Gaston Garcia

I’ll just keep stuff I do here while I try to use Emacs. So this is a post in progress.

Note to self: Remember, have fun. If not, forget about it. I don’t have to, it’s for fun.

OK, so here’s what I did first. I downloaded Carbon Emacs and installed it. I got it from here.

Then what I wanted was to replace the default Emacs that OS X uses and use my installation of Carbon Emacs. I did it by adding this to my .profile file:

alias emacs="open -a /Applications/Emacs.app"

Oh oh. Seems like if the file doesn’t exist it doesn’t create it… it only works for files that exist. : P (fix?)

Added some keyboard customization from this file in Github. (Thanks topfunky). Now if before you kill yourself, this is where it should go (I think so)

/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/site-lisp

Geoffrey Grosenbach, producer of the PeepCode screencasts gave me some quick advice on how to get started with Emacs (here).

Unless I have some really urgent work to get done, for which I’ll surely fire up Textmate, I’ll give Emacs a try. I’m already an every once in while VIM user and remember it was hard to learn it.

Anyways it’s good to not be that mechanical and always do the same things in the same way. My baby always reminds of this. So just as today I brushed my teeth with my left hand, I’ll switch Editors for a few days. I’ll see what happens.

On the Nuby on Rails website I came across this post on Emacs. I was in a good mood with my mind full of curiosity and then a thought hit me. “Could it be that I somehow missed the good parts of Emacs?” I remember having used Emacs before, when I was using Ubuntu all the time. I tried as hard as I could to use it, but it was pretty damned hard.

So last night I went ahead and installed the Carbon version of Emacs. I started the tutorial, worked on it for some time, and then I simply closed it. “What a nightmare!”

I just don’t get the whole Ctrl+V command for moving around. It’s just not a comfortable position for my hands. Which finger are people using for pressing the Ctrl key? Do I have to take Hand-Yoga lessons from a Guru to feel ok with it?

: ) Nothing like VIM.

As you can see. I have no problem with the whole editor war thing.