Intro to Emacs

• Emacs provides a very flexible (and stupidly configurable) system for working with good old ASCII/Unicode Text
• Can mean source code (obviously popular with programmers)
• Also works great for markup formats (Org mode, Markdown, LaTeX)
• Text-based interactive interfaces (Shells, REPLs)
• Intermediate text-based UIs (dired, helm, etc)

Technically, Emacs itself is one big shambling Lisp interpreter:

(defun insert-p-tag ()
  "Insert <p></p> at cursor point."
  (interactive)
  (insert "<p></p>")
  (backward-char 4))

Emacs is written and configured in Emacs Lisp, its own dialect of Lisp.

ELisp itself is in some sense 2 things:

• A Lisp dialect with some similarities to Common Lisp or Scheme
• A library of functions for manipulating the content of Emacs buffers
• (advance the point one character, insert some text here, cut some text to the clipboard, etc etc.)

• IRC / Chat Clients - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InternetRelayChat
• Games - M-x tetris
• Web Browsers - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryWebBrowser
• Its own shell… - eshell
• FTP and SSH Clients - tramp-mode
• Literate Progarmming - org-babel

Emacs is a great operating system in need of a good text editor…

(har har har)

• Emacs -> "Editor MACroS"
• Started in the early 1970's as a collection of more-or-less complex scripts for the terminal-based text editors at the MIT AI Lab
• 1976 - Stallman assembled these into the first version of what we would probably call Emacs now
• 1978 - First User Manual
• 1984 - Stallman starts working on GNU Emacs; v1 released 1985
• Current Version: 24.5
• jwz's Emacs Timeline

• Sometimes controversial
• 2015 - New maintainer for Emacs
• Good sign for continuity and succession in the community

• Eclipse / IntelliJ / XCode / etc
• Focus on featureset and large codebases
• Wants to be your "1 tool" - VCS, Code Editing, Dependency management, Release Packaging, etc
• Slow and heavy but very sophisticated

• Textmate / Sublime Text / Atom / VS Code / etc
• Popular for web tech / dynamic languages (less benefit from static analyis tools of an IDE)
• Lightweight, usually pretty fast (well, except for Atom…)
• Decent package ecosystems, especially within "mainstream" languages

• Emacs and Vim – Somehow still kicking
• Open Source, community-driven
• Unrivaled customizeability and package ecosystems

• You want something that works "out of the box"
• You want something that behaves like a normal "App" on your OS (keybindings, GUI chrome, etc)

Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me.

• David Thornley

• "Quality without a name"
• Rooted in Hacker / Lisp cultural heritage
• Good things were, in fact, made before 2005
• Especially if you're a junior-ish developer who started in the last several years, Emacs can be a good gateway into learning about the history of open source technology and of other software tools

• Out of the box, Emacs is functional but crude
• Assembling your first Emacs configuration is a right of passage in some circles
• Can get endlessly complex with it
• https://writequit.org/org/#orgheadline39
• Can also get a lot done pretty simply
• Configuring Emacs could be that nerdy hobby you've been looking for
• ~/.emacs.d - Default directory where Emacs will look for your configuration
• ~/.emacs.d/init.el - Default "init" file

• Can be one of the steepest parts of the learning curve
• Many of the standard OS keybindings you're used to won't always work
• Fortunately you know some of them already
• shell text navigation commands (end of line, beginning of line, etc) actually come from Emacs
• We'll also pass out cheatsheets of the most common keybindings
• https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf

• C- Control
• M- Meta (Alt/Option)
• S- Shift
• C-n Hold control and press "n" (note there is no space between the 2)
• C-x C-b Hold control and press "x", then release both keys then hold control and press "b"
• C-x b Hold control and press "x", then release both and press "b"

• A "Mode" represents a collection of related functionality in Emacs
• At any time you can have 1 Major Mode active
• Major modes often define features for a given file type – Ruby mode, HTML mode, etc
• Can also have any number of Minor Modes – these usually provide more general functionality
• For example "linum-mode" is a simple Minor Mode for displaying line numbers in a file

• C-h a - "Apropos" help – Type in a string and get a list of matching emacs commands
• C-h k - Keybinding help – Emacs will prompt you for a key and then describe what it does
• C-h m - "Mode" help – list all the currently active modes so you can get more info on them
• C-h t - Emacs Tutorial - Built-in Emacs walkthrough that introduces common keybindings and concepts – do it!

• Prelude - https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude – Probably most popular "starter kit"
• Spacemacs - http://spacemacs.org/ – pre-configured distribution centered around evil mode
• Good: Look pretty and have lots of cool stuff out of the box
• Bad: No idea what is going on
• Recommendation: play around with them on your own to get ideas for different tools you might like to bring into your own configuration

What are the essential things we would need to edit code productively in Emacs?

• Not look like garbage
• Basic syntax highlighting
• Find Files, Search text in a project
• Run Tests
• Run a REPL
• I got you dog: http://worace.works/2016/06/07/getting-started-with-emacs-for-ruby/

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. (…) It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text.

• Neal Stephenson

Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way smart to use it well, and it makes you incredibly powerful if you can master it. It's a real eye-opener for someone who's used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs their whole career.

Emacs is the 100-year editor.

It's more than just a productivity boost from having great typing shortcuts and text-editing features found nowhere else on the planet. (…) Emacs has the Quality Without a Name.

• Steve Yegge

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel