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Editing Code in Emacs

159 points by redpenguin101

by eviks

1 subcomments

> A note on defaults. A problem with customised setups is that they mean you can’t pick up your friend’s Emacs setup and use it
> can be mitigated by sticking with the ‘language’ of the system
No? You're still going to be mistaken a lot of the time to the point of making your experience unpleasant. And how often do you really pick up your friend's Emacs setup for this to outweigh the other 99% of your time?
> Emacs has pretty clear (if arguably not very good) conventions
Indeed, so it's a waste of productivity and ergonomics to rely on it

by dustfinger

5 subcomments

My favorite way to move around in Emacs, and to move text around, is via avy-mode: https://github.com/abo-abo/avy. If you have not experienced avy-mode, give it a try, I think you will wonder how you ever got along without it.

by floathub

1 subcomments

I used Emacs for several years before I discovered "project" (it's built in). If you're navigating dired trees or similar to find files or grep for strings in groups of files, this is like magic:
C-x p f (find any file in the current "project", e.g. git repo)
C-x p v (grep the whole project super fast)
It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize it was there all along. :-)

by mark_l_watson

2 subcomments

I am going to sound like a mouse-using Luddite but I configure .emacs with a one line addition to allow a mouse click to reposition the cursor and fast scrolling works also.
I have been using Emacs for 40 years, and decades ago, before ground based fiber, it was a 2 satellite bounce ping time between my office in San Diego and the 38 data collection sites around the world for a DARPA project and the mouse click in Emacs saved a ton of time.
In the present time, I use Emacs on remote servers and local editing, either using my iPad Pro, and Apple Mouse, and a Studio monitor, or a MacBook - on both environments I find occasional mouse clicks or fast scrolls using mouse or Apple trackpad still saves time even in zero latency environments.

by nine_k

0 subcomment

In short: turn Emacs navigation into Vim-like navigation, make the editing modal, and thus make navigation hyper-efficient. (If you like the idea, I would suggest taking a look at evil-mode if you come from Vim, or god-mode and devil-mode if you already are used to Emacs.)
A few useful pieces of advice beside that, too. The workflow the author describes is not how I prefer to do things, but the author mentions a number of important capabilities to be aware of: operating at sexp level, subword motion, etc. Narrowing and folding, which I like to use, are not mentioned.
No mention of LSPs or compilers, but these are their own large topic.

by rickstanley

0 subcomment

Thanks for sharing. I've been off editor hopping for quite some time, nowadays I just use some pre-defined configuration like Doom Emacs, occasionally I try to build some environment, with AI help, from "scratch" for fun and curiosity.
I really like Emacs' flexibility + evil-mode and reactivity, recently I searched for something similar and found Lem: https://github.com/lem-project/lem, looks promising, I'll try it out and compare with Emacs when I have the chance and time.

by final_aeon

1 subcomments

In my opinion there's no reason to stick to the "old school" / classic emacs controls. They're archaic at this point.
I am an experienced emacs user and I still use CUA mode, arrow keys, and I wrote a package which completely overhauls built-in "word jumping" commands (called bbww on melpa.)
You don't need to worry about upholding traditional emacs orthodoxy

by mystifyingpoi

2 subcomments

I really like this, it's a bit hardcore, but for someone that really cares about efficiency (whether it is worth it or not - debatable), this is great.
Though I have one minor nit against one point, that I've seen basically in every similar article:
> This means no arrow keys and no mouse
I use Neovim daily, and there is no denying that 98% of the time, using mouse is less efficient than doing a fancy search or jump. But for the remaining 2%, it's provably true that mouse is better - like, selecting an arbitrary block of code (without {} or any keyword to hang on). So I always recommend leaving the mouse enabled. Just use it when it makes sense.

by OhMeadhbh

1 subcomments

Meh. I'm not a fan of modal interfaces. But if it works for you, then knock yourself out. I appreciate the write-up here. I'll give it a try to see if I can see what the author is talking about. The overwhelming majority of code I write now is in snippets inside text documents (think Knuthian Literate Programming) so I don't know how that would work w/ the author's modal setup. But they went to the trouble of documenting it, and it seems sort of like what `vi` people are always yammering about. Seems a decent idea to try to understand it.

by eichin

0 subcomment

Hmm, would be interesting to see a "race" between this and isearch; from the examples, it looks like this has an advantage only if you have lots of similar strings, so "the one you're looking at" vs. "typing more letters of the word" is an advantage? (externally timed, see The Humane Interface for details on how self-reporting doesn't actually work to measure this kind of thing)

by tacker2000

0 subcomment

You can also use a great vim “integration” in emacs by using doom emacs.

by emil-lp

3 subcomments

I've used Emacs for 20 years and I never learnt to navigate in a file except backwards and forwards search.
Is there still hope for me?
I think my biggest issue is that I am a slow coder and I never feel in a hurry.

by jmclnx

0 subcomment

Seems to be an intro to a kind of but lite weight vi mode. I tend to like the regular mode in Emacs.
Maybe a bit OT, but I think I saw here a week or more ago a post about magit, I am toying with using it, but seems to be a rather big package. Plus I wonder why dash is needed:
https://emacsdocs.org/docs/magit/Installing-from-the-Git-Rep...
In anycase to avoid downloading additional packages I may use Melpa
https://emacsdocs.org/docs/magit/Installing-from-Melpa

by user333311

1 subcomments

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by user333311

1 subcomments

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by user333311

1 subcomments

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