@@friedrichmyers i guess it depends on what you mean by old days then. i consider all those keys you mentioned except for ctrl to be more of modern inventions/standards
Disclaimer: I have not seen the entire video yet, but it seems like this binding is not very well known so I might as well give it there (although to be fair, it is usually not the most useful): M-m calls "back-to-indentation', i.e. it moves the point at the first non-whitespace character of the line ! Another cool trick is that you can easily change how the M-a and M-e (beginning and end of sentence) bindings work, by tweaking some variables that you can find in the documentation of the function "sentence-end". For example, it assumes that sentence are typically ended with a dot and two spaces, which is the American convention - in France, we tend to use a single space after the period, but by changing one variable (setq sentence-end-double-space nil) I can tell Emacs that this is how I want it to understand what a sentence is !
Another thing I didn't notice was mentioned is moving by s-exp: C-M-f - move forward by s-exp C-M-b - move backward by s-exp It's especially useful for moving around the code where there are brackets, parentheses etc. Although not elegant I also find myself using numeric argument followed by C-n or C-p - this is often better than centering the pointer; especially that numeric argument done with C-9 is quite easy for fingers to complete it with C-n or C-p. Not very slick, but sometimes does the job. I know It's the matter of personal preferences and years of customization and so on but... It's probably C-s and C-r (searching for text) which calls for mastering and is used by most skilled Emacs users who teached the eye to find unique word in particular place of interest to be navigated to. Sometimes you would think that you cannot beat a person using a mouse but think about the times where you don't exactly remember the spot that particular word is in - this is the appliance I'm thinking shows the efficiency of this method the most.
Yep, the sexp movements are useful when editing Emacs Lisp but I avoided those for now since this video is more beginner-focused and I don't want to talk about Emacs Lisp too much just yet. I also haven't mentioned numeric arguments yet, but I probably should before long! Yep, I agree that C-s can be a very useful tool not just for searching but primarily for navigating to the thing you currently see on the screen. Hopefully I explained it well enough to make it clear that this is the important reason to use it!
Hi David! Some useful keybindings I didn't know about, thx! For the mouse die-hards here I usually define this mouse+key combo for scrolling the document: (bind-key [S-down-mouse-1] #'mouse-drag-drag) , You can drag your document up/down/right/left with shift + mouse-button1 click and move. Hope is useful for someone.
@@SystemCrafters thx! I also used to define Control+mousewheel-up/down to increase/decrease font size...but it seems emas 27 does it...at least for me, I've removed those mouse+keybindings from my config and they still work :)
C-s will search and find, however if you do NOT hit RET but then instead press cancel (C-g) it will send you right back where you started your search. Very useful when just checking something.
Thank you David - used vanilla emacs Keys for long time, and still managed to get few i never knew existed because i bound them to something else long time ago :)
I've never tried xah-fly-keys, but I did use ErgoEmacs many years ago (which I think Xah also created, if not mistaken). I'll have to cover some of these alternate key layouts in the future!
I migrated to Emacs from Vim, and only after that the absence of hjkl showed me how much I got used to them and the other vim bindings :) So after not very long, I became a happy Evil user, just as the overwhelming majority of émigrés, according to the latest Emacs survey
@@SystemCrafters It's too bad emacs wasn't designed from the ground up with vim-style modal editing and vim or vim-like keybindings. If that had been the case, there would be no need for vim and everyone would use emacs. Evil is a nice way to have one foot on either side of the fence, but it's not without problems.
I like to set some of the default-unbound Function-keys to open files I acces the most. F7 maps to open an org file full of my web bookmarks for example. I started computing with MS-DOS and remember when software often came with overlays for the F-keys which matched their meaning within the program, which was actually pretty user-friendly without needing to memorize keychords or function names.
I remember those little plastic cards you can place around your function keys to remember what they do for a given program :) This is a great approach, I actually never use the F keys for bindings but maybe I should!
@@SystemCrafters F5 pulls up my emacs dotfile, F3 opens the buffer-menu. The main thing is to [C-h k F3] etc first to make sure it's not already bound to something else, or to check that your window manager doesn't trap it. It can also get trickier if you sometimes use emacs in a terminal: whether the key or chord makes its way down into Emacs can get confusing.
Nice refresher and learned about C-M-l and am now questioning why I use avy goto rather than C-s. Avy can jump to another visible buffer, but I end up wasting time deciding if I want to search for something on the screen or not on the screen. I like the idea of muscle memory hitting C-s while I decide.
I use avy, but not as reflexively as I should. The one thing I don't like about C-s is that you have to press RET to finish jumping to the next location, avy makes that experience a little bit smoother. Trying to use C-s as a default behavior isn't bad though!
Hmm... weird, the "M f" keybinding to move forward one word, is not working out of the box 🤔 Going back one word with "M b" and even selecting one word forward with "M-S f" is working though. What might be causing this inactivity? 🤷♂
How do you configure Emacs so that emphasis markers are automatically unhidden once you move point into a marked-up section? Like jumping onto "paragraph-start" instantly unhides the verbatim markers and shows "=paragraph-start="?
8:35 maybe this is just worded wrong but shouldn't left-char/right-char *ignore* right-to-left text because left and right are still left and right? forward-char and backward-char are the ones that should respect text direction.
Hey David, what is the keycasting package that you are using in the video? Can you provide a link? Also in regards to scrolling do you think the name has something to with the old days when computers used paper for memory, such as punch cards? Old typewriters used to have a scroll wheel(A least I think it was called a scroll wheel) on the side. When you would scroll up it would cause the paper to move up thus bringing you closer to the bottom/end of the paper.
Hey David! It's called Keycast: github.com/tarsius/Keycast. You could be right! The terminology in Emacs is so old that it must be influenced by the technology and concepts of the time
@@peterkois4858 Check out the "use-package keycast" part in this section of my personal config, it should work with both: config.daviwil.com/emacs#streaming
Thank you for making this video! I love your Emacs videos, but I was always a bit bummed you jumped right into using Evil from nearly the very beginning. I get that there are a lot of Vim converts, and Evil is a quality package, but I find that it’s good to learn a new system’s intended workflow before you try to coerce it into one of your own :-) But still, hacking the editor is what Emacs is all about!
Yep, I was basically just showing how to replicate my own configuration in the early Emacs From Scratch videos so it was Evil-focused. My goal with the Emacs Essentials series is to make up for that by covering only things that are built in to Emacs!
Couldn't disagree more. They aren't "the vim key bindings", they are used throughout a lot of applications, like less/more, screen, hell even the Gmail webpage uses j/k for scrolling up and down through emails (presented as lines) and x for deleting etc etc. And many of the commands get used in other places, e.g. like ^, $, / in regex. Familiarity with these bindings is universally helpful. I don't really see Emacs as having "editing key bindings" that are at all fundamental, Emacs has /modes/, all with their own bindings and that's fundamental to how Emacs works. I think the Evil bindings fit perfectly into the ethos of Emacs.
@@fennecbesixdouze1794 Other applications use vim bindings because the vim key bindings are pretty good and designed for humans to get work done without leaving home row. If I had a finger in the middle of my palm that could press the alt key, I might be more open to the default emacs bindings. They are just so awful!
Thanks! This is actually an Org Mode file displayed in Emacs with the org-present package (and some tweaks of my own): config.daviwil.com/emacs#org-present
I'm stuck in this awkward spot where I'm not a vimmer, so I have quite a bit of difficulty getting used to modal editing and the hjkl workflow, but at the same time I also struggle to be efficient using the native Emacs navigation keys (which can be a little bizarre). I'm decent at elisp, am familiar with a lot of the core concept of Emacs and even have quite the elaborate configuration that I created myself, but for some bizarre reason I keep on struggling with basic navigation in Emacs, and it's one of the primary reasons why I can't get used to Emacs as my daily driver. It's quite frustrating, and I'm not sure how to improve my skills.
I try to remember the menmonics, and typing them are like typing text, so there are no problem finding the keys. And touch typing are a skill you need to have. At least a decent one. And a tip, learn how to remove a word, as that is often faster to retype a word then to back to right place and to retype the whole word. Unless you type in German and Swedish, with loong words. :-)
First learn basic, then learn colemak keyboard with hax-fly-keys.. This is my setup, it is hard but worth it every penny on long term, if you code like me all day long dont stick to qwerty keyboard, it is not natural, dvorak or colemak(easier to switch from qwerty)
I done do the same think but with dvorak, because orther than english I’m typing chinese and japanese too. At the time I search for alternative keyboard layout to reduce my pinky pain, that’s what I found, all the people I saw said the colemak only for english then I found xah-fly-key and his website.
Those keybindings are all so awful, to be frank. There's a reason people force emacs to use vim keybindings. EVERY keystroke that requires the meta key requires removing my hands from home row, and probably searching around as well and possibly hitting the windows key by mistake--both alt keys are directly under a palm. Don't get me started on chords that require meta, control, shift, and one or two other letters!
Even when I wasn't using Emacs much, Ctrl + A and Ctrl + E helped so much at the shell prompt.
Yep, and I forgot to mention that these bindings can also be used in Bash!
I use C-r all the time to search the command history in the shell.
@@mbarton98 and C-s to go back...
I used the standard keys for editing text since the old days. Ctrl and arrow keys. Home, page up/down, End and some shortcuts.
@@friedrichmyers i guess it depends on what you mean by old days then. i consider all those keys you mentioned except for ctrl to be more of modern inventions/standards
Disclaimer: I have not seen the entire video yet, but it seems like this binding is not very well known so I might as well give it there (although to be fair, it is usually not the most useful): M-m calls "back-to-indentation', i.e. it moves the point at the first non-whitespace character of the line !
Another cool trick is that you can easily change how the M-a and M-e (beginning and end of sentence) bindings work, by tweaking some variables that you can find in the documentation of the function "sentence-end". For example, it assumes that sentence are typically ended with a dot and two spaces, which is the American convention - in France, we tend to use a single space after the period, but by changing one variable (setq sentence-end-double-space nil) I can tell Emacs that this is how I want it to understand what a sentence is !
Thanks for telling me about M-m! I was actually wondering about this when I recorded the video, glad to know there is a binding for it :)
Another thing I didn't notice was mentioned is moving by s-exp:
C-M-f - move forward by s-exp
C-M-b - move backward by s-exp
It's especially useful for moving around the code where there are brackets, parentheses etc.
Although not elegant I also find myself using numeric argument followed by C-n or C-p - this is often better than centering the pointer; especially that numeric argument done with C-9 is quite easy for fingers to complete it with C-n or C-p. Not very slick, but sometimes does the job.
I know It's the matter of personal preferences and years of customization and so on but... It's probably C-s and C-r (searching for text) which calls for mastering and is used by most skilled Emacs users who teached the eye to find unique word in particular place of interest to be navigated to. Sometimes you would think that you cannot beat a person using a mouse but think about the times where you don't exactly remember the spot that particular word is in - this is the appliance I'm thinking shows the efficiency of this method the most.
Yep, the sexp movements are useful when editing Emacs Lisp but I avoided those for now since this video is more beginner-focused and I don't want to talk about Emacs Lisp too much just yet. I also haven't mentioned numeric arguments yet, but I probably should before long!
Yep, I agree that C-s can be a very useful tool not just for searching but primarily for navigating to the thing you currently see on the screen. Hopefully I explained it well enough to make it clear that this is the important reason to use it!
This is amazing man!! great quality screencast and content as well. Im definitely going to hang out a lot around here
Hi David! Some useful keybindings I didn't know about, thx!
For the mouse die-hards here I usually define this mouse+key combo for scrolling the document: (bind-key [S-down-mouse-1] #'mouse-drag-drag) , You can drag your document up/down/right/left with shift + mouse-button1 click and move.
Hope is useful for someone.
That's great, thanks a lot for sharing it!
@@SystemCrafters thx!
I also used to define Control+mousewheel-up/down to increase/decrease font size...but it seems emas 27 does it...at least for me, I've removed those mouse+keybindings from my config and they still work :)
C-s will search and find, however if you do NOT hit RET but then instead press cancel (C-g) it will send you right back where you started your search. Very useful when just checking something.
Argh, I forgot to mention that, thanks for bringing it up!
Thank you David - used vanilla emacs Keys for long time, and still managed to get few i never knew existed because i bound them to something else long time ago :)
lol, yeah, I have trashed the default bindings with my own so I always have to go look up the default bindings in the manual :)
Always nice to refine movement skills in applications.
It's definitely a quick win to make switching to Emacs more worthwhile!
@@SystemCrafters True, your channel has really helped make Emacs worthwhile. It's such a nice editor.
@@appenzell958 So glad to hear that! Emacs is a lot of fun :)
This is absolutely critical to master
You'll be zoomin' around like a ninja
@@SystemCrafters I'm gonna put a throwing star into my IDE
I am currently learning the modal system xah-fly-keys. Really liking it coming from vim! It has awesome support for different keyboard layouts.
I've never tried xah-fly-keys, but I did use ErgoEmacs many years ago (which I think Xah also created, if not mistaken). I'll have to cover some of these alternate key layouts in the future!
me too :-)
What do you think of it now are you still using it
Your videos are the best.
Thanks a lot!
I migrated to Emacs from Vim, and only after that the absence of hjkl showed me how much I got used to them and the other vim bindings :) So after not very long, I became a happy Evil user, just as the overwhelming majority of émigrés, according to the latest Emacs survey
Yep, I'm also an Evil user! I had to review the Emacs documentation to learn about a few of the things I mentioned here :)
@@SystemCrafters It's too bad emacs wasn't designed from the ground up with vim-style modal editing and vim or vim-like keybindings. If that had been the case, there would be no need for vim and everyone would use emacs. Evil is a nice way to have one foot on either side of the fence, but it's not without problems.
I like to set some of the default-unbound Function-keys to open files I acces the most. F7 maps to open an org file full of my web bookmarks for example. I started computing with MS-DOS and remember when software often came with overlays for the F-keys which matched their meaning within the program, which was actually pretty user-friendly without needing to memorize keychords or function names.
I remember those little plastic cards you can place around your function keys to remember what they do for a given program :) This is a great approach, I actually never use the F keys for bindings but maybe I should!
@@SystemCrafters F5 pulls up my emacs dotfile, F3 opens the buffer-menu. The main thing is to [C-h k F3] etc first to make sure it's not already bound to something else, or to check that your window manager doesn't trap it. It can also get trickier if you sometimes use emacs in a terminal: whether the key or chord makes its way down into Emacs can get confusing.
@@SystemCrafters I have C-F5 - F9 set to visual aids.
(global-set-key (kbd "C-") 'display-line-numbers-mode)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-") 'whitespace-mode)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-") 'highlight-indent-guides-mode)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-") 'hl-line-mode)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-") 'visual-line-mode)
How do you hide the org-mode markdown syntax until your point is inside a marked-down region? e.g. at 10:45
This is the org-appear package, it only works for Org Mode files: github.com/awth13/org-appear
@@SystemCrafters Awesome, thanks!
Great series! What package are you using for the presentation?
Thanks! It's Org Present with my own customizations. Check out my video "The Secrets of My Presentation Style" for the full setup
It's so cool! Continue to make Emacs videos!)
Will do!
Nice refresher and learned about C-M-l and am now questioning why I use avy goto rather than C-s. Avy can jump to another visible buffer, but I end up wasting time deciding if I want to search for something on the screen or not on the screen. I like the idea of muscle memory hitting C-s while I decide.
I use avy, but not as reflexively as I should. The one thing I don't like about C-s is that you have to press RET to finish jumping to the next location, avy makes that experience a little bit smoother. Trying to use C-s as a default behavior isn't bad though!
Hmm... weird, the "M f" keybinding to move forward one word, is not working out of the box 🤔
Going back one word with "M b" and even selecting one word forward with "M-S f" is working though.
What might be causing this inactivity? 🤷♂
....Figured it out why M-f was not working. There was a conflict between Emacs and other program running in the background.
I don't see in much tutorials and blog posts that C-m also does same thing as RET(Enter key). Which is easier than enter key in my opinion.
How do you configure Emacs so that emphasis markers are automatically unhidden once you move point into a marked-up section? Like jumping onto "paragraph-start" instantly unhides the verbatim markers and shows "=paragraph-start="?
8:35 maybe this is just worded wrong but shouldn't left-char/right-char *ignore* right-to-left text because left and right are still left and right? forward-char and backward-char are the ones that should respect text direction.
Hey David, what is the keycasting package that you are using in the video? Can you provide a link?
Also in regards to scrolling do you think the name has something to with the old days when computers used paper for memory, such as punch cards? Old typewriters used to have a scroll wheel(A least I think it was called a scroll wheel) on the side. When you would scroll up it would cause the paper to move up thus bringing you closer to the bottom/end of the paper.
Hey David! It's called Keycast: github.com/tarsius/Keycast.
You could be right! The terminology in Emacs is so old that it must be influenced by the technology and concepts of the time
@@SystemCrafters Could you in your show notes write keycast config for emacs from scrstch and doom also?
@@peterkois4858 Check out the "use-package keycast" part in this section of my personal config, it should work with both: config.daviwil.com/emacs#streaming
Thank you for making this video!
I love your Emacs videos, but I was always a bit bummed you jumped right into using Evil from nearly the very beginning.
I get that there are a lot of Vim converts, and Evil is a quality package, but I find that it’s good to learn a new system’s intended workflow before you try to coerce it into one of your own :-)
But still, hacking the editor is what Emacs is all about!
Yep, I was basically just showing how to replicate my own configuration in the early Emacs From Scratch videos so it was Evil-focused. My goal with the Emacs Essentials series is to make up for that by covering only things that are built in to Emacs!
@@SystemCrafters very cool! I completely understand. Thank you for helping people like me nerd out on a text editor!
We're all nerding out together here :)
Couldn't disagree more. They aren't "the vim key bindings", they are used throughout a lot of applications, like less/more, screen, hell even the Gmail webpage uses j/k for scrolling up and down through emails (presented as lines) and x for deleting etc etc. And many of the commands get used in other places, e.g. like ^, $, / in regex. Familiarity with these bindings is universally helpful.
I don't really see Emacs as having "editing key bindings" that are at all fundamental, Emacs has /modes/, all with their own bindings and that's fundamental to how Emacs works. I think the Evil bindings fit perfectly into the ethos of Emacs.
@@fennecbesixdouze1794 Other applications use vim bindings because the vim key bindings are pretty good and designed for humans to get work done without leaving home row. If I had a finger in the middle of my palm that could press the alt key, I might be more open to the default emacs bindings. They are just so awful!
Hi, great video, This apresentation, what softare is using?
Thanks! This is actually an Org Mode file displayed in Emacs with the org-present package (and some tweaks of my own): config.daviwil.com/emacs#org-present
@@SystemCrafters the first time feeling of realizing how much of an operating system and IDE Emacs is: 🤯😆
I'm stuck in this awkward spot where I'm not a vimmer, so I have quite a bit of difficulty getting used to modal editing and the hjkl workflow, but at the same time I also struggle to be efficient using the native Emacs navigation keys (which can be a little bizarre). I'm decent at elisp, am familiar with a lot of the core concept of Emacs and even have quite the elaborate configuration that I created myself, but for some bizarre reason I keep on struggling with basic navigation in Emacs, and it's one of the primary reasons why I can't get used to Emacs as my daily driver. It's quite frustrating, and I'm not sure how to improve my skills.
I try to remember the menmonics, and typing them are like typing text, so there are no problem finding the keys.
And touch typing are a skill you need to have. At least a decent one.
And a tip, learn how to remove a word, as that is often faster to retype a word then to back to right place and to retype the whole word. Unless you type in German and Swedish, with loong words. :-)
The content you came for starts at 2:30
👍
First learn basic, then learn colemak keyboard with hax-fly-keys.. This is my setup, it is hard but worth it every penny on long term, if you code like me all day long dont stick to qwerty keyboard, it is not natural, dvorak or colemak(easier to switch from qwerty)
I done do the same think but with dvorak, because orther than english I’m typing chinese and japanese too. At the time I search for alternative keyboard layout to reduce my pinky pain, that’s what I found, all the people I saw said the colemak only for english then I found xah-fly-key and his website.
@@subarutendou nice dude, you are like my brother :-)))
Those keybindings are all so awful, to be frank. There's a reason people force emacs to use vim keybindings. EVERY keystroke that requires the meta key requires removing my hands from home row, and probably searching around as well and possibly hitting the windows key by mistake--both alt keys are directly under a palm. Don't get me started on chords that require meta, control, shift, and one or two other letters!
C-M-l logs me out of Plasma :(
I just experienced the same thing xD
My mnemonic for ‘a’ = stArt... :-)
That is much better!
a=anfang, e=ende… Germans have it easy.
Why is Gavin Belson teaching me emacs?💀