So it’s been 95 days since I decided that learning Emacs would be a worthy accomplishment, especially for someone whose grey matter has decidedly incurred permanent etchings from many years of vimming.
The process has been very start/stop. I probably only manage to persist at it for about 3 days before conceding temporal defeat and switching back to my old modal ways of text crafting. Since then, it has been pretty much stop.
Today presented itself as the perfect opportunity to dust of my C-c and M-x chordings and give it another short. Work brought Alexandre Salomé (of Symfony fame) all the way from Paris to give us a multi-day training seminar in the Symfony framework.
This first day was particularly suitable for reviving my latent Emacs chops because the Symfony topics covered were pretty basic. I was able to tweak the configuration files while listening in, and there were just enough type-along code exercises for me to, well, type along, and clock some time in this editor.
I’m led to believe I’ve made some good progress on this very long and arduous journey. I’ve got a git repository going for my .emacs files, copied stuff into my .emacs file mindfully, wrestled nxhtml-mode into running reasonably, and I’m begnning to enjoy C-x C-f-ing around my project tree in ido-mode and C-x b-ing between buffers.
The next things on my list to figure out is code folding (which I use a lot for work that I’m doing at the moment) and macros, which are just plain cool.
I also need a quicker way to modify/test my emacs config files.
Pity no one else at work uses Emacs.
Do you know Evil? It’s a mode for Emacs that gives you modal editing, more precisely it emulates Vim. With Evil, switching to Emacs (after having used Vim for over a decade) was like a walk in the park.
Try out org-mode on Emacs. Its a note taking, project managing, authoring, getting-things-done, freelancer, organiser, scheduling, do-whatever-you-can-imagine mode for emacs. If you once get used to it, it will pin you to emacs forever.
Org-mode generates this warmy parents child feeling, this I am home feeling, between you and your emacs system.
Seriously, you might feel homesick after not visiting your main org-files for some time 🙂
For Code folding, I usually use hideshow.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HideShow
If you want a quicker way of modifying and testing your .emacs, then you need to Learn Elisp.
For instance, once you have written up more of your config file, set up a region, and using M-x eval-region to test it out.
Really though listen to Torwang. Org mode is like mana from heaven.