educative and I learned a lot about Emacs and Elisp.

The irony is after all of this I'm back to Vim and I don't feel like going back to Emacs (yet).

uncletaco3• 5 years ago

Maybe I'll never get the popularity of doom

Honestly its a double edged sword here. Doom has so many built in convenience functions like `set-font!` and `set-repl!` that an experienced elisp programmer would probably love it for building their own configuration.

On the other hand it bundles so much that an inexperienced emacs user might be more keen to do the bare minimum and rely on the packages bundled with doom to give them all the cool stuff without much effort. After all, why "reinvent the wheel"? I personally don't agree with that sentiment, I think learning how to build and maintain a personal emacs config makes a person a better programmer generally, and makes them prone to reading and writing documentation rather than copying solutions.

I started off with doom and even though I don't use it anymore I still find myself reading its source to figure out how Henrik approached a solution. Love it or hate it, Doom is great in both very good and bad ways for emacs users.

mynameismon2• 5 years ago

Doom has so many built in convenience functions like `set-font!` and `set-repl!` that an experienced elisp programmer would probably love it for building their own configuration.

Fair enough, I came from a background of JavaScript and Python, and Lisp was entirely foreign to me, let alone Elisp.

After all, why "reinvent the wheel"?

I think its not of "reinvent the wheel", but let the other person do the decision making for you, including picking packages, setting up the modeline, so on and so forth. Starting out with a bare Emacs installation, you have to piece together the various packages that you would want to use, where as with Doom, you get everything out of the box. Also, maintaining your own init.el helps one learn Elisp

I still find myself reading its source to figure out how Henrik approached a solution

For example?

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

I'd just like to point out that every single one of Doom's modules is optional, and you can install it without any external packages whatsoever (including Evil) if that's what you want.

thom3• 5 years ago

Some people like ready made Emacs distros, some people like hand coding their init.el (don't forget your early-init.el!) Some people like Arch, some people like Ubuntu. Some people like Linux From Scratch, some people like typewriters. Live your life, be free.

thom3• 5 years ago

It sometimes seems to me that there's this idea that unless you're customising Emacs and gaining complete understanding and mastery of its primitives, there's no reason to use it over another editor. As if the core editing experience is so horrible, why would you go through all that if you're not going to use the superpowered bits? I think this is doing a big injustice to how good most of Emacs and the packaged up versions are, even without a line of elisp.

rprospero2• 5 years ago

... don't have random keybindings triggering stuff.

As a long time Emacs user, I feel that this is slightly unfair. When I first started out, I found that my documents from Emacs were far more common than in other editors. It took me two years to realise that I was often bumping C-t where trying to hit C-r or C-y and silently transposing two characters. In over twenty years of Emacs usage, I have never once used C-t on purpose. I feel that this perfectly matches the "keybindings triggering random stuff" experience and it is fully there in vanilla Emacs.

With twenty years of experience, I have my own, esoteric init file that I would not recommend on any newbie. However, I personally feel that Emacs has succeeded despite its default keybindings.

chipotle_coyote2• 5 years ago

In over twenty years of Emacs usage, I have never once used C-t on purpose.

This is funny to me because, while I'm not an Emacs user, I'm a Mac user who's gotten used to the tiny subset of Emacs keybindings built into Cocoa text fields, and I use C-t fairly frequently! Apparently you do not make character transposition errors as often as I do.

donio2• 5 years ago

Yes, gradually building your own config is a much better approach on the long run. Start lean, learn the basics and add one thing at a time as you learn. Always have complete mastery of your .emacs and understand every line: why it is there, what exactly it does. Never blindly copy random stuff wholesale without understanding it.

sping• 5 years ago

I have to say I don't particularly see the wisdom of this (common) view.

It's acceptable to people to use the standard Elisp, and Emacs itself, without digesting that code, but somehow using a canned config is bad. I find the choice of where to draw the dividing line somewhat arbitrary.

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

Doom Emacs is excellent. I believe you were negatively impressed by the default install, but you can install it without any packages you don't wan't, or any package at all. You can even remove Evil altogether.

You can also easily remove anything afterwards.

Doom is essential for my sanity, and extremely flexible. I can do everything I want, just like on a barebones install. But I do it in a way that is way simpler, more practical, and performant. I'd use Doom even without any of its modules, just for the macros, the speed, and the sane configuration layout.

I tried the build your own route for 2 years, ended up with a huge messy init impossible to maintain. Doom removes a lot of complexity and provides extremely useful macros. The guy really knows what he's doing, and the optimizations that he uses are impressive.

mcbuilder• 5 years ago

If you have spent years writing your own config, you appreciate all the things doom brings to the table. I know I'd never end up writing such a good system from the ground up.

taeric• 5 years ago

I do disable those things. But mostly out of aesthetics. That and I am easily distracted. I remember used to trying to find how to accommodate all items in the menu bar into my use.

Completely agree with this article, though. Happy with my purchase of this book a while back.

thom3• 5 years ago

I dunno, everything the menu does can be recreated in the minibuffer (and you have things like apropos if you're really lost). Personally I like to reclaim as much space as possible, so I turn off modelines too (I have a bit of status info written into the minibuffer, but I'd kill that too if you could).

jmclnx• 5 years ago

Correct, I did not know about 'C-h k', very nice !

very nice write up

dark-star• 5 years ago

"But just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice."

I stopped reading after this. If you want to look like you're objective, don't use pizza as an argument

oblio2• 5 years ago

It's just a joke.

jrumbut• 5 years ago

This is advice for how to give text editor configuration advice. The pizza comparison is apt because it's a matter of taste.

If the author tried to look objective it would be a false front.

rbanffy• 5 years ago

I have been turning off the menu bar for quite some time because I get distracted easily and any content that's not necessary just gets in the way.

That said, you can always call it up as a pop-up menu.

forgetfulness• 5 years ago

The menu bar is pretty good for discovery, you'll have to rely more on naming convention and documentation without it.

The toolbar is pretty fungible though, few modes do anything with it and the core functionality you get from the standard chords you find in the tutorial, little bang for the pixels.

aidenn02• 5 years ago

For those picking up emacs for lisp development, I'll add another piece of terrible advice: enabling paredit mode.

I think these all have a similar theme to them "I am more productive now since I have turned them on, so I wish I had switched sooner" but they ignore the fact that each of those things adds friction to learning the basics, and at some point people will just nope-out.

felideon• 5 years ago

Yes, good point. Learn how to balance parens with rainbow delimiters (if anything) and, once you you're comfortable with sexps, give paredit a try.

crumbits• 5 years ago

menu bar

I never leave it enabled any more. When I was a beginner it was helpful but as time goes on you learn more of the system and better ways of finding commands.

One thing I suggest is building emacs without dbus and using only Athena widgets. Both contribute to overall emacs stability.

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