5 Reasons to Learn Emacs in 2021
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- Опубликовано: 28 июл 2024
- In this video, I intend to make a case for why YOU should learn Emacs this year. Maybe you've been interested in Emacs for a while or maybe you're skeptical of what you hear from others. Either way, I'll give you 5 reasons why you should give Emacs a shot and see if it works for you!
Chapters:
0:00 5 Reasons to Learn Emacs in 2021
0:56 1. It's not a text editor
7:00 2. The keyboard-driven interface
11:51 3. It enables you to craft your environment
19:39 4. The power of Org Mode
23:11 5. We'll cover Emacs a lot in 2021
Links to videos about the topics mentioned above:
- Getting Started with a Basic Usable Emacs Configuration: • Emacs From Scratch #1 ...
- Adding Helpful UI Improvements: • Emacs From Scratch #2 ...
- Key Bindings and Evil: • Emacs From Scratch #3 ...
- Magit: • Emacs From Scratch #4 ...
- Organize Your Life with Org Mode: • Emacs From Scratch #6 ...
- Configure Everything with Org Babel: • Emacs From Scratch #7 ...
- Build your own IDE with lsp-mode: • Emacs From Scratch #8 ...
- Streamline your Email Management with mu4e: • Streamline Your E-mail...
Check out more videos in these playlists:
- Emacs From Scratch: • Emacs From Scratch #1 ...
- Emacs IDE: • Emacs From Scratch #8 ...
- Emacs Desktop Environment (EXWM): • Emacs Desktop Environm...
- Emacs Mail: • Streamline Your E-mail...
- Emacs Tips: • Emacs Tips - How to Sh...
My Emacs configuration: github.com/daviwil/dotfiles/b...
If you enjoy this series, please consider becoming a sponsor on GitHub or Patreon:
- github.com/sponsors/daviwil
- / systemcrafters
You can also leave a tip via PayPal: paypal.me/daviwil
Follow me on Twitter for more Emacs content!
/ systemcrafters
Chat with the System Crafters community on Discord: / discord
Intro music: Coriolis Effect by logos feat. stefsax, licensed CC-BY
ccmixter.org/files/mseq/26296 
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All that Emacs needed to grow the popularity is this channel, I love your videos
Thanks Guillermo! I don't know if I'll convert many people to Emacs, but I'll surely try :)
@@SystemCrafters I am a new convert ;-) Great job popularizing Emacs. Thank you!
Thank you Wawrzyniec!
@@SystemCrafters Hi David, I have gotten into emacs last year, I would like to share my progress using a format similar to your videos. Could you tell me, or make a video, about your video-editing set up? thank you for your amazing videos because they make me want to go back to emacs as I was during the lockdownm Thank you forehand for your help!
Yay an emacs channel 😁😁😁😇😇😇😊
The Linux community needs more people like you!
I like how practical and useful features that you have highlighted. So far, I've used about half of them, excited to try the rest!
Thank you. It's nice to have an introductory level video about some basic things possible in emacs. Very nicely done!
Man, thank you very much. Really great EMACS stuff on this channel.
What a great find was this channel! I'm definitely watching all the videos
this channel is my favorite source of emacs knowledge
Can't wait to learn more about elisp through your videos
Man, your videos are everything we were missing from the emacs community... please keep going, this channel really have valuable content
Thanks a lot Eric!
I had to come back to Windows 10 late last year because of a ton of work I've yet to finish on some documents that refuse to work nice with Libre/etc.
Once I'm done I will move back to Linux and give Emacs a go, I've been saving your videos for this purpose haha. Thanks for the amazing work you put into your channel! Really appreciate it :)
omgoodness im glad i found this channel!!!
Can't wait to see what you've got in store, also haven't made my way through all of your currently uploaded content! Keep up the good work!
Thanks a lot!
Your video is actually pretty good. Subscribing and gonna look into your emacs config later.
Thanks David, loads of reasons to give Emacs a try. Great review of what you've covered. I've still got a lot of work to make Emacs function the way I want. Thanks for your videos they have been fantastic. Best wishes for 2021.
Thanks a lot Jerry! Best wishes to you as well! Keep on hacking on that Emacs config :)
Thanks for the informative video. I'm an emacs(doom emacs) noob but I am definitely into learning emacs. I went with doom because I am a long time vim user but your setup with the nice background looks even better! Maybe I should start fresh with gnu emacs and use evil mode
You did inspire me to invest a bit of cash in buying some physical books, about the basics, GNU EMACS 3RD EDITION, and EMACS LISP AN INTRODUCTION. I found each online, but decided they're worth owning physical copies of, in print.
I expect that I'll get even more from your videos while also studying these, simultaneously.
Great job on continuing to demystify Emacs! Now I understand it CAN be a productivity tool, once you get to know it. Looking forward to demystifying Emacs LISP!
Thanks Stephen!
the single best resource for anyone looking to learn emacs
Very impressive video. One of the best explanations of the power of emacs. Subscribed!
Thanks a lot!
David is on fire again, thanks for another awesome video
You are too kind!
Nice! Looking forward to those elisp & core code patterns of community packages series! After half a year of writing emacs configs without understanding holistic ways of doing it, those configs start looking like a bunch of hard to maintain spaghetti plates. If anyone knows other good resources on the topic, would much appreciate!
Круто! Замотивировал изучать Emacs, и, надеюсь, на этот раз, моя очередная попытка не будет провальной ))) Спасибо!
Hi there, I am still learning lots in org-mode, drawers, logbooks, properties etc
I use pure Emacs in terminal for about a year and I am super productive. I would say Emacs shines in it's flexibility and customizability. You basically write your own ide on base of Emacs. Very convenient. I use use-package and daemon mode to start it quickly. I use it for c++/go/python/rust/shell/clojure/lisp programming, you name it. Most of all I like it's buffer management and key bindings. I should admit learning Emacs is hard but absolutely worth it! One down side is that Emacs is not pre installed on most Linux distros, so I always compile it from sources and make install the latest version
Looking forward for your 2021 content. Sadly the livestream are usually too long for me, but I've gone over your configs.
Thanks! I'm making more prerecorded videos that are shorter now (15-30 mins), hopefully that helps. Any particular reason it's hard to get through the longer ones? Too much content coverage?
@@SystemCrafters I usually have 15-30 minutes for that. I find myself watching just parts of each video. The content is great - don't change it on my behalf ;)
Just want to make sure everyone can enjoy it! Thanks for the feedback :)
Thanks, just subscribed and can't wait for the videos about lisp and Guix. I really need to up my Emacs game as work isn't getting easier so my workflow need to bet better.
We've started the Emacs Lisp series! A new video will come out for that tomorrow. The Guix series should start pretty soon :)
@@SystemCrafters thx, I started to watch the elisp series and learned a lot already - can't wait for the next video :)
Please, do video about emacs! You are doing great!
Man you're doing a lot for the Emacs community
Great video, very happy to see some emacs content in 2021
Advice is a term from Aspect Oriented Programming. It's pretty descriptive in AOP context.
Wow just found this channel. Been planning to learn emacs forever!
It’s definitely a compelling argument for Emacs that you make here.
I really like this much prettier powerpoint presentation that you did with Emacs. Do you plan on teaching us how to do that? Thank you, subscribed!
Thanks! I've got a video showing a different way to do presentations with Emacs: ruclips.net/video/vz9aLmxYJB0/видео.html
Recently I switched to a custom configuration using org-present (check out the second code block at this heading): github.com/daviwil/dotfiles/blob/master/Emacs.org#presentations
It'll require having your Org Mode fonts set up the right way, check out this video for that part, about halfway through: ruclips.net/video/VcgjTEa0kU4/видео.html
@@SystemCrafters awesome! Thank you very much!
Wow emacs was my main dev env more than twenty years ago. Didn’t realize anyone was still using it.
Magit is a good enough reason all by itself. Amazing.
Agree 100%!
Org-mode is the other reason all by itself. :-)
@@AndersJackson True, there is no shortage of great reasons.
@@theherk VIM
@@JosueRodriguez08 I don't follow.
Thanks for this video. I'm a new Emacs user and I'm still in learning mode, but I can't seem to get used to the GUI app since I'm mostly a CLI person. It seems that the TUI version of Emacs is pretty limited in comparison to the GUI version. For example, I've found that many org-mode keybindings just don't work in the TUI version. Not sure why yet though. It would be pretty cool if you could perhaps make a video about running Emacs (and specifically org-mode) inside the terminal.
I'll definitely do a video (or series) on using Emacs in the terminal but I probably won't get around to it soon. I definitely understand, though! I use Emacs in the terminal on my phone with Termux sometimes and some things aren't quite there.
I feel like because I am still learning programing changing from vs code to emacs this will probably be a good time to change and learn emacs
Great video. I'm glad I found it. I've been using emacs for many years. The only issue I had using emacs in the past was file size limitation and when using macros to do many lines, the speed was too slow performing the macro. Maybe there is something to tweak to speed that up?
Thanks a lot Gary! There's a package for Emacs called 'vlf' which helps with 'very large files', it might speed things up for you: elpa.gnu.org/packages/vlf.html
I haven't actually tried it though so I'm not sure if it will solve your exact problem. Let me know how it goes if you try it!
@@SystemCrafters Thanks for your reply. After watching several of your emacs-from-scratch youtubes, my .emacs file is much improved. Right now I'm kind of semi retired but there is a chance of getting some contract work which would definitely require emacs work. What about my comment about slow macro execution. Most of the time I would just right a perl script to do what I needed with the file since the macro took too long to execute. Mostly simple stuff modifying some string for many lines. Thanks again for your awesome youtubes!
You're my favorite floating head right next to the busts in the Haunted Mansion!
lol, thanks! Just call me Mr. Disembodied Mode Line Head
@@SystemCrafters Coming soon to MELPA no doubt
may be, a video on how to optimize perf would be good thing, like when yiu add lsp with two, three language it came to be slower than vscode ...
Any doom-emacs configuration for EXWM?
Alright I guess I'll try it again!
That's the spirit! :)
Is there any way to bypass issue with emacs bindings in 2021? Like avoid problem when "ctrl-m" behaves like "enter".
I've said this elsewhere, but coding in Common Lisp actually makes Emacs' elisp a negative. Keeping them straight is like coding in Ruby 2 & Ruby 3 at the same time. You have to understand -- the language standard of Common Lisp is like 900 pages long -- that's a LOT of commands, and which is the one that gives you a rougher estimation of the floating point number you're looking at, is it rational, or rationalize? and is this predicate with-labels, with-labelsp, or with-labels-p? And that's before you load a single library.
Actually I'm VIM user, but thanks to this channel I started to look into Emacs. Btw, is there any database viewer for Emacs?
There was edbi, but it seems to have stalled. An interesting way to look at databases with emacs and org-mode ist documented here www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-database.html and here bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/
Use spacemacs with vi mode and sql layer and you will be able to fetch data from most database type
exwm doesn't only work on Linux as stated at 26:38, it works beautifully on FreeBSD ;-)
Fair point! I shouldn't forget the many fine folks in BSD land
btw EXWM does NOT only runs on linux it runs on *BSD as well
How to share documents from Emacs Org mode in 2021?
Amazing and useful video! I used Emacs heavily in the late 80s, and need to use it again recently for coding in Python, Java, and teaching (where I've been using Jupyter). The Org mode seems to be similar to Jupyter. Can it render Latex math as well? Thanks for doing this series of videos!
yes, org-mode export to PDF renders Latex formulas natively - for export to HTML there is a JavaScript include to render the formulas - haven't used that in a long time but I see no reason why it should have stopped working
i was learning Vim to start use nvim, should i learn Emacs?
why would I IRC in text editor?
Do you have any tutorials on evil-mode for Vim users planning to make the switch? I would like to see how that integrates with Org-mode.
At the moment I am using Vim but Emacs looks more tempting with each day.
I am planning to do a series sometime this year going through the Vim modal editing patterns and show how to use them in evil-mode, though it may take a while to get there :)
thanks! nice video. what did you use to create the presentation itself?
ach, I joust found this video, maybe it contains an answer ;-) ruclips.net/video/vz9aLmxYJB0/видео.html
according to this other video, the answer is org-tree-slide
Since that video I've started using a different package called org-present: config.daviwil.com/emacs#org-present
Is there a way to get a version of your RUclips movies without music playing? I find that very distracting.
Even vanilla Emacs (without that toolbar stuff, which they added later) looks more appealing than any version of Windows I have ever seen. Emacs looks like saying: "I am here to accompany you through your work. I am not trying to be particularly pretty, but I am also not ugly. Most importantly, I will be there when you need me, however, I will also not get into your way." Emacs tends to keep this promise. Although performance on large files could be better.
Agreed!
@@SystemCrafters I still remember using Emacs the first time, which was in 1996 on a Solaris workstation. An exciting sense of productivity radiated from that system. Switched to Vim in 1999, and back to Emacs in 2014. Since then moved most of my activities to Emacs: text editing, e-mail (notmuch), shell (eshell and terminal), system administration (tramp), git (magit), org mode, etc. One amazing feature is the ability to link to a particular e-mail message from org mode (for people who use e-mail not just to send hoaxes and viruses to their friends). My humble configuration files are here gitlab.com/lxkl/dot-emacs in case anyone is interested; parts of it were also inspired by Prot's channel ruclips.net/user/ProtesilaosStavrou.
One of the reasons i wanna switch from vim to emacs is emacs can handle bidi and most of the good terminals can't. The other reason is org mode which is better than pandoc markdown.
Btw, Do you use latex (pure) for creating professional documents? I think there must be things in latex that org can't do. If you use latex, may you provide some info about what your setup is?
Thanks.
You can actually embed LaTeX in Org, I use Org to write sometimes and commonly use LaTeX with it.
@@ethanedwards8296 yes I know about that. that is really helpful and most of the time more than enough. but I want to config emacs to autocomplete latex code, snippets and that kind of stuff. I think I will eventually do that myself. I switched back to vim and currently forgot many things about configuring emacs. basically I wanted to have some ideas how emacs is configured for latex.
I tried using emacs, but it was way too hard for me to get into. I got demotivated very quickly
Is there a way to search for org mode headers with a certain property value in the properties drawer?
There's a function called `org-find-property` which will find the first heading with a particular property set with an optional parameter for the desired value. You can try it like this: `(goto-char (org-find-property "property name" 42))`. You'll have to check whether `org-find-property` is nil before calling `goto-char` in practice since that function returns nil if the property isn't found.
You mentioned that your videos are building to a goal. I looked over your playlists, but they seem to be siloed into specific topics. Would it make sense to also organize it into a single meta "everything emacs" playlist that builds from the bottom up?
Also, if you do have a chance to reply, I have been considering Doom Emacs after watching Distro Tube's video on it. Assuming I'm attached to vim keys, is there any benefit to vanilla emacs over Doom? Or would Doom be a good starting point as well?
That's a good idea, having a playlist that is a true progression to a fully Emacs-managed system would be useful! I'll set up something like that when we get a little further along.
Vanilla Emacs doesn't necessarily give you any benefit over Doom for a Vim-like key binding setup. Doom has a lot of packages pre configured for good bindings so you can get up and running a lot faster. However, making your own config is more fun in my opinion, so you should give it a try after using Doom for a while :)
@@SystemCrafters I think I will definitely do that when I get a chance. I did like the simplified configuration approach that Doom seems to have. Maybe it will also be a good jumping off point for custom configurations.
What is your IRC nick and on which chanels do you usually hangout on ?
daviwil, #systemcrafters
What is the thing that pops up every 2-3 mins (cc mixer), lyk I thing you're hearing songs while recording videos
Yep, it's the notifications for the audio player I use for playing the background music. I have left the notifications on to give credit to the Creative Commons songs I use, though it might be a little distracting.
How is it that I have been scared off EMacs for so long?
are we speaking about emacs or GNU emacs?
Between worlds. Are you listening Deep Focus playlist by Spotify?
I haven't listened to that one, I just found these tracks on ccmixter.org
Somone needs a patreon account. This is awesome :)
Thanks Gurpreet! I do have one, check out patreon.com/SystemCrafters
why is it 1 a.m. I really want to binge your videos now & configure my emacs to death.
I'm a vimmer, but the nyxt browser is making me reconsider emacs
As a 4 year Neovim user, i still didn't got the reason. Magit definetely is not a "best Git client ever". Org mode also seems super overhyped. I also don't see how eLisp could improve my workflow over Lua. The only difference i see is GUI vs TUI, but also there i don't see the reason to make a switch.
Ooh, a menu bar. No one ever mentioned that to me before. I'm willing to learn a complex text editor but not willing to take a class on it, and something like a menu bar helps me get started learning it. In Midnight Commander I thought it was a killer feature and it's definitely the main reason for Nano's popularity
Quite a lot of Emacs functionality is exposed through the menu bar and context menus, it can definitely be useful for learning what is available!
Emacs is a REPL for elisp.
Indeed!
Seriously I'm not trying to be a troll or anything BUT why would someone choose to build it's own car instead of just call an Uber to get from point A to point B? Maybe I'm just too close minded for it or just cause I'm a front end dev and maybe I'm not your audience but I'm really trying to get what could be better to me in terms of productivity... Although I'll try it just to feel how it is, but u make it sounds like I'm gonna have to learn an entire new skill just to continue doing what I'm already doing with little effort... I can see your passion about the topic and really appreciate your channels quality, so it makes me think if I'm looking it at the wrong perspective or it isn't really good for me. That's being said, love from Brazil and keep spreading knowledge ❤️
If your tools are working for you, there's no reason to change them! Emacs is a tool for people who enjoy tinkering with their configuration and coming up with ideas on how to make their environment more personal. It is a lot of work, but I find it really fun and rewarding! It's worth a try, but if you don't like it, nothing will be lost :)
Thanks for the kind words!
@@SystemCrafters thanks, for replying, I'll try it for my side projects and see how it goes. Your content will not make me helpless at least ❤️
So Zero cool u like hackers movie lol what a classic nice! :D
Yep, I have been watching that movie since the 90s :)
Did you try gccemacs? What is Your impression?
I have been meaning to try it but haven't set it up yet. I'm excited about the potential speed boost it promises!
@@SystemCrafters me to especially lsp, company , I also read that group od people consider to rewrite Emacs to other language then elisp ( rust or c) due lack od multi-thread and slowness. Nothing against elisp, but rust can be really nice, is it worth ? I don't know
Rewriting Emacs in Rust is an enormous undertaking and largely not worth it in the end because it will be a total fork of Emacs. I can't imagine the Emacs development team would switch over to the Remacs code base even if there was 100% parity in implementation. Our best hope is gccemacs!
I'd recently become quite happy with using neovim coming from IDEs and editors like vscode notepad++ and code::blocks etc. I still have some issues with nvim however I love the ability to jump around and quickly edit text with the keybindings and language manipulation. Evil mode emacs sounds perfect for me. Can people recommend either emacs evil mode, doom emacs or spacemacs for myself (complete emacs beginner, but very computer literate with coding experience) ? Which version do you guys like best and why? Thanks for the help!
Doom Emacs or Spacemacs are both good options if you want a Vim-focused configuration right out of the box. They will show you what Emacs is capable of and give you ideas for what you will need when you make your own Emacs configuration! Check out my Emacs From Scratch series for a full walkthrough on how to do that.
@@SystemCrafters Hey thanks for replying, I have been checking out your from scratch series and just started your lisp stream(s slowly!). I decided to go with doom as I'd heard more good things about it than spacemacs. The one thing I'm struggling with is adjusting to not having my custom nvim settings and keybindings; which I will try and integrate into emacs soon. I used to have nmap qq to go to normal mode and had C-s to save, C-q to quit and a bunch of keys for switching between buffers, tabs, and splits
Is this video just presented on orgmode?
Yep! I'm using a package called org-present with some personal tweaks to make it look better
I began with emacs, but I have slowly migrated to vim, first by installing evil mode, then spacemacs... now I am using neovim full time
Do you have your own browser?
I think the one you saw in the video is called Vimb, it's a minimal browser that uses Vim-style keybindings
@@SystemCrafters cool i want to able to do everything, so i will get rid of all ny apps :-)
BTW did you try to convince Luke?
Luke Smith? I don't think he is interested in Emacs
@@SystemCrafters yep, him 😊 he had a challenge to convince him to switch to Emacs. Although it obviously was a non win game 🤣
I think Magit is supposed to be pronounced as Majit (like Magic), not maggot lol
Yes, I've been informed :)
Emacs is an Operating system!
I see why people call Emacs a whole operating system. I am making a switch from vim to Emacs
Ha. Zerocool. Has anyone gotten that Hackers reference on this channel in the comments? I'm probably very late to the party. 😅
You might want to reign in your pokemon card budget
Thanks I liked your video Happy Hacking !
I only need one reason not to learn it. I have no use for LISP.
"you can just override a function definition with what you want"
5:36 It's Magit ('Ma-jit, 'mæʤɪt) as in 'Magic', not 'Maggot' !! 😤lol. The _unfortunate_ bit is that people say 'git and not 'jit. hehe.rhymes..😜
I have been informed :) Someone on a stream "corrected" me when I pronounced it another way, saying that it's maggot. I don't remember who it was but you can blame them!
I wouldn't be surprised if he had replaced systemd with emacs...
I use GNU Shepherd :)
@@SystemCrafters For years, I heard the Emacs v. Vim arguments from a far. Then as a young Sys Admin I needed to edit some configs, and the default was EDITOR ='vim' ... I had no clue how to do anything. I thought emacs would be easier... I was wrong as well. I still chose to learn vim because of a playright/author friend of mine who encouraged me to do so, He said that vim is "actually" a text editor, emacs could do much more and be overwhelming. I knew I made the right decision for my use case.
tramp mode is not comparable ti the vscode remote extention
until then I cant use it
To be honest, the argument that Emacs is so much more than a simple text editor isn't really a good argument at all, because being a simple text editor would be the sole point why people would even consider switching to Emacs from something like Visual Studio. And as a consumer, I really don't care about ELisp in the slightest; I don't want to write it; I don't want to modify every conceivable aspect of the editor; I just want a solid, simple, non convoluted editor that understands LSP. But if you include an organizer, email client, and everything into your editor, then congratulations; you just reinvented what you wanted to get rid off in the first place.
That's fine, Emacs isn't for you! However, it's not that I'm trying to get rid of all those other things -- I'm bringing them into an environment that I have full control over and can manipulate however I want.
this is how you sell something.... honestly, if the rest of the Linux community follows same suit, Linux will be the most popular operating system type...
Would've be better to see more **action**, if you know what I mean. :)
That's what the rest of the videos are for :) I would have shown more but I was trying to keep the length of the video down.
@@SystemCrafters I mean like "fast-speed" 30sec of your daily commands at the end of the video for motivation.
Nice idea! I might do a video like that in the future
@@SystemCrafters That would be a video I'd like to see.
Keybinding are supposed to be accompanied by some sort of menu.
All those functionality looks like bloatware do-all, to me. I didn't see any must have feature in this video.
Nonetheless still looks better than VIM, at least to my tastes 😃
Vim is Better
why you watching then
Don't really need 5.
Some people need more convincing I guess :)
This video is so outdated. It's 2022, get with the times, man!
get GNUed
Nice, but tooo fast for average people. You are a geek and I am wise.
This was meant to just be a teaser to get people interested, not exactly meant to educate. Definitely let me know if other videos move too fast, though, I don't want to confuse anyone!
reason 1 to not learn emacs in 2021: it's slow, very, very slow
It can be, but it depends on how you use it! Large file support has never been good in Emacs.
@@SystemCrafters yeah, I have to use a special mode for large files and disable flycheck for Rust, besides that, it's a great app
Sure, looks fine.. but as a noob I prefer VS Code.