I personally havent really used emacs for organizing, but I really like it for bash coding and writing software documenation in orgmode. I am even starting to get a little bit comfortable at writing my .emacs file but at some point I will have to do a lot of reorganizing and updating and I kind of dont want to do it (I still use .emacs and not emacs.d/init.el and all keybindings still use the legacy global-set-key command).

Apart from the work I am putting into it it is really great, because when I actually get to do stuff I can do so with great efficency. I am even starting to miss my emacs keybinds when not using emacs (especially ctrl-k for killing from your cursor position to the end of the line ctrl-a for jumping to the beginning of a line and ctrl-e for jumping to the end of a line). At this point when I am writing stuff in emacs (as example working on a bash script) I at maximum use my mouse for scrolling.

Fuck, I really did turn into the meme (and I am not even using it for longer than 4-5 months at maximum)___

  • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    11 hours ago

    People who know what’s emacs is the same demographic as people who love talking about what software they use

  • chickenf622@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    13 hours ago

    Excuse me while I get really mad at you for not using Vince even though it doesn’t effect me in anyway.

    Jokes aside, I’ve gone the route of just using an extension in VS code to give me the Vim key bindings. I can’t go back to non-modal text editors the muscle memory is too strong. I really should play around with emacs in “evil mode” at some point. Maybe I could get the best of both worlds then.

  • Venat0r@lemmy.world
    16·
    14 hours ago

    (especially ctrl-k for killing from your cursor position to the end of the line ctrl-a for jumping to the beginning of a line and ctrl-e for jumping to the end of a line)

    I haven’t tried emacs but in any other text editor for these things I’d do:

    • shift+end, del
    • home
    • end

    do you have any more complex examples where emacs excels?

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    8 hours ago

    I am even starting to miss my emacs keybinds when not using emacs (especially ctrl-k for killing from your cursor position to the end of the line ctrl-a for jumping to the beginning of a line and ctrl-e for jumping to the end of a line)

    A number of software packages permit use of basic emacs keybindings.

    It’s the default in bash, which uses readline. If someone is a vi user, they can enable vi keystrokes in software that uses readline with editing-mode vi in their ~/.inputrc.

    For GTK-based apps, looking on my system:

    GTK 1: in ~/.gtkrc:

    gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

    GTK 2: in ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

    gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

    GTK 3: in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

    gtk-key-theme-name="Emacs"

    GTK 4 apparently can’t do this.

    Note that this can collide with other keybindings that a given GTK app has assigned to it. I moved the standard Firefox modifier key from Control to Alt to reduce the impact of that on my system. That was a little obnoxious to get worked into muscle memory, but I did ultimately manage it.

  • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    12 hours ago

    I had a college professor that I worked for who was basically the Emacs Enthusiast. So I gave it a try, learned about a half dozen commands and never really moved past that. Later, I was told to give vi a try, so I did and had basically the same experience. Built-in discoverability is/was non-existent for them and I never had a real need to pick up any more or spend hours reading man pages to figure them out. Time past, I went through a few different phases of GUI text editors/IDEs but could always pull out just enough vi or emacs commands when I needed. I did see my colleagues and friends who were all in on vim/emacs with 1000 line configs and thought they looked pretty cool, but I just didn’t have the time or inclination when I could be doing other things.

    Then in the last year I needed to go all in on a text mode editor for a variety of reasons. I looked around, gave Helix a try, and loved it from the beginning. My few vi commands worked, there is actual discoverability built in, and the select->action grammar makes way more sense to me than the others I’ve tried.

    Helix is not as extremely customizable or configurable as vi or emacs (yet, plugin system coming soon™ ) but it has a good default out-of-the-box configuration, enough configuration options for what I want, good lsp support, and discoverability.

  • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    15 hours ago

    I used to live in emacs, back when emacs stood-for “Eight Megs ( RAM ) & Continuous Swapping”.

    ( the 386-486 days )

    Morass-of-capability.

    Then, after being fought-off by Vim a couple times, I read, in “The DESIGN of Everyday Things”, that humankind has a mental-defect which causes us to NOT change-levels, when we NEED to have changed-levels.

    People who speak louder, when the hearer doesn’t even know the language, are doing this, e.g.

    & after that, I encountered a good explanation of Vim’s modality, & found out about vimtutor…

    & tried it, again…

    & then understood that by forcing my self to keep using Vim ( I’m autistic/woodenheaded, so forgetting what mode I’m in is much more frequent than it would be for neurotypicals ) applies-force to help break my unconscious-woodenness-of-mind, making my mind more levels-agile.

    Through the years, it has worked.

    I’ve not used Helix, which apparently is a modern improvement/replacement for Vim ( without much of the damn cruft ),

    but modal editors do help make one’s mind more levels-agile, & THAT is immensely worthwhile: it is competitive-advantage that few others invest-in!

    No, I’m not recommending Vim: I’m recommending modal-editors.

    Find the one which works rightest for you, & let it keep bashing your unconscious-mind’s stuckness default-habit, & eventually you’ll be cornered by fewer bugs, be broken to failure less often, etc.

    Morass-of-capability felt nice, but it was solving the wrong problem.

    Modal-editing corrects one’s human mental-defect of not-changing-levels, to some extent, & that’s like being ambushed by a gang, except that one’s got what Crocodile Dundee called “a knife” on one…

      ( :

    _ /\ _

        • da_cow (she/her)@feddit.orgOP
          2·
          8 hours ago

          Vim and emacs are really worth it when you do a lot of writing and editing (whether it be code or text). If you only occasionally edit config files nano is completely fine. However I do recommend to learn stuff like exiting and saving in vim because no matter what, about every single distro has some form of vim so you might encounter it in imporant scenarios and then you know your way around.

          • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
            1·
            8 hours ago

            It was originally pico, which IIRC was bundled with the pine email client (a “tree name” pun off elm, an older email client, whose name came from “ELectronic Mail”; this pun extended to many other Unix email clients, like mulberry and such). I think that “pico” probably stood for something like “PIne COmposer”. Because it was designed to be particularly approachable, listed the basic commands at the bottom of the screen, and pine was installed on a lot of systems, it kind of got adopted as the “Unix notepad for the terminal” — a simple editor that most users could use for lightweight tasks. Then IIRC due to pine predating standard open-source licenses, the nano clone was created to be GPL.

            searches

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_(text_editor)

            Yeah, it’s “pine composer”, it was indeed bundled with pine. And apparently part of the problem was that the license didn’t fully spell out the conditions under which it could be redistributed.

        • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          14 hours ago

          I’m only ever using a command line text editor for changing the odd config file, so for me the benefits of vim or emacs has never outweighed the hassle of figuring them out. So I stick with nano.