from Hacker News

Bad Emacs Advice

by grep4master on 1/20/22, 12:55 PM with 145 comments

• by beepbooptheory on 1/20/22, 3:00 PM

  Just to add: the built-in "Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" is also really really great. I have been using emacs for a while, with one framework or another, but always hesitated actually learning lisp. I was too focused on learning the kinds of languages and systems that might get me a job, and it felt like too big of a venture in learning a whole language just for my development environment. Now, I have a given up on the employable thing, and have been enlightened by SICP and lispey languages, and in general, the simple beauty of Emacs itself, not just what I can make it do. It takes only a little time to get comfortable with the nested (), and weird vocabulary, and it just really will click with you at some point, how simple it all really is, how every function bears on the simple syntactic principles of the language as whole, its lists all the way down!

  You can see the language work, by looking at the code.

  It may not get me a fancy computer job, but I think I am happier on the whole anyway, giving myself to lisp. Something therapeutic about it.

• by 0xdky on 1/20/22, 2:59 PM

  Another lesson I learned from almost 2+ decades of using Emacs:

  Track your customizations in a version control. Using customize package and reading the diff in dot Emacs file has taught me quite a bit about certain aspects of the package.

  Side note: It would be awesome if Emacs could do the versioning as part of saving the customizations - build Emacs with libgit2 and make it a native git client.

• by Yuioup on 1/20/22, 2:13 PM

    just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice.
  

  I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious!

• by mynameismon on 1/20/22, 3:19 PM

  Maybe it's me, but starting out with Emacs the previous month, I tried using Doom Emacs the other week, and the number of packages it was being used frightened me. Building your own init.el is much much better, because you know your Emacs in and out, and dont have random keybindings triggering stuff. Maybe I'll never get the popularity of Doom

• by drothlis on 1/20/22, 2:43 PM

  Years ago I wrote the Emacs tutorial I wish had existed when I was learning Emacs: https://david.rothlis.net/emacs/tutorial.html

  It follows a similar philosophy as the OP: Start by reading Emacs's built-in tutorial, and then my tutorial shows you how to leverage the built-in help system to figure out how to achieve what you want to do.

• by bitwize on 1/20/22, 2:36 PM

  I agree that the tool and menu bars are helpful for beginners. I disable mine to reclaim the vertical space (precious in a 16:9 world), to focus my attention on using the command keys, and because I'm a relatively experienced Emacs user! If keeping them helps you get your way around Emacs, by all means go nuts!

• by taeric on 1/20/22, 3:39 PM

  I do disable those things. But mostly out of aesthetics. That and I am easily distracted. I remember used to trying to find how to accommodate all items in the menu bar into my use.

  Completely agree with this article, though. Happy with my purchase of this book a while back.

• by aidenn0 on 1/20/22, 5:11 PM

  For those picking up emacs for lisp development, I'll add another piece of terrible advice: enabling paredit mode.

  I think these all have a similar theme to them "I am more productive now since I have turned them on, so I wish I had switched sooner" but they ignore the fact that each of those things adds friction to learning the basics, and at some point people will just nope-out.

• by aww_dang on 1/20/22, 2:58 PM

  Feels like these problems mostly relate to the tech-wizard elitism theme. By all means use the help features and GUI menus if that's what you need. I believe when you run these commands via GUI you also get feedback explaining the equivalent keystroke sequence.

  Reminds me of the old days of IRC posturing, newbie bashing and RTFMing. Today most info can be obtained by a well crafted search query.

• by jmclnx on 1/20/22, 4:24 PM

  Correct, I did not know about 'C-h k', very nice !

  very nice write up

• by thom on 1/20/22, 4:09 PM

  I dunno, everything the menu does can be recreated in the minibuffer (and you have things like apropos if you're really lost). Personally I like to reclaim as much space as possible, so I turn off modelines too (I have a bit of status info written into the minibuffer, but I'd kill that too if you could).

• by crumbits on 1/21/22, 1:31 AM

  >menu bar

  I never leave it enabled any more. When I was a beginner it was helpful but as time goes on you learn more of the system and better ways of finding commands.

  One thing I suggest is building emacs without dbus and using only Athena widgets. Both contribute to overall emacs stability.

• by rbanffy on 1/20/22, 4:49 PM

  I have been turning off the menu bar for quite some time because I get distracted easily and any content that's not necessary just gets in the way.

  That said, you can always call it up as a pop-up menu.

• by dark-star on 1/20/22, 4:46 PM

  "But just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice."

  I stopped reading after this. If you want to look like you're objective, don't use pizza as an argument

• by distantsounds on 1/20/22, 2:17 PM

  so let me get this straight:

  - read the manual - follow the tutorial - customize it to your liking

  wow, what enlightening advice! this must be unique to emacs and not _any_other piece of software!

  once again, all you need to get FP'd on hackernews is to put the word "emacs" in your title. zoom! to the front page!