beginner questions

beginner questions

[JohnF]

Can't use my favorite editor any more (long story, don't ask:),
and decided to go with emacs. Of course, there are zillions of
tutorials, etc, but most are almost-infinitely wordy, whereas
I'm comfortable with editors and basically want a cheat sheet.
But even they're usually too long, with lots of arcane commands
that I'm sure I'll eventually want to know, but not while I'm
still trying to remember how to cut-and-paste.
  So I started making my own  forkosh.com/emacs.txt  but am
having difficulty zeroing in on some info.
  Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
<h2>stuff</h2> underlined. And really annoying, I don't want
the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
I just want a dumb editor in the sense that it shouldn't think
it knows >>anything<< about the language/syntax I'm writing in,
regardless of filename extension. It should just see a stream
of uninterpreted characters, unless it sees C- or M- (or
something with special emacs significance).
  And various and sundry minor questions, e.g., what exactly
is the undo scope of C-/ and how do you just undo "last keystroke",
and no more than that (if last keystroke was a C-y then, okay,
undo the entire yank)?
  Finally, have I missed some tutorial/cheat-sheet-type info designed
for my kind of needs -- already familiar with various languages
and editors, and just wants to get down to work using emacs?
Just wants the 100 or so most used commands "telegraphed", without
more extra words than necessary? Thanks,
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

Re: beginner questions

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:

> Can't use my favorite editor any more (long story, don't ask:),
> and decided to go with emacs. Of course, there are zillions of
> tutorials, etc, but most are almost-infinitely wordy, whereas
> I'm comfortable with editors and basically want a cheat sheet.
> But even they're usually too long, with lots of arcane commands
> that I'm sure I'll eventually want to know, but not while I'm
> still trying to remember how to cut-and-paste.
>   So I started making my own  forkosh.com/emacs.txt  but am
> having difficulty zeroing in on some info.
>   Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
> no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
> <h2>stuff</h2> underlined. 

M-x fundamental-mode RET

This gives you the basic editor features and nothing more.


M-x text-mode RET

is designed to edit natural language texts (paragraphs, lines, words,
characters).  It may not be useful to edit code, which is structured
quite differently from natural language text.


> And really annoying, I don't want
> the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
> Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
> I just want a dumb editor in the sense that it shouldn't think
> it knows >>anything<< about the language/syntax I'm writing in,
> regardless of filename extension. It should just see a stream
> of uninterpreted characters, unless it sees C- or M- (or
> something with special emacs significance).

Yep, fundamental-mode will give you that.


>   And various and sundry minor questions, e.g., what exactly
> is the undo scope of C-/ and how do you just undo "last keystroke",
> and no more than that (if last keystroke was a C-y then, okay,
> undo the entire yank)?

It seems to me, history coalesce input, so that undo can't undo text
entry character by character, (unless you separate each character by
some other command, such as cursor move).  Other than that, it seems to
me that undo works like that, undoing one command at a time.


>   Finally, have I missed some tutorial/cheat-sheet-type info designed
> for my kind of needs -- already familiar with various languages
> and editors, and just wants to get down to work using emacs?
> Just wants the 100 or so most used commands "telegraphed", without
> more extra words than necessary? Thanks,

http://cs.iupui.edu/~kweimer/EmacsCheatSheet.pdf
seems to be a nice and short cheat sheet.

Now of course, the big win of emacs, is when you activate those modes
that provide automatic features specific to the kind of document you're
editing and its syntax.  So fundamental-mode is not used often.  But I
agree that it may help for newbies, to start with it, and add layers and
tools later.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com/

Re: beginner questions

[JohnF]

Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
> 
>> Can't use my favorite editor any more (long story, don't ask:),
>> and decided to go with emacs. Of course, there are zillions of
>> tutorials, etc, but most are almost-infinitely wordy, whereas
>> I'm comfortable with editors and basically want a cheat sheet.
>> But even they're usually too long, with lots of arcane commands
>> that I'm sure I'll eventually want to know, but not while I'm
>> still trying to remember how to cut-and-paste.
>>   So I started making my own  forkosh.com/emacs.txt  but am
>> having difficulty zeroing in on some info.
>>   Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
>> no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
>> <h2>stuff</h2> underlined. 

> M-x fundamental-mode RET
>    This gives you the basic editor features and nothing more.
> M-x text-mode RET
>    is designed to edit natural language texts (paragraphs, lines,
> words, characters).  It may not be useful to edit code, which is
> structured quite differently from natural language text.

Thanks, Pascal, that's perfect. Don't know how I missed it
during maybe ~5 minutes trying various google queries.

>> And really annoying, I don't want
>> the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
>> Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
>> I just want a dumb editor in the sense that it shouldn't think
>> it knows >>anything<< about the language/syntax I'm writing in,
>> regardless of filename extension. It should just see a stream
>> of uninterpreted characters, unless it sees C- or M- (or
>> something with special emacs significance).
>
> Yep, fundamental-mode will give you that.
Yep, works great.

>> And various and sundry minor questions, e.g., what exactly
>> is the undo scope of C-/ and how do you just undo "last keystroke",
>> and no more than that (if last keystroke was a C-y then, okay,
>> undo the entire yank)?
> 
> It seems to me, history coalesce input, so that undo can't undo text
> entry character by character, (unless you separate each character by
> some other command, such as cursor move).  Other than that, it seems to
> me that undo works like that, undoing one command at a time.

No big problem, I don't suppose. I guess I'll get used to it.
Just caused me some minor inconvenience when it behaved
unexpectedly (unexpected to me, that is) and undid lots more
than I'd intended. I'm just being more careful now, until
I comfortably know what to actually expect.

>> Finally, have I missed some tutorial/cheat-sheet-type info designed
>> for my kind of needs -- already familiar with various languages
>> and editors, and just wants to get down to work using emacs?
>> Just wants the 100 or so most used commands "telegraphed", without
>> more extra words than necessary? Thanks,
> 
> http://cs.iupui.edu/~kweimer/EmacsCheatSheet.pdf
> seems to be a nice and short cheat sheet.

Thanks, again, Pascal. That's perfect, too. Just what I wanted,
and had also failed to find (neither that nor anything close to it)
during google searches.

> Now of course, the big win of emacs, is when you activate those modes
> that provide automatic features specific to the kind of document you're
> editing and its syntax. So fundamental-mode is not used often. But I
> agree that it may help for newbies, to start with it, and add layers and
> tools later.

Yeah, I peeked at your informatimago.com homepage, and saw all
your gpl'ed emacs tools. The asm7090 seemed especially unusual.
I started with keypunches (and that's 026's), and ran stuff
on the 7040 in CCNY's EE dept a long (long,...) time ago.
But the creation date on your pjb-asm7090.el is 2005-06-04.
Somebody still emulating that somewhere?
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

Re: beginner questions

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:

> Yeah, I peeked at your informatimago.com homepage, and saw all
> your gpl'ed emacs tools. The asm7090 seemed especially unusual.
> I started with keypunches (and that's 026's), and ran stuff
> on the 7040 in CCNY's EE dept a long (long,...) time ago.
> But the creation date on your pjb-asm7090.el is 2005-06-04.
> Somebody still emulating that somewhere?

Indeed.  The sources of LISP 1.5 written in 7090 assembler are
available, and there's an emulator, so as a week end project when time
permits, (unfortunately not since a few years, given the amount of
competiting interests :-/), we may have fun with it.

http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2012/08/29/590/
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispOnePointFive
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/

You may perform further searches with:
http://www.masswerk.at/google60/
;-)


But on the other hand, Common Lisp let you run LISP 1.5 programs almost
unchanged, with minimal supporting code:

http://informatimago.com/develop/lisp/com/informatimago/small-cl-pgms/wang.html


For more nostalgia, you may try pjb-computer-paper.el:
M-x set-foreground-color RET black RET M-x computer-paper RET

C-u M-x computer-paper RET will ask for the modulo (number of colors)
and block (group of lines) with which to set the background lines.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com/

RE: beginner questions

[Doug Lewan]

There's also the emacs reference card (which, of course, overlaps greatly with the cheat sheet). It can be found in /usr/share/emacs/24.3/etc for any "official" installation. Otherwise, look for the etc/ directory under the value of the `installation-directory' variable.

,Douglas
Douglas Lewan
Shubert Ticketing
(201) 489-8600 ext 224

These are my principles and if you don't like them... well, I have others. - Groucho Marx


-----Original Message-----
From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+dougl=shubertticketing.com@gnu.org [mailto:help-gnu-emacs-bounces+dougl=shubertticketing.com@gnu.org] On Behalf Of JohnF
Sent: Wednesday, 2013 September 25 03:56
To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: beginner questions

Can't use my favorite editor any more (long story, don't ask:),
and decided to go with emacs. Of course, there are zillions of
tutorials, etc, but most are almost-infinitely wordy, whereas
I'm comfortable with editors and basically want a cheat sheet.
But even they're usually too long, with lots of arcane commands
that I'm sure I'll eventually want to know, but not while I'm
still trying to remember how to cut-and-paste.
  So I started making my own  forkosh.com/emacs.txt  but am
having difficulty zeroing in on some info.
  Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
<h2>stuff</h2> underlined. And really annoying, I don't want
the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
I just want a dumb editor in the sense that it shouldn't think
it knows >>anything<< about the language/syntax I'm writing in,
regardless of filename extension. It should just see a stream
of uninterpreted characters, unless it sees C- or M- (or
something with special emacs significance).
  And various and sundry minor questions, e.g., what exactly
is the undo scope of C-/ and how do you just undo "last keystroke",
and no more than that (if last keystroke was a C-y then, okay,
undo the entire yank)?
  Finally, have I missed some tutorial/cheat-sheet-type info designed
for my kind of needs -- already familiar with various languages
and editors, and just wants to get down to work using emacs?
Just wants the 100 or so most used commands "telegraphed", without
more extra words than necessary? Thanks,
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

Re: beginner questions

[Jude DaShiell]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, JohnF wrote:

> Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> > JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
> > 
> >> Can't use my favorite editor any more (long story, don't ask:),
> >> and decided to go with emacs. Of course, there are zillions of
> >> tutorials, etc, but most are almost-infinitely wordy, whereas
> >> I'm comfortable with editors and basically want a cheat sheet.
> >> But even they're usually too long, with lots of arcane commands
> >> that I'm sure I'll eventually want to know, but not while I'm
> >> still trying to remember how to cut-and-paste.
> >>   So I started making my own  forkosh.com/emacs.txt  but am
> >> having difficulty zeroing in on some info.
> >>   Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
> >> no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
> >> <h2>stuff</h2> underlined. 
> 
> > M-x fundamental-mode RET
> >    This gives you the basic editor features and nothing more.
> > M-x text-mode RET
> >    is designed to edit natural language texts (paragraphs, lines,
> > words, characters).  It may not be useful to edit code, which is
> > structured quite differently from natural language text.
> 
> Thanks, Pascal, that's perfect. Don't know how I missed it
> during maybe ~5 minutes trying various google queries.
> 
> >> And really annoying, I don't want
> >> the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
> >> Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
> >> I just want a dumb editor in the sense that it shouldn't think
> >> it knows >>anything<< about the language/syntax I'm writing in,
> >> regardless of filename extension. It should just see a stream
> >> of uninterpreted characters, unless it sees C- or M- (or
> >> something with special emacs significance).
> >
> > Yep, fundamental-mode will give you that.
> Yep, works great.
> 
> >> And various and sundry minor questions, e.g., what exactly
> >> is the undo scope of C-/ and how do you just undo "last keystroke",
> >> and no more than that (if last keystroke was a C-y then, okay,
> >> undo the entire yank)?
> > 
> > It seems to me, history coalesce input, so that undo can't undo text
> > entry character by character, (unless you separate each character by
> > some other command, such as cursor move).  Other than that, it seems to
> > me that undo works like that, undoing one command at a time.
> 
> No big problem, I don't suppose. I guess I'll get used to it.
> Just caused me some minor inconvenience when it behaved
> unexpectedly (unexpected to me, that is) and undid lots more
> than I'd intended. I'm just being more careful now, until
> I comfortably know what to actually expect.
> 
> >> Finally, have I missed some tutorial/cheat-sheet-type info designed
> >> for my kind of needs -- already familiar with various languages
> >> and editors, and just wants to get down to work using emacs?
> >> Just wants the 100 or so most used commands "telegraphed", without
> >> more extra words than necessary? Thanks,
> > 
> > http://cs.iupui.edu/~kweimer/EmacsCheatSheet.pdf
> > seems to be a nice and short cheat sheet.
> 
> Thanks, again, Pascal. That's perfect, too. Just what I wanted,
> and had also failed to find (neither that nor anything close to it)
> during google searches.
> 
> > Now of course, the big win of emacs, is when you activate those modes
> > that provide automatic features specific to the kind of document you're
> > editing and its syntax. So fundamental-mode is not used often. But I
> > agree that it may help for newbies, to start with it, and add layers and
> > tools later.
> 
> Yeah, I peeked at your informatimago.com homepage, and saw all
> your gpl'ed emacs tools. The asm7090 seemed especially unusual.
> I started with keypunches (and that's 026's), and ran stuff
> on the 7040 in CCNY's EE dept a long (long,...) time ago.
> But the creation date on your pjb-asm7090.el is 2005-06-04.
> Somebody still emulating that somewhere?
> 
Control+g may be useful here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net>

Re: beginner questions

[JohnF]

Doug Lewan <dougl@shubertticketing.com> wrote:
> There's also the emacs reference card (which, of course,
> overlaps greatly with the cheat sheet).
 For those not following earlier posts,
 the cheat sheet previously recommended by Pascal is,
    http://cs.iupui.edu/~kweimer/EmacsCheatSheet.pdf
> It [the refcard] can be found in
> /usr/share/emacs/24.3/etc for any "official" installation.
> Otherwise, look for the etc/ directory under the value of
> the `installation-directory' variable.  ,Douglas

Thanks Doug, found it under ...etc/refcards/refcard.pdf
And it's indeed also a great resource I'd missed myself
(embarrassingly missed, since it's right there and
you'd think I'd have found it pretty trivially).
Funny how some of the things in that refcards/ directory,
like survival.tex, only have the .tex source, but not
a "compiled" .pdf (and pdflatex seems to have some little
problems with it on my slackware 14.0 default install).
  I'd incorporated some of Pascal's remarks and some of
the EmacsCheatSheet.pdf into my own forkosh.com/emacs.txt ,
but hadn't found some things like "goto line  M-g g"
that the refcard contains and that I'd been looking for.
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

Re: beginner questions

[Ken Goldman]

On 9/25/2013 3:55 AM, JohnF wrote:

>    Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
> no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
> <h2>stuff</h2> underlined. And really annoying, I don't want
> the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
> Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
> I just want a dumb editor

For a beginner, I suggest you give 'everything' a try before you turn 
emacs into a dumb editor.

Emacs was written by real users, and does the right thing so often that 
you'll wonder how you ever used any other editor.

If you're writing code (and html is code) parenthesis matching, region 
commenting, coloring, indenting, inserting tags, headers, lists, check 
boxes and such will save a lot of typing and debug.

Once you get into emacs, you can change the colors to your liking, as 
well as assign keys for frequently used operations.

Re: beginner questions

[Rustom Mody]

On Thursday, September 26, 2013 11:22:06 PM UTC+5:30, Ken Goldman wrote:
> On 9/25/2013 3:55 AM, JohnF wrote:
> 
> 
> >    Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
> > no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
> > <h2>stuff</h2> underlined. And really annoying, I don't want
> > the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
> > Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
> > I just want a dumb editor
> 
> 
> 
> For a beginner, I suggest you give 'everything' a try before you turn 
> emacs into a dumb editor.

For every one JohnF who makes the courage to come here and ask there are 10 who find that this something called 'editor' is just too far removed from notepad/Word/vi/gedit/eclipse/whatever to be worth the effort.

[I just had one a few days ago]

Re: beginner questions

[JohnF]

Ken Goldman <kgoldman@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> On 9/25/2013 3:55 AM, JohnF wrote:
>>    Most importantly, how to "turn off everything". For example,
>> no html help, e.g., I don't want to see <u>stuff</u> or
>> <h2>stuff</h2> underlined. And really annoying, I don't want
>> the cursor to momentarily jump back to ( after I type (stuff).
>> Ditto <stuff>, etc. Very distracting (to me). Basically,
>> I just want a dumb editor
> 
> For a beginner, I suggest you give 'everything' a try
> before you turn emacs into a dumb editor.

Not a beginner programmer, just a beginner with emacs.
And to begin with, I want to get some real work done immediately --
use emacs as a tool, not as a toy. Dumbing it down will just help
me get down to work. Otherwise, not yet being familiar with emacs,
I have to look up every second or two to see what it's doing,
to make sure I'm not doing something it's already done for me, etc.

> Emacs was written by real users, and does the right thing so often that 
> you'll wonder how you ever used any other editor.
> If you're writing code (and html is code) parenthesis matching, region 
> commenting, coloring, indenting, inserting tags, headers, lists, check 
> boxes and such will save a lot of typing and debug.

You're welcome to prefer what you like. Personal preferences are
personal. That's why they call them personal. My working habits are
different than yours. I absolutely hate colors, parentheses matching,
indenting.
 Speaking of which, I hadn't really exercised that fundamental-mode
properly when I remarked in preceding post that it worked fine.
It stops "parentheses" matching <stuff>, which is what I'd noticed
since I'm currently writing some html (but mostly write C nowadays).
But it still matches (stuff) and [stuff] and {stuff}. Any way to
turn that off? Thanks.

> Once you get into emacs, you can change the colors to your liking, as 
> well as assign keys for frequently used operations.
The only colors I like are black fg on white bg -- for >>everything<<.
And I usually prefer learning and using an editor's native command set,
rather than having it learn me. But some of those M-x commands can get
pretty lengthy.
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

Re: beginner questions

[JohnF]

Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
> 
>> Yeah, I peeked at your informatimago.com homepage, and saw all
>> your gpl'ed emacs tools. The asm7090 seemed especially unusual.
>> I started with keypunches (and that's 026's), and ran stuff
>> on the 7040 in CCNY's EE dept a long (long,...) time ago.
>> But the creation date on your pjb-asm7090.el is 2005-06-04.
>> Somebody still emulating that somewhere?
> 
> Indeed.
Thanks, Pascal, that's remarkable...
> The sources of LISP 1.5 written in 7090 assembler are
> available, and there's an emulator, so as a week end project when time
> permits, (unfortunately not since a few years, given the amount of
> competiting interests :-/), we may have fun with it.
>    http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2012/08/29/590/
>    http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispOnePointFive
>    http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/
> You may perform further searches with:
> http://www.masswerk.at/google60/
> ;-)
> 
> But on the other hand, Common Lisp let you run LISP 1.5 programs almost
> unchanged, with minimal supporting code:
>    http://informatimago.com/develop/lisp/com/informatimago/
>    small-cl-pgms/wang.html
> For more nostalgia,
..."Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." -- Peter De Vries
> you may try pjb-computer-paper.el:
> M-x set-foreground-color RET black RET M-x computer-paper RET
>    C-u M-x computer-paper RET will ask for the modulo (number of colors)
> and block (group of lines) with which to set the background lines.

Two more questions, please. First (as also mentioned in post
further down this thread), when I earlier said that fundamental-mode
stops parentheses matching, I'd only actually checked <stuff>.
Unfortunately, it still matches (stuff), [stuff], {stuff}.
Any way to turn that all off?
   Secondly, I figured I could easily get that fundamental-mode, as
well as other initializations, into .emacs by myself with a little
googling. But I tried all of (separately and together)
   ; -*- mode: Fundamental;-*-
   (setq-default major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
   (setq major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
   (fundamental-mode)
and nothing works. Still comes up in its own default mode.
And just to be sure, I put some gobbledy-gook into .emacs
and ran it with --debug-init, and it brought up a screen
with the expected "Error: you're a moron" message
(I'm already plenty familiar with that message:).
So it's indeed reading the file. I must be writing it wrong.
What's the right way? Thanks again,
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

Re: beginner questions

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:

> Two more questions, please. First (as also mentioned in post
> further down this thread), when I earlier said that fundamental-mode
> stops parentheses matching, I'd only actually checked <stuff>.
> Unfortunately, it still matches (stuff), [stuff], {stuff}.
> Any way to turn that all off?

M-x customize-variable RET blink-matching-paren RET


>    Secondly, I figured I could easily get that fundamental-mode, as
> well as other initializations, into .emacs by myself with a little
> googling. But I tried all of (separately and together)
>    ; -*- mode: Fundamental;-*-

    ;; -*- mode: fundamental;-*-

>    (setq-default major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
>    (setq major-mode 'fundamental-mode)

M-x customize-variable RET default-major-mode RET


>    (fundamental-mode)
> and nothing works. Still comes up in its own default mode.


You should also set auto-mode-alist

   (setq auto-mode-alist '(("." . fundamental-mode)))


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com/

Re: beginner questions

[Rustom Mody]

On Saturday, September 28, 2013 9:00:40 PM UTC+5:30, Pascal J. Bourguignon > 
> M-x customize-variable RET blink-matching-paren RET
> 
> 
> M-x customize-variable RET default-major-mode RET
> 
> 
> You should also set auto-mode-alist
>    (setq auto-mode-alist '(("." . fundamental-mode)))

[To Pascal]
Why do you part recommend customize and part setq??

[Asking because I belong to the camp that dislikes customize but still sometimes is forced to use it]

[To John]
If you tell us what editor(s) you have used/like the advice you get can be more precise.

Re: beginner questions

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> On Saturday, September 28, 2013 9:00:40 PM UTC+5:30, Pascal J. Bourguignon > 
>> M-x customize-variable RET blink-matching-paren RET
>> 
>> 
>> M-x customize-variable RET default-major-mode RET
>> 
>> 
>> You should also set auto-mode-alist
>>    (setq auto-mode-alist '(("." . fundamental-mode)))
>
> [To Pascal]
> Why do you part recommend customize and part setq??

I would have proposed customize, but auto-mode-alist is not
customizable.

> [Asking because I belong to the camp that dislikes customize but still
> sometimes is forced to use it]

customize-variable is advantageous for the self-documentation of the
thing, and to navigate in the groups of customizable variables.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com/

Re: beginner questions

[Stefan Monnier]

> me get down to work. Otherwise, not yet being familiar with emacs,
> I have to look up every second or two to see what it's doing,
> to make sure I'm not doing something it's already done for me, etc.

Emacs generally tries to make it so that what you see is all there is
to see.  So while it may perform extra edits for you, it should always
be immediately visible on screen.  IOW as long as you look at your
screen, you should immediately see when something's going on.

Also, usually by default Emacs tries not to perform changes you haven't
explicitly asked for.  This is not always the case (e.g. the
auto-indentation of after inserting ; in C mode), but these exceptions
so they should be reasonably rare.

IOW, I recommend you don't try to force fundamental-mode everywhere, but
instead to use Emacs in its vanilla form and then to ask how to disable
specifically those things that bother you.

> different than yours. I absolutely hate colors,

(global-font-lock-mode -1)

> parentheses matching,

(setq blink-matching-paren nil)

> indenting.

This normally only happens when you explicitly ask for it by hitting TAB.
The exceptions will depend on the major-mode in use, so when you bump
into a problematic case, post it here (and/or do a M-x report-emacs-bug
pointing out that this major-mode should obey electric-indent-mode).

>  Speaking of which, I hadn't really exercised that fundamental-mode
> properly when I remarked in preceding post that it worked fine.
> It stops "parentheses" matching <stuff>, which is what I'd noticed
> since I'm currently writing some html (but mostly write C nowadays).
> But it still matches (stuff) and [stuff] and {stuff}. Any way to
> turn that off? Thanks.

In most cases I've seen (tho not all), beginners misunderstand the
default paren-matching and have the impression they have to wait for
"the cursor to come back".  Once they discover that they do *not* have
to wait (IOW the cursor comes back as soon as they type something), they
tend to like it (it's really designed to be "as unintrusive as we
could").
But if you still dislike it, just add

   (setq blink-matching-paren nil)

in your ~/.emacs file.

> The only colors I like are black fg on white bg -- for >>everything<<.

Same for me.  So, I use

   M-x customize-face RET font-lock-<yourchoicehere>-face RET

to change those nasty default colors and replace them with
italics/bold/grey.


        Stefan

Re: beginner questions

[Kai Grossjohann]

On Saturday, September 28, 2013 7:11:00 PM UTC+2, Rustom Mody wrote:

> [Asking because I belong to the camp that dislikes customize but still sometimes is forced to use it]

My knowledge of Emacs is rusty, but from what I remember, usually you could do without customize what you could do with customize.

RE: beginner questions

[Drew Adams]

> customize-variable is advantageous for the self-documentation of the
> thing, and to navigate in the groups of customizable variables.

And for proper type checking/control.  And in some cases for proper
actions taken when initializing or setting.

Re: beginner questions

[JohnF]

Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
> 
>> Two more questions, please. First (as also mentioned in post
>> further down this thread), when I earlier said that fundamental-mode
>> stops parentheses matching, I'd only actually checked <stuff>.
>> Unfortunately, it still matches (stuff), [stuff], {stuff}.
>> Any way to turn that all off?
> 
> M-x customize-variable RET blink-matching-paren RET

Thanks again, Pascal. That works great (and the elisp example
it provides by rewriting the .emacs file is terrific, too).
Only rhetorical question is why I couldn't manage to find that while
trying to google the answer myself, before posting the question.

>>    Secondly, I figured I could easily get that fundamental-mode, as
>> well as other initializations, into .emacs by myself with a little
>> googling. But I tried all of (separately and together)
>>    ; -*- mode: Fundamental;-*-

Aside: I'm sure you realize I'm writing (trying to write)
   "; [dash][asterisk][dash] mode: etc"
above, although it shows up on my reader as a bold asterisk
without dashes.

>    ;; -*- mode: fundamental;-*-

I thought I'd googled that particular "executable comment" with
one semicolon, but I'm currently failing to re-locate the page
that contained the explanation. I'd understood it kind of like
a postscript file comment that actually gets interpreted.
Anyway, I changed it to two semicolons like you suggest,
and it seems to work (both ways, as far as I can tell).

>>    (setq-default major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
>>    (setq major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
> 
> M-x customize-variable RET default-major-mode RET

That coughs up a [No match], although it does recognize
a major-mode variable. But that's already set to
fundamental-mode, probably thanks to your auto-mode-alist
suggestion below, which solved the problem.

>>    (fundamental-mode)
>> and nothing works. Still comes up in its own default mode.
> 
> You should also set auto-mode-alist
>   (setq auto-mode-alist '(("." . fundamental-mode)))

Yup, that solved the problem. And googling your answers
(e.g., googling blink-matching-paren) nicely fills in the
explanations of what's going on (once I know the answer,
it's a lot easier to google it:). Now I'll have to find a
quick-and-dirty elisp tutorial (tried googling bnf elisp,
but could only find useful stuff for bnf lisp) to learn
just enough to init emacs entirely to my liking.
But, thanks mostly to your answers here, I can now see that's
all easily do-able, and can probably easily figure out how.
Thanks again,
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

Re: beginner questions

[JohnF]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> me get down to work. Otherwise, not yet being familiar with emacs,
>> I have to look up every second or two to see what it's doing,
>> to make sure I'm not doing something it's already done for me, etc.
> 
> Emacs generally tries to make it so that what you see is all there is
> to see.  So while it may perform extra edits for you, it should always
> be immediately visible on screen.  IOW as long as you look at your
> screen, you should immediately see when something's going on.

Well, that sounds to me somewhat like, "...as long as you
look out your windshield, you should see that Mack truck
about to crash into you at 100kph [55mph]." Seriously, though,
in my personal experience (emphasize personal, I'm just talking
about me), I more often than not have to undo "extra edits it
may perform for you". And maybe even worse, I have to stop
and think about it while I'm trying to concentrate on what I'm
actually working on.

> Also, usually by default Emacs tries not to perform changes you haven't
> explicitly asked for.  This is not always the case (e.g. the
> auto-indentation of after inserting ; in C mode), but these exceptions
> so they should be reasonably rare.
> 
> IOW, I recommend you don't try to force fundamental-mode everywhere, but
> instead to use Emacs in its vanilla form and then to ask how to disable
> specifically those things that bother you.

As above, my experience isn't "reasonably rare", and my preference is
therefore opposite -- disable everything, and then enable those things
that I like. Granted, I won't immediately be aware of things I may like
if they're disaabled to begin with, but I'll eventually stumble across them.

>> different than yours. I absolutely hate colors,
>   (global-font-lock-mode -1)
>> parentheses matching,
>   (setq blink-matching-paren nil)
> 
Thanks for the answers, Stefan.

>> indenting.
> This normally only happens when you explicitly ask for it by hitting TAB.
> The exceptions will depend on the major-mode in use, so when you bump
> into a problematic case, post it here (and/or do a M-x report-emacs-bug
> pointing out that this major-mode should obey electric-indent-mode).
> 
>>  Speaking of which, I hadn't really exercised that fundamental-mode
>> properly when I remarked in preceding post that it worked fine.
>> It stops "parentheses" matching <stuff>, which is what I'd noticed
>> since I'm currently writing some html (but mostly write C nowadays).
>> But it still matches (stuff) and [stuff] and {stuff}. Any way to
>> turn that off? Thanks.
> 
> In most cases I've seen (tho not all), beginners misunderstand the
> default paren-matching and have the impression they have to wait for
> "the cursor to come back".  Once they discover that they do *not* have
> to wait (IOW the cursor comes back as soon as they type something), they
> tend to like it (it's really designed to be "as unintrusive as we
> could").
>
> But if you still dislike it, just add
>   (setq blink-matching-paren nil)
> in your ~/.emacs file.
> 
>> The only colors I like are black fg on white bg -- for >>everything<<.
> Same for me.  So, I use
>   M-x customize-face RET font-lock-<yourchoicehere>-face RET
> to change those nasty default colors and replace them with
> italics/bold/grey. Stefan
Thanks again,
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

RE: beginner questions

[Drew Adams]

> > [Asking because I belong to the camp that dislikes customize but still
> > sometimes is forced to use it]
> 
> My knowledge of Emacs is rusty, but from what I remember, usually you could
> do without customize what you could do with customize.

Yes, of course you can.  It's just Lisp.  But it's not just setq - that's the
point.  If you want to use `customize-set-variable' and so on, no problem.

Re: beginner questions

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:

> Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
>> JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
>> 
>>> Two more questions, please. First (as also mentioned in post
>>> further down this thread), when I earlier said that fundamental-mode
>>> stops parentheses matching, I'd only actually checked <stuff>.
>>> Unfortunately, it still matches (stuff), [stuff], {stuff}.
>>> Any way to turn that all off?
>> 
>> M-x customize-variable RET blink-matching-paren RET
>
> Thanks again, Pascal. That works great (and the elisp example
> it provides by rewriting the .emacs file is terrific, too).
> Only rhetorical question is why I couldn't manage to find that while
> trying to google the answer myself, before posting the question.
>
>>>    Secondly, I figured I could easily get that fundamental-mode, as
>>> well as other initializations, into .emacs by myself with a little
>>> googling. But I tried all of (separately and together)
>>>    ; -*- mode: Fundamental;-*-
>
> Aside: I'm sure you realize I'm writing (trying to write)
>    "; [dash][asterisk][dash] mode: etc"
> above, although it shows up on my reader as a bold asterisk
> without dashes.

Yes. But (eq 'Fundamental 'fundamental) --> nil ; in emacs lisp.


>>    ;; -*- mode: fundamental;-*-
>
> I thought I'd googled that particular "executable comment" with
> one semicolon, but I'm currently failing to re-locate the page
> that contained the explanation. I'd understood it kind of like
> a postscript file comment that actually gets interpreted.
> Anyway, I changed it to two semicolons like you suggest,
> and it seems to work (both ways, as far as I can tell).

(info "(elisp) Comment Tips")


>>>    (setq-default major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
>>>    (setq major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
>> 
>> M-x customize-variable RET default-major-mode RET
>
> That coughs up a [No match], although it does recognize
> a major-mode variable. But that's already set to
> fundamental-mode, probably thanks to your auto-mode-alist
> suggestion below, which solved the problem.
>
>>>    (fundamental-mode)
>>> and nothing works. Still comes up in its own default mode.
>> 
>> You should also set auto-mode-alist
>>   (setq auto-mode-alist '(("." . fundamental-mode)))
>
> Yup, that solved the problem. And googling your answers
> (e.g., googling blink-matching-paren) nicely fills in the
> explanations of what's going on (once I know the answer,
> it's a lot easier to google it:). Now I'll have to find a
> quick-and-dirty elisp tutorial (tried googling bnf elisp,
> but could only find useful stuff for bnf lisp) to learn
> just enough to init emacs entirely to my liking.


An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/  or  M-: (info "(eintr)Top") RET
(for non-programmers)

Emacs Lisp Manual
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/elisp.html  or  M-: (info "(elisp)Top") RET


> But, thanks mostly to your answers here, I can now see that's
> all easily do-able, and can probably easily figure out how.
> Thanks again,


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com/

Re: beginner questions

[JohnF]

Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
> 
>>> You should also set auto-mode-alist
>>>   (setq auto-mode-alist '(("." . fundamental-mode)))
>> Yup, that solved the problem.
>> Now I'll have to find a quick-and-dirty elisp tutorial

> (info "(elisp) Comment Tips")
Thanks, Pascal. I'd totally forgotten about info,
and  info elisp  from the shell also works great.

> An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/
I'm getting "page not found" for that one (and a couple
of variations I tried). Backing up a notch,
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ has a general
"Lisp Language" link to wikipedia (which also has an emacs lisp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_lisp page that doesn't quite
seem quick-and-dirty-tutorial-like).

> or
>   M-: (info "(eintr)Top") RET
>   (for non-programmers)
That seems good, too. A little different than the
shell info elisp, but I haven't looked through
either one carefully yet.

> Emacs Lisp Manual
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/elisp.html
Yeah, a little too wordy for my quick-and-dirty definition
which, to me anyway, starts with a "hello, world" example.
That is, it assumes the reader has enough overall programming
experience so that if he's shown a small example, he'll
intuitively see a lot of the semantics behind the syntax.
And he'll intuit a good deal of syntax, too.
   For example, just your  M-: (info "(eintr)Top") RET
above was very informative. I wasn't aware of  M-: ,
but as soon as it said Eval:, and I took another look at
your (expression), I got the point.
   Now, I obviously don't get everything, or even all that much,
so a good quick-and-dirty tutorial might well add some discussion
after that example. But at least I'll start with a good sense
of what we're talking about and where we're going. And if
it's not what I'm currently interested in, I can immediately
move on to another example and discussion.
   But most of these tutorials start out with thousands of
words about elementary syntactic stuff that's indeed crucial,
but can often be kind of telegraphed with a few well-chosen
examples. You sure won't rigorously learn all the syntax
immediately, but you'll immediately get a pretty good idea
of how to do simple things. And the interpreter/compiler
(or assembler:) will gleefully let you know when you've
messed up syntactically.

> or
>   M-: (info "(elisp)Top") RET
Right, this one looks exactly like the shell info elisp.
Thanks again,
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )

Re: beginner questions

[Rustom Mody]

On Saturday, September 28, 2013 11:48:20 PM UTC+5:30, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Emacs generally tries to make it so that what you see is all there is
> to see.  So while it may perform extra edits for you, it should always
> be immediately visible on screen.  IOW as long as you look at your
> screen, you should immediately see when something's going on.

Just had an hour-long battle with an exception to that rule!

I yanked from google/firefox and pasted a link into org-mode/emacs.
When exported to html that link was having some junk character(s) that was giving a broken link on being clicked.

Naturally my mind was going along the lines "bug in org exporter..."

Cut down the org file to a single header and the link. No luck

Switched from org to fundamental mode -- same -- no character in the link in emacs but some junk on html-export.

Finally switched to vi. It showed me:
[[http://cs.brown.edu/people/pw/papers/monist.ps<200e>][Philosophical diffs between OOp and FP]]

200e??? What the hell...
Asked emacs to describe-char (the nothing at that point!) and that is something called 'left-to-right-mark'

So humble request: Please show what is there!

Emacs version 23.4.1

Re: beginner questions

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 10:27:35 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com>
> 
> Finally switched to vi.

??? Why not "M-x hexl-mode RET" or "M-x hexlify-buffer RET"?  This is
Emacs, right?

> It showed me:
> [[http://cs.brown.edu/people/pw/papers/monist.ps<200e>][Philosophical diffs between OOp and FP]]
> 
> 200e??? What the hell...
> Asked emacs to describe-char (the nothing at that point!) and that is something called 'left-to-right-mark'
> 
> So humble request: Please show what is there!

That character is displayed as a thin space in my Emacs 23.4.  Not
sure why you didn't see it.

In Emacs 24, you can control the display using the glyphless-char
stuff.  But otherwise, I don't see what exactly is wrong with Emacs in
that case.

Re: beginner questions

[Joost Kremers]

EN:SiS(9)
Rustom Mody wrote:
> Finally switched to vi. It showed me:
> [[http://cs.brown.edu/people/pw/papers/monist.ps<200e>][Philosophical diffs between OOp and FP]]
>
> 200e??? What the hell...
> Asked emacs to describe-char (the nothing at that point!) and that is something called 'left-to-right-mark'
>
> So humble request: Please show what is there!

Well, if you google left-to-right-mark, you'll see that it is an
"invisible formatting character", which means that it shouldn't be
displayed. So arguably vi was doing the wrong thing when it showed you
the hex code. Now, obviously something like this is confusing when one
doesn't know what's going on, but I don't think Emacs is doing the wrong
thing here.

-- 
Joost Kremers                                   joostkremers@fastmail.fm
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht

Re: beginner questions

[Stefan Monnier]

> Finally switched to vi. It showed me:
> [[http://cs.brown.edu/people/pw/papers/monist.ps<200e>][Philosophical diffs between OOp and FP]]

> 200e??? What the hell...

Indeed, as the display engine becomes more powerful over time, the
general rule gets broken more and more often.  Unicode is a source of
lots of problems along this way (e.g. with all the barely visible
characters such as the one above, as well as all the "different
character, but displays identically").  There are some libraries that
try to help with this, e.g. uni-confusable (in GNU ELPA), but it's
a hard problem because there is no single "right thing to do".


        Stefan

Re: beginner questions

[Rustom Mody]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2013 6:26:06 AM UTC+5:30, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Finally switched to vi. It showed me:
> 
> > [[http://cs.brown.edu/people/pw/papers/monist.ps<200e>][Philosophical diffs between OOp and FP]]
> 
> 
> > 200e??? What the hell...
> 
> 
> Indeed, as the display engine becomes more powerful over time, the
> general rule gets broken more and more often.  Unicode is a source of
> lots of problems along this way (e.g. with all the barely visible
> characters such as the one above, as well as all the "different
> character, but displays identically").  There are some libraries that
> try to help with this, e.g. uni-confusable (in GNU ELPA), but it's
> a hard problem because there is no single "right thing to do".

Thanks Stefan. I appreciate that choosing the right action is probably very hard.

I was just pointing out that your statement: What you see is all there is to see
seems to be eminently suitable for an editor (as against say a browser, a word-processor etc) and it would be a shame if emacs started breaking that rule more than necessary.