Emacs

That editor people make jokes about

EMACS is short for “Editing MACroS”, but some fun people have come up with alternatives.

• Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
• Even a Master of Arts Comes Simpler
• Emacs Manuals Are Cryptic and Surreal
• Eradication of Memory Accomplished with Complete Simplicity
• Elsewhere Maybe Alternative Civilisations Survive
• Easily Maintained with the Assistance of Chemical Solutions
• Emacs May Allow Customised Screwups
• Generally Not Used, Except by Middle-Aged Computer Scientists

• Emacs is a thing which edits text
• Emacs gets compared to Vim a lot
• Emacs is versatile, it does a lot
• Emacs is weird

“Emacs is a thing which edits text” … so, a text editor? \pause nope \pause

Indeed. \pause However while that definition matches a text editor, it also applies to a: \pause

• Task planner \pause
• File editor \pause
• Terminal Emulator \pause
• Email Client \pause
• Remote server tool (SSH, FTP) \pause
• Git frontend \pause
• HTTP client / server \pause

Emacs can do all of that. Yep.

Ever wanted to generate memes without leaving your current app?

Nope. Not by a long shot.

Emacs has it’s own (large) collection of issues.

• Emacs has annoying quirks
• Areas of Emacs are showing their age (naming conventions, APIs)
• Emacs is single threaded. When something holds that thread up the whole of Emacs freezes
• And more… :(

However, Emacs has managed to stay competitive thanks to an unparalleled ability to be tinkered with, and adapt.

• Emacs has terrible defaults
• Emacs is often a huge time sink for customisation
• Other applications can be seen as an “off the shelf” tool, while Emacs is a raw piece of steel which must be forged and tailored for your needs
  • The effort can be great, but so is the reward

A fancy configuration base to make Emacs nicer to use and easier to work with.

Doom solves this by providing modules for common use cases.

e.g. JavaScript, c++, \LaTeX, markdown, …

Follow the getting started guide. Say yes to every prompt.

\tiny https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/develop/docs/getting_started.org

People there are quite useful. https://discord.gg/qvGgnVx

Let’s look at how Emacs is now. Open the Emacs app.

Expect it to appear with your other applications. On Linux/Mac you can call emacs in a terminal.

Doom has a executable which is used for some updating doom, installing packages, troubleshooting, and more.

Mac/Linux

~/.emacs.d/bin/doom

Windows

C:\Users\USERNAME\.emacs.d\bin\doom

Consider either adding the bin folder to your PATH, or (on Mac/Linux) using an alias with:

alias doom=~/.emacs.d/bin/doom

Doom has three configuration files.

• init.el
• config.el
• packages.el

On Mac/Linux these will probably be in ~/.doom.d. On windows try C:\Users\USERNAME\.doom.d as long as you set your HOME, else try C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming.

Remember those ’modules’ I mentioned?

       :checkers
       syntax              ; tasing you for every semicolon you forget
       ;;spell             ; tasing you for misspelling mispelling
       ;;grammar           ; tasing grammar mistake every you make

       :lang
       ;;agda              ; types of types of types of types...
       ;;cc                ; C/C++/Obj-C madness

       ;;latex             ; writing papers in Emacs has never been so fun
       ;;lean
       ;;factor
       ;;ledger            ; an accounting system in Emacs
       ;;lua               ; one-based indices? one-based indices
       markdown          ; writing docs for people to ignore
       ;;nim               ; python + lisp at the speed of c
       ;;nix               ; I hereby declare "nix geht mehr!"
       ;;ocaml             ; an objective camel
       org               ; organize your plain life in plain text
       ;;php               ; perl's insecure younger brother

1. Uncomment the ones you like the look of — like latex, which we’ll be looking at next week.
2. Once you’ve done that call doom sync and all the required packages will be downloaded etc.

Want to read about modules? Press SPC h d m and you’ll be presented with a list of modules, picking one gives you the documentation.

Basically everything. All your configuration beyond init.el. We’ll go over some example stuff later.

Any packages you want to use other than those installed from modules.

Read the comments for details, but often you’ll use something of the form:

(package! something)

Just remember to run doom sync.

This can be explained quite simply. Most people can type 50 wpm. Assuming an average word length of 5, that’s 250 keystrokes per minute!

1. Try comparing that to how many actions/clicks you can preform with a mouse.
2. Enabling a fully keyboard-driven workflow meas you never have to take your hands off the keyboard.

Take a menu bar.

How might you access those items with a keyboard? Perhaps following some trigger you could use f to get to file, e to edit, v to view, etc.

Doom does this, using SPC as a trigger.

• SPC f f find (and open) file
• SPC f s save file
• SPC b b switch buffer
• SPC b k kill (close) buffer
• SPC p p switch project

The help is great.

• SPC h has a lot of help under it
• SPC h v look at variables
• M-x call an interactive function

Want to set a variable in your config? Add something like this to your config.el.

(setq variable value)

magit

a fantastic git interface

org-mode

an exceptionally versatile plaintext format

dired

powerful file manager

tramp

lets you act on remote servers with ease

It’s the language used by everything in Emacs. It’s a Lisp, so it probably looks a bit strange. Consider reading a bit about the syntax if/when you feel like configuring Emacs :)