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Ask HN: How do you learn emacs?

4 points by adrusi ↗ HN
I'm a Vim user, but I use Haskell a lot and it's not uncommon for me to find myself using clojure or scheme/racket. Vim is kind of the new hip thing so there are plenty of free resources online for learning it, and that's how I learned it about a year ago. Unfortunately, emacs seems to be less mainstream right now so there aren't as many resources, and what is available tends to be the very basics, that are found in emacs's built in tutorial.

In vim you usually don't learn about new setups by learning everything possible in the editor and coming up with a new way to use it, you take pieces from other people's setups and make your own. I assume it's similar in emacs which is an even more monolithic beast. Where can you go to find people sharing their setups?

9 comments

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gharbad
Alternatively, you can set up Vim to play more nicely with Haskell and clojure. I assure you that you don't need to use <editor X> to program in <language Y>.
adrusi
Well I have been using haskell and clojure in vim for a few months now, but since most haskellers and lispers use emacs, I figured there must be a reason.
__ingrid__
I would guess that's for other reasons. I often associate Haskell and Lisp with academics, and emacs with a slightly older crowd, and there is some over lap there. Of course, I don't think they should be strictly limited to these crowds, this is just a guess based off personal observation.
cag_ii
The emacs wiki is a good place to start:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryDotEmacs

> Unfortunately, emacs seems to be less mainstream right now

I don't know about the popularity of emacs vs. VI right now (I'd suspect that it's fairly close), but there is no shortage of current and active emacs info on the web. There's plenty of active .emacs files can be found on github for example.

Some other sources of info:

http://www.masteringemacs.org/

http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Emacs

smerritt
Probably the best way to get started is to grab an Emacs 24 pretest and use technomancy's Emacs Starter Kit: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

Emacs 24 gives you a solid package manager, and the starter kit gives you a good solid spot to build on.

From there, install the packages you want. If you want haskell-mode, just M-x package-install [return] haskell-mode. Get the full package list with M-x package-list-packages.

subsection1h
I learned Emacs by reading the Emacs manual[1], the Org mode manual[2] (Org mode was the main reason I switched to Emacs), the Emacs Wiki[3], and other people's config files[4][5].

Note that I didn't use other people's config files, such as the Emacs Starter Kit that another commenter referenced; I read them. I've previously used other people's config files, skeleton apps, etc. when attempting to learn new technologies, and I always ended up regretting it. With Emacs I started from scratch and took only what I needed from other people's setups. This worked very well for me.

I don't know if you have any interest in using Org mode, but I'd like to mention that using Org mode to create a personal wiki has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. I previously had hundreds of files (.txt, .doc, .xls, etc.) containing notes for the subjects I've studied, and these files weren't interlinked like wiki pages, nor could they be converted to HTML and published to the web with a single command. Sharing knowledge with my team and family is so efficient now. I can't recommend Org mode enough for notetaking.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/

[2] http://orgmode.org/manual/

[3] http://www.emacswiki.org/

[4] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryDotEmacs

[5] https://github.com/search?type=Repositories&q=Emacs

__ingrid__
I know some emacs users who post their config files on github (myself included). You can do a quick search for "emacs config" and get a lot of results, some better documented than others.

See: https://github.com/search?q=emacs+config&type=Everything...

I'm not going to post my own because I'm still new (and it is in some serious need of documentation) but here is a link to my friend's configuration, from which I got most of my stuff. His file organization is a bit intimidating at first if you're not used to it (each addon that has more than a few lines of code gets it's own folder), but it's actually great for outsiders reading his config, and it makes it easier to leech just the bits they want of his config.

https://github.com/bmac/emacs/tree/4999800dd54975fb5222d30d5...

If you're coming from vim though, I'd suggest googling emacs versions of the plugins you already use though. Almost everything of that nature gets ported, whenever I see a plugin I like for editor (x) I can usually find an emacs version in minutes.