Emacs power user screencast

by alecst • 17 years ago

50 26 17 years ago

mikeyur• 17 years ago

I'm not hardcore enough to use emacs, I'm wimpy and love my TextMate gui. Cool little screencast though to show off some of the aspects of emacs.

mcav• 17 years ago

I'm not either, yet -- but I'm tryin'. (Hey, Emacs still sits on my dock, and that's a start...)

jderick• 17 years ago

Sorry, why would I use a mouse? It's emacs.

yason2• 17 years ago

Exactly. I basically like the concept of speedbar but it's just pretty unidiomatic for Emacs in its inefficiency with usage both with a mouse or the keyboard (via C-x 5 o).

It's zillion times more effective to navigate using find-file or just by jumping to an existing buffer.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

It's zillion times more effective to navigate using find-file or just by jumping to an existing buffer.

Jumping to an existing buffer is fast.

For finding files, I like eproject:

http://github.com/jrockway/eproject/tree/master

For finding tags, I obviously prefer tags table lookups, with imenu for navigating inside files.

bprater• 17 years ago

If you aren't familiar with Emacs, being able to use a mouse can be a good stop-gap until you are familiar!

rman666• 17 years ago

Maybe he used it so those watching the screen cast could follow along a little better/easier? Duh? I think it's pretty obvious he could be keyboard only if he wanted to (i.e., emacs supports and he clearly has the ability).

lallysingh• 17 years ago

Mice + Text Editors = Better editing.

You can move to a specific position easier & faster in a mouse. When you're not in raw typing mode, you're mostly browsing and editing. Mice are useful for that, and the time lost in hopping over to the mouse from the keyboard is well worth it.

I can move a mouse very quickly, and I can be very accurate about it. Text cursors are harder to predict, and they jump around (as the page scrolls), making them harder to track than the mouse.

What really sold me on the idea was a good amount of time using a macintosh. A properly mouse-friendly environment makes you appreciate how useful the mouse can be.

Even back on a decent unix, I still love my select and middle-click to paste. Scroll wheels are also pretty wonderful.

zzzmarcus• 17 years ago

Obviously with the right amount of time and patience you can configure Emacs well enough to be an extremely powerful editor. This screencast seems a little misleading though because it makes it look like like you get all that functionality 'out of the box.'

In my experience it took me at least a couple weeks of tinkering to get Emacs working well enough to replace most of the features I constantly use in TextMate.

elq2• 17 years ago

I've spent about 90 hours tweaking my emacs config to get it working exactly how I like... over the past 10 years - it is now soo well tuned to how I work I could not even begin to imagine using another editor.

I can understand how Emacs might not be right for others, but it is perfect for me.

yason2• 17 years ago

Emacs is like programming. Spend a good ten years on it and you somehow can't fathom how you could solve (your textual) problems in any other way. Anything less and you just keep comparing it to other text editors which makes as much sense as comparing practicing programming to practicing medicine or law (or some other high-profile occupation) as all of them require lots of reading and having lots of knowledge.

iamwil• 17 years ago

Though I favored emacs over vi in college, it was my friend Ian was the one that turned me on to emacs. He's the one that said to me, "emacs isn't just a text editor, it's a way of life." For lent, he gave up emacs.

Anyway, I was hoping to see other things, but they were mostly clicky plugins, rather than little hidden ways to use emacs. What I found to be pretty powerful with emacs are stuff like using search to navigate, instead of the arrows, or replacing a regex across multiple files (albeit it's a long procedure). And even more so, you can edit these behaviors with eLisp if it's not to your liking. However, I wish there was a distribution package for elisp modules, rather than just cutting and pasting them off the web.

elq2• 17 years ago

> I wish there was a distribution package for elisp modules, rather than just cutting and pasting them off the web.

http://tromey.com/elpa/

parbo• 17 years ago

Yes! M-x install-module http://foo.com/bar would totally rock.

jaaron• 17 years ago

You mean like elpa? http://tromey.com/elpa/

gne1963• 17 years ago

I could never give up emacs for lent... diet pepsi, coffee, and vi, maybe, but never emacs.

joshuaxls• 17 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm a vim guy. When I get awe-struck comments from those looking over my shoulder, it's not about any plugins or IDE-like functionality, it's about how fast I'm editing text. Let's remind ourselves, that's the core function of a text editor: to help you edit text, as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.

I was hoping to see more of that angle in this video, but instead I just saw how emacs can be an IDE. I'd be very interested to just see a couple of classes (or any substantial chunk of code) written by an emacs "power user" without the narration and tutorial.

geocar• 17 years ago

You're not going to see it.

Emacs users don't type or edit text faster than vi-users, they type and edit less text.

Its a hard thing to convince someone that Emacs is a better editor, when it's clearly and obviously worse at editing text.

viper-mode helps emacs be a better text-editor, but it also demonstrates that it is difficult to access that functionality that helps you type less and access the functionality that helps you type faster at the same time- it might not even sure it's possible.

Disclaimer: I wrote a vi-clone in Javascript, and for editing text, I use vi.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

I'd be very interested to just see a couple of classes (or any substantial chunk of code) written by an emacs "power user" without the narration and tutorial.

I've tried to do this, but it ends up being not very interesting. There is too much breadth; you really need to be familiar with all of emacs' features to be able to use them at the right time. For any given editing task, there are probably only a few features that you need. Learning the rest will save you time, but you only need the features occasionally. This means that you have to read the manual -- a screencast isn't going to help you. Practice is also essential. You need to burn the commands into your muscle memory, otherwise you aren't going to be very fast.

Emacs is like a musical instrument. You have to practice, and you're not going to become a virtuoso overnight.

rudle• 17 years ago

As a vim user, I have to ask - is that it? I didn't see much stuff there that I don't already have in vim.

I'm not trying to troll, I just am wondering what the big deal is.

Goladus• 17 years ago

The way I use emacs looks nothing like that. But the thing about emacs is that almost nobody uses it the same way. That's the point of being highly customizable.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

Yes, one video details the interaction between each of emacs' 3 million lines of code.

Hexstream• 17 years ago

I'd like to see a screencast of an emacs pro tackling a medium-sized project that doesn't require too much thinking in record-time by expert use of a wide number of advanced time-saving features.

And then make another version of the video that highlights, in slow-motion and with a voiceover that explains what the heck is going on, those features as used in the original video.

I'm always a bit disappointed by screencasts slowly explaining how much faster you can work with the advanced features. Show, don't tell.

jrockway4• 17 years ago

Yeah, but most people that are good with emacs are good programmers, and good programming rarely involves a ton of rapid-fire text editing. (Typing new pieces of text, yes. But randomly jumping around files and editing small pieces of text? That's pretty uncommon.)

Anyway, people worry too much about this. Read the manual and practice the commands "in real life" (even if it means a trip to the manual to refresh your memory), and you'll quickly become able to edit effectively enough to not worry about editing mechanics anymore. It also helps to be a good typist, but that's not very fun to talk about.

Practice makes perfect.

zandorg• 17 years ago

I loved the little CPU noises coming through as interference on his soundcard mic (noting that it's probably a motherboard sound 'card').

avinashv• 17 years ago

Much like some of the other Vim users who've commented here, all I can say is, "So what?" I don't know if I'd call this "power user". Unless I'm mistaken (going on replicating this functionality in Vim), any beginner with a bit of determination and a browser can download and configure plugins to resemble this somewhat.

Now, it's highly possible that this guy is very proficient at using Emacs, but I'd have preferred a screen cast on the _editing_ features of Emacs over replicating TextMate. For example, I would love to see someone re-do some of the bigger coding screen casts (such as the Ruby on Rails blog engine one) using Emacs. It has the potential to not be useful--I know my Vim configuration is different from the standard and that there are a wide variety of ways to do things, but it might be enlightening to someone like me.

I have to say, aesthetics make a big difference to me. I liked the icons in the project pane (though, with a mouse? Really?) and all, but that environment was far too spartan--uhh, ugly--for me. I use MacVim, and with a bit of color scheme tweaking, a nice font etc. etc. I have a pleasing environment to work in. Note I know you can do the same in Emacs, but the point was MacVim--it's the pretty scroll bars, the OS X anti-aliasing and all that makes it nice. I can't use Vim in a terminal for long periods of time. Obviously, this is definitely just me.

Emacs power user screencast

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