Continuing yesterday’s theme of moving to Emacs, let’s discuss some ways of easing the transition. Nikhil Soni has a nice post that describes how he got Emacs to provide the features he was used to from editors like VSCode, Atom, and Sublime.
In particular, he wanted Emacs to give him these functionalities:
- Duplicate current line
- Move a line up or down
- Multiple cursors
- Auto-completion
- Fuzzy search for file name
- Project tree view
- Go to function or class definitions
- Return to previous cursor position
- Find all function references
- Markdown preview
Most serious Emacs users already have solutions for these but Soni goes through them one-by-one and shows how he implemented them. Almost every item was implemented by loading a package or with a (very) few lines of Elisp. Soni shows the Elisp in his post but also provides a pointer to the file in his configuration that provides them.
It’s a nice post that demonstrates that there’s nothing—other than bling—keeping you from upgrading from VSCode, Atom, or Sublime. Or so I say. Some partisans of those other editors will doubtlessly strongly disagree. That’s alright. As I’ve said before, the choice of an editor is a personal, not a moral choice. Of course, if you want the best editor…