master emacs

At this point, there’s too little overlap between mastering Emacs and the rest of my life. So I’m putting this on hold indefinitely.

I’ve decided to pull this goal off of my list because it’s just too broad to ever really accomplish. I’ll try to come up with some specific Emacsy goals to replace it with.

I use it regularly, but there’s a long way to master it!

Emacs Rocks! P_E_R_I_O_D I’ll just give 2 main benefits and a bonus-link. First: Since the Emacs is highly configurable, in fact he is totally configurable, using Emacs means you will get your perfect computing tool excactly the way you want it. You just configure it so. You can use it for nearly everything (except web browsing, maybe). There are tons of ready-made modes (kinda plugins) for every thinkable application, programming language, database, spreadsheet whatever you can think of. And this woks the way you want it, because you can configure it so.
Second overall butt-kicking benefit: because the editor is open source and your files are textfiles (iaw open formats) you will be able to keep your settings, your perfect working environment pretty much for your whole computing-life. It’s there on every platform and it will be there, forever. (;-))
Okay, what’s left on the table? The bonus-link today is a very elaborating, brilliant essay about this whole computer-human-interaction topic. One of it’s main actors is the Emacs himself. Read it, an you will be amazed: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

So long.

Doesn’t seem like a super high priority right now. I have my hands full with Scheme/HTDP and Dr. Scheme is a perfectly good environment for now.

I finally got Don’t Panic: An Introductory Guide to the 6.001 Computer System to cough up a real good nugget of info about how to use Emacs/Edwin. At least I assume this also works for regular Emacs. Anyway, so you don’t have to go searching for this helpful tip, here’s what you do to get an Emacs tutorial. While you’re in Emacs, just type C-h t—that means, hold down the “control” key and type “h”, then type “t”. Don’t Panic saved this gem for page 14.

I’m using Edwin to edit my MIT Scheme code for SICP. Edwin is quite Emacs-like. So it looks like, after all these years, I have to learn Emacs. I’ve been a committed vi user for all these years but now I’m finally breaking down and going to the dark side.

The emacs wiki is cool http://emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki

I just swapped my caps lock and control keys, to put control in an accessible position. Definitely a good move. Once I’m used to it :)

the one thing I really miss while using emacs was a directory browser something like the one seen in the Textmate. Well not anymore Get the Emacs Code Browser (ECB) extension and you get a sidewindow that displays directory tree and files within directories

I started using emacs because the old machine which I was using to discover linux was too slow to use KDE or any of it’s fabulous applications. I needed some sort of day guide to be able to keep track of my university studies. So I used emacs with planner and emacs-wiki initially. Then I switched over to muse as the backend. I was trying to configure the publication portion of that as well, but when I recently completely installed Kubuntu on my Powerbook, I was able to use Kontact as my Personal Information Manager. I no longer feel the pressing need to learn how to master emacs. Perhaps some other day, I will once again feel this pressing need, but for now, I will be completely shifting all my emacs generated .txt files into the my new PIM.