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Dan's Fall 2015 Opus
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Introduction
In this space you can provide a description of yourself, your pursuits, your interests. To fill out this section, click the edit button off to the right, delete this placement text, and type your original content.
MONTH Day, YEAR
This is a sample format for a dated entry. Please substitute the actual date for “Month Day, Year”, and duplicate the level 4 heading to make additional entries.
As an aid, feel free to use the following questions to help you generate content for your entries:
- What action or concept of significance, as related to the course, did you experience on this date?
- Why was this significant?
- What concepts are you dealing with that may not make perfect sense?
- What challenges are you facing with respect to the course?
DECEMBER 5, 2015
From Vim to Emacs
For a while now, Vim has been my editor of choice (sorry Sublime Text). It's a great program, with both a mature code base and large, dedicated community behind it. I thought I'd never be persuaded to use the other editor in what people call the “editor wars” - Emacs. A few months ago, Richard Stallman, an (in)famous computer scientist known for the creation of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation had a presentation at CCC. He's also the creator of GNU Emacs, the variant that is considered the original. At one point during his talk he had muttered about the two editors, and I decided to make an input about being a Vim user. Waving a Emacs manual in my face repeatedly, he convinced me to buy the book and learn it. I mean, who else could convince me none other than the creator himself?
So I got to it. I installed a non-graphical Emacs on my Arch Linux netbook and immediately struggled with keystrokes as I was unfamiliar to the excessive use of Control and Alt key combinations that are so important in Emacs, being used to the command mode of Vim. After learning basic commands/key combinations like Alt-x to run a function or Control-x Control-c to quit (you get asked whether to save as well), I decided to install some packages and edit the configuration file. I installed a Monokai theme and evil. evil introduced some features very helpful to me, providing a basic command mode layer for Emacs and support for other various features from Vim. So far, I've really grown to like Emacs, even though I still use Vim most of the time. Heh.
