Comments on: Lisp Enlightenment and Emacs Frustration

By: matt schick

matt schick — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 19:20:04 +0000

If it’s only RSI worries that is keeping you back from emacs than I’d highly recommend using a foot pedal for the alt and meta keys.

By: Yuryshev

Yuryshev — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:15:12 +0000

In fact I can’t understand what is bad in emacs.

I’m a novice to emacs, I’ve installed it 2 weeks before today.

I have experience/use regulary: vim, visual studio, Delphi/CBuilder IDE, PyScripter, notepad++.

What I found extremely pleasant in emacs: It does not have a learning curve at all.

Yes. In fact all I need to figure was Alt-X. And then cua-mode.

It’s fun to use, I suppose it will be my general text editor in future.

By: Arjun Mukherjee

Arjun Mukherjee — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 07:55:38 +0000

Vim rules for Lisp too. I am also a Lisp hacker but I use a combination of:
gVim (on Ubuntu)
screen
My own simple shortcuts in Vim
Small Python plugin for Vim

You will not miss slime, etc.

Note: I have hard coded certain things and it can be made generic. Just hacked it up when reading Land of Lisp.

Here you go:

* Install screen

* Open a terminal
screen -S session01

* Press C-a
* Press Shift-A

* Give the window a name – window01 (Note you can name anything you want – just change the scripts. It is all hardcoded right now. But super comfortable to use)

* Now open your vimrc

; Basically in visual select mode – ;e – sends your Lisp forms to SBCL or whatever – and bang code gets executed – Stay put in Vim !
vmap ;e “ay:call system(“screen -S session01 -p window01 -X stuff \”" . escape(@a, ‘`”‘) . “\”\r”)

; In normal mode – just press – f – and the current line is sent
nmap f V;e

; Press – ;g – and the output of the last command is right below the line you type – cut and put it inside your notes
nmap ;g :py screen_dump()

* Here is the Python plugin

python < 0:
lastcmd.append(l.strip())
if l.startswith(‘*’):
count += 1
if count == 2:
break
lastcmd = lastcmd[1:]
lastcmd.reverse()
lineno, col = vim.current.window.cursor # mark the next line – since lineno is 1 based
# Basically adds n blank lines and these are then filled up
vim.command(“normal %do” % len(lastcmd))
endlineno = lineno + len(lastcmd)
vim.current.buffer[lineno:endlineno] = lastcmd
endpython

* Sorry once again for the hardcoding – it was all hacked up in couple of minutes

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 07:20:38 +0000

Have you thought about remapping Caps-Lock with Control? You can stay on the home row with that. You can also use Esc instead of Alt for Meta, if that’s more convenient. Of course you can also use viper-mode or just use vim for Lisp. Those work just as well.

By: Bjoern

Bjoern — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 23:23:35 +0000

Some tips for choosing the right keyboard for emacs.
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_pinky.html

Even with plugins like LIMP or SLIMV, vim sadly cannot match emacs when it comes to Lisp. I wish it was different.

But, emacs isn’t that bad, it’s only real problem being the Control-Meta-Shift hell. And that can hopefully be fixed with the right keyboard and some remappings.

By: Elena

Elena — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:52:26 +0000

> I’ve tried viper-mode. While a nice attempt, it doesn’t really work. Some buffers use it and some don’t. Particularly all the helpful buffers that SLIME provides (like the debugger and code completion) and the REPL. So you have to become an expert at the C-b, C-f, C-n, C-p navigation anyway…so what’s the point?

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/viper-in-more-modes.el

Cheers ^_^

By: Isaiah

Isaiah — Fri, 07 May 2010 11:04:48 +0000

I hate emacs too. I’ve been trying to get lisp working with vi, but can’t find syntax files. I think I’ll make my own IDE as a project to learn more of lisp. I want to make something like netbeans and slime mixed together.
Will be a great learning experience. And hopefully better then scite.

By: Nicolas Martyanoff

Nicolas Martyanoff — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:38:38 +0000

I’ve been climbing the Lisp cliff, and I have had the same problems than you, emacs. I tried. I really tried. Being a hardcore vim user, using emacs is particularly painful, and I finally came back to vim.
I now use only vim to develop in lisp, and if I don’t have all Slime’s nifty features, I compensate with vim’s.

Since, I read Doug Hoyte’s Let Over Lamba, and discovered I wasn’t the only one to program in lisp with vim, so I stopped to worry about it.

Enjoy lisp AND vim

By: Erik R.

Erik R. — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:29:25 +0000

I have, thanks. Clojure rocks!

By: PFar

PFar — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:26:47 +0000

Excellent blog post. Take a look at Clojure (clojure.org). A Lisp dialect written for the JVM. An awesome language.

It nicely solves #2 ) above quite well : “No standard libraries for many modern problem and application domains.” Clojure has first class Java Interop.

As for IDEs, there are plugings for all the majors (e.g. Netbeans, Eclipse, etc.).