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Comment by laarc | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any recommendations for programs that pop-quiz you periodically until you retain what you've learned?

I've been using vim for a decade and I'm trying to switch to emacs. Retaining muscle memory is only possible if I keep using the bindings I learn. Remembering all of them is difficult, and using a subset will lead to suboptimal results.

Some kind of app that quizzes me seemed like a good path to learning emacs, since after 100 hours I would end up much more effective. Then I realized maybe an app like that might be helpful for anyone investing 100 hours into a variety of things.

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The best thing to do is use emacs. I've through switching from vim to emacs. It was difficult for me at first until I ended up removing vim from my computer to force me to learn emacs. I would recommend org-drill[0] to pop-quiz you. Develop your own work flow with org-mode and organize your stuff with it.

[0] - http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html

Thanks very much. That's awesome.

I have a few questions I was hoping to ask an emacs user, and it sounds like your situation was almost identical to mine. Is there an email address I can reach you at? (If not, that's fine! Thank you anyway.)

I've never had more "Oh my, this is awesome" moments with anything than I have with Emacs. I'm Going to check out org-drill.el too. Thanks!

Just concatenate my user name and "@gmail.com" :)

Yes very much to org-drill. It's a huge part of my daily life.

Sounds like spaced-repetition software like Anki, which is mostly used in language learning.

It works well for anything that needs to be committed to memory and can fit into the flashcard format. Especially if you can get into the habit of using something like AnkiDroid whenever you need to kill 10 minutes.

Have you tried spacemacs out for emacs? It uses evil mode for vim key bindings and made the transition to emacs painless for me.

Embrace the suptimal. You can live a pretty good life being suboptimal.

I've been using Emacs for over twenty years, and only know a small percentage of its commands. Every now and then, I realize I'm doing something repetitive, and I use a few minutes to find out what the best way to do it is, and then I've learned a new thing (most recent: M-; , for "comment-Do What I Mean").

There is no reason to wait until you're great before you start using a text editor.

Something like this might be useful: https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/emacs

I'm not sure if you use IntelliJ, but there's a plugin for that called KeyPromoter which is great. Every time you do an action with your mouse, KeyPromoter pops up a dialog that tells you the shortcut key you could've used instead. I wish there was a plugin like that for other tools. (Small caveat: I last used KP about 3 years ago; I'm not sure if it's still working with the latest version of IntelliJ)

That site is incredibly helpful. Thank you very much :)

Usually I try not to leave dupe comments, but in this case the story is off the front page and you might not see it otherwise:

I've been trying to find an emacs user to ask some (admittedly beginner-level) questions. I'm trying to get a certain obscure emacs plugin set up, but I occasionally run into some elisp problems that take a few hours to track down. So I was hoping to find someone to bug with questions.

I'll figure it out one way or another, but a peer would be nice. I was wondering if it would be ok to email you?

No worries either way. Have a great week!

There's also the Emacs stack exchange^1. It's good if you have specific problems (this setting does X, I expected Y, what's up?), but not too much for advice (what do you prefer for task Z?)

[1] http://emacs.stackexchange.com/

I actually don't use emacs -- sorry! I found that site recently when I was trying to memorize terminal commands, and I happened to remember that they had quizzes for emacs and other editors, too.

Depending on why you want to use emacs, you could just use viper or another set of VI bindings. I switched to emacs back in The Day so that I could have an integrated debugger on Linux; I wasn't switching because I thought emacs had a great set of command bindings, so staying in VI mode was perfect.

If you use viper and emacs 22 or later, you'll probably want to add (setq viper-ESC-key "\C-[") to your .emacs file so that ctrl-[ works as ESC.

The CLI quiz(6) program from bsd-games package, preferably with -t option. Should be available on, or for, most POSIX systems.

Duolingo does this to teach you languages.

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