{"id":10282,"date":"2022-01-27T13:42:48","date_gmt":"2022-01-27T18:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10282"},"modified":"2022-01-27T13:42:48","modified_gmt":"2022-01-27T18:42:48","slug":"bad-emacs-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10282","title":{"rendered":"Bad Emacs Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"

The incomparable Mickey has a few words to say on Bad Emacs Advice<\/a>. Mickey and I have been using Emacs for approximately the same amount of time and although we are both still learning, we agree that there\u2019s some well meaning but bad advice about learning Emacs. Mickey identifies the four hot sports for bad advice:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Turn off the menu and tool bars<\/li>\n
  2. Ignore the Emacs manual<\/li>\n
  3. Don\u2019t bother with the tutorial<\/li>\n
  4. Don\u2019t use the Custom Interface<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In a nice example of serendipity, I learned a couple of new things from Mickey\u2019s post on Emacs advice. The first is that you can access the menu system from the keyboard with Meta<\/kbd>+`<\/kbd>. that\u2019s probably not useful for any but the most hardcore antimouse GUI user but it\u2019s very<\/i> useful if you\u2019re using Emacs in terminal mode.<\/p>\n

    The second revelation is that can find out what a menu item does in exactly the same you find out what a key combination does: Simply precede the menu mouse click with Ctrl<\/kbd>+h<\/kbd> k<\/kbd>.<\/p>\n

    Mickey\u2019s advice strikes me as sound. Whether or not you use the menu bar when you gain a bit of experience, it\u2019s undoubtedly true that it can be a big help in learning Emacs. Some say the same about the tool bar but I\u2019ve never found it useful: it\u2019s ugly, doesn\u2019t help you learn the shortcuts, and doesn\u2019t have any functionality that the menu bar doesn\u2019t. As for the manual and tutorial, advice to ignore them seems particularly ill advised to me. Why wouldn\u2019t you want to avail yourself of comprehensive documentation on the workings of Emacs?<\/p>\n

    As for the Customize Interface, I used it a lot in my early Emacs days but don\u2019t use it at all now except for those automatic package things that Emacs insists on inserting into the Custom Configuration and even then I exile it to custom.el<\/code> so it doesn\u2019t pollute my init.el<\/code>.<\/p>\n

    I agree with Mickey about his take on bad Emacs advice. Take a look at his post to see what you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The incomparable Mickey has a few words to say on Bad Emacs Advice. Mickey and I have been using Emacs for approximately the same amount of time and although we are both still learning, we agree that there\u2019s some well … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-10282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10284,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10282\/revisions\/10284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}