Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by leephillips on Thursday December 26, 2013 @11:40AM (#6966763)

Thanks for taking the trouble to write all this (when all I asked for was a link). It gives a good flavor of what you're talking about. I used to read network news inside of emacs, using a mode called gnus, decades ago, and before I switched to vim. That's probably an example of a complex application that could be written within emacs because of the architecture that you describe. This extensibility is tempting me to try emacs again, because vim is so hard to extend, but I don't want to give up vim's pure editing efficiency. I guess I need to see how well evil (vim mode for emacs) works in practice.

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Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by lewaldman on Thursday December 26, 2013 @02:40PM (#6967643)

Former VIm user... Current Emacs user.

IMHO, Evil Mode makes to use emacs doable OTOH, the fact that there are so much extensions and possibilities under the hood makes to use emacs mandatory! :P

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Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by codygman on Thursday December 26, 2013 @01:44PM (#6967362)

I've been using emacs for a while (after vim for 6, 7... 8 years?) and have recently been looking at evil. I can't seem to find any really comprehensive tutorials for Evil mode, though I haven't put a lot of work towards it.

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Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by ZaneA on Thursday December 26, 2013 @02:46PM (#6967675)

The great thing about evil is you can enable it in your .emacs and it mostly just works. But even better, because this is Emacs the vi layer is also easily extendable. Here's an example of adding other operators (adding `mit`, `mit>` etc): https://github.com/ZaneA/Dotfiles/blob/1858a02de25e25de20e96...

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Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by xiaomai on Thursday December 26, 2013 @05:53PM (#6968511)

I'm tempted by emacs/evil as well, but everytime I try to make the switch I run into two problems:

1) intial emacs setup: it feels really tricky to just get basic editor sanity configured (auto-indent, syntax highlighting, etc.)

2) I worry that by using evil mode, I lose out on a lot of the goodness of emacs major and minor mode's. Do you remap everything to be more vi-ish for each mode that you use? I guess that is fine but the transition just seems daunting.

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Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by ZaneA on Friday December 27, 2013 @01:52AM (#6969684)

I second the idea of using Prelude to start with Emacs, along with the package manager which makes the initial setup and adding modes/stuff very easy (see http://melpa.milkbox.net).

I haven't seen any lost functionality by using evil; modes that define bindings continue to work, and the usual C-x/C-c/M-x/whatever works fine with evil. There is the odd major mode that doesn't work with evil out of the box (usually if it redefines j/k) but most have no problems. You can still use most (all?) regular Emacs movement commands with evil as well.

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Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by aoeuaue on Thursday December 26, 2013 @08:25PM (#6968963)

Prelude[1] is a great way to start with emacs. I don't have any experience with evil, though.

http://batsov.com/prelude/

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Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by deadghost on Thursday December 26, 2013 @09:52PM (#6969209)

Getting the vim portions working in emacs was surprisingly easy. I didn't have a significantly modified vim so there wasn't much to port. Stuff like mapping jj to esc and Y to y$ was simple enough. I don't notice any difference between evil and vim.

I'm still trying to figure out the emacs portions of emacs. I don't have the work flow quite right; things like buffer management, saving sessions, shell in emacs, etc.

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Re:Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors by babs474 on Thursday December 26, 2013 @11:07PM (#6969357)

Here are things I use for those 3 things that I find really helpful, maybe you will too.

1.http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractivelyDoThings

2. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DeskTop

3. For 3 I just use built in shell-mode, but what is really neat is saving your shell session to a file "C-x C-w" every so often. Then if you reboot or crash or whatever, emacs-desktop will bring back all your open files and all your shells. I usually have 3, regular bash, a sql session, and maybe an ssh session to somewhere, all with a full record of what I've done, sometimes going back months.

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