Comments on: Lisp Enlightenment and Emacs Frustration

By: Stuart Overton

Stuart Overton — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:41:08 +0000

I wouldn’t worry about the difficulty of learning Emacs. I started with Emacs, then moved to vi, then back and forth for a while until I finally settled on the perfect editor: both of them. If you switch back and forth, the default key bindings just stick with you after a while. So, I use Emacs for long programming sessions in various languages, but when I’m at the command line, I tend to use vi, for editing rc files, shell scripts, subversion logs, etc.. It loads faster than Emacs and is also extremely powerful. I even took the time to learn ed, just in case I ever need it, say, if I accidentally delete Emacs or vi, which is unlikely to happen as Emacs and vi are editors you could only take from me by prying them from my cold dead hands.
I say learn ‘em both. It’s like being multilingual. It can’t hurt ya’!

By: Emmett Witherspoon

Emmett Witherspoon — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 08:33:19 +0000

No, you don’t need emacs or slime to be a lisp developer. Both are worthless. Don’t get too mesmerized by the slime video. There’s absolutely nothing noteworthy about emacs+slime that I can’t do with a couple of gnome terminals, some gnome keybindings, and vim. Vim is actually better for editing lisp expressions than any mode of emacs.

Use slime+emacs long enough and you’ll be gradually aggravated to the point of insanity by annoying default behaviors. Helpful morons will tell you to waste your time slogging through mailing lists and elisp garbage if you want to change these. As if you don’t have better things to do with your time. Don’t bother. Emacs+slime is a time-wasting brain-sucking plaything.

By: ardaliev

ardaliev — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 18:34:06 +0000

Cusp, a Lisp plugin for Eclipse

http://www.paragent.com/lisp/cusp/cusp.htm

By: erik

erik — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:47:20 +0000

UPDATE:

Thanks to a comment on reddit, I’ve downloaded Eclipse, the Cusp plugin, and the Vi plugin, and I’m very happy with what I’ve seen so far.

I rather dislike Eclipse for Java development. I’ve tried downloading it several times over the years and found it inferior to IntelliJ every time. But it looks like it might be just what I need to spread my Lisp wings.

Thanks to all those who commented. The comment in the form of an Emacs extension to print out “Fear not, dear Erik, for this is the last cliff you’ll ever have to scale.” was quite clever. Unhelpful, but clever.

By: erik

erik — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:17:17 +0000

santhalus: Thanks for the links. I’ll check ‘em out. I understand that Emacs is completely customizable. Paul Steuber’s OS X setup is pretty nice.

I’m reminded of how scary and daunting losing my Linux virginity was. It’s possible to be too configurable.

By: santhalus

santhalus — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 10:50:13 +0000

Did you check the vimpulse mode? Maybe it will suit better your needs.
There are also Easymacs and EMacro projects, which modify Emacs’ default settings to more modern standards.

You don’t need to learn nor use Emacs’ default key combinations in order to use Emacs effectively. This seems to be a common myth which discourages many potential users. I personally hate the way that Emacs works out of the box and this put me off at the beginning, too. However, after looking at other people’ config files and a little tweaking and I was able to make it work exactly the way I wanted.

Remember that Emacs is also mainly written in Lisp (an early dialect but Lisp nonetheless) so tweaking and learning it will boost your Common Lisp practice.

By: erik

erik — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:56:01 +0000

I’ve tried viper-mode. While a nice attempt, it doesn’t really work. Some buffers use it and some don’t. Particularly all the helpful buffers that SLIME provides (like the debugger and code completion) and the REPL. So you have to become an expert at the C-b, C-f, C-n, C-p navigation anyway…so what’s the point?

Thanks for pointing me to that page, though. I feel better already. My current, minimal, Lisping has been done in Vim with a CLisp REPL open, arrowing up to (load “myfile.lisp”) every time I make a change. I wonder how Paul Graham really does it…

By: the daniel

the daniel — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:31:55 +0000

You mentioned Graham in your post - seems vi worked for him ( http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html ) so you may not need to feel trapped in emacs-land after all. If all else fails there’s always M-x viper-mode