Learn Emacs

I have a screencast and documentation, I am working in Linux and want to learn Emacs. I tried learning it, but always returned back to other GUI IDEs because it always was easier.

I try to Emacs a few weeks now. It’s hard to memorize all these key combinations. I still don’t know how to program in emacs and how to receive emails.

Got vim started, heard good things bout emacs, learn emacs!

It’s too huge for me

Ok, I’ve picked up Emacs and put it down a few times now. I’m actually not terrible with it anymore, so technically I’ve finished the Thing. However I’m switching to Vim at this point. I guess after I learn that well enough, I can pick between them, but so far I think Vim will take the day.

This ties into my desire to learn to be a better programmer. Emacs is supposed to be the real developer’s IDE. I’ve also enjoyed learning the ins and outs of VIM, so I figure I should see what the other half of the editor-wars is about ;)

decided to do something about this goal so that i can finally say that i’ve started doing something about it. i tried out emacs a minute ago. being a vi user for nearly two years, learning emacs is so frustrating for me. even navigating through the menu bar is so frustrating. maybe i’m just used to vi’s :e, :w, and :q. hmmm, guess i still have to spend some time reading online tutorials and playing with emacs for awhile before i can finally get comfortable with the emacs editor…

I was running this afternoon when it occurred to me that my running is a lot like my attempts at using emacs. Both start, go for a while, then stop. I think I’m over the hump with running though. I ran five miles today and didn’t feel like I had to quit at any point during the run. It took me three weeks and a lot of pushing through the little pains to get there though. First I had side splits, because my lungs were out of shape and I never really ran long enough to get past it before. Then my shins begged me to stop, but after running through the shin pain for a week and a half they seem to be ok with my milage now. All in all it wasn’t a terribly painful run, and it was the longest yet in my training for the Lincoln Marathon. What does it have to do with Emacs? I think learning to use Emacs as my editor will be the same way. One of the things that holds me back now is that I’m so used to the difference function in TextWrangler that whenever I need to compare files I just use that. What I need to do is work through the pain of figuring out the functions I need, I know they’re there after all. Another pain with Emacs is remembering how do cut and paste, which I still have to look up half the time (as well as doing regex searches). I imagine there will be a hump that I’ll cross at some point (and not know it) where I’ll know those things and it won’t feel so painful. I’m also aware that there are other pains I’m going to want to work through with Emacs like making the Windows key (at home) or the option key (at work) be the Meta-Key when I hold it down (instead of having to hit esc all the time!)... but I’ll work through that one in time too. I guess the key is to just keep at it.

Why do we want to learn this?

I have always been interested in corpus linguistics, and machine translation, dictionary work, pronunciation.

“learn emacs”...??? over the past few weeks that i have used emacs i have learnt that using emacs is one thing and exploiting its potential is well… a totally different thing!
but i am getting used to it…(thanks to my friend and mentor Isaac )

C-z