Emacs Rocks

by pmoriarty • 12 years ago

361 112 12 years ago

covi• 12 years ago

"Mind Exploded" basically does what vi/vim natively does in an inferior way... (2x key strokes!)

hk__22• 12 years ago

Vim is a modal editor, which means one keystroke doesn’t have the same meaning in one mode and in another. Emacs, on the other hand, doesn’t have all these modes, which is why you have to use modifier keys like ctrl/shift/alt to tell it what to do. That’s two paradigms, I’m not sure one is better than the other (note: I’m a Vim user).

aerique• 12 years ago

I switched from Vim to Emacs 15+ years ago because I did not like modal editing. Now I am using evil-mode in Emacs :-|

I'm not sure which one is better either.

pyre4• 12 years ago

I'm currently in the middle of attempting to gain proficiency in Emacs. I have to admit that it's difficult being someone that's spent 10+ years using Vim. I'm used to being able to just hit HJKL as a nervous habit, which doesn't go over so well in Emacs. I feel like there are many things in Vim that seem superior at first glance.

For example, if I want to do a regexp search/replace in Vim, I can do this from Normal Mode (which will replace throughout the whole file):

  :%s/regxp/replacement/g<enter>

Emacs (by default) has `replace-regexp`:

  M-x replace-regexp<enter>regexp<enter>replacement<enter>

My only problem? This only replaces from the cursor to the end of the file/buffer, so to replace over the whole file I would need to do:

  M-< M-x replace-regexp<enter>regexp<enter>replacement<enter>

It just seems that much more complicated, and now I've lost my place, so I'm at the top of the buffer rather than wherever I was in the file.

On the other hand, I find Emacs Lisp to be much easier to deal with then VimScript/VimL even as someone that has written my own Vim plugins, and created plugins to patch issues with files in the standard Vim dist (too lazy to submit a patch and wait for the next Vim release).

pmoriarty2• 12 years ago

Emacs does have modes (even if we set aside vi/vim emulation modes like evil, which is discussed elsewhere in this thread).

When you use certain major or minor modes in emacs, you get to use a whole new set of keystrokes, by which you're effectively doing modal editing.

One well-known example is magit.[1] When you activate magit, you can type all sorts of new one- or two-key commands. This is comparable to modes in vim.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Magit

rdtsc• 12 years ago

No because keystrokes happen at the same time. They are cords. Is typing 'A' 2x the keystrokes that typing 'a'. Sure but it doesn't matter, it happens at the same time -- 'Shift+a'.

So it is actaully Vim that takes 2x the time to do anything because you have multiple modes to track and switch from.

If you look at how stenographers type, they don't use modes, they use cords. They also minimize moving the hands away from the homerow (or equivalent of), and by "minimize" I think that movement might be 0 actually.

mostly_harmless• 12 years ago

But programming is not equivalent to stenography. Stenography works on a stream of input speech converting it into text, whereas programming is separated into the 2 modes of browsing&thinking and actually editing.

But I think it comes down to preference of whether you want the universality of commands, or conceptual separation of modes.

clarry3• 12 years ago

Counterpoint: many of the world's fastest typists avoid using modifier keys (and prefer caps lock over shift for typing uppercase letters), because using them requires careful timing: press the modifier after any other keys, press the key you need modified, lift the modifier. If you press the modifier too early or raise it too late, you screw up. In normal typing with no modifiers, it doesn't really matter when you lift the finger. You can afford to go much faster.

na85• 12 years ago

Emacs is pretty decent, yep. It remains my editor of choice. From what I've read over the years it's a paradigm of poor design under the hood however.

S4M• 12 years ago

It's pretty neat for a paradigm of poor design to last so long...

aarohmankad• 12 years ago

There's also http://emacs.sexy/

3ifbyw• 12 years ago

This feels strangely relevant: https://rms.sexy/

kristopolous• 12 years ago

https://rms.sexy/img/p1010270.jpg is a great one.

joliv• 12 years ago

Ooh, and http://vim.sexy!

lucb1e• 12 years ago

It died. This still works for me:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

smacktoward• 12 years ago

The "How to Learn Emacs" infographic that's linked a little ways down on that page includes a bit of attitude that drives me nuts:

NOTE: The Emacs tutorial has lots of weird terms: "Meta key", "frame", "buffer". This is because Emacs started a LONG time ago. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it with practice.

I have no idea why we make people jump through the hoops of learning archaic terminology, rather than evolving the software to use the terms people actually use today.

The Meta key is called the "Meta key" because that's the label that was on the keyboards of the Lisp machines in the MIT AI lab when Emacs was first developed. It's been thirty-plus years since that key was found on anything close to a significant fraction of keyboards in use in the world. There's no evidence that it's ever going to make a roaring comeback, either.

In other words, the Meta key, as a key, is dead and gone. It is literally as dead as disco! And yet the name persists, even though the way people have interacted with the "Meta key" for decades has been to press a key labeled something other than "Meta."

So: why hang on to a dead word? It serves no practical purpose, and does active harm by confusing people new to the editor.

But no, rather than update our terminology so it bears some resemblance to the world we actually live in, we hang on to it and tell newcomers that to learn Emacs they're just going to have to get used to pretending they're working on a space-cadet keyboard, because that's The Way It Has Always Been Done. Sigh.

gaius• 12 years ago

Because Escape Meta Alt Control Shift of course :-)

rcthompson• 12 years ago

Because the terminology is tied into the code in ways that would cause incompatibility with past code if changed. For example, emacs uses "frame" to mean what we now call a "window" and vice versa, and all the functions for interacting with windows and frames reflect this usage. If one just did a blanket search-and-replace swap of window and frame throughout the entire Emacs codebase and documentation, you would probably have a working Emacs, but all external packages and customization code that interact with windows or frames in any way would now be broken. You can't just update the documentation but leave the code as is, because then you have to start telling people ridiculous things like "switch windows with 'other-frame' and switch frames with 'other-window'", which isn't going to be any less confusing that what you started with. Elisp is a dynamic language, so you can't set up some sort of name-translation layer and use it for backward-compatibility with old code (that code could have a reference to an old name inside a quoted form, or even a string).

And the window/frame term swap is only one of many such examples. So basically, you could make your own Emacs that uses modern terminology and is completely incompatible with all existing 3rd-party elisp code, and then you could try to convince people to switch to it. But would having two equivalent but fundamentally incompatible Emacs/elisp variants be beneficial to Emacs as a whole? I doubt it.

ericssmith• 12 years ago

"why hang on to a dead word?"

Because it doesn't refer to a key. It's more of a identifier. It would be considerably more confusing to substitute whatever key you think it should be. Cmd? Alt? Opt? Esc?

When I see "M-" in the literature, I know what that means and translate it to the relevant keystrokes. For instance, M-x for me is actually "C-[ x". I've customized it that way. However, we have a lingua franca for communicating commands despite the personalizations.

tptacek5• 12 years ago

More people would be confused if you dispelled the term "meta" than are confused by its use today.

Similarly: there is no particularly good reason to use the term "lambda" for anonymous function constructs --- its use traces back to a typesetting quirk of Alonzo Church's. But here we are today, typing "lambda" like a bunch of chumps. :)

gumby• 12 years ago

The Meta key is called the "Meta key" because that's the label that was on the keyboards of the Lisp machines in the MIT AI lab when Emacs was first developed.

You have your cause and effect backwards. TL;DR: The Lispm's bucky keyboard simply extended existing practice.

Emacs predates the Lisp machines (CADRs in this case), and was originally written in TECO. Originally escape escape would open and close a minibuffer in which you could simply enter raw TECO. The Knight TV system had a custom keyboard used by us at MIT AI (and at Stanford AI for their own, slightly different TV system) had a Meta key which was used to invoke the minubuffer with a single keystroke (meta-altmode, mapped to escape when using ASCII) which later turned into direct "long" commands (M-X commands) and a wider keyspace.

In those days most programs on the PDP-6 & PDP-10 used six or seven bit bytes (though byte pointers could stride by 1-18 bit bytes) but the KTV was built on a PDP-11 which had 8 bit bytes, so meta was trivially available. FWIW the PDP-11 was memory mapped into the 36-bit PDP-6 through an arcane process I have thankfully forgotten.

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

Disco is most definitely not dead. In fact, if you were to look at relative usage as "dead", and compared Emacs and disco, I'd put money that Emacs is deader than disco.

Disco lives on as house music, which has influenced current pop music so much it's scary. Disco didn't die, it just went underground. Like every other cultural phenomenon, it has its subcultures and offshoots. I could play you music released in the last year that you would probably think was released in the late sixties.

spopejoy2• 12 years ago

Disco is not dead, it's called "House" now.

pyre4• 12 years ago

I personally like the emacs.sexy icon better than the current one (Emacs 24.4 on OSX). I actually liked the older icon better than the current one too.

GoofballJones2• 12 years ago

It's a great OS.

I mean, Emacs is an OS, right? They've certainly crammed enough things into it to make it an OS.

hollerith2• 12 years ago

I didn't downvote you, but I wish people would stop saying that.

There's no scheduler inside Emacs. In contrast, there is something very much like a scheduler inside Firefox and inside Google Chrome so that more than one browser tab can make computational progress "simultaneously".

What Emacs does have (at least when it is running on a Unix-like OS rather than on Windows) is a way to use the underlying OS to create and manage child processes. I.e., a way to add processes to the OS's scheduler. But a terminal-emulation app that lets the user create and manage multiple terminal-emulation windows or tabs has the same capability, and no one calls it an OS with an OS.

Moreover, the programs `screen` and `tmux` also have that capability, and no one call them OSes within OSes.

People who like Emacs sometimes treat it like a generalized interface to information. But the combination of a Unix shell and a terminal-emulation app ("the Unix commandline") is often treated the same way, and no one calls it an OS within an OS. Ditto a simple web browser like Lynx.

EDIT: replaced "OS" with "OS within an OS" to try to make my argument less vulnerable to jacquesm's reply.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

There was no scheduler in DOS either but it definitely was an OS.

GoofballJones2• 12 years ago

I wish people would stop saying that.

Really? I thought I had an original thought there for a second. So, someone, somewhere, agrees with me out there.

edwintorok• 12 years ago

"Well, the nice thing about an operating system is that you can write a text editor for it; that text editor is called evil-mode." https://bling.github.io/blog/2013/10/27/emacs-as-my-leader-v...

cosarara97• 12 years ago

Maybe if there was a way to use it without modifier keys. Even using shift for caps is painful for me.

3rd3• 12 years ago

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/StickyModifiers

jqgatsby• 12 years ago

On a kinesis keyboard all the emacs modifier keys are by your thumbs. It makes emacs so much more awesome

bostonvaulter2• 12 years ago

There's also optional foot petals.

clarry3• 12 years ago

It's a shame the modifiers (shift included) like to get stuck on the Kinesis. Expensive pile of crap...

If I had the money, I'd try out the Maltron 3D keyboard. I haven't heard about such problems with it. It also comes with a numpad in the middle, which I kinda miss in the Kinesis. It would be great for nethack, and something else.

blue12• 12 years ago

in OS X system preferences you can set sticky modifiers. I used it for a while with emacs, but finally abandoned it because, while easy on fingers, it tends to cause strange things if you start typing a combination and halfway you change your mind (you can just release a modifier key usually, but if you just typed it there is nothing you can do to undo it, except C-G).

hollerith2• 12 years ago

When you wrote that, did you know that if the sticky-keys setting is set and you accidentally hit a modifier key, then you can undo that by hitting the key 2 more times?

(I've been using OS X's sticky-keys setting with Emacs for years, BTW.)

pmoriarty2• 12 years ago

There's evil-mode,[1][2] which is a fantastic vim-emulation mode for emacs. Using it, you'll get all the modal editing you're used to in vim.

One user's transition from vim to emacs+evil was recently discussed here.[3][4]

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

[2] https://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home

[3] http://juanjoalvarez.net.nyud.net/es/detail/2014/sep/19/vim-...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8581530

ostrichpepper2• 12 years ago

Evil-mode, god-mode and key-chord are a few that address the modifier issue.

Re-mapping caps lock to ctrl is also immensely helpful.

jasonm232• 12 years ago

M-u - uppercase current string starting at point

M-l - lowercase current string starting at point

M-c - capitalize from current point to next word delimiter

noobermin• 12 years ago

I've been using emacs for years and I didn't know a few of these tricks!

I've been meaning to dig deeper, and things like this site are a great way to whet my appetite.

alttab• 12 years ago

I'll leave this comment here for those of us who still prefer vi. :)

rayshan• 12 years ago

Nice! Is there something similar for vim? For newbies looking to get into one, it'll be nice to see a comparison.

Walkman• 12 years ago

There is very high quality series: http://vimcasts.org/

valvar• 12 years ago

There's also http://vim-adventures.com/. Costs a bit, unfortunately, but it's an amazing way to learn vim.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

Costs too much, I think, in that I think they're probably losing too much business. I know that I clicked the button happy to pay $10, they probably could have squeezed $20 out of me, I balked at the "$50/yr".

I think it might very well be worth paying that to someone just learning vim. I'm skeptical enough of that population understand that, though.

entreprenewb• 12 years ago

I ran across this site the other day when I was looking at overhauling my .emacs file since I'm only an occasional emacs user these days. This guy has a great starter repo of his customized .emacs.d directory that takes care of a lot of the setup work to use all the customizations and modes he's using: https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d

One note, if you do clone the repo, make sure to use the --recursive option (as the readme instructs) since there are a bunch of other git repositories imported in the repo.

michaelsbradley2• 12 years ago

Bozhidar Batsov's Emacs Prelude is also worthy of study:

https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

That is, even if you didn't want to use it outright for your config, prelude's init.el and modules are a good resource for learning how to wire things together with Emacs Lisp.

josteink• 12 years ago

One note, if you do clone the repo, make sure to use the --recursive option (as the readme instructs) since there are a bunch of other git repositories imported in the repo.

Doing this, you can tell that this guy really doesn't care for the Emacs package-repositories :)

martin1975• 12 years ago

I've never used emacs- currently using XCode to do C++ development. While I find the demonstrations interesting, what would emacs buy me as a C++ developer?

michaelsbradley2• 12 years ago

Emacs is not only an editor, but a "computing environment" that can be readily customized and extended using the Emacs Lisp (elisp) language. In fact, much of Emacs itself is built with elisp. Some developers find that kind of flexibility in their tooling to be highly compelling, others not so much.

I'm not a C++ programmer, but I turned up the following guide with a Google search, which might you might find interesting:

C/C++ Development Environment for Emacs

http://tuhdo.github.io/c-ide.html

derengel• 12 years ago

http://tuhdo.github.io/c-ide.html

myg2042• 12 years ago

On the good side, once you are used to the keys, the text editing part is pretty efficient. Also, you have access to a lot of the other modes once you want to step out of the C++ tasks, to look at other files (makefiles, log files), keeping notes with org-mode, opening ftp windows, pretty-printing,.... Plus there's less behind the scene magic than in IDEs and you have access to everything to see where something breaks. It's not a black box the same way an IDE is.

On the bad side, you'll have to spend time tweaking packages and so on to get IDE-similar goodies like autocomplete. I can't remember if there's a similar thing as a background compilation that highlight errors as you type. But the thing with emacs is that if you wonder about a plugin, there'a good chance it exists already.

ddinh• 12 years ago

I can't remember if there's a similar thing as a background compilation that highlight errors as you type.

Check out Flycheck: http://flycheck.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

to3m2• 12 years ago

Maybe not much. When working with C++ - at least in my experience - you get more use out of code navigation and code completion (two things that emacs supports rather averagely, even after customization) than you do out of text editing functionality (for which emacs is excellent).

tptacek5• 12 years ago

I don't know that I agree with this. I'm rewriting for the fourth time a blog post I wrote on auditing C/C++ code using Emacs. The combination of Helm, cscope/ascope, hi-lock, ectags, Projectile, and incremental recursive grep is pretty hard to beat.

I use unobtrusive dabbrev-style completion --- I don't want popup menus with completion possibilities drawn from documentation, because Dash.app does a better job of that and is shared by all applications.

I think Emacs does an at least adequate job at all the core functions of Xcode, but does some things Xcode can't do at all.

(It's been a few years since I've written more than a couple thousands lines in Xcode, though.)

tuhdo8• 12 years ago

Not really. With Emacs, it makes navigating a project like Linux kernel seems a small project. You can see the demos in my other answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616737

Emacs allows you to jump to anything instantly, even with source tree like Clang or Linux.

fourier• 12 years ago

XCode is amazing for C/C++ development, but Emacs is just better as a text editor. The rtags project [1] is under active development right now to have more IDE-like features in Emacs for C/C++ developers. There are some other projects, for example clang-complete-async [2]

[1] https://github.com/Andersbakken/rtags

[2] https://github.com/Golevka/emacs-clang-complete-async

tuhdo8• 12 years ago

Here are some nice features that Emacs provide:

- Powerful automatic indentation: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Bruce-Connor/aggressive-in.... It does not only indent the current line, but the whole Semantic context around your cursor.

- Live grep: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/live_grep.gif

- Access to a list of project with a few key strokes: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil....

- Quickly access any file in your project, as large as Linux kernel, instantly, regardless of where you are in the project, and within a few keystrokes: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil....

- Jump to any file depends on context, even if the file path is in a plain ASCII text file: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil....

- Copy files from anywhere to anywhere: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil....

- Delete files anywhere; files are always at your finger tip to do whatever with them: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil....

- Switch between other files with same names but different extensions: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil.... Work not only for C/C++ but other languages, and is customizable. You don't have to configure anything, like adding include paths for the command to search. Everything is automatic. Just use it as it is.

- Jump to tag definition, from Emacs's own parser or external parser like GNU Global: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/helm-gtags-jump-dwim.gif

- Jump to any definition from a list of definitions in source tree, even for Linux kernel: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/helm-gtags-select.gif

- Jump up to parent: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/senator-go-to-up-referen....

- Do you like outline tree?: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/sr-speedbar.gif

- Interactive outline tree: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/helm-semantic-or-imenu-w....

- Easily move back and forth using the interactive outline tree: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/part3/helm-semantic-or-imenu-2....

- References retrieved from its Emacs internal parser: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/semantic-symref.gif.

- Beautiful compile output: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/compilation-compile.gif

- Frontend support for GDB: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/gdb-many-windows.gif

- Code completion: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/semantic-boost-demo.gif.

- Open man page for symbol at cursor: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/part3/helm-man-woman.gif.

- Emacs open 39MB C file: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/performance.gif

- Emac opens multi-gigabtye file: http://www.emacswiki.org/VLF

- Emacs is a bit torrent client: https://bitbucket.org/ukaszg/aria2-mode/

You can see more demos in:

+ Emacs Mini Manual: http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html + C/C++ Development Environment for Emacs: http://tuhdo.github.io/c-ide.html + A Package in a league of its own: Helm: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html + Exploring large projects with Projectile and Helm Projectile: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html

Note that in the demos you may see me type in the commands. You can think of it like the start menu in Windows, but actually those commands can be executed quickly with a shortcut. I type in the commands for demonstration purpose to Emacs users.

Those demos are just tip of the iceberg.

oblio2• 12 years ago

Most of your links are truncated :(

swah4• 12 years ago

And if a parenthesis is missing in any of those 2300 elisp files: MWAHAHAHAH

;)

drothlis• 12 years ago

Possibly not much. I've never used XCode for C++ development but I imagine it has pretty nifty Clang integration, given Apple's investment in Clang. Anyone who suggests using ctags, GNU Global, gtags, CEDET's own parser (implemented in elisp!), etc. for C++ navigation is basically saying "use a C parser to parse C++ code", which works well enough if you're writing 1990s style C++, I suppose. There are projects out there to integrate with Clang (such as rtags mentioned by another poster) but it will require hours/days of setup & frustration, and the result won't be as good as a dedicated C++ ide.

BTW I say this as an emacs fan and the author of http://david.rothlis.net/emacs/howtolearn.html and https://github.com/drothlis/clang-ctags/

Where emacs shines (for me, at least) is when you spend a lot of time in different languages. Maybe you spend 50% of the time in C++, but the other 50% in shell, makefiles, python, etc. -- and the benefit of better C++ code navigation begins to seem like a micro-optimisation that isn't worth the tradeoff compared to Emacs's support for navigation, version control, compilation, linting, grepping, etc etc, all of which are consistent across all languages. Not to mention Emacs's great support for text manipulation in general.

Also Emacs seems to me the best bet for the "one true editor" you'll still be using in 20 years (by which time hopefully few of us will still be using C++).

I'll also point out that on OS X, Emacs has a lower learning curve than any other OS, at least as far as the basic keystrokes: OS X's Command key still works for the usual shortcuts (cut, copy, paste, save, open, quit, undo) while the quirky emacs bindings are on the Control and Option keys. This doesn't make it any easier to set up a C++ navigation solution, of course.

tuhdo8• 12 years ago

I agree with everything you said about other aspects of Emacs.

You are right that supports for C++ is not as rich, since it is such a complicated language. But for small C++ projects and large C projects, it is pretty much usable, especially just for code navigation. At least it's better than using Grep and better than nothing at all. The currently available tools are perfectly usable for those who only write C.

For code completion, there's no pretty solution, but at least simple solution like company-clang which uses clang to get completion candidates from system include paths is pretty usable.

spiffy-spaceman• 12 years ago

I just found my new emacs logo ;-)

rayalez• 12 years ago

Thank you very much for a great link! I am using emacs for almost everything I do, and I've naturally learned a lot about it, and I was planning for a long time to start seriously learning some in-depth things.

I've just recently learned the basics of lisp, this will be the perfect time to find out more about emacs. It is fantastic, and every time I discover some new feature it blows my mind how great and useful it is.

dschiptsov2• 12 years ago

my 2¢ - http://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Emacs

mapcar• 12 years ago

Can't you just create an alias for

`emacs -nw -Q` or `emacsclient -nw`

when you want to open an instance in a terminal?

dschiptsov2• 12 years ago

I could, of course, but I like it less bloated - 70 shared libraries less.)

craigching• 12 years ago

Another good emacs site is http://www.masteringemacs.org

weavie• 12 years ago

The annoying thing about customising Emacs is that when following along with tutorials, I keep tripping up against shortcuts that I have reconfigured to work in a different way. Luckily emacs lets you type out the command in full to bypass the short cut key. I can then determine if it is useful enough to remap the command to a different key.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

other screencasts here http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsScreencasts ;)

azinman2• 12 years ago

Nice concept. Id like to see this for vim, the one "true" text editor.

cbd19842• 12 years ago

You'll never need it for ed, the standard text editor, because it is the standard. It is eternal. It is infinite. It is the standard, and any change would make it not standard. Puny mortals fail to see the immanent perfection of ed. There is no configuration because a Platonic Form has no time, no space, no change. It Is, It Was, It Will Be.

thomasfl• 12 years ago

I've been using Magnar's and Christian's excellent collection of emacs settings and packages for some years now, and haven't bothered to adjust the settings in emacs myself evet since.

It's like turning your trusty old emacs into a monster hacker tool. Watching the screencasts is much more entertaining than reading boring documentation.

Emacs Rocks

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