May I introduce you to the simple life of just using whatever text editor and terminal that comes presintalled on your favoraite distro? It’s ridiculous how far this can get you, I’ve been enjoying gnome text ediotor with gnome terminal.
ed is a truly wonderful editor indeed!
The greatest WYGIWYG editor, with an extremely consistent error interface.
Works great on 300 baud; not many editors can boast that. Also, if your programs are all under 2000 lines long.
some distros ship kate, and that’s a super good pick for code editing
Fake news. Emacs is the only text editor non-heathens and heathens should be using.
I did this for the past 3 years. At some point I just got curious what all the hype is about, so I installed emacs and slowly started to use it. Now I am at a point, where Im getting comfortable around emacs and actually start to enjoy its features.
Befor I usually used nano, since I mostly edited my text files from within my terminal.
You really should use vim though.
No (I already somewhat learned Emacs, I ain’t gonna learn something new)
That’s how the meme goes though. Anytime someone suggests, says something positive about one of vim or emacs, the response should be that they should use the other. 😄
It’s an almost 40-year-old flame war.
That wikipedia article is pure comedy gold
Glad to lighten up the day!
The vim key bindings are a lot better.
Yeah, I daily drive spacemacs. 🙂
I found Doom to be a good middle-ground between raw Emacs+Evil and a complete overhaul of Spacemacs.
I’ve thought about Doom, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it out. Finding the time to sit down and learn it hasn’t been a high priority.
It’s very easy to pick up. Out of the box, it’s just Evil, Ivy/Vertico, Org-mode, and several programming modes. The spacebar is likewise employed for many actions, but I don’t use most of them myself: just have about a dozen that I invoke regularly. The enabled modules (readymade configuration) and installed packages are specified in config files, and
doom synchandles installing them.It has some emacslisp helper functions/macros to add mappings, add hooks on modes, etc. — these are more convenient than those of raw Emacs.
I’m not sure why the author switched Doom to Vertico in the upcoming version 3, when Ivy was working fine. I’ve made some configuration tailored to Ivy, so enabled it back via the config file.
I’ve been using emacs for work for years because the proprietary language I have to work in was set up with emacs as the default editor. I bitched and moaned when I first started because I was used to more modern solutions.
When they finally got VS Code support working…I stayed with emacs. Stockholm Syndrome, I suspect. But I know what I’m doing in emacs. I’m comfortable.
A wild guess… Magik/Smallworld? That was it for me.
Nah, it’s called CM which I believe stands for Configura Magic. It’s a C-based language sort of similar to C#, but specifically made for use with Configura’s space-planning software.
I actually like the language, I just hate that it’s extremely niche.
Edit: the similarity between the names Magik and Configura Magic is not lost on me, but I don’t think they’re related.
Hmm seems coincidence yes. Though Magik is also very niche… I think it was more Pascal inspired and later ported to jvm. I guess the name and Emacs were just a sign of the times.
Neovim with Nvchad is what finally made me ditch pretty much all other IDEs. As much as I used to like Jetbrains, they’ve pivoted to vibe coding so hard that I can’t justify using their IDEs.
this week i started using kickstart [modular], but i’m definitely considering going back to nvchad
I use helix btw
I decided to give it an honest try after somebody mentioned it on lemmy a few weeks ago.
… I really like it.
I still pop open Theia if I’m just doing some research that has me hopping all around, or sometimes on a separate monitor for a referenced project/library associated with my work, but I do the actual work in Helix.
I guess we are more on the vim side in the editor wars, but only against our shared foes
There are dozens of us!
I use kakoune btw
my fedora is bigger and my neckbeard is longer :D
Save yourself the trouble and just skip ahead: real programmers use butterflies
Good ol’ C-x M-c M-butterfly
Say goodbye to your pinkie
Pro tip: use Evil.
Another pro tip: if on Windows or Linux, remap alt to ctrl and win/menu to alt.
I may be crazy, but for regular text file, VIM is usually my go to. But, because of tag auto completion Bluefish has been my HMTL/CSS editor for a while. Most other things are in VIM. Bash? VIM. Python? VIM. C? Trash bin! Did not like the C class I took last quarter!
Exception being things like .docx or .odt files that have no business being opened in VIM.
… Do people open docx and odt files in VIM? Fuckin why?
IDK if people do, but I’d assume there are some people would just to avoid the bloat of having office suite software.
It’s unfortunate that your experience with C wasn’t a good one. imo it’s a cool language, even if it may be overshadowed by languages that are more intuitive to use.
Org-mode, which is made for Emacs, has built-in spreadsheets.
Use micro after everyone makes fun of you for using nano
Nano os shit. Micro is fine. Vim is good. Helix is peak.
helix is good, but kakoune is where all the fun happens
I’m coming from kakoune. Language servers are something that’s shockingly hard to get running reliably. Helix has solved this for me
weird. I just use kakoune-lsp, and it works just fine out of the box, spare bit of copypasting from the readme on their github.
I really like that i have to put in no effort for Helix to work, but unfortunately its just too rigid for me.
And it also backs down on kakoune’s philosophy, returning back the necessity of selection mode. It really frustrates me in this aspect. Kakoune’s more heavy reliance on modifier keys seems way more handy and sensible to me. Helix’s way just creates unnecessary complications, and feels like a change for the sake of a change.
Helix pretty much shares the kakoune keymap and interactions, so no idea what you mean. If you mean the line select mode using x - you can bind that in the config.
Also, plugin support using scheme is in the works. The dev still only sees it as a draft but it’s pretty usable already
no, what i mean is that they moved a whole list of motions into selection/extension mode. You can’t just press
shift+worshift+alt+i, you need to think “do i want to jump to the next selector, or do i want to extend the selection to it?”, press or not pressv, and only then pressw,alt+ior whatever. It’s literally vim2: the electric bogaloo in that aspect, because the user needs to think of a verb first:jumporextendin this case, then select nouns:word,paragraph, etc., then select the verb again, this time the actual operation i want to do to my selection. This practically defeats the whole point of the verb-noun motion reversal that the kakoune dev expressed first, and the helix dev repeated after.I learnt about helix first, so it wasn’t much of an issue, since a) i was just learning the motions, so i wasn’t striving for speed just yet b) i had no point of comparison… Until i tried kakoune. After that the idiocy of that design became apparent, and it can’t stop frustrating me ever since.
P.S. i remember seeing the discussion about helix future plugin support back in 2023, when i just found it. Since it’s still just “in the works”, i’m feeling really skeptical about it, and about whether the plugin infrastructure will grow big enough. Kakoune is much more mature in that aspect
Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast
All time classic.
Im not going crazy just playing around a bit, remapping some keybindings and so on. It is in fact kind of fun.
(I actually just tried jumping to the first line of my comment while writing it using C-a, which is the default keybind for this in emacs. I think its getting worse. Aaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhh)
Im a neovim user myself, and i swapped my caps and escape keys at the os level. I touch another computer and am WONDERING WHY IM WRITING LIKE THIS xD
As a “caps lock is another control” enjoyer, I know that pain. Don’t need to take your fingers off the home keys to type ^[ , whereas the proper escape key is a bit of a stretch.
Look into Doom Emacs. It’s pretty cool in general, but especially if one is inclined towards Vim’s keybindings (which I recommend learning) and uses Org-mode.
tried jumping to the first line of my comment using C-a
That would work in MacOS (iirc), since most of app shortcuts there are on the cmd keys, and some Emacs/readline bindings work in text fields. Though C-a moves to the first character of the current line, not first line.
The problem with Emacs is that it sucks but there is nothing better, and you are getting stuck with it forever. Welcome!
Emacs and (Neo)Vim are a bit too overwhelming for me. I’ve tried Neovim for a relatively long time, but I felt kind of overloaded with the vast amount of features and plugins it has. I’ve tried Emacs a bit, but its complexity always scared me (not to mention it uses its own version of Lisp, a language that is notorious for its ability of creating new language features on the fly, hence even more complexity). I’ve been using Helix, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve realized that I don’t really care much about editor customization, and that what I was looking for was just a cool modal editor with some useful features (such as file picker, LSP, tree-sitter, multiple cursors, …). The keybinds are also easier to grasp, as fewer of them feel arbitrary compared to Vim. In Vim and Emacs, it feels like you can do everything, while in Helix, it feels more like you can do everything the developers think that might be useful for you. Who knows, maybe I’ll try again Emacs and (Neo)Vim again in the far future, but I don’t feel like it for now.
May I recommend Helix? It’s a modal editor like vim, but has a better out of the box experience, better discoverability for commands, and uses an easier to understand select->command syntax.
Just started using helix a few months ago and I’m in love. The movement took a second to get used to but its super efficient once you get the hang of it. I highly recommend it, especially if you’re doing any kind of programming or sysadmin work and you hate gui ides.
I’ve written in my comment that I’ve been using Helix, but still, thanks for the suggestion.
Emacs is love, emacs is life
One of my year goals is to change from vsc to vim hehe
Good, good! You’re on the right way! But remember, there is a world outside your Emacs, don’t forget about it.
You mean Vim?
Surely, you mistyped neovim?
I have indeed
