Comment by julian37 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by julian37 | Hacker News Reader

It should be pointed out that Emacs maintainers aren't in some kind of stubborn elitist get-off-my-lawn mindset.

Making Emacs more welcoming to newbies has been discussed time and again on the Emacs mailing lists. But the general consensus (one that I happen to agree with) seems to be that "learning Emacs the hard way" is, generally, the right way.

As just one example, I think that emulating the inferior Undo/Redo paradigm (using the Ctrl+Y/Z binding familiar to Windows and MacOS users) hides the full power of the Kill Ring and may mean that some Emacs users will never get to know about it.

I know it's a topic of heated debate and I don't mean to start this debate all over here on HN. I just thought it would be good to point out that newbie-friendliness is continually being considered and reconsidered by Emacs' maintainers, but (for the most part) usually rejected, and I think for good reasons.

See this thread for one example, there are many more if you care to look for them:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2005-03/msg...

Right. It seems effort in this direction would be better spent making it easier to learn emacs as it is than trying to make it something else. The world is filled with CUA mode editors, many of them don't even suck. Users who truly want that are very well served, and emacs isn't going to bring much to the table. People who actually want emacs' features like it the way it is.

I truly want the programmability of emacs without the weird interface. I tried to use the former to implement the latter, but it's a ton of work and it seems to break all the time.

Spend some time seriously getting used to the "weird interface" (I mean: really work at it. Throw out the arrow keys, remap control, and stop using other editors cold turkey) and I suspect you'll change your mind.

What about the emacs interface is weird to you? Is it just the unfamiliar keybindings, or is there some overarching paradigm of emacs' that just rubs you the wrong way?

I think there are a huge percentage more people who dont know the first thing about the emacs kill ring because they tried out emacs and it didnt support the same keyboard shortcuts as every single other application on their computer.

I am an emacs user, I love it, but I avoided it for over a year because it made absolutely no attempt to play nicely with new users, emacs doesnt need to be so hard to new users, it does it on purpose

To be fair to Emacs, Emacs had the key bindings it has for cut and paste, etc., long before there were such conventions for cut and paste.

I agree, except it doesn't do it on purpose. It's too old to change.

Emacs' ugly, clunky, non-standard 1970s way of doing everything is so closely bound to all the good things about Emacs that you can't have one without the other. People always try (for good reason), but then Emacs doesn't work as well, and the efforts evaporate.

I kind of hate the kill ring, because I don't know how to suppress putting things into it. I would really like to be able to delete swatches of stuff I don't care about in such a manner that they aren't pushed onto a "paste" stack on top of other things I do care about.

I've also never really understood the benefit of not having "redo". What am I gaining in exchange for the annoyance of having to hit an arrow key before being allowed to "undo the undos" and duplicating a big chunk of my undo history?

You can set delete-active-region to t; hitting DEL will then delete the region without adding it to the kill ring (i.e. delete it as opposed to kill it.) Alternatively, you can bind delete-region to a keystroke of your choice.

Regarding your second issue, I'm happy with the undo system as it is, but if you're not you could try and see if this works better for you: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UndoTree

Also, instead of cursor motion to "break" the undo operation, you can use C-g. I.e. C-g C-_ will redo (undo the last undo) rather than going back further in the undo history.

UndoTree is a true godsend! It basically shows a graphic over the undo tree and lets you navigate it. Really handy. :)

One of the clearest benefits of Emacs's undo system is that you never lose history the way you do with an undo/redo system. I also personally find it more convenient.

However, as somebody else mentioned, you should also check out the undo-tree plugin. Some of my friends really like it.

If you routinely find yourself dredging up stuff from deep in the kill ring you might want the browse-kill-ring extension, but you also might want to think about using registers, which are emacs's idea of a solution to your problem: If you often find yourself wanting to explicitly distinguish between delete-forever and delete-for-recovery, you should probably try distinguishing between delete-for-recovery and add-to-the-kill-ring-in-case-of-emergency instead; it's safer.

I think registers sound like the sort of approach I want, thanks.

I agree with the maintainers. I view these pre-configured init files as a good middle ground. They help you be productive while you learn.

The way undo works in emacs is better than standard CUA behavior for two reasons: 1. It doesn't lose history. 2. You can undo within a selection.

However, there's room for improvement. In particular, there's packages that turn undo history into a tree. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UndoTree

The problem is that if you use other program a lot you begin to confuse shortcuts. That was a big problem for me.

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