Emacs Thread - M-x autism

[Cryonic Haunted Bullets]

Post anything regarding the Editor for Middle-Aged Computer Scientists and its love/hate relationship with your pinky finger. Configs, scripts, cool hacks, et cetera.

To start this thread, I'd like to share a few utterly heretical lines from my init.el:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-'") ctl-x-map)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-,") 'counsel-M-x)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-.") 'ivy-switch-buffer)

The bindings for , and . come from TF2, where , switches class and . switches team; for some reason, these concepts are analogous to "mode" and "buffer" in one of the few folds of my dysfunctional :autism: brain, and it just works as a result.

 

[Dick Justice]

Every time I decide I'm finally going to learn emacs I immediately think of this and get scared away.

Spoiler

 

[Joe Swanson]

Ah yes the eMac, I remember using one in School

 

[ditto]

(server-start)

Join the emacs server master race.

 

[Branchland Count]

The Editor for Middle-Aged Computer Scientists

I dunno, Emacs has experienced something of a revival recently. I definitely feel like there are a lot more people talking about it now than when I started.

Going all in on Emacs was one of the best computing decision I've ever made. I keep it running in the background as a daemon and use it as my mail, IRC, and RSS client in addition to text editing. It might be a little rough around the edges, but a fully programmable and inspectable universal environment is how I'd like all computers to work in an ideal world, so it's well worth adapting to Emacs' quirks.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I make some money on the side by running a webpage of "helpful Emacs shortcuts". One of them is a crypto miner in Emacs Lisp that mines right to my wallet. So far no one's noticed.

 

[Dreamland]

It's a fun operating system (though much bigger than many operating systems), but you need to have pedals.

 

[garakfan69]

 

[Coolio55]

I used it to sneak games onto work pcs and learning the keybindings made it look like I was doing actual work...

Nothing else really :/

 

[BoingBoingBoi]

just swap ctrl and caps lock like a functional human being and stop bitching about your pinkies.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I used emacs for a few years also basically consistently running and moved off pieces of my other software to emacs functions but then I piece by piece figured out that while it does and can do a lot, it kinda does nothing properly or at least, let's say, particularity well. I'm of course mostly talking about the available packages. While it's true you can extend it programatically and I did get along with elisp somewhat (although I never developed a love for it, and I tried) in practice you're just not going to fork and rewrite packages. It's just not a thing that happens for most people. I also tried vim for several years, and came to a similar conclusion like with emacs, although it did seem more polished overall if you could resist to lurk under the hood and avoid the insanity that's waiting for you there in the form of vimscript. I then used vis for a while, which is basically vim with some features of Plan 9s sam in it and lua. Liked it more than vim, but again didn't do a whole lot with it.

Eventually I went over to ne which is a tiny, feature-clean and efficient text editor very similar to Amigas TurboText which has the feature of letting me pipe text blocks through external programs and insert their output and let me script hotkeys, the top-down menu and a few simple macros in the purest form of the sense. (no scripting language really) I decided that's all I really need and want from a text editor. I then made a few small patches to it to fix some annoyances which was only comfortably possible because it is as small as it is. If I need external programs to do things to text, I can write them in whatever language in whatever way and use that pipe feature. It's better if a program does one thing well instead of many things "kind of". Emacs is a lot of the latter.

 

[ditto]

I used emacs for a few years also basically consistently running and moved off pieces of my other software to emacs functions but then I piece by piece figured out that while it does and can do a lot, it kinda does nothing properly or at least, let's say, particularity well.

Emacs falls prey to the classic "Bipolar Lisp Programmer" effect :-

I saw this 10 years ago when looking for a GUI to my Lisp (Garnet had just gone West then). No problem, there were 9 different offerings. The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly documented and none were bug free. Basically each person had implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was fine. This is a BBM attitude; it works for me and I understand it. It is also the product of not needing or wanting anybody else's help to do something.

 

[Branchland Count]

just swap ctrl and caps lock like a functional human being and stop bitching about your pinkies.

Swapping ctrl and caps makes the leftmost alphanumeric keys hard to press with ctrl and ruins the symmetry of touch typing. Here's the secret pro technique if If you have a full height keyboard: move your whole hand to press ctrl with the base of your pinky, use right ctrl with keys on the left side of the keyboard and vice versa as you would shift. It's fast, painless, and every combination is equally easy.

 

[cecograph]

I used Emacs a lot at my last job. It was an open plan office, and I would use w3m mode to browse and post on kiwifarms without people realising.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Swapping ctrl and caps makes the leftmost alphanumeric keys hard to press with ctrl and ruins the symmetry of touch typing. Here's the secret pro technique if If you have a full height keyboard: move your whole hand to press ctrl with the base of your pinky, use right ctrl with keys on the left side of the keyboard and vice versa as you would shift. It's fast, painless, and every combination is equally easy.

Can't you just use more keyboards?

 

[Kosher Dill]

Can't you just use more keyboards?

Appropriate for an editor whose heyday coincided with prog rock's.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Appropriate for an editor whose heyday coincided with prog rock's.

Power-user

 

[Ask Jeeves]

(server-start)

Join the emacs server master race.

I'm forever being saved by that server.

just swap ctrl and caps lock like a functional human being and stop bitching about your pinkies.

That's what I used to use before I learnt it was possible set caps lock to escape when tapped and control when held down. It works really smooth.

Here's the code if anyone wants to give it a try

setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps
xcape -e 'Control_L=Escape'