Stevey's Tech Talk E39 -- A guided tour of Emacs

I got inspired by an Emacs video [0] I found on HN and decided to (once again) try and learn to use it. A lot of emacs videos are tutorials and boring, but it was really cool to see some of the features from someone who was very enthusiastic about it. I keep coming back to emacs every few months so I figured it has to mean something. I tried setting up a react development environment. Got some stuff like auto-complete, but missing other stuff. I essentially want it to mirror VS code to start. I know it's possible but there's definitely a learning curve. I also tried setting up a python environment, and had similar results. It's one of those technologies that seems life changing. Not necessarily in productivity (who cares right?), but just empowering. The closest thing you can get to being a hacker in a movie, setting up an environment where you can easily program macros to do any arbitrary tasks or alter the environment. It really seems like an incredible piece of software that, on the surface level, looks like it could serve as as the framework for so many things, kind of like the web browser is today, but more flexible and programmable. Maybe it's just been around too long. I think if it was invented just today it would have a lot of hype. But because it's been around so long, it's just meh. I don't know, maybe I'm just being romantic about it and will never get over the learning curve. It's really hard to leave VS Code for development. [VIDEO]

For those who don't really know what Emacs is (besides being an editor), I found this overview video from Steve Yegge as excellent. I never used Emacs, so it was very informing for me: [VIDEO] One particular aspect that intrigued me: you can extend VS Code (and similiar), but it's a lot of work and boilerplate to create a plugin whose actual functionality is 3 lines of code (let's say toLowercase()). In emacs, you can just write those 3 lines of code and that's it, that's your plugin.

Two videos by Steve Yegge should be enough to convince the most dyed-in-the-wool anti-Emacser to consider re-evaluating their position. (Here is the first: [VIDEO] ). My top-tip, FWIW, is learning how to navigate the help system to the point that it drags you into the deepest layers of Emacs' source code. > smex The three packages, whichkey, helpful and marginalia are excellent for beginners for quick overviews of what's going on at the surface. And, yes, Mickey P's work is undoubtedly of great value!

I will treat your comment as serious and explain why I personally use emacs. The thing I love most about emacs is that it is joyously consistent. The same key combination to jump ahead by a word works everywhere, such as when you're opening files or navigating directories. This consistency means that I am often very efficient trying new packages that I have never used. Maybe you've never seen someone use emacs in anger? If so, check out this video of Steve Yegge doing some stuff in Emacs: [VIDEO]

He has also recorded two videos on youtube demonstrating some of emacs' features that I really like. - A guided tour of Emacs: [VIDEO] - Emergency Emacs: [LINK]