To see what I have been missing, I have decided to really get into and learn Emacs. So far, I can I configure the modes and know a lot of the basic commands. I have the Erlang, Ruby, Slime, and Javascript modes working. The thing that has made the difference this time has been making Emacs my editor for everything everywhere. There's no way to fall into old habits.
Some might be wondering why am I torturing myself? I want to see and experience what so many developers that I respect love about Emacs. It's a different viewpoint than mine. Everything is viewed as text whereas I view the world as all objects. It's interesting. It's pushing me out my comfort zone of rich IDEs. I'm not going to say that I've been dealing with is better yet. But, I am making an effort in earnest to learn.
Next steps, I would like to start customizing Emacs through ELisp. Should be exciting and fun!
Sunday, March 09, 2008
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2 comments:
Welcome to the Church of Emacs. Come and be healed.
Neal Stephenson said it best -- while a certain software company was trying to figure out how to embed videos in presentations, Emacs hackers were trying to make the seemingly-simple problem of processing text better. All the little things in Emacs have already been solved. Getting them into your consciousness is another thing.
If I had to recommend on package to you, it would be Icicles. It will make finding files and commands a whole lot easier, because you can match them on any part of the name with a Shift-Tab.
It is hard to switch from whatever editor it is that you have used for a long time. I tried to use emacs many times but weaning myself from 12 years of constant use of vi was hard. But once I did switch to emacs, I was so glad and my eyes were opened to the endless possibilities of this superbly extensible environment. How cool is to be able to teach your editor to display a graphical view of your code stitching a bit of elisp and dot together?
You will wish you had a better Lisp implementation but with the use of 'cl, you should be happy. Glad to see emacs gaining another user :)
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