

There are many things you can say about Emacs... - iamelgringo
http://pyside.blogspot.com/2008/02/there-are-many-things-you-can-say-about.html

======
1gor
I have always been surprised why TextMate rather than Emacs has got all of the
mindshare in Rails developer community.

'emacs-rails' mode had the same rails-specific navigation, snippet-expansion
etc. features two years ago and has improved greatly since then. (See
screencast: <http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net> for example)

I've tried to follow the crowd initially and to learn TextMate, but then...
why learning new set of keystrokes? And why reimplementing a fraction of
editing modes that emacs has available? When you can have... So I went back,
but I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support
TextMate. Matz uses emacs after all...

~~~
ardit33
"I am still puzzled by majority of Rails programmers choosing to support
TextMate. " -- mainly b/c most of them are noobs. (seriously). A huge amount
of Rails dev. are young, and just started programming, and to them emacs is
just arcane old stuff, while textmate is much more accessible, and I actually
agree with that.

Just trying to download emacs is a pain, hidden in between ugly pages, while
look textmate's webpage is much more shiny, and accessible. Plus people
nowdays hate to have to jump thru config loops, and learn arcane old keyboard
shortcuts just to get started.

So, darwinian process is going on, and the new, simple, and nimble, is
replacing the old and arcane.

~~~
jraines
Guilty as charged.

Anyone know of a good Rails editor for Windows? I like the eclipse-based
RadRails, but I heard they stopped supporting and updating it. I don't care
about tons of IDE features, just would like something simple and shiny. I
tried the NetBeans Rails editor and hated it.

~~~
davidw
Emacs, of course.

~~~
jraines
I will give it a try tonight!

~~~
mechanical_fish
If you try it and find yourself tearing your hair out in enormous handfuls, do
get somebody to give you a demo before you give up. Emacs is my favorite piece
of software ever, but it does take some getting used to, and some practice.

My inner emacs evangelist will haunt me for saying this, but there's a
supposed TextMate clone, which I believe is called "E", that the local Ruby
guys were talking about. I don't know if it's really any good, and I don't
know if it's for Windows or just Linux.

~~~
davidw
Yes, emacs is something to marry, not spend a night with:-) You'll love it
more and more as the years pass and you continue to discover new aspects of it
that continue to surprise and delight you.

------
johnrob
I think the first picture is pretty ugly, it looks too much like eclipse.

~~~
ardit33
and what's wrong with eclipse? It does it's job well. It is an IDE not just a
editor, and so far has been pretty popular for good reasons. I know it is
trendy to bash java, but really what's wrong with eclipse?

~~~
johnrob
For many folks, myself included, the spirit of emacs is to avoid the mouse.
That particular screen looks like it was designed to be used with a mouse.

I agree that eclipse is a useful tool, but I don't think it has much in common
with emacs. It feels strange saying this about editors, but they embody
completely different notions of how programming is done.

For example, when I pull up a file in emacs, I intend to read the code.
Eclipse users tend to load the file and then examine the structure tab,
looking directly at the method definitions. I've seen eclipse users ignore my
comments because of this structure pane (and not reading the code file top to
bottom). These editors definitely put us on different wave lengths :)

~~~
ghiotion
My God. I never noticed that, but you're absolutely right. I'm a vi guy
myself, but all the other, more _visually_ oriented developers in the office
don't read code from top to bottom. They scan the methods in the structure tab
on eclipse. I always wondered why their eyes would constantly drift off the
editor...

------
lojic
I recently switched from vim to emacs. It's so easy to extend with elisp
functions, and the buffer handling & directory editing is great. Not to
mention ecb, etc. I still like vim, emacs just works better for me presently.

I did have to put in some effort to get nice fonts, but as the article states,
if you use emacs 23, you can get it to look beautiful. I wrote a post about
how to get it running with nice fonts:

[http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-
on...](http://lojic.com/blog/2008/02/07/nice-fonts-for-gnu-emacs-on-ubuntu-
linux/)

------
coffeeaddicted
Well, as he asks for my excuse, why I still not use it ...

I did grow up in the MS World where your fingers are trained to use <ctrl-v>
and <ctrl-c>. And certainly all the other keybindings which you learn when
programming with VS for a decade. I tried switching a few times, but having to
press 3 keys at once is probably the main reason which keeps me still away
from emacs.

Does anyone know of some emacs scripts which put all the keybindings from VS
into emacs? Including stuff like blockselection with alt+mouse? Serious, I'm
mostly working on Unix these days, but I still miss the VS editor :-(

~~~
mechanical_fish
You can accomplish this if you want to, but please let us try to convince you
that you don't want to.

Learn emacs. If you do you will never need to "miss" your editor again, in
your entire life. Emacs is open source, it's cross-platform, and it will never
die... unless it is replaced by something so great that you will never miss
it. Which may never happen. (TextMate is the best alternative I've seen in the
last decade, but it has a long way to go.)

You will eventually get emacs into your fingers. Buy _Learning Emacs_ , a very
good book. Learn to use kill-and-yank instead of copy-and-paste.

Three keys at once? Am I such an emacs veteran that I just don't notice myself
doing that? I guess I do have a few combos like that (C-M-\ , indent-region,
is one I use quite a bit) but I have a Kinesis keyboard with Ctrl and Meta
mapped to adjacent keys, one set for either hand, and that kind of solves a
lot of the problem. One of the reasons I got fed up with TextMate and
retreated _back_ to emacs is that I can't stand all the three-key combos that
the Mac insists on... it's all command-shift-this and command-option-that,
because the Mac refuses to use the emacs prefix approach.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
As you might guess I have heard similar argument a lot already. I don't doubt
that switching to emacs can be worth it, that's why I am asking about making
it easier for me to start with it. I just don't see why I have to learn a new
keymapping when nearly every new application out there uses a keymapping which
is rather similar to the one which I am used to.

I'm not looking for emacs to simulate VS. I'm really only interested in
mapping the behavior of the mouse and the keyboard to common shortcuts. And
you didn't really make an argument why learning another set of combos should
be preferred to that. As it seems you rather also mapped it to your liking...

So yes - I want to learn emacs. But no - I don't want to learn that specific
keymapping, my current one works fine and every time I tried some emacs
tutorial I was appealed by the 3 key combos after a while so much that I did
give up. And because I'm not so deep in emacs I don't know yet how to do that,
so I hoped that maybe someone else already did it.

~~~
marvin
Long post ahead.

It's not really that hard...maybe Emacs isn't for you, but I was in your place
just six months ago, when I started my CS studies and heard that Emacs could
make your life easier. I am still a newbie, but I have started loving the
editor.

Here's how to learn.

You _need_ a good cheat sheet, printed and preferably taped to your monitor.
You don't need the most arcane keymappings, but you'll need document
navigation, search/replace, the escape commands (abort, save, quit), set
mark/region, kill and yank (cut and paste, that is). And maybe after a while a
quick reference on how to create and kill buffers. I am sorry I have to
present it like this, but the keybindings are IMHO the best thing about Emacs
when you're a newbie. Don't use the arrow keys! I know that sounds rather
ludicrous, but it will save you hours of hand motion in the course of a year.
And if at some point you miss a document navigation mapping, it is likely
already included in the standard distribution and hence only a web search
away. Try for instance
<http://astro.berkeley.edu/~robishaw/comp/emacs.crib.html>.

Actually, you could probably manage it with just document navigation,
kill/yank and save/quit. Those will teach you how to hate your mouse. I love
it when there's something I can do exclusively in Emacs, because it is so much
easier to get my thoughts into bytes. I don't have to worry about any stupid
motoric kung-fu. My hands never leave the keyboard.

If you're a newbie, Emacs won't serve you well for all kinds of work. I still
prefer Eclipse for Java stuff, because it has a much gentler learning curve
for getting debuggers, auto-complete, inspectors and syntax checking in order.
You can do all those things in Emacs, but you have to be a lot more dedicated
than I have been thus far. For scripting work, however (and that includes just
about any Python work et. al.) it is glorious.

Emacs' revered customization won't be of much value to you when you're a
newbie (you have to download an emacs lisp file just to change the editor's
colors, for instance), but hopefully such details will keep out of your hair
until you are familiar enough in the environment to tackle them. My Emacs
looks really pretty now, so you know it can be done.

Getting the book that was mentioned seems like an excellent idea. I have been
wondering myself whether there was one. Good books make learning a hell of a
lot easier than scouring the web.

Good luck to you, I hope you find a solution that makes you happy :)

[Actually, now that I come to think of it, it would be nice if someone made an
Emacs distribution with tighter integration to the windowing system. With
menu-bars for most of the commands, easier configuration dialogs and all that
stuff. Maybe most emacs developers don't care for these things, but it is very
intimidating to have to look up every unfamiliar keybinding on the web. Just
pulling down a menu and reading it would make the editor much less
intimidating. I think the reason most programmers scorn Emacs is that it
frightens them, just like LISP.]

~~~
coffeeaddicted
Well, thanks it's sort of nice to get all those advice. Just... I'm not
exactly a newbie. Like mentioned above I already have worked a decade with VS
(and started programming more than 20 years ago). And I'm used to those
keybindings very much by now and not only have no problem with them, but I
actually do like them. Really. Not the least because nearly identical bindings
work in nearly every single modern application on Windows, Linux and even on
most Applications on the Web.

The reason I had to leave VS behind is that it's not available for other
systems and I also I didn't like VS so much anyway beside it's editor and it's
debugger. I can live with smaller changes - so I have for example no problem
working with kate and CodeBlocks. But they are still not as powerful as the VS
editor had been. Emacs probably is - from all I heard it's even way beyond all
of them.

But for all the power it might offer, for a start I would already be glad with
simple familiar keymappings :-) I think people who had to work with VS and
come from emacs (that stuff happens sometimes) know the feeling and therefore
emacs keybindings exist for VS. I'm just looking for something the other way
round. Though by now I guess that it's not yet available.

If I like the editor afterwards, well maybe I learn the original keymappings
then also someday. But for a start I would just prefer it to work with the
keys I like and know.

And I'm not afraid of Lisp - not the least bit ;-)

~~~
hollerith
I have used Emacs every day since 1991, have never run Windows or Mac and
hardly ever use Windows or Mac, and even I agree with you about the
keybinding. You should refuse to learn a new set of keybindings because the
set you already know is the set that well over 90% of the world and 90% of the
world's desktop applications use. (I have not used this CUA mode of Emacs that
other commenters mention.)

------
systems
anyone here used scite, i've tried so many editors on windows and i've found
scite to be the best of them all

it's starts up quickly, i've added it to the windows shortcut context menu,
and scite have this option that allow you to open all new file in the same
instance on new tabs

it have really good folding, and it have a simple and nice perl integration by
default!

i don't know much about scripting scite, i know it uses lua, but i am sure if
it gets more popular, one will find nice languages mode for it

on windows scite is king!

------
jrsims
Can someone give me a reason to try emacs and leave my trusty vim?

~~~
lojic
Hard to say what would be a good reason for you, but I had used vim for a
couple of years and really liked it. I still like its conciseness.

I became interested in emacs because of the good support for Lisp w/ slime,
etc. Plus, I thought I'd prefer extending my editor with Lisp vs. vim script -
I was right. I hadn't written any vim scripts while using vim, but I've
quickly written many little elisp functions and bound them to convenient keys.

The dired (directory editing) feature is great. I like the way it handles
buffers & bookmarks better than vim. I actually use the calendar feature.

I like how the functions you right get integrated into the help facility
automatically.

The "Learning GNU Emacs" book is great.

The architecture seems better than vim.

I wasn't thrilled with all the "chording", but I'm writing new functions and
making the keybindings comfortable for me.

The help facility seems superior to me. Dynamic abbreviations, window/frame
control.

I'm sure there's more, but I only switched about 10 days ago :)

------
tehmoth
first screenshot would be 'pretty' if it weren't editing python, which is
horrible to look at, worse to code in.

