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82 lines
3.9 KiB
82 lines
3.9 KiB
5 years ago
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title = "Mastering Emacs, Mickey Petersen"
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date = 2019-11-18
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["en-au", "books", "reviews", "emacs", "mickey petersen"]
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[GoodReads summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25587882-mastering-emacs):
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Learn Emacs from the ground up. In the Mastering Emacs ebook you will learn
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the answers to all the concepts that take weeks, months or even years to truly
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learn, all in one place.
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<!-- more -->
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{{ stars(stars=4) }}
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Why is an avid VIM user -- to the point that I usually do some *gatekeeping* in
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which is the true editor for real programmers [^1] -- reading a book about
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Emacs?
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Well, for one, I wanted to learn how to use Org-Mode better, but with my usual
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EVIL bindings, its keybinds feel alien and did not make a lot of sense.
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And, thus, I decided to read a book about Emacs, to gear me up for using Emacs
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without EVIL and make a more smooth passage to Org-Mode.
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In that, I guess I can say that the book helped me, although I'm pretty
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confident that I'm going to use VIM/EVIL bindings from time to time -- muscle
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memory is not that easy to change.
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One thing that stuck with me after reading the book is the concept of "flow",
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in which you start a sequence of commands all with the same modifiers (or, at
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least, with a bigger set and then with a reduced set). For example, how you
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can keep Ctrl+Alt pressed and execute a bunch of changes without ever removing
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your hand from Ctrl+Alt, or maybe just dropping one of those two keys, but you
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keep the modifiers up all the time through the transformation. And while this
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sounds awesome, it also shows that some Emacs commands do not follow the flow
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and make a big mess of "Ctrl+Alt+key, key, Alt+key" in sequence -- thus,
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removing you from the "flow".
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Even with that, I feel not everything was perfect:
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- There is a push towards using the configuration buffer/tool inside Emacs,
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instead of showing the elisp command for that. I do understand that this
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makes the book lighter and removes a lot of redundant information (why
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describe how to set things up twice?) but with some things not being able to
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configure through the configuration tool and some not, it just looks...
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weird. And, to be honest, I'd prefer to see the elisp changes, 'cause one
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could expand it into "let me show you some changes you can make on your
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`init.el` to make this work" and, from there, you could expand to everything,
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including package management.
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- Speaking of package management, I already have experience with use-package,
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which would download and enable packages, but there is no mention of it
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(maybe it is a recent addition?)
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- Sometimes, there is the same mistake VIM books do: explaining some topic and
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going through it in a way to never come back. Although it does make sense
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sometimes, sometimes it does not: You can be talking about movement and,
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instead of explaining every single movement, you go to how to modify your
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code and then come back to movement to explain more complex things, 'cause
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they make more sense with text modification, making it easier to grasp the
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movement concepts than explaining it along several others (and, again,
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that's a mistake several VIM books do).
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- As pointed, sometimes it shows how the flow can be broken, which would be
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better moved out of the way and kept at the very end of the book, which
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could be taken as being an example of the above point.
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I could point that I'd like to have an EVIL topic, but the book starts saying
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that it wouldn't touch that, so far point -- although I'd still prefer to have
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some chapter about EVIL.
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Also, I'd like to have a chapter about Org-Mode, but we can argue if that
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makes sense to put along a "Mastering Emacs" topic or it should belong to some
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other "Advanced" Emacs concepts.
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In general, it's a good book about Emacs, specially pushing the concept of the
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flow.
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[^1]: Again, this is me playing with gatekeeping, a real programmer uses
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whatever editor fits their workflow better -- and that includes editors
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which do not fit my workflow.
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