Of all Emacs features and possible ways to use, what were some of the hardest things to learn or get used to?

cross post from reddit, OP: @pizzatorque@mastodon.social

Personally mine was just getting around buffers; creating new ones, splitting windows, deleting the ones I don’t need and so on. In the beginning I used to have just a single file open at a time like nano

16 points · 18 comments · view on lemmy.world

18 Comments

PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Where the hell is the "meta" key and why does every command tutorial online talk about it.

furikuri@programming.dev · 5 pts · 1y

Remnant of the type of keyboard that Emacs was developed on. Also the same place that the Super, Hyper, and Compose keys originate from

You can map it through your X server/Wayland compositor, but if not Emacs recognizes Alt and Esc as valid meta keys

jerkface@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 1y (1 reply)

It took me a while to think in lisp.

AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1y

Thame.

mtw@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Definitely display-buffer-alist for me. I was using purpose-mode for the longest time but I think I finally managed to get display-buffer-alist working mostly how I want.

NanoooK@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 1y

Mind to share it?

At the moment I think I only have the magit-status in the same biffer.

crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 1y

I also moved from evil mode to meow a year or so back, which was sort of a big change for me:

https://drewsh.com/trying-out-meow

callcc@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y (6 replies)

You don't usually split buffers, maybe windows?

crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 1y

ah yes an oopsie on my end :p

frankenswine@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y (4 replies)

isn't it Frames in Emacs context?

not that i use or need it often, but terminology is (obviously) not that easy

callcc@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1y

Frame (what the window manager calls Window)>Window>Buffer. These are probably concepts that come from a text based terminal age.

kyoji@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1y (2 replies)

Frames are the outer-most container for windows. I may be wrong on this, but there is 1 frame per instance of emacs, or emacs-client

joby@programming.dev · 3 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Now I'm curious whether the emacs concept of frames is older than the desktop environment concept of a window... And what exactly a new frame means in a tui environment. I make new frames all the time, but I'm usually in a GUI environment.

kyoji@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y

Emacs is from 1975 I think? So it's very possible 🙂

joby@programming.dev · 2 pts · 1y

Yeah, clearly the emacs concept of windows is older (or they'd be called panes or something)

Trent@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 1y (2 replies)

Keyboard macros.

crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 1y (1 reply)

keyboard macros are so good, and using consult to go through old ones is great UX.

I can never remember the kmacro ring commands so I used to just redo everything.

Trent@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 1y

Oh, I agree. I just never remember to use them until I'm done and realize I could have used a macro.