Emacs Manual for ITS Users (1981) | Hacker News Reader

Emacs Manual for ITS Users (1981)

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59 pointssusam12 comments

It is remarkable how many things listed in this manual will still work, more than 40 years on, in modern emacs. It is probably not surprising that the basic text navigation is unchanged, but it had incremental search (on C-S/C-R). Many computer users might have imagined that this was a recent invention.

The M-S keybinding, to centre a paragraph has only be recycled in recent versions of emacs.

And the tags tables (with the visit-tags-table function and M-.) is also there, though I note that language support, particularly for languages that had not been invented, has been widened in recent years.

> it had incremental search (on C-S/C-R). Many computer users might have imagined that this was a recent invention.

Incremental search is a recent invention; it was invented for Emacs in the late 01970s, making it a decade more recent than things like hypertext, parser generators, graphical user interfaces, CAD, garbage collection, computer video games, packet-switched networks, and filesystems, and two decades more recent than things like high-level languages, compilers, operating systems, hash tables, and SIMD instructions.

I'm curious whether vi copied tags tables from Emacs or vice versa; ctags already existed in 2.9BSD in 01979.

I really like emacs and use it whenever I can. I wish the community of emacs users and contributors was larger, but emacs is so clunky out of the box it's really hard to onboard new people.

Oh I don’t know, the emacs ecosystem seems pretty healthy to me.

The thing is that the “accessible” environments like VSCode are getting really good. Ten or twenty years ago you couldn’t really move serious code around fast without knowing vi or emacs (ideally both).

emacs is still mandatory if you want to go crazy fast, but the people who reply “challenge accepted” always seem to find their way to it.

I recommend getting crazy fast for a number of reasons (separate conversation), but it’s no longer obvious that the non-emacs/non-vi folks are handicapping themselves gratuitously.

For me, it's not even the "crazy fast" aspect that makes me love Emacs. It's the utter intuitiveness about the environment. Need info about a function and what it does? Short keybind away. Want to add a command/function without restarting the whole thing? Select it, and short keybind away, to load it.

It just makes sense. And once you get used to it, it feels so much more smooth to operate on textual data than with something more "point-and-click, modern-user-friendly" like VS Code. Especially after you learn enough to know how you want to start customizing it to bend to your whim.

About this crazy fast thing... Is it really possible to edit text that fast ? My experience is that I spend quite sometime thinking and just a bit of time typing. So in the end, I just basically use the CUA keys and a few other shortcuts and I've been using emacs like that for 10 years or so.

But when I look at some emacs power users on YT, my feeling is that they type fast because they know shortcuts for every single kind of edit they want to make. Is memorizing dozens of shortcuts the way to be crazy fast ? OR is it something else ?

I love emacs and use it since two decades but it took so much effort to get into it, its hardly a thing I would recommend. Emacs is for the people that dont need recommendations anyways, either you want to learn emacs or you find alternatives with less entry level.

That's a good way of putting it. I've talked Emacs up to several friends. They all say "wow that's so sick" but then they never want to put the effort in to learn it. VS Code works good enough that they don't care.

My experience is that emacs is not that good compared to other editors when it comes to edit code (and I use emacs almost exclusively -- because I don't have time to learn something else and because I'm a total fan of RMS). The LSP thing is not that good (at least on my emacs, lsp-mode lack a lot of polish). Org-mod is OK though. The things I find really cool are

- marginalia/vertico; those really help.

- ability to open pictures in the editor

- ability to reformat text paragraphs

- (for my own use caes), R integration is really nice

- super configurable

When in my work environment (linux, tiling wm, emacs main window) I do almost everything with emacs. I run a terminal emulator, sometimes I open web pages, I code (obviously), I debug, I used to write mails, I use IRC exclusively with an emacs client for over a decade (rcirc).

Everything text related is a joy once navigation and using emacs is purely muscle memory.

The covert art is an appropriate representation of the physical requirements necessary to use Emacs' default keybindings.

Ah the excellent incompatible time-sharing system ;)

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