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The long-term advantages that come with using Emacs just make life easier. I also hope to provide you with enough detail that you can have a successful experience with it, without hours of Googling. But, this post is about Emacs for CEOs and other Pointy-Haired Bosses (PHB) 1 (and, hey, anyone who’s curious), so I'm going to explain and/or rationalize why I love it and how I use it. I'd say our engineers are about 30% Emacs, 40% IDEs, and 30% Vim users.
EMACS QUIT CODE
I don't write code any more (other than Ludwig and Emacs Lisp), but many of the engineers at Fugue use Emacs to good effect. If you like the new and shiny and want to get straight to work without much investment of time and mental cycles, it's likely not for you. If the notion of building your own personal working environment by editing Lisp code and having that fits-like-a-glove environment follow you to any computer is appealing to you, you may really like Emacs. Just as the lugged steel frame will be useful and comfortable in decades to come and the carbon fiber wunderbike will be in a landfill, having shattered on impact, so will Emacs persist as a useful tool when the latest trendy app is long forgotten. To me, Emacs feels like the future rather than the past. The terms are pretty far off the beaten path and seem odd, but there is a logic to them that is both compelling and charming. It's powerful and timeless, but demands that you patiently understand it on its terms. This may give the impression that Emacs is anachronistic or old-fashioned. Check out this comparison of frame tubes. YMMV.Ī 1933 steel bicycle that I still ride. I'm the sort of person who feels equal joy at finding an old stash of Campy parts or tweaking my editor with eLisp.
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The second is a source of endless joy or annoyance depending on your personality-and will last until your dying day. Emacs is like a box of classic Campagnolo parts and a beautiful lugged steel frame that's missing one crank arm and a brake lever that you have to find in some tiny subculture on the Internet. They come kitted out very nicely and fully assembled. Modern productivity and authoring applications (e.g., Pages or IDEs) are like carbon fiber racing bikes. Perhaps more importantly to me though, it's the one application I've ever used that makes me feel like I really own it instead of casting me as an anonymous "user" whose wallet is cleverly targeted by product marketing departments in fancy offices somewhere near Soma or Redmond. When you think about how much your computing life revolves around text, this is a rather bold statement. well, just about anything you want to do with text. That hardly sounds like an endorsement, but the key phrase is "at first glance." Once you grok Emacs, you realize that it's a thermonuclear toaster that can also serve as the engine for. It's sort of a Rube Goldberg machine the size of a house that, at first glance, performs all the functions of a toaster. emacs and Dropbox tips so that you can set up a good, movable environment.įor those who haven't used Emacs, it's something you'll likely hate, but may love. It was a good decision for several reasons that will be covered in this post. About three months ago, noticing just how much of my time was spent switching between applications and computers, I decided to give Emacs another try.
EMACS QUIT HOW TO
As a result, I forgot how to do tasks as basic as efficiently navigating files without a mouse. Years went by and I moved to newer, shinier things.
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I wrote code and documents, managed email and calendar, and shelled all in the editor/OS. See the man page ($ man emacs) for more information on using Emacs.Years-no, decades-ago, I lived in Emacs. emacs init file found in your home directory: To permanently remove this option, include the following line in the. If you are using Emacs outside an X environment and want to remove the pull-down menu for the current session, type Esc-X menu-bar-mode.
EMACS QUIT FULL
Editing commands are issued by first pressing the Escape key (shown below as M) followed by a command character or by holding down the Control key (shown below as C) and typing a command character.Įmacs 20.7, the version available on the CUNIX Cluster, has X-windows (graphics) support: when run in an X environment, such as on a ColumbiaNet Station or an HP workstation (251 Mudd), and the DISPLAY variable is set correctly, Emacs is displayed in a separate window with a pull-down menu on the top and full mouse control. To start Emacs, type emacs at the UNIX $ prompt. Emacs is a very powerful text editor which you can use to create or edit text files in UNIX.
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