The two complaints I hear is:
1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve.
2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time.
Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.
The two complaints I hear is:
1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve.
2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time.
Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.
I've only ever used emacs in vim mode (evil-mode). Its vim emulation is the best I've seen anywhere.
It's terribly inefficient for emacs vi emulation mode to actually quit emacs when you type ":q", because it takes much longer for emacs to start up than vi, and people use a long-running emacs a lot differently than they use disposable vi's.
UniPress[1] Emacs's vi emulation mode would actually flip you over to an emacs shell buffer when you typed :q, and the shell would recognize when you typed "vi foo.c" and flip back over to a vi emulator buffer instead of actually running vi, but INSTANTLY, since changing buffers in a running emacs was much faster than actually starting up a new vi process.
So die-hard vi users didn't have to re-learn their muscle memory, and could just stay in the same emacs all the time, while the same old emacs alternately flipped between pretending to be a shell, and pretending to be vi.
[1] "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
I use emacs --daemon with emacsclient for this. I always have a running emacs instance, and connect with the client. Opening and quitting a client is near instant.
Yup. I've aliased it to e and and it works just fine. Sort of "send file into Emacs". I've also added some elisp to say things like e something.c:43 so that it opens it up at line 43.
I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.
I used emacs for about 16 years, but never properly gotten into client-daemon setup. What’s your setup? Does the daemon preserve open buffers and stuff, so when you connect you have all your openned stuff? Or each emacs sessions have separate set of buffers and windows?
> Does the daemon preserve open buffers and stuff, so when you connect you have all your openned stuff?
Yes. I use it instead of tmux for that.
WRT point 2, binding the caps-lock key to ctrl helps a lot, or finding a keyboard with the ctrl key to the left of "A".
being scared of emacs pinkie was a major contributor for me back as a student to learning vim. I remap ctrl to CAPS LOCK on all my computers as one of the first things but I still end up using my pinkie. I've been playing with the idea of switching ctrl to the spacebar at least in non insert mode though because I still end up using my pinkie a lot when scrolling with Ctrl+E for example
On my MacBook I map the right hand command key to “ctrl” and the right hand option key to “meta”. Since the command keys are right next to the space bar that puts the ctrl key on a thumb position most of the time, and for the times when that isn’t a good key for a given combo I still have caps lock bound to “ctrl” as well. Seems to work reasonably well and lets me keep the usual command and option keys on the left side for “super” modifiers and for typing accented and other characters.
For my desktops, I use an Ergodox EZ keyboard and mapped ctrl and meta into the thumb clusters there.
Don't use your pinkie or any finger. Use the meat of your hand to hit the control key.
This works especially well on an IBM Model M because there's nothing in the vicinity of either the left or right ctrl, you just chop your palm down and can't go wrong. I could also pretty reliably M-x in one hit by flipping my left hand over, curling my pinkie finger, and hitting the keys with the knuckles. On more crowded keyboards I remap ctrl:nocaps and use thumb and forefinger for M-x. I actually deliberately got rid of my Model M to teach myself to do it this objectively worse way, because context switching between my docked workstation setup and laptop keyboard on the go was difficult. If only someone would make a laptop with a proper keyboard...