Emacs, naked

by bzg • 13 years ago

294 193 13 years ago

Configure GNU Emacs (24.3 or above) to avoid distraction.

terhechte10• 13 years ago

Coming from Vim, when I switched to Emacs, I found the starting aesthetic experience more than lacking (or, ugly). It took me some time (and a helpful HN discussion) until I found good themes and good plugins to make it look aesthetically pleasing (to my eyes, at least, after all people's tastes differ).

If somebody is looking for a nice Emacs theme and feels that the OP is a bit too minimal, have a look at my Emacs conf (I know, shameless plug) here [1]

There's also a screenshot [2]

This configuration is kinda optimized for Emacs+Evil to be more like Vim, so you may just want to have a look at the theme / plugins.

[1] https://github.com/terhechte/emacs.d [2] https://raw2.github.com/terhechte/emacs.d/master/screenshot....

bzg4• 13 years ago

Oh, nice mode-line! I can't figure out how to get the theme from your repo, any hint?

jbeja2• 13 years ago

I believe that is emacs powerline: https://github.com/jonathanchu/emacs-powerline

terhechte10• 13 years ago

Hey, I'm using the Soothe theme, with local modifications: https://github.com/terhechte/emacs.d/tree/master/elpa/soothe...

The original can be found here: https://github.com/emacsfodder/emacs-soothe-theme

Another nice theme is Cyberpunk: https://github.com/n3mo/cyberpunk-theme.el

As jbeja answered, I'm using powerline with the default theme for the status bar: (require 'powerline) (powerline-default-theme)

anuragramdasan• 13 years ago

What line numbering plugin is this? Looks very similar to vim numbers. I've been trying to find something like that for emacs for a while now. All I found wasLinum mode, which clutters the UI and doesnt give relative line numbering.

terhechte10• 13 years ago

Hey, I'm using relative-number: https://github.com/terhechte/emacs.d/blob/master/plugins/rel...

It mostly works as well as in Vim, except if you're using Code folding, which confuses it a bit.

fafner7• 13 years ago

Why do you want line numbers next to your code at all? Aren't they just visual clutter? The current line number is shown in the mode-line anyway.

mercurial2• 13 years ago

I try out emacs every few years. Every time, I get discouraged whenever I attempt to do something simple (change the theme, etc) by the amount of configuration necessary. I may try your repo, since it seems to have a lot of stuff already configured.

The other thing is that Emacs is really slow to start as soon as you have a few plugins, compared to vim.

terhechte10• 13 years ago

If you try my repo, have a look at the custom keys that I defined, that helps things a lot.

Also, the one great feature about Emacs is MX (which I bound to CMD-. This opens the minibuffer where you can execute arbitrary EmacsLisp functions. Everything you do in Emacs (even arrow up, left or right) is bound to an Emacs function. So if you start out, and you want to do something, but you don't know the shortcut, just do CMD-. and start typing. The naming is really good. Say you want to deactivate line truncation. You go into MX and type "truncate" and among the results will be "toggle-truncate-lines" you go there, hit enter, and you're done. This is a bit more difficult in stock Emacs, as it has no wildcard search for MX but I'm using the Helm plugin, which offers this feature and makes it really really easy to find functions. I hardly ever use all these Emacs shortcuts like C-c C-e ... I just hit MX and type what I need to do.

Sadly, startup is still really slow for my configuration, which is why I have a Vim config with similar keys for quick Terminal usage. I start Emacs in the morning and keep it open all day. When I need to quickly fix something in the Terminal, I use Vim.

pivo2• 13 years ago

It's a lot better, and easier, in Emacs 24.3.x. Just run

   M-x customize-theme

And pick from a list of themes. New themes are installed via the new, built-in package manager:

   M-x package-list-packages

aaronem19• 13 years ago

When, a few years ago, I really started to get serious about using Emacs, I spent three days or so going through the customization options for pretty much everything, or at least everything I could figure out at that time, and adjusting it to taste. Since then, I haven't had to touch it except for minor tweaks. Emacs is what they used to call "a moby frob"; some initial investment is required, and it took me three or four tries before I had the perseverance to stick with it, but the payoff has been handsome indeed.

As for slow starting, the best way to solve that is by running an Emacs server, and creating and killing client frames at need. You only pay the startup cost once that way, and all your editor instances share history, buffers, and everything else, which is sometimes handy, and doesn't get in your way otherwise.

saulrh• 13 years ago

Slow emacs startup isn't a problem thanks to the new emacs-server stuff. Running emacs with the "--daemon" flag will cause it to do initialization, fork into the background, and become persistent; now edit files using commands like "emacsclient $filename". Eamcsclient will connect to the daemonized emacs server and have it open $filename, bringing it forward either in an existing frame or (using the "-nw" or "-nc" flags) creating a convenient new frame to edit with. Not only does this give you the ability to get into emacs without going through init, the server will maintain all of your editing in the same process so you don't have to manage editor instances.

dilap5• 13 years ago

The slow emacs startup problem can be mitigated by lazily loading custom modes as much as possible. The two big things to use here are autoload (instead of require) and eval-after-load.

On my machine, a vanilla emacs startup is ~70ms, and one with my fully-loaded .emacs is ~240ms. Still not as fast as I would like, but not terrible. (You can benchmark emacs startup from the command line with "time emacs --eval '(save-buffers-kill-emacs)'").

(Of course, even a 70ms startup for vanilla emacs is arguably pretty bad -- it's way slower than the ideal of "instant"; I just checked and vanilla vim is something like 8ms, for example, which is just-shy of imperceptible.)

creese2• 13 years ago

Run emacs as a daemon. Then in a terminal type 'emacsclient -t'.

Instant on.

astrobe_• 13 years ago

I switch between Vim and Emacs depending on mood. It's a very hard deal: Emacs is a plateform that can do a lot of things besides editing, but it requires a lot of configuration fiddling, and is a bit too slow on the old machine on which I'm using it (must be a single core Pentium with Mandriva 9). Vim has a lot of things right off the box and is fast, but you have to use other programs to have a comfortable environment (mc, screen, ...).

Anyway. The trick with Emacs is to customize incrementally. Also, use customize-option as much as possible instead of editing your .emacs; too often people make you insert lines in your .emacs when already customization exists. Also, use the package manager (list-packages) that Emacs acquired recently instead of fetching from emacswiki or a github repo. It compiles automatically stuff, so it might help with startup times.

onedognight• 13 years ago

The other thing is that Emacs is really slow to start as soon as you have a few plugins, compared to vim.

This just mean you are "doing it wrong". Your .emacs file should not be loading anything, but instead setting things to be loaded when needed using autoload, eval-after-load and auto-mode-alist.

dilap5• 13 years ago

Very interesting thing you've got going there, and I love the visual aesthetic. Two quick tips that you probably already know, but just in case it's useful to you or someone else:

* Emacs can wrap lines at word boundaries, while intelligently preserving/extending indentation (something like this: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8581161)

* If you're using emacs on the mac, it's worth taking a look at the railwaycat fork ("brew install emacs-mac"). Some improvements over vanilla emacs: Emoji (and other fun unicode) display works, fullscreen and maximize work better, scrolling with the trackpad works in a reasonable way.

abrowne• 13 years ago

I think you need to "brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport" first to install that.

terhechte10• 13 years ago

Thanks for these tips, I'm already using the railwaycat fork, and it is really good. I compiled it myself though, didn't know that I can get it via brew now. That is fantastic, as I'm still on 24.3.1 :)

Also, I didn't know about the wrap-while-keeping indentation, that's something I always wanted. Will try it out later. Thanks!

__david__6• 13 years ago

Also, note that Emacs 24.4 (currently unreleased) will have improved full screen support and better color support (same effect as "brew install emacs --srgb"). I've been using the Emacs head (from a month ago) and it's been very stable for me.

For sane trackpad scrolling in vanilla Emacs I use this:

    '(mouse-wheel-scroll-amount (quote (0.01)))

aaronem19• 13 years ago

Seconding the recommendation for the Railwaycat fork, which is excellent. I just wonder about how quickly it'll be integrated into the 24.4 codebase, once that version drops; I'm really looking forward to file change notification support, for example so that Emacs can autorevert my Dropbox-synchronized Org files when it sees that they've been synced.

_telemachus• 13 years ago

Thanks for the tip about railwaycat's fork. Note though that before you can run:

    brew install emacs-mac

you first need to run this:

    brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport

Otherwise, `brew` won't be aware of that version. (Whoops. Noticed just now that someone said this earlier as well. Since the comments are all spread out, I'm leaving mine in case it helps someone see the issue faster.)

antonios• 13 years ago

Very nice. Which font is this?

quesebifurcan• 13 years ago

I think he's using PragmataPro. If not, it's very similar. Beautiful font, one of my favorites.

terhechte10• 13 years ago

It is M+ http://mplus-fonts.sourceforge.jp/

Can't recommend it enough. Beautiful monospaced font for terminal and editor. And the light version works great on my 11" Macbook Air as it consumes less pixels and therefore allows more code to be visible.

blueblob2• 13 years ago

Not trying to be a douche, but trying to get an honest answer: if you are coming from Vim, using Evil-Vim to get Vim-like commands why use Emacs in the first place? What features do you use/did you want that made you switch?

terhechte10• 13 years ago

Primarily I wanted to write my own extensions in an integrated language with a good, honed, text api. Vimscript is really not so nice, and Emacs has a fantastic text / editor API that's a pleasure to work with.

Other features that were important to me were - Org Mode (I'm using it for all documentation now)

- Usability: As described below, every function in the editor can be accessed with a quick command (with pattern matching to find the correct one) vs. knowledge of arcane commands in vim. Also, most modes offer convenient access to all their features in the menu bar. So when I'm using a Clojure mode, and I can't currently remember the correct command / keystroke for changing the current Repl namespace to my current file, I click the menubar and there it is. All neatly listed. Makes it a lot easier.

- I like the Emacs way of having all in one window. I have one big fullscreen window with multiple buffers, and in there I have a terminal, a repl, multiple code windows, html documentation. So I never have to leave that mode. Keeps me productive. That is also kinda possible with tmux and Vim, but then I always had overlapping keyboard shortcuts for switching windows. All in all Emacs works better for me here.

- Lots of small things, in general Emacs feels like a much more solid editor, with more configuration options to fit it to my liking.

Crito• 13 years ago

I haven't made the switch yet, mostly because I am not enamored with elisp (when the hell is that guile-emacs thing going to properly get off the ground? Probably never...), but the basic design of emacs (C core, everything else built up around it with a lisp) appeals to me greatly.

If I ever do make the switch, I'll definitely still be using Evil mode though. I can't drop vi-editing, and don't want to anyway.

zem• 13 years ago

emacs's autoindentation for several languages (e.g. haskell) is a lot better than vim's. that all by itself is a compelling reason to use evil for those languages.

jasonm232• 12 years ago

I am super glad to see Soothe being used / well loved. Thanks for using it.

sdegutis7• 13 years ago

I switched to Emacs a year and a half ago when I started using Clojure, and customized it heavily for the first few months. But I avoid customizing it any more. I'm never truly satisfied with what I end up with, and I hit too many frustrating walls trying to make it just right.

One major problem for me is the plugin ecosystem. There's Melpa which is easy to use and has the most up-to-date packages, but they're built off of HEAD which makes them extremely brittle. Many plugin authors decry Melpa and say that if you installed their package from it, then you're on your own. There's also Marmalade but I haven't found it to have nearly the same scope of packages.

bzg4• 13 years ago

Actually, I'm also on the "less configuration, less trouble" side. That's why I like some minor mode to let me get rid of what I don't want to see, sometimes.

pivo2• 13 years ago

Agree with the less is more idea when it comes to configuration. An additional benefit to this is that it's more comfortable to use vanilla emacs when you need to work on hosts you don't typically use.

FraaJad2• 13 years ago

I like this approach to package mgmt. https://github.com/overtone/emacs-live

Even though it is "manual", i prefer stability of my programming environment over the ability to install packages "quickly".

NigelTufnel• 13 years ago

I walked almost the same path.

For the first couple of months I was customizing the hell out of Emacs. Then the things started falling apart and I've switched to the 20-line long .emacs and empty .emacs.d (well, almost empty if you don't count key-chord/ace-jump-mode combo which makes file navigation a mindreading experience)

kirubakaran• 13 years ago

Thanks for mentioning ace-jump-mode. I thought that I had a pretty extensive Emacs setup, but it is now much better with ace-jump-mode.

dotemacs2• 13 years ago

Are you sure that MELPA has issues? I've been running with it since it started and one thing that I can say about it is that its been a joy to use. Hats off to milkypostman & sanityinc for maintaining it.

If you do have an issue, I suggest you open it on MELPA's GitHub issue page and I'm pretty confident that you'll get a quick response.

As for tweaking Emacs' config, yea, I have to admit, I've spent time on it too and things can always improve.

sdegutis7• 13 years ago

The issue Melpa has is that it builds from HEAD, whereas many package authors treat HEAD as a working state that should not be used directly. Melpa doesn't (or didn't last time I checked) have support for building off tags or non-master branches, which would solve this. And if I remember correctly, when I raised this issue, he disagreed on some philosophical grounds. So it's an inherent problem in Melpa.

kinleyd2• 13 years ago

-1, 1 and t have worked for me in setting most modes except that blasted scroll-bar-mode, which it turns out calls for a 0 - what the heck! Thanks for a super post.

fafner7• 13 years ago

(scroll-bar-mode -1) and M-- 1 M-x scroll-bar-mode RET both work for me.

kinleyd2• 13 years ago

Yeah, when 0 also didn't work, I took another look at it. Turns out I needed to call (add-hook 'server-visit-hook 'my-custom-function) with the call to scroll-bar-mode inside my custom function, because I'm working off an emacsclient. Now I have my choice of -1, 0, nil, etc. Finally sorted out. :)

swah4• 13 years ago

Ì wonder if some Emacs people intend to migrate to LightTable in a few years?

agumonkey3• 13 years ago

I'd bet on a clang/gcc evolution, emacs has made adaptation/absorption a native specialty, LT will probably give it a push.

bzg4• 13 years ago

Emacs loves diversity. As a dinner.

username2232• 13 years ago

I wonder what the fad-editor in LightTable's place will be called in a few years?

willismichael• 13 years ago

What was it a few years ago? I'm going to guess that whatever the answer is, it didn't have anywhere near the extension capability of either Emacs or LightTable.

squidsoup• 13 years ago

That's pretty uncharitable to LightTable which is doing a number of things differently. Inline evaluation, and great support for ClojureScript with a connected repl to name a few.

pavelludiq• 13 years ago

I'll certainly give lighttable.el a try when somebody decides to write it :)

taeric• 13 years ago

I am curious what the upside of doing so would be.

swah4• 13 years ago

I'd like to see graphics inline, for example. Another one: in Emacs, to display inline docs, you either use the modeline, or a buffer, or a tooltip. It could be nicer... The amount of hackyness needed for adding something like a Markdown preview bothers me..

To me, LT could be Emacs with better rendering.

I really enjoyed learning Emacs, its a great design, like an open-world game. I want more apps to capture that.

fafner7• 13 years ago

https://github.com/Fuco1/litable

dilap5• 13 years ago

I thought it was a fair question. You're being downvoted by overly-sensitive emacs junkies :)

I know I'm keeping an eye on lighttable (I'm an emacs users since forevs) -- it's definitely the only modern editor that seems geared to possibly being a match for emacs in the flexibility and customizability departments.

But of course, historically, emacs just incorporates whatever's interesting in other editors and continues on, more powerful than ever.

It's the borg of editors.

npsimons3• 13 years ago

Much like Linux is "the last OS": http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=101317&cid=8633695

creese2• 13 years ago

I like the concept of treating the smallest unit as a function. If only the emacs mode wasn't so light weight!

npsimons3• 13 years ago

Speaking as an "Emacs [person]", no.

sdegutis7• 13 years ago

I love the concept of LightTable, basically a new Emacs with a redesigned architecture and plugin system.

I don't love that it's written inside a WebView. I don't love that the best cross-platform graphics library we have is the mess we call HTML+CSS+JS. I don't love that I have to compile Clojure to JavaScript and run it inside a WebView in order to do anything to customize it.

On the other hand, I love the simplicity of the UI of emacs. But I don't love how it's decidedly focused on text-only and its GUI is a second-class citizen. (Try scrolling per-pixel rather than per-line, and consider that tabs can only be implemented as a complete hack based on the ruler area.)

I love that Emacs Lisp compiles to bytecode and is interpreted natively. I love the simplicity of the language and its implementation and how it's integrated with Emacs. But I don't love the language itself.

dilap5• 13 years ago

If you're on a mac, the railwaycat port of emacs has pixel scrolling with the trackpad/mouse out-of-the-box. It's not as crystal smooth as you'd hope for, but it's decent.

http://snag.gy/g8NIF.jpg

swah4• 13 years ago

I'm 100% with you. Feels dirty to write Clojure that becomes Javascript, I rather be writing Lua or Scheme or Python. But LT already exists, and the imaginary editor we want doesn't.

klibertp7• 13 years ago

I don't "plan" to, but I hope for it to be possible. In a couple of years, yes.

LightTable shows great promise as an editor and it's design makes it well suited to being an environment in the future.

I'm just worried that before LT gets to become what I want it to Emacs will already have what is attractive in LT. For me it's ClojureScript and much more flexible UI. If Emacs gets Guile as it's scripting language (and I think: Scheme > Clojure > Elisp) and it's UI somewhat reworked (and threads, and easy bindings to compiled code - all of which is being worked on or at least seriously considered), the decision to migrate to LT will get much harder.

Anyway, LT is the only possible choice for me other than Emacs. There is no other editor which could replace Emacs for my use cases and I don't see new ones emerging.

As a side note: I have some hope for editor embedded in Pharo. It got much better this year and continues to evolve, and being a part of Smalltalk image it is very easily hackable. Having strong editor with things like Moose/Roassal/Glamour natively integrated would be a huge win, but that's probably something I will need to do myself :)

MarcusDenker• 13 years ago

If you are interested in helping with the Editor and improving text support in general... the first step is to help with the new text model. If you are interested, contact us. It would be nice to have that ready for Pharo4 :-)

ams61102• 13 years ago

nice stuff. My .emacs keeps the mode line, which I like, but turns off the scrollbars and menu bars, and sets a wide fringe (though not quite as wide as shown). I don't like text jammed right up to the edge of the window.

Anyone know how to achieve a "fringe" on the top and bottom? And also how to do it in xterm windows?

ams61102• 13 years ago

Just discovered, you can create a "fringe" in xterm by the -b option:

  -b number
      This option specifies the size of the inner border (the
      distance between the outer edge of the characters and the
      window border) in pixels.  That is the vt100 internalBorder
      resource.  The default is ``2''.

shocks2• 13 years ago

Nice!

For vim I like to use

    " remove the toolbar
    set guioptions-=T

    " remove scrollbars
    set guioptions-=L
    set guioptions-=r

euoia• 13 years ago

And in macvim:

  if has("gui_macvim")
    autocmd GUIEnter * set fullscreen
  endif

shocks2• 13 years ago

Ohh! I've been using Cmd-Ctrl-f like a loser all this time!

adorton• 13 years ago

That fringe is neat. Anybody know if Vim supports something like that? I've never been able to make complete sense of vim's line length options. They never seem to work quite "right".

girvo• 13 years ago

There are a number of hacks to do it as plugins, but I can never get them to play nice with other plugins :(

TeMPOraL4• 13 years ago

(shameless plug)

Don't you want a nice Nyan Cat in that modeline in the sky? ;).

http://nyan-mode.buildsomethingamazing.com/

aaronem19• 13 years ago

(shameless plug)

And don't you want the current weather to go alongside your Nyan, thanks to an Emacs minor mode inspired by a Hacker News comment?

https://github.com/aaron-em/weatherline-mode.el

TeMPOraL4• 13 years ago

Nyan Cat endorses this plugin!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/216352/weather.png

sjm• 13 years ago

Any chance of getting this added to MELPA? :)

stevenrace• 13 years ago

Even though 'Nyan Cat' breaks things other plugins I'd like to use (like Powerline.el) - I still use it anyway.

It's silly and I'm glad you made it.

TeMPOraL4• 13 years ago

Thank you! :).

Could you tell me (or open an issue on Github) how it breaks other plugins?

Meh, I have lots of changes to add, but I keep procrastinating here on HN instead...

throwaway_yy2Di2• 13 years ago

If you reflect for a moment, obviously a minority of HN will be made alienated and uncomfortable by this sexualized humor. Do you really want this?

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

Well another minority might view strip teases as an act of empowerment and self expression, and be made alienated and uncomfortable by your sex-negative viewpoint. How would you balance the interests of these two minorities?

dTal• 13 years ago

Evidently, by changing the title.

Personally I thought "striptease" was a much richer metaphor for what the linked article showed - the removal of "dressing", piece by piece. But then I'm not a prude with a stick up my ass.

throwaway_yy2Di2• 13 years ago

Obviously the professional way! By inviting them to the center of the office to discuss frankly their viewpoints on sex until everyone quits from misery. I'd also scatter conservative religious pamphlets and dildos around the office to encourage everyone to participate.

Because obviously it would deprive a reader to explain how to remove GUI widgets from an emacs frame [window], without making a metaphor of the window as a naked female, and the widgets as clothing, and the process as a striptease. This is exactly how a mature team of mixed-sex professionals discuses emacs widgets. An HN thread on removing emacs widgets without overt sexual analogies [0] would be a unnatural, stilted place full of repressed sad people.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983088

vezzy-fnord2• 13 years ago

Thank heavens, I was hanging by the edge of my seat waiting for someone to make the inevitable comment.

SimHacker4• 13 years ago

If THAT makes you uncomfortable, then obviously you haven't seen THIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo

SimHacker4• 13 years ago

It's the ASCII art social commentary about the cultures surrounding various popular programming languages that I hope people will find the most offensive about that video. Well worth pausing and zooming in when he mentions your pet programming language.

theorique• 13 years ago

It's a joke. For grown-up people with a sense of humor. This is the internet. If you don't like it, vote with your mouse and don't click on it.

annasaru• 13 years ago

I sleep with emacs regularly, yet I am seduced ...

FraaJad2• 13 years ago

swalpa uppinakayi haakappa.

gavinpc• 13 years ago

Wait, do you mean fall asleep on emacs?

Until I break the habit, thank God for undo.

phkn1• 13 years ago

Why go to all that trouble? There's always "emacs -nw" to get pretty minimal in an xterm...

__david__6• 13 years ago

You don't get as many color choices and you don't get as many key bindings.

"C-M-%" is pretty much impossible in the terminal. You have to do "M-x query-replace-regexp", or make some other custom binding.

claudius• 13 years ago

You can hit Esc before the combination to fill in for M and then it is just C-S-5 for me, which is certainly doable?

vsbuffalo• 13 years ago

As a long time emacs user (and lover) I wish RMS and other emacs developers would take his quote to heart more in emacs development. Emacs is shipped with too many things.

Emacs finally has a really nice package manager, so I'd love to see a version with minimal default packages. Do I really need java-mode if I never, ever will use Java? Calc when I have R? SMTP support? No, I need absolutely none of this.

bza• 13 years ago

The current policy (as enunciated by Stefan Monnier, who took over as maintainer from RMS a few years ago) is for new packages to be added to the package archive unless there's a very strong argument for their providing core functionality. (Packages that already ship with Emacs are unlikely to be removed from the core, though.)

technomancy3• 13 years ago

I've heard it's actually being considered to move org-mode and eshell into packages, provided the release process can be ammended to generate releases which include packages by default.

klibertp7• 13 years ago

Obligatory link: http://nullprogram.com/blog/2009/06/23/

I don't get why this is a problem - almost everything that comes with default Emacs installation is not loaded by default and so you don't even need to know it's there. Or you can just remove these modes altogether from your installation, no problem. On the other hand, if something made it to the Emacs core, it's probably more stable and easier integrated with other plugins. There are many plugins in the wild which do a great job by themselves, but fail miserably in the presence of other plugins enabled, and such plugins are not in Emacs (or I didn't see them yet).

fafner7• 13 years ago

So why does it bother you that there are modes which you don't use? They aren't loaded as default anyway.

brickcap2• 13 years ago

Here is a screenshot of my emacs.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7346/12104669276_154ae3d98f_o....

Scroll bars and menu turned off. Theme solarized and transparent background. I feel good when I am programming :)

fafner7• 13 years ago

A transparent background adds too much visual noise in my opinion. The same is true for line numbers.

brickcap2• 13 years ago

Line numbers can be handy to locate compiler errors. I removed it once but then it became a lot harder to locate where the program was causing problems or where the compiler errors occurred. I would like to remove them but I guess I am stuck with it ....

kabdib2• 13 years ago

I've found the latest revisions of Emacs to be incredibly ugly, and I have to turn off most of the crap (menus, etc.) to be comfortable.

Stock Emacs also seems to want to open up a minibuffer when I've told it "please just edit this set of files". It's also got some idea that I want to to suspend the shell I launched it from (er, no, not ever).

The argument I see on forums is: "Well, the right way to use Emacs is to just start it and then never leave, so you only have to get that stuff out of the way once."

So I spend 30 minutes figuring out the right elisp stuff to disable so I can get rid of the crapware.

Crapware in Emacs. What's next, AOL sponsorship splash screens?

SimHacker4• 13 years ago

UniPress Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs aka Soft Hoarder Emacs) had a VI emulation mode, that when you went :q, switched you back into a shell buffer that had its mode lines hidden, with all the keyboard bindings set so you couldn't tell you were in Emacs.

The only vi command I know is :q!

kabdib2• 13 years ago

Earlier this week I was using ed(1) to edit a conf file, because (as the parent says) I only know one vi command :-)

Karunamon2• 13 years ago

This is the same problem I've run into. I want to try living in Emacs, because there's pretty much a mode or package for everything, but a few of the basics don't work quite right to a point where that is usable yet. For instance, terminal emulation. There's terminal mode and eshell, but if you have even a mildly complicated PS1, all you get are control codes everywhere. Just strange, off-kilter behavior.

At this point, I'd be happy if I could just embed iTerm2 in a buffer and be done with it.

cag_ii• 13 years ago

Have you tried "M-x ansi-term" ?

alexhutcheson• 13 years ago

If you prefer a more vim-like workflow (i.e. jumping in and out of your editor from your shell), a good solution is to fire up emacs in daemon mode to run in the background, and then connect to it using emacsclient.

I automatically run

  emacsclient --daemon

when my OS boots up.

In my .zshrc and .bashrc files, I use the aliases

  alias e='emacsclient -t'
  alias vi='emacsclient -t'

to give me quick access to emacs from the shell.

I'm not sure if this addresses your problems entirely, but it does keep you from having to deal with all of the crap that loads on startup.

lispm• 13 years ago

Like Zmacs of the Lisp Machine. Mostly full screen, with a mini buffer and the status line at the bottom.

A lot of interaction then happens with a type-out buffer which comes down from the top and disappears when not needed.

nayefc• 13 years ago

If you use Emacs in the terminal, almost none of this applies as they are there by standard.

jbeja2• 13 years ago

For some who works with split windows, i don't like the idea to trim the space and hide the status-bar, but everything else is great.

yamaneko• 13 years ago

Rule 34, what have you done?

skywhopper• 13 years ago

It's very unfortunate that Emacs' default appearance is so terrible. I slogged through figuring most of this stuff out myself a few years ago.

mixedbit• 13 years ago

Are there usability reasons for a dark text on a light background being default in almost all editors?

technomancy3• 13 years ago

It depends on the lighting of the room you're in. In a well-lit room or outside (I love hacking outdoors) a light background will reduce eye strain, but when it's darker around it's less suitable. In any case, it's always easier to darken a light screen than to make a dark screen brighter given that you rarely see laptop screens brighter than 300 nits.

bitwize• 13 years ago

emacs -nw

It looks great when it combine it with amber-on-black Glass Tty in my xterm.

SimHacker4• 13 years ago

:TCTYP GLASS

npsimons3• 13 years ago

Many of these suggestions seem similar to Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs" which I can recommend if you are a new Emacs user (or even if you've just not seen it before):

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

I like getting rid of toolbars and such, but still like to keep the modeline and gutters.

lucidguppy• 13 years ago

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Myrmornis• 13 years ago

plug: I wrote a minor mode that's similar to this: https://github.com/dandavison/minimal (hi bzg!)

jaseemabid• 13 years ago

I have a moderately well written emacs.d, and I'd be happy to see a few use it/learn from it/correct me/give feedback.

Just startup emacs (24+) with the init.el and it will download dependencies from elpa. Will have to restart once afterwards to make the theme right.

Screeshot : http://i.imgur.com/2wmxir5.png Source: https://github.com/jaseemabid/emacs.d

drdaeman• 13 years ago

I hoped the article would be not about look-and-feel, but about building a stripped-down version of Emacs without obsolete parts like TRAMP or LEIM (because there are system-global subsystems for those nowadays), or maybe even trying to tear chunks from MULE.

In a perfectionist "must be a pure gem, no imperfections allowed" sense, ton of seemingly unnecessary libraries is the only thing that actually bothers me about The Editor.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

   ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --program-prefix=t --without-x11 --without-all \
   && make -s bootstrap && sudo make -s install

Emacs, naked

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