Comments on: Do you know where your .emacs file is? UPDATED

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:58:35 +0000

Still working on it!

By: Tim Schafer

Tim Schafer — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:37:08 +0000

I’ll take this as an opportune moment to remind you of this:
“The emacs philosophy is deeply flawed and needs to be overhauled. I’m working on a post that follows up on that rather tendentious statement, and don’t worry, I’ll make good on it.”

It’s only been a year, no rush, I can wait. On the plus side you’ve got another follower.

I see what you did there.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:32:05 +0000

But it makes coffee.

By: gruebait

gruebait — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:40:36 +0000

I’m suspicious of any text editor that includes a text adventure.

By: Dave X

Dave X — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:22:45 +0000

I never considered the C-f = isearch-forward setting. Duh. I’m doing it.

I also like having a comment like this in my .emacs file, since I forget it after months, but always seem to want it when I’m looking at an elisp file.

;; C-x C-e == eval-last-sexp

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 15:31:06 +0000

Jim, you could always grow an extra finger in just the right place, using certain elisp code.

Eric, yes, it rages!

on the iMac, I recommend BBE.

By: Eric Lund

Eric Lund — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 15:11:06 +0000

Back when I was in grad school, there was an emacs vs. vi holy war raging (perhaps it rages still), and my sysadmin was definitely on the vi side. So I ended up using vi, despite its infamously user-hostile interface.

It’s better now–at least it color codes keywords and comments when you are writing source code in any of several different languages–but it’s still frequently annoying. It likes to wrap lines when it wants to (there is a reason I want all of that text on one line, damn it!), and it can do spectacularly destructive things if you think you are in edit mode when you are not.

But yes, it’s largely inertia that keeps me with vi. I’d have to (re)learn an entirely different set of arcane keystrokes to switch back to emacs, and I don’t use either program enough to justify the effort (I have a LaTeX application on my Mac, and it has an editor built in; for other things like paper reviews, TextEdit is perfectly adequate).

By: Jim Ramsey

Jim Ramsey — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:22:10 +0000

http://files.myopera.com/bashvi/albums/642917/vi-emacs-final.png

I’m only slightly evolved from using “ed”, so I use “vi”. At least I don’t have the crippled fingers from using “emacs”.