this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Hello and thank you for reading this. I'm starting my journey to study Emacs, and I'm interested in turning Emacs in my IDE (mainly C, C++, JavaScript, Rust, and Python, etc...) and taking notes. Could you please give me your best suggestion on how to accomplish my goals? Thank you once more, and have a wonderful day/night.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

First off know that it will take time for everything to click and that is ok. One day you'll go from struggling and annoyance and at various stages you'll level up and what was once weird or annoying will become easy.

My biggest tips are:

  1. As /u/Horrih recommended, start with vanilla nd use system crafters series. I found this invaluable as I wanted to know emacs inside and out, not just get it working.
  2. Mastering Emacs book is a nice consolidation for a fair price. If you can spare some cash its well worth it. You can start with various blog articles to see if you like how the author presents things: https://www.masteringemacs.org/all-articles
  3. Learn elisp via the built in info docs "Emacs Lisp Intro" you can find this via C-H i
  4. Org mode is freaking awesome. Initially when I started with emacs for coding I was still using Notion and a few other organization/note apps. I'm fully Org and Org-Roam now and not only do I vastly prefer it, I now own all my data, and it is all in plaintext.
  5. After you get a decent base setup going it can be very easy to fall into bike shedding and continually improving/working on your setup. To solve this keep a separate todo/project list (i do this via a dedicated org file for my config wants/needs/reminders) and block time to work on it rather than doing this continually. It's an easy trap to fall into.
  6. Niche / Specific Bonus Tips that are huge for me
    1. If you're not going modal / evil mode (I do not) then figure out your solution to "ctrl" pinky. I found this odd as throughout life I never used my pinky. I press ctrl with the edge of my palm. Many do a rebinding to caps lock.
    2. If you're in a financially ok spot, or have some tendencies towards making things yourself. I highly recommend making or buying a mechanical keyboard with thumb clusters. While you could use the thumb for Ctrl binding (as mentioned above) I do this for a different reason - Additional modifier keys. See my next tip.
    3. Utilize Hyper and Super. If you're on windows super is a bit more annoying to work with but it is doable. On Linux its totally workable. I have Hyper and Super setup on my thumb clusters and use this to help me add 2 extra sets of bindings which keeps more of my keypresses as + and helps me organize my configuration model. This enables a lot of combos (see below). You don't really need a thumb cluster keyboard to do this i.e. you could map your apps key to hyper and your win key is the super key. BUT because I have the thumb cluster keys I can use my strongest digit to hit them. On top of that they are next to each other and alt in an L shape so pressing Super+Hyper+Alt or any combo of two is very easy.
      1. Hyper +
      2. Super +
      3. Ctrl + Hyper +
      4. Alt + Hyper +
      5. Ctrl + super +
      6. Alt + Super +
      7. etc

I know I put a lot here but if any of it intrigues you just take a note of it for the future and start simple with an initial setup and learn a bit of elisp and you'll be off to the races!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

thumb clusters

Thank you; I will look into what you have said. :^)

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