To use it, open Files on GNOME and click Other Locations in the left-hand panel. I don't use Emacs for literally everything, so I really appreciate GNOME's Other Locations feature. If your editor doesn't have a remote-editing feature, your desktop might. It's a subtle and nearly transparent way to edit files without leaving Emacs or your favorite computer. C-x C-f terms of your experience, there's almost no separation between the local host and the remote host. The tramp command within Emacs enables you to edit a file on a remote system. The features don't add anything to your life if you ignore them, so make them work for you. Find the small integrations offered by your editor and put them to good use. No matter what editor you're using, find that shortcut. My hands never left my keyboard, I discovered new keyboard shortcuts (it turns out that just + to add a directory is a lot quicker and easier to remember than dired-directory-create), and my workflow was permanently simplified. The muscle memory to Alt+Tab out my desktop was strong, but eventually, the workload involved in leaving Emacs became too costly, and I found myself defaulting to dired. It took me years to realize that Emacs has a file manager built into it. There are features and extensions for Vim, Atom, VS Code, Kate, and many others that make the editor fit neatly into the rest of your system. Many editors have integration features similar to Emacs. Indeed, there's rarely a reason for me to leave Emacs when I need to run a quick command on localhost, or even take a quick glance at an email or PDF. There's very little separation between Emacs and everything else I do. On Emacs, I can open an elisp shell with M-x shell or any terminal with M-x term, I can split screens with M-x 2 and M-x 3, I see everything in its Git context, I can interact with my filesystem with dired, and so on. I want my editor to be fully aware that it's running on Linux I want it to take me $HOME rather than to whatever it thinks is equivalent to My Documents I want it to know that I'm in a Git repository and what branch I've checked out I want it to not only invoke shell commands but the whole shell itself. IntegrationĪ good text editor, in my opinion, ought to feel less like an application and more like a part of your operating system. When using a simple editor, I tend to manage my config files so that I can optimize the way I work and replicate that experience in that editor regardless of what machine I'm using. But most great editors have rich configuration options, and config hacks are essentially what most plugins start out as. Heck, neither Emacs nor Vim had packages when they were starting out, either. Some editors don't have plugins, and that can be considered a feature. Install plugins there, and they're easy to find, maintain, and use. There's a dedicated interface for package browsing and maintenance.Īs of version 8, Vim has an official plugin structure based around the ~/.vim/pack/vendor/start directory. Text editors like Atom and VS Code integrate package management in a similar way as Emacs does. However, for a text editor you use for hours at a time, plugins add important customizations and optimizations. Sometimes the only feature you want in a text editor is simplicity. Not all text editors have plugins, and not all of them need plugins. However, development tends to be pretty fast-paced these days, and so Emacs also has a package command that lets you browse, install, and update plugins from within Emacs. In simpler times, you could download an elisp file (or copy and paste it from the internet) and stash it away in your. Plugins and package managementĮmacs has lots of plugins, and it's hard to imagine using a text editor that doesn't have user-contributed extensions. Here are five great text editor features I learned from Emacs and strive to implement, one way or another, in any text editor I use. That's one reason I use open source! Emacs has a few key features that I consider essential, not necessarily in implementation but in concept. That's how text editors get you, though: You develop a subtle familiarity with an editor such that the "work" of translating thought-whether it's a network design idea, a specific configuration, or a Bash script-into text feels so natural that sometimes you have to type your thoughts just to make sense of them.Īt some point, I accepted that I was an Emacs user, but I like a diverse toolset I like alternatives and options.
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