Comment by DoingIsLearning

4 days ago

Warning: this comment may offend some in the Emacs community.

> GNU Emacs literally has a several decades head start on any new niche electronic writing tools and is, in my estimation, a towering achievement in this space.

I love Emacs but I had to spend more time that I would like to admit making changes to my init file in the first months of seriously using it. The 'average' user expects to be able to hit the ground running with reasonable defaults.

A large fraction of my (blasphemous) changes was of course overriding keyboard shortcuts to match the expectations that average users have of what keyboard shortcuts should do, in at least the last 40 years of software. I don't have the mental bandwidth or appetite to learn incantations.

So to me I see emacs as a tool no different from Notepad++/VS Code but a tool I can actually open the hood and mod to my needs/preferences that also happens to have a huge community that I can leverage with all the packages and minor modes.

However, neither of this is realistic or practical as a key turn solution for the 'average' user looking for a distraction free editor.

5 comments

DoingIsLearning

teddyh 3 days ago

> A large fraction of my (blasphemous) changes was of course overriding keyboard shortcuts to match the expectations that average users have of what keyboard shortcuts should do, in at least the last 40 years of software.

You mean the same thing you can get by clicking the checkbox under Options → Cut/Paste with C-x/C-c/C-v (CUA Mode)? (And then, Options → Save Options to… save your options.)

Some people really like to exaggerate the difficulty of Emacs, and claim that they spent ages modifying their .emacs files to do what is really the simplest of settings.

DoingIsLearning 3 days ago

(bind-keys*

    ;; file operations

    ("C-o" . find-file)         ; open file

    ("C-s" . save-buffer)       ; save file

    ("C-S-s" . write-file)      ; save as

    ("M-Q" . kill-this-buffer)  ; close file

    ;; folder tree

    ("C-d" . neotree-toggle)  ; toggle hide/show folder tree

    ;; buffer content operations

    ("C-a" . mark-whole-buffer) ; select all

    ("C-f" . isearch-forward)   ; find in file and highlight

    ("C-S-f" . query-replace)   ; find and replace

    ("C-z" . undo-tree-undo)    ; undo

    ("C-S-z" . undo-tree-redo)  ; redo

    ("C-c" . kill-ring-save)    ; Copy

    ("C-x" . kill-region)       ; Cut

    ("C-v" . yank)              ; Paste

    ;; font size

    ("C-+" . text-scale-increase)

    ("C--" . text-scale-decrease)

    ;; Pane/buffer switching

    ("M-1" . other-window)      ; toggle

    ("M-2" . previous-buffer)   ; previous
 
    ("M-3" . next-buffer)       ; next 

    ("<M-down>" . split-window-vertically)

    ("<M-right>" . split-window-horizontally)

    ("<s-up>" . shrink-window)

    ("<s-down>" . enlarge-window)

    ("<s-left>" . shrink-window-horizontally)

    ("<s-right>" . enlarge-window-horizontally)

    ("M-q" . delete-window)     ; close window

    ;; launch term

    ("M-0" . term)

    ;; code folding

    ("M-e" . hs-show-block)

    ("M-E" . hs-hide-block)

    ("M-h" . hs-hide-all))

edit: Added extra line breaks otherwise the comment text seems to be treated as a single block of text.

Arguably some of these are not standard anything (just something I was happy with) but equally there is also a lot of normal stuff people are used to in several software applications for many decades now.

teddyh 3 days ago

I would still recommend using CUA Mode over simply rebinding C-x, C-v and C-z. CUA Mode does a few more things than that, and is smarter about it: <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CU...>

Also, you can prefix code blocks by two extra spaces on each line:

  (bind-keys*
   ;; file operations
   ("C-o" . find-file)         ; open file
   ("C-s" . save-buffer)       ; save file
   ("C-S-s" . write-file)      ; save as
   ("M-Q" . kill-this-buffer)  ; close file
   ;; folder tree
   ("C-d" . neotree-toggle)  ; toggle hide/show folder tree
   ;; buffer content operations
   ("C-a" . mark-whole-buffer) ; select all
   ("C-f" . isearch-forward)   ; find in file and highlight
   ("C-S-f" . query-replace)   ; find and replace
   ("C-z" . undo-tree-undo)    ; undo
   ("C-S-z" . undo-tree-redo)  ; redo
   ("C-c" . kill-ring-save)    ; Copy
   ("C-x" . kill-region)       ; Cut
   ("C-v" . yank)              ; Paste
   ;; font size
   ("C-+" . text-scale-increase)
   ("C--" . text-scale-decrease)
   ;; Pane/buffer switching
   ("M-1" . other-window)      ; toggle
   ("M-2" . previous-buffer)   ; previous
   ("M-3" . next-buffer)       ; next 
   ("<M-down>" . split-window-vertically)
   ("<M-right>" . split-window-horizontally)
   ("<s-up>" . shrink-window)
   ("<s-down>" . enlarge-window)
   ("<s-left>" . shrink-window-horizontally)
   ("<s-right>" . enlarge-window-horizontally)
   ("M-q" . delete-window)     ; close window
   ;; launch term
   ("M-0" . term)
   ;; code folding
   ("M-e" . hs-show-block)
   ("M-E" . hs-hide-block)
   ("M-h" . hs-hide-all))

spudlyo 3 days ago

Consider the audience we are writing for, I believe many of us who read Hacker News have greater aspirations than that of the ‘average’ user.