Comments on: Emacs: 7 months later

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 11 May 2013 17:46:45 +0000

When I used Emacs (a two-year period beginning in 2002), it was to compose prose text. I loved that I could make corrections so quickly without having to move my hands away from the keyboard, but I found that Emacs’ key bindings caused a burning pain in my hands after about forty-five minutes of typing. Still, I persisted. I wanted to learn Lisp to customize my .emacs file, but found it sufficiently complex to dissuade me from bothering with it, even though I bought a book specifically aimed at teaching Emacs Lisp. As I gained more experience with it, I noticed that Emacs did not fit into either Windows or Linux. To be fair, Vim doesn’t fit into Windows either, but it is a nice fit on any Linux system. Emacs felt like a strange glob of goo in Windows and like a monster on an ant hill in Linux. It was not designed for either of these systems. Eventually, I concluded that I was not the target audience to which Emacs (or its Lisp interpreter) was aiming, and I abandoned it. And again, in all fairness, Vim is not aimed at authors of prose any more than Emacs is; I was simply lucky to be a touch typist (Vim is best used in combination with touch typing) and to have approached learning it in a way that was likely to succeed: memorizing the tactile feel of commands rather than their alphabetic symbols.

:wq

By: Emacs: One year later « Aaron Meurer's SymPy Blog

Emacs: One year later « Aaron Meurer's SymPy Blog — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 03:28:54 +0000

[...] As readers of this blog may remember, back in 2011, I decided to move to a command-line based editor. For roughly two weeks in December, 2011, I exclusively used Vim, and for the same amount of time in January, 2012, I used exclusively Emacs. I had used a little of each editor in the past, but this was my first time using them to do true editing work. My experiences are chronicled in my blog posts (parts 1, 2, 3, and 7 months later follow up). [...]

By: Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 18:55:51 +0000

It looks promising, but it would require a bit of customization to get it how I want, so I’ll probably not get around to it for a while.

By: Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 18:41:23 +0000

Thanks. I’ll check out helm.

By: Le Wang

Le Wang — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 04:27:15 +0000

Emacs’ regexp syntax takes a little bit getting used to, but with so many libraries dependent on it at this point, it won’t change.

For your isearch problems, you’re using the wrong tool. See `occur`. Helm has interactive interactive occur.

Also check out helm for your general incremental completion needs. Ido is for the kiddies. ;)

By: Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:22:44 +0000

I know that you can press C-s again. But that’s not the point. I have to press C-s up to four times just to determine if a string is really in a document or not.

Thanks for the url tip.

For regular expressions, that doesn’t really solve my problem. I want something user-friendly and interactive. If I was an elisp wiz, I might try to do it on my own. But I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who’s felt this deficiency.

I’ll checkout semantic or ecb. I vaguely remember trying semantic before but giving up because it was too hard to setup.

By: Nei

Nei — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:17:49 +0000

as for the re-builder, first change syntax to string with C-c TAB and then remember it’s \( \). if you’re pleased with the result use C-c C-w to copy and in the query-replace-regexp you can paste it with C-y — still to hard? write your custom elisp and put it on a key binding ;-)

about isearch, just hit C-s again at the end and it will “wrap around”. And if you want to edit your search string, just type M-e first and then you can delete the last char or whatever.

for code navigation I highly recommend you set up semantic and then you can use something like eassist-list-methods to get a pop-up menu with quick jump to all the methods, or if that isn’t enough check out ecb

By: Nei

Nei — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:23:16 +0000

re. html editor: select text and C-c C-c h then you can type in the link target

By: Aaron Meurer

Aaron Meurer — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 23:12:55 +0000

Thanks!

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:55:05 +0000

;; y/n instead of yes/no
(fset ‘yes-or-no-p ‘y-or-n-p)