Irreal

Howard Abrams has a nice video that serves as an introduction and demonstration of Emacs. Don’t be fooled by the “introduction” part. Abrams doesn’t spend any time on the usual 【Ctrl+p】 to move up a line, 【Ctrl+n】 to move a line down stuff that take up the majority of introductions. Rather, he emphasizes the demonstration aspects and shows the new user some of the advanced possibilities that Emacs offers. Abrams covers features such as

• Multiple Cursors
• Expand Region
• Org Mode
• Writing simple Elisp functions
• linum-relative

I hadn’t seen the linum-relative before but it looks as if it could be useful in a lot of cases. The idea is that the buffer is numbered with 0 at the line the point is on and negative numbers for the lines above, and positive numbers for the lines below. That makes it easy to jump a required number of lines. For example, if you want to jump to the line labeled 6 you could type 【Ctrl+6 Ctrl+n】. Most of the time, I use ace-jump-mode for jumps of that sort but I can see how linum-relative could be useful.

Abrams offers some other tips that you might not have seen so the video is definitely worth watching. It’s about 36 and a half minutes so plan accordingly.

Continuing with yesterday’s theme of Why I Use Emacs, here is an excellent post by Bozhidar Batsov over at (think) on why he uses Emacs. Anyone who follows the Emacs scene will be familiar with Batsov. He blogs regularly and is the author of prelude, projectile, and cider as well as the excellent series of short posts over at Emacs Redux. And, of course, Sacha has interviewed him. Here at Irreal, we’ve talked about Batsov and his works several times.

Batsov starts by pointing out that although many younger programmers prefer IDEs over text editors, the IDEs all suffer from the defect that they’re not really good at editing text: they make use of the arrow and other auxiliary keys that are death to efficient touch typing and mostly rely on the mouse and menus for their UIs. They are, in short, not optimized for the thing we do the most: editing text.

He remarks that Emacs is what you want it to be, a perspicacious remark, I think. You can configure it to work how you want it to work not how someone else thinks you should want it to work. As I’ve said so many times, this is the result of Emacs’ wonderful extensibility; its provision of a lisp environment that happens to have a lot of functions useful for text editing that you can mold to meet your needs.

Batsov covers a lot of ground so I’ll let you read the post yourself. It will be well worth your time. I will note that he offers a comparison with Vim and IDEs that strike me as fair and balanced so if you’re trying to make up your mind, you may find his discussion useful.

Update: Sasha → Sacha

Vincent Foley-Bourgon has a very nice post on why he uses Emacs. I probably like it because his reasons pretty much mirror mine. Still, I think his post will resonate with every Emacs user.

Following the old joke, Foley-Bourgon considers Emacs as an operating system and its embedded editor. The punch line of the joke, of course, is that all Emacs lacks is a good editor but Foley-Bourgon makes the case that Emacs is a superb editor and able to hold its own against any competition. It has all the usual capabilities as well as several that most editors don’t have.

Any intermediate Emacs user is familiar with the operating system aspects of the editor and Foley-Bourgon covers many of them. All your file manipulations can be carried out with dired and remote editing is easy with tramp. There’s lots more, of course, and Foley-Bourgon covers much of it.

Finally, Foley-Bourgon considers Emacs as a development environment and Lisp machine. As regular readers know, I consider these the most important aspects of Emacs. Because you have access to the same tools that the developers of Emacs used, you can extend it in any way you want—even ways not anticipated by the original developers. A consequence of this is that tons of folks have used that ability to extend Emacs in ways that benefit us all. Some of those have been folded into Emacs core and others are available as separate packages easily installed with the built-in package manager.

Foley-Bourgon’s post is interesting even for those already committed to Emacs. If you know someone who is curious about Emacs and thinking of trying it out, this post may help decide the issue.