Learning Emacs Part 1

As I mentioned in my last post, January and February were to be devoted to getting to know Emacs better.

After reading "Tip 22: Use a Single Editor Well. Choose an editor, know it thoroughly, and use it for all editing tasks" in The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, I decided that I would go ahead with Emacs because I have used it some in the past and it would be available in both Linux and Windows, so I really could use it for all of my editing tasks. Also, I am a supporter of GNU and the FSF, so I figured I would give Emacs the first shot at being my all-purpose editor.

Overview

The first thing I learned about Emacs is that there is most likely nothing you can't do in Emacs! The second thing I learned is that with great power comes great complexity. Using Emacs is not something that I would call intuitive or even user friendly. I also don't think that it was designed to be so. It is really the single most powerful tool I have ever come across in my computing career.

Installation

Since I was using Ubuntu 9.04, the installation couldn't have been easier. I went to the terminal and typed:

sudo apt-get install emacs23

After the download/installation completed, I just typed (also in the terminal) :

emacs

This brought up the main screen for Emacs. Installation successful! I also wanted to have it available to me for when I had to boot to my Windows partition as well, so I rebooted and began the download for Windows. After I downloaded the .zip file, I unpacked it and in the /bin directory is emacs.exe.

Using Emacs

When you first load Emacs and are greeted with the main screen, there are two links. The first is the Emacs Tutorial and the second is the guided tour. I went through the tutorial and learned quite a few keyboard shortcuts. I really enjoy not having to take my hands off of the keyboard in order to use a mouse to move around. The most useful shortcut is M-f and M-b (M stands for the ALT key, so M-f means hold down the ALT key while pressing f). This moves the cursor either forward (f) one word or backward (b) one word. I have been using Emacs now for just over a month and I can tell you that I now hate all editors that don't do this!!! In fact, I installed Emacs on my work machine as well (Windows based, unfortunately). I can no longer bare to use a mouse or hold down the arrow keys just to move a cursor around!

I will admit that I still find myself looking at the refcard for certain key combinations and that the learning curve is steep, I have already noticed a significant increase in productivity. I just recently discovered Org-mode (M-x org-mode). Which lets you do all sorts of amazing things and gives me more reasons to use Emacs. I have also started looking into Emcaspeak, which apparently lets you tweet from Emacs on top of other things. There is also a Blogger add-on that will let me write and post my posts from Emacs! Hopefully my next post will be written in and posted through Emacs.

gNew Sense saves the day and some self promotion

Alright, as many of you may know, I am a self proclaimed Linux Evangelist. I love Linux and I am a big fan of the Open Source Community. I have been a long time user and promoter for Ubuntu. Today, I am going to give some love to a Gnu/Linux distribution that does not get enough credit and that is gNewSense (not just open source, it's Free Software). I downloaded and burnt the ISO file for gNewSense onto a CD last night because I have a thumb drive that failed (OCZ ATV 32Gig) for the second time. I had some data on there that I didn't want to lose (nothing important or personal, just some software I didn't want to download again) and I hadn't backed it up in a few months (you think I would have learned after the first time). I tried to get to the data via Ubuntu and I also tried in Windows. Neither worked.

I decided to give another version of Linux a try, hopefully something supported by the Free Software Foundation (more on them later). This is where I found gNewSense. I decided to load the Live CD and see if it would read my bad thumb drive. As I am sure that you have guessed by now, my thumb drive mounted fine and I copied all of the data off of it. I now have all of my data and learned a valuable lesson about backing up your thumb drive regularly. Thanks to gNewSense I did not have to learn this lesson the hard way.



I enjoyed using gNewSense so much, that I am going to give it a partition on my hard drive later on this week. I will then use it as my sole machine for a while and I will do a full review on it later. For the time being, here is a screen shot:

The fact that I was able to save myself such heartache and annoyance made me think, that I should return the favor. I have decided that I would like to help out the Free Software Foundation. I have recently submitted this blog to Amazon. Amazon has excepted it and they are now selling subscriptions to my blog for the Kindle. I will be donating all proceeds garnered from these subscriptions to the Free Software Foundation.



I have not approached the Free Software Foundation about this as of yet, because I am afraid that they will not be too happy about it. Unfortunately, they have a standing feud with Amazon in reference to Amazon's use of DRM in some E-Books. I will update when I have heard back from them about this.