Emacs worth it ?

Hey everyone, recently I've been more and more interested about emacs for some reson and was wondering if it's really worth to start using it and to learn the shortcuts in 2023 (or after), and if yes, should I start with one of these fancy doom emacs configs or just the base. I'm already a vim user so there is this part of me that will always think it's useless but I know emacs isn't just a text editor at the same time so try to change my mind about it I guess. I was also wondering if when you want to learn some lisp, it is recommended to use emacs or you can just code in lisp on any other text/code editor. I don't really know anything about lisp but I'd like to learn maybe some scheme, would starting with a bit of elisp be better ? TL:DR I don't know anything, make me take the emacspill

>>37339 Emacs has org mode which is one of its fancy features. There are some emacs configuration files on github that can give it a pretty cool look. You can also use emacs for email, Usenet news etc. I enjoy using emacs for large projects. When making small edits I still prefer to use nvim.

>>37339 >if it's really worth to start using it and to learn the shortcuts in 2023 (or after) Yeah, org-mode is best-in-class organization software (although getting it to run on a smartphone is a /little/ bothersome) >should I start with one of these fancy doom emacs configs or just the base. Definitely a fancy config to start with, and then write your own if you feel the need. I think emacs is an infinitely better editor for involved work than vim. But, if you have a job or interface often with the "normal" world, be prepared to fall back to vs code often.

>if it's really worth to start using it and to learn the shortcuts in 2023 It's not. It was in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 2020, 2021, 2022, but not 2023. It will be again worth it in 2024 onward, so you should wait until 2024. Jokes aside, what you're looking for is evil-mode, so you can carry your vim knowledge over to emacs. By the time evil-mode becomes an obstacle you will have already learned how emacs works and how to leverage e-lisp.

>>37339 I started out with Vim (actually GNU nano but...) and then went through the GNU Emacs tutorial (from the splash screen or help menu) and I ended up preferring GNU Emacs keybindings over Vim keys. I suggest you try the Emacs tutorial first and if you do not like the keybindings, you should either use GNU Emacs with evil-mode or use Doom Emacs (Spacemacs is not as good). I recommend you use the GUI version of Emacs because it's actually better and more powerful than the terminal version (unlike gvim). There are tons of thing that are great about GNU Emacs: * org-mode for taking notes * Emacs has great documentation/help system. Try C-h ? * Emacs can optionally use libgccjit to enable native compilation of elisp code and/or you can run Emacs as a daemon (I don't need or use either of these features) * elisp is used to write most of the editor and the same language is used for configuring Emacs & writing extensions. * magit interface to git * M-x compile and M-x grep open buffers that have click-able links to relevant positions in files. In other words, you can jump to the grep result. * SLY/Geiser are great for Common Lisp/Scheme (also install rainbow-delimiters) * elfeed RSS reader is great * Emacs even has terminal emulator (M-x ansi-term) and Emacs shell (eshell, see https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/complete-guide-mastering-eshell). I recommend you avoid eshell until you have more Emacs experience. * It comes with amusements: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Amusements.html I watches these video tutorials when I started using Emacs: >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYzPWnk2mE&list=PLxj9UAX4Em-IiOfvF2Qs742LxEK4owSkr&index=1 >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iY_1aMzeg&list=PLX2044Ew-UVVv31a0-Qn3dA6Sd_-NyA1n&index=1 >I was also wondering if when you want to learn some lisp, Emacs lisp (elisp) is only good for Emacs extensions. You should learn either Common Lisp or Scheme (start with R5RS). You can find resources at the lisp thread: >>36959 Scheme is more beautiful language but Common Lisp is the more practical one for writing serious programs. Scheme ecosystem is also fragmented because each Scheme implementation is a bit different (I recommend Chicken scheme). This problem doesn't exist in Common Lisp world.

>>37341 this. orgmode alone, and especially org-roam, makes it worth it.

start here lain: https://sr.ht/~ashton314/emacs-bedrock/

>>37339 Well, if you don't know why you need emacs, you should not use it. But if you want to try it, you should take a look at doom (https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs).

>>37339 Hello, I'd like to speak about my experience with Emacs. When I decided to give Common Lisp a proper try, I was disillusioned by how everyone said to use the Slime REPL in Emacs. All I thought was "Great, one more.. no TWO more things to learn first." I didn't bother with tutorials, just downloaded a cheat sheet and decided I'll crash into it and learn what I need as I go. I was actually pleasantly surprised. Having concepts in a text editor felt like too much, but I embraced it and I actually like having well defined parts of the program to use. Out of the box it looks nice, I enjoyed not fuarrrking around with customisation so that I can have a readable set of colours and font. Slime mode was actually really easy. So it's become my favourite text editor in general. I use it for writing notes, lists, and assembly. I still stick to VS Code for projects, school and personal. I don't care if its le bloated, whatever, I like me tree view, source control buttons, and diff viewing, and it doesn't run bad even on my soykafbox laptop. Overall I'd say yeah learn a bit about Emacs, though don't feel you have to sit down and study the Fundamentals Of Emacs. Just learn as you go, if you need to do something look it up, read neat things here and there about power use.

>>37434 >Tree View Treemacs? >Source buttons Magit? I get using Vim and stuff for quick edits, but choosing VSCode over Emacs for these small conveniences is goofy, seeing as Emacs has even more convenient versions.

>>37435 >Treemacs? >Magit? You just got played! I said that knowing somebody would be eager to tell me that Emacs can do that. And you even told me what to get. Thank you for falling into my trap :) I guess I'll figure out what I can use for diff views and merge conflicts. And hopefully something for viewing the declarations of functions

>>37339 Some will find emacs incredibly useful, while others (like me) will be put off by its massive depth. It's fair to interpret that either as a compelling feature or as a complete turn-off. For me, I would just get totally lost in endlessly reconfiguring it and adding new features. But then, I already have satisfying email and irc programs, why exactly do I need to do it all in a single window? Vim by contrast gets me up and running with a few lines of configuration that I don't have to think about. Not an argument against, just to say that you have to know what you want out of it first.

>>37434 >I like me tree view Perhaps using M-x speedbar accomplishes what you want? ( Treemacs or emacs-neotree is probably better ). >and diff viewing, M-x diff or open a patch/diff file (with regular C-x C-f). Also, see >https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Emerge.html >https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Comparing-Files.html >https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/ediff/index.html#Top >>37438 >And hopefully something for viewing the declarations of functions This is something I would also like to know. I found dumb-jump: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump But I haven't used it myself. You can also create tag file and use etags but I haven't used that either. In elisp code, you can use M-. Bonus: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Compilation.html Emacs can jump to the line errors that GCC or Clang complained about ( click on the button with mouse ). I don't know if it works for other compilers as well? >>37443 >why exactly do I need to do it all in a single window? You don't need to! You can just choose the Emacs modes/extensions that are useful for you personally. >Vim by contrast gets me up and running with a few lines of configuration You don't need a huge .emacs config file if you want to start using GNU Emacs. I started with blank .emacs file and used M-x customize-themes to select a theme. Then I just started adding stuff that I needed (and when I needed something). Alternatively, you can copy someone's config (or use Doom Emacs) or you can use this website to generate your minimal config: https://emacs.amodernist.com

yes, but dont use any of the configuration frameworks like doom, also do not use evil... emacs is complex by itself and it can become overwhelmingly hard to grasp with one of those things that change all the defaults.. also if you are gonna replace your current editor setup with emacs, its not gonna be easy, and will most likely only feel frustrating.. mostly because you have to relay to documentation and other people to make it work like you want, especially when you dont know lisp.. my recommendation is to start using emacs with holy keybindings (the default ones), if you keep using the non-arrow navigation C-f, b, n, p with other common key combinations like C-a ,e, C-s, r and M-w, C-y, etc.. then after a while you realize they make sense collectively.. it takes time to get used to, but once it comes from muscle memory, its just fine.. oh and remember to bind caps lock to control key.. and always use that, instead of the control in the corner.. from my experience, and many other people, its much much better. finally, learn the help and describe commands.. learn elisp, try to learn it as much that you can implement some basic functionality, if you cant think of anything, just try to create something silly, for instance make a command that replaces every second character of every word in a region, or whatever.. the point is, once you learn emacs interface and elisp, it gets really easy to extend, debug and understand all of it from there on. sure, emacs is a rabbit hole. you wont learn it in a week or a month, but once you do learn it, really learn it. then you dont ever feel like switching to any other editor. good luck.

>>37339 Hey OP. As a non emacs user I can tell you it is worth trying to pick it up. Just go through a tutorial. The editor is pretty outdated in its base config so yeah you probably wanna spend some time tweaking it, that’s the whole point. So like set it up, learn it, and give yourself a few weeks of using it. If you’re like me and you don’t go back to it then it’s probably not for you. I personally like a nice customized vim, screen, intellij, midnight commander editor and some random barebones gui editor. I’m just way too used to these but I’ll say emacs could probably replace ALL of them.

Personally, I use vim due to its simplicity and because I am quite used to it... However, using emacs, vim or whatever is really just a personal choice. The text editor you want to use doesn't necessarily need to be objectively chosen. Just use what you feel most comfortable with.

>>37339 i love emacs and like writing lisp but emacs is so easy to get distracted by customizing it. i do use it for notes because org mode is fuarrrking amazing but i use vscode a lot now after primarily using emacs for like a decade. emacs + home row mods is awesome btw using your strongest fingers for common modifiers is really really comfy

Emacs is like a funhouse full of fancy toys, but not all of the toys are that fun to play with after the novelty wears off. Org mode is still the best note taking tool, but more often than not I find myself using external programs to do stuff nowdays. Things like email, music, reading pdfs, are better outside emacs.

longerm users are you really faster on emacs/nvim than with mouse? went through tutorials,learned keybinds and still felt slower vs just mouse in notepad+ also do you have mouse aim training like playing fps games or none? I'm theorizing the claims to speed result simply from different backgrounds. I got a good decade of fps training which might be the difference.

>>37938 I am soo fast with nvim it isn't comparable at all. I am not talking "it is 0.5 seconds faster in one document" i am talking 40% 50% increase. I am of course talking about editing that requires a lot of changes to the text, if you are writing a book and grammar check later it probably won't make much difference but if you are writing code or writing markup it will have far more difference. At the worst of times vim-like editing is as fast as notepad's mouse driven editing, you are probably trying to learn too much too fast. Try to learn basic deletion and pasting after you digest hjkl movement. dd deletes whole lines, dw deletes a word right of your cursor and p pastes the text you deleted. These alone make vim faster than notepad.

>>37939 i found deleted content saved in buffer to paste good for rearranging code but it backfired when i wanted to copy/paste one line multiple times because on first replacement buffer is already overwritten with the deleted content which means you have to copy your desired content again for each replacement. Now apparently you can switch buffer back to previous content but keeping mental track of your buffer state seems a lot harder than pointing and spamming ctrl+v. dd,dw and movement is part of tutorial so i know those. What i didn't learn yet is creating tags to jump between in a file. Wasn't part of inbuild tutorial, heard about it going through more guides online. I suppose it might be possible to automatically tag function headers and jump straight to functions? Would accelerate finding what you need. Im still trying to make it work cause i want to use it on a laptop without a mouse, its just so far a week in im clearly lacking so thought would ask if someone has vital advice to speed up.

>>37941 after the tutorial there is a more extensive help.txt that likely shows you how to do the tags thing. some tools that let me use my mouse less are warpd, kmonad/qmk

I'm quite new with Emacs and Lisp in general, and I've been wondering: How would one go about programming an autocomplete module for emacs? I need some pointers, I have the idea but have no idea where to start and what to look for... I use visual lisp for autocad at work, and I thought adding my own module to support the dialect would be a nice project to get more acquainted with both emacs and lisp, I was thinking about basic suggestion when writing visual lisp specific functions name for starters. (Example: typing (vla- would create an inline drop-down box with all the relevant function names)

>>37955 ive never done it, so forgive me if any of these breadcrumbs are false starts etags/gtags capf -- completion at point ?framework? ?functions? lsp

>>37956 dw it's better than nothing, thanks!

I need fold/unfold support for C (blocks, ifdefs) in Emacs. What would you suggest lainon?

>>38062 https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Selective-Display.html#Selective-Display

>>38062 hs-minor-mode then bind hs-{show,hide}-{block,level,all}. Same with hide-ifdef and {show,hide}-ifdef{s,block}.

>>37339 Emacs is the best editor I've personally used. I've now been using it for two years and the best way I can describe it as an extension of myself. For me it's the closest thing to programming at the speed of thought. I don't think it's for everyone, but there is a good chance you'll like it Lain.

Prolific Emacs user, this is going to be controversial maybe, but not really in most cases. While I love Emacs and playfully mock my vim-using friends, it's ultimately just another editor these days and one that's starting to show its age. You'll often bump into issues with its single-threaded runtime unless you spend way too much time making a perfect, responsive config (and occasionally even then). Get ready to spam C-g whenever the editor freezes up. I initially made the switch because I was a vim user but decided to switch to dvorak, which doesn't work well with vim bindings, and I wasn't the kind of scrub who was going to use Atom or whatever was popular in those days. I absolutely adore Emacs and wouldn't change off it for the world (and am far too used to the bindings at this point besides), but the best editor is more often than not the one you're already using. That said, if you're learning Lisp then it's absolutely required unless something major has changed that I've missed. SLIME (or Sly) is borderline required to be an effective Common Lisp developer. The only exception I can think of is that if you're picking up Racket then DrRacket is a solid enough editor (although Emacs is still better simply due to be being a better text editor, even though they have approximate parity in interfacing with Racket). So throw out the rest of my advice out if you're wanting to learn a lisp, I guess.

>>37344 >>37446 >>37359 >>37575 spacemacs vs doom? why pick one over the other? i played around with spacemacs for a bit, don't remember what made me pick it, but going from neo-/vim, it seems to make sense to start with one of them

The complexity of setting up emacs is what keeps me from the emacs cult. I don't even care about looks, I just want to have my LSPs working and (almost) zero input lag. In vim I find it very easy to set up everything, you just write a vimrc file and you're done. With Emacs you have like 37842893 ways to do the same thing and the documentation isn't clear enough. If I try to use some distro such as Doom or Space, it will be so full of bloat it makes impossible to do actual work. I'm open to to try it again, though. It seems to me that I'm missing a whole world of possibilities.

>>37938 Sometimes, but that is not the priority for me (people say I am fast, but I don't notice it. I notice that others are slow). Here is something I have been thinking about: An editor provides a "language" for manipulating files. Different editors have different "vocabularies" and "grammars" (e.g. Vim is more line oriented, while Emacs binds commands that operate on expressions by default). While it might be possible to argue that one language is more expressive than another, the main thing is to start "thinking" in whatever language you are using, instead of translating between them. When you acquire the ability to elegantly and comfortably express whatever file manipulation you intend, you'll find it easier to execute more complicated operations, and according to (weak) linguistic relativism, also become conscious of more ways to interact with the computer. It might be a bit absurd to speak in these terms of a text editor, so it might be better to think of this in terms of human-computer-interfaces or programming systems in general. The quip with Emacs is that one is explicitly encouraged to define your own commands, bind and rebind them, giving you not only the OOTB "language", but the "meta-language" that you can use to further refine your interaction. While other editors support this in principle, Emacs continues to place more emphasis on this point. There is no difference between user and programmer. Hope that makes some kind of sense...

>>37938 I think the question is if they're faster doing a specific activity. I think there is some research to suggest that seeking around the screen is faster with a mouse than with a search. But the issue you then run into is that programmers do more than just seeking around the screen. Vim keybinds allow for the structured editing of files, talking about them in terms of text objects and actions on those objects. Manipulating text in this way may be faster than the mouse equivalent. Then you also have other binds for project navigation. Being able to trigger menus for regex searching files/file names at just a keystroke can help to navigate projects with more files, especially when you have a lot of different ones open at ones.

>>37339 It kinda is like kicking dead whales down the beach, but every other text editor is like kicking dead whales down the beach more. I switched from Vim about ten years ago and I'd do it again. The thing that motivated me to switch was Vim's extension language. Not only was the syntax and semantics terrible compared to general-purpose languages like Python; it also felt way under-abstracted. When doing non-trivial customization, I was just piling kludges on top of kludges. A comparison of key binding is instructive here. In Vim, I was just shoving groups of custom keybindings into the editor globally. In Emacs, there's a whole system of keymaps which have priorities and can be created, enabled, and disabled - kind of like layers in an image editor. There are also overlays, text properties, and proper interaction with async processes - though Vim has gained the last one too since my editor change. A secondary motivation to switch was that Emacs had a better package ecosystem. Despite having a smaller community, Emacs packages were usually more advanced. They had more functionality than Vim packages, displayed their information in a nicer way, and used full-screen UIs that turn your keyboard into a hundred-key joystick for the task instead of just exposing a bunch of Ex commands. I think this is strongly related to the language point above - a superior language and superior abstractions have let the Emacs community write packages with less effort than the Vim community. I didn't go with any starter kit. I wrote my own configuration, built around evil-mode (a Vim emulation package). It's more than 3,000 lines now. Overall, I like it a lot. The most important "feature" to me is the editor being moldable like putty. If I want to add something, I just open my config and write a bit of Elisp, then it's available everywhere - in my org-mode personal wiki, in my org-mode to-do list, when programming, when writing commit messages. I would even say that this is Emacs's biggest strength in general: there's little difference between just configuring it and writing a proper plugin. That's probably why there are so many packages. The biggest downside, on the other hand, is the very poor default configuration. This doesn't just apply to settings, like indenting with tabs or littering the project's directory with backup files, but also to the functionality included by default. Included with Emacs is Tetris, Pong, M-x doctor, not one but two IRC clients, and a useless toolbar that everyone disables. Not included is autocompletion in the minibuffer (e.g. ido-mode or Helm), autocompletion for programming (company-mode), Debug Adapter Protocol integration, help-fns+, helpful.el, evil-mode, magit, smart-tabs-mode, emacs-refactor, smartparens, yasnippet, undo-tree, elisp-slime-nav, AUCTeX, or ws-butler. It feels like whether something is included has little to do with whether it's useful for programming in 2024, and everything to do with how old it is. While Emacs is gaining new functionality regularly, it just gets added as extra functions you can use or knobs you can tweak. There is little redesigning of old functionality, because that could break old-timers' workflow (pic related). Despite these flaws, I wouldn't exchange it for anything else. At this point, I have it customized just how I like it. I do complex git surgery with a few keybindings thanks to magit, I organize my knowledge and my time with org-mode, and I have a ton of little useful keybindings, like one that inserts the current date, or one that takes a URL and inserts the URL, webpage title, and date in the format I want. I've even added extra motions and operators to evil-mode. It was actually nicer than doing the same with Vim. If you're going to switch to Emacs, I'd recommend learning Elisp - even if you're going to use the Doom Emacs "starter kit". Elisp is more list-oriented than I'd like, and doesn't have namespaces, but overall it's quite nice to program in. You'll need it to access the main advantage of Emacs, which is its customizability. For Common Lisp, I've heard amazing things about the Sly package. I don't know about Scheme, but there's probably something good for it too. You may also want to check out structural editing packages like smartparens and lispy. They make editing Lisps very pleasant. Standard Scheme is nice for learning but pretty useless for practical programs. Its standard library just doesn't cut it if you want to get things done quickly instead of reinventing the wheel. You'll probably want to either use Common Lisp, or settle on Racket or Guile, or perhaps Chicken, and use that one implementation to the fullest instead of trying to stick to the standard. >>37938 I think I'm significantly faster, but haven't measured it rigorously. I do play arena FPSes (mainly Xonotic) and I'm good at them, so aim is not an issue. I think it's mostly about "batching" actions. With keybindings, some of the common ones eventually just become sequences that I enter instinctively, without waiting for any feedback. I just type the whole sequence the way I touch-type a word without thinking about every individual letter. With mouse-centric interfaces that doesn't really happen. It's click one thing - look at what popped up, locate next thing to click - click that - visually parse another thing that popped up - etc. It also helps that I don't have to take my right hand off the keyboard, it just stays on the home row. That said, editing speed isn't the most important thing for fast programming. Most important is deep familiarity with your language, its ecosystem, the problem domain, and experience in writing complex things on a deadline. If you have two Python programmers, and one has just recently switched to Python, while for the other it's "just another argparse+logging+requests+pydantic project, I've done this a hundred times before, I'll just use my usual Poetry project template and naming conventions"... the experienced guy is going to thoroughly beat the Python newbie on speed, even if he's using notepad.exe and the newbie has the most carefully optimized Vim/Emacs config ever. >>37955 So you want to add support for another language to Emacs? You probably want to write something called a "major mode". For completion, start with completion-at-point-functions. That can get used automatically by the most common autocompletion package, company-mode. If it turns out later that this doesn't provide enough functionality, you can look into writing a company-mode backend directly, but completion-at-point-functions is the more universal mechanism.

I have been using vanilla emacs for a while (with a terrible .emacs since I never bothered learning elisp) and I wanted to try doom emacs. I quite like it, but I'm having a couple issues that I can't figure out how to fix: - Visual line mode Activating it through the GUI works (Option > Line Wrapping in This Buffer > Word Wrap), but it isn't saved when I restart emacs. From my old .emacs, the only related setting seems to be (word-wrap t), which I copied into ~/.doom.d/custom.el , but it doesn't do anything. - Not-maximized frame I use a tiling WM (dwm). When I start emacs, the frame occupies a small portion of the window. It only fills the available space if I resize the window. This doesn't happen with vanilla emacs or if I open doom emacs with the -mm switch, but I couldn't figure out a fix from with emacs. (add-to-list 'initial-frame-alist '(fullscreen . maximized)) doesn't do anything and (add-to-list 'initial-frame-alist '(fullscreen . fullboth)) starts emacs in fullscreen.

>>38553 Use vanilla emacs, install prelude on it which makes it very beginner-friendly without making it into something completely different (looking at you, doom emacs). M-x "list-packages", select the lsp packages that you want, make sure you have the corresponding languages installed outside of emacs (I know that I struggled a bit with the latex-lsp-backend, but that was a minor issue). There, you are done. From there on you can slowly start to expand your .emacs.d/init.el file to your liking.

Been using GNU Emacs for since i was 15 (now i'm 24), i would recommend it if you like configuring stuff. Currently writing my bachelor thesis on Emacs concurrency. It took two weeks for me to learn the basic keyboard shortcuts, then maybe half a year until i got faster then other "normal" text editors. Emacs is a really fun editor, its composed of a "core" which defines a basic Lisp interpreter, the whole editor is then built on top of this core in Elisp, making it possible to read and modify the Lisp code. Emacs also has a great documentation system. The hardest part with Emacs is learning the keyboard shortcuts and getting into configuration.

I don't really understand people who say emacs is too hard. It's a complex tool. wtf do you expect. It's literally impossible to not have to spend time learning tools to solve a difficult problem. You can use emacs with arrow keys, mouse, and the menu buttons. You don't need to learn any key shortcuts.

>>37339 >and was wondering if it's really worth to start using it and to learn the shortcuts in 2023 (or after) you're a vimsister already so start using evilmode from the get go, going from vim bindings to emacs is mental reatrdation trust me i tried both

No. We're not living in 1990 anymore. If it was worth it, most people would've shifted to it already. It's a meme at this point.

>>39926 >You don't need to learn any key shortcuts. Thereby removing any supposed "benefit" to using emacs.

>>39960 then what's the alternative? vscode until microsoft kills it?

>>39961 The benefits are: 1. It can do just about anything you would like it to do 2. It's rather lightweight (compared to VSCode, vim wins on that point but fails at being easy to use)

>>39967 https://www.geany.org

You need to test emacs yourself. There is no other way of knowing whether you like it or not. That being said, however, there isn't a better editor for Scheme, Clojure or Common Lisp. I think my top 3 features of emacs are: > great help system and docs! You can do a lot of inspection, too (describe-*). You can make the help system even better by installing following packages: helpful ; vertico ; marginalia * This site has more info: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-02-17-emacs-modern-minibuffer-packages/ > elisp because it's nice that the same lang is used to implement most of the editor and all 3rd-party extensions. You even write your config in it. It's also pretty similar to Common Lisp in some aspects, so there aren't many lang features to learn if you already know a bit of CL. > recorded keyboard macros can often be used instead of writing elisp code. You can combine it with regular text search or regex search. Some of the goodies that emacs has to offer out of the box: > ielm (elisp REPL): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsrPfMoaI8k > org-mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiBt8CieE7U&t=314s > dired: https://emacsrocks.com/e16.html > M-x grep (try it!) And a lot more! >>38544 Doom Emacs is the better one. But there is no point in learning vi keys if you don't know vim already. But knowing vim can be useful if you are sysadmin since all systems have some implementation of vi editor (note that it may be vim-tiny or even just Busybox).

>>40011 At least "just try it" is an honest response. org-mode is probably its best feature. Still it's easily replaced. If you need to run with the l337 kids in the console, go for it.

Enjoy getting a foot pedal for the pinnacle of text editors. <guffaw>

I'll be brutally honest here, I don't think it's worth it. Yes, I've been using Emacs for at least two decades, but I still believe that for most people it simply doesn't make sense to use Emacs, especially since we have infinitely more powerful IDEs today. Yes, Emacs is infinitely lighter, but it doesn't offer everything that an IDE offers out of the box. If you want to have something close to a modern IDE, you're going to spend a lot of time configuring a ton of "setq", "use-package" and "defun". I started configuring my Emacs in a more sophisticated way in 2010, and today I have a ton of settings that I don't even remember the reason for, lol. However, everything I said falls apart if you're not a mediocre person who only thinks about how to optimize your productivity. If you are a person who genuinely enjoys programming, likes LISP, has a passion for the history of computing, and is interested in things outside the mainstream, then I highly recommend Emacs, as well as other more obscure things like Guix, Scheme, Guile, etc. It all depends on the type of person you are. I genuinely hope that you will try Emacs for at least a month and try to understand the historical reasons for the creation of Emacs and also understand the importance of Free Software. Even though Emacs is not in ATH at the moment, I am an Emacs user, and I am always willing to help anyone who is interested in it.

>>39960 >If it was worth it, most people would've shifted to it already. Right on, bro! You also shouldn't touch type, because if it was worth it, most people would have learned it already. Don't use Linux, because if it was worth it, most people would have switched from Windows already. And definitely don't learn programming. If it was worth it, most people would have learned programming already. In fact, don't use a real computer at all, just consume content on your phone, because that's what most people do. I am very smart.

>>40027 Don't get a foot pedal. Just rebind Caps Lock to Control.

>>39890 >Currently writing my bachelor thesis on Emacs concurrency Link? Source? Out yourself!

i consider having learned gnu emacs to be worth it. edwin doesn't have enough documentation. vs code is gross

>>37941 >i found deleted content saved in buffer to paste good for rearranging code but it backfired when i wanted to copy/paste one line multiple times because on first replacement buffer is already overwritten with the deleted content which means you have to copy your desired content again for each replacement. Now apparently you can switch buffer back to previous content but keeping mental track of your buffer state seems a lot harder than pointing and spamming ctrl+v. If you know you'll want to paste multiple times, you can use custom mappings to yank/delete to and paste from a non-default register. You can even append multiple lines to paste as a single block. See :h quote_alpha (Staying in Insert mode and spamming Ctrl-V also works.)

so many emacs too many emacs GNU Emacs Edwin uEmacs JOVE JED mg Zile someone should rewrite edwin to be based off a newer version of emacs. i might do it if i get some external focus and motivation

As other have said, org-mode is great, the help system and general debugging is nice, if you don't like the keybinds, you can use evil mode or one of the fancy setups like doom or spacemacs (don't have any experience with them though). It is also a great introduction to learning lisp. Emacs has a built in book for learning Elisp (you may need to install the emacs-common-non-dfsg package if you are on some flavors of Linux). I don't even do that much programming in it these days besides writing stupid terminal programs/games in some new language or trying (and failing) to write modes for them. But thats all part of the fun. For smaller edits, and if you like the default keys like me, look for the mg editor (included in OpenBSD base system, should be in most Linux repos as well.) I really recommend emacs if you have even a passing interest in Lisp. It is built with it and for it. Most of my computer time outside of vidya is spent in Emacs. File management, email, news, basic web browsing, you can do it all in Emacs. And if you can't, you can try writing it yourself!