Emacs: I Broke

Pretty much the entire editor and most external packages have info pages. It is easy to search the entire set of info pages on the computer, including those for non-Emacs-related programs. Something that will be relevant later on is that, since Emacs isn’t a purely textual program, different typefaces and text sizes can be used where relevant (e.g. monospaced code snippets and large headings).

Even the terminal info page viewer is at least some minimal version of Emacs, so it’s not surprising they go together nicely. NeoVim has an info-page viewer but it doesn’t seem to be documented yet so I probably won’t use it much.

Emacs has two man-page viewers in the standard distributon, Man and WoMan. There’s not much that can go wrong viewing man pages, but WoMan is notable for being Elisp-native, so it will run in environments without an external man program. It also has the mixed blessing of allowing/forcing the user to interactively select which section to view a page from when multiple with the same name exist.

It is worth noting that the NeoVim man-page viewer has the minor advantage of being able to apply C syntax highlighting to code snippets, although this only seems to work reliably for the standard library.

This one is particularly notable, because most programming is documentation formatted in HTML; specifically, it is usually fairly plain HTML with a simple layout that can often be rendered quite capably by the eww web browser that is in the standard Emacs distribution. They will generally consist of a single column of text, with headings and code snippets, that eww can represent quite well due in part to the aforementioned variable typefaces.

However, it is worth noting that eww is basically unusable for sites with almost any kind of dynamic content or with more than the most trivial of layouts, although eww-readable can be helpful for some pages, such as the Rust documentation, where it will hide the table of contents most of the time.

Emacs has a lot of things that either ’just work’ or can be enabled within the standard distribution, that *Vim could only replicate with external plugins, if at all. These include automatic bracket pair insertion, changing input methods (e.g. to programmer’s dvorak) for text while keeping key bindings the same, and the integration between the editor and the terminal that eshell provides.

As I at least implied in the previous post, this does not mean I am ’switching to Emacs’. The phrase implies (admitting to) a deep, unhealthy obsession and personal identification with the tools one uses for programming. I have simply gotten to the point where Emacs will be a more appropriate tool for the job of programming than *Vim in certain situations.

Possibly due to familiarity, I still find it quicker to navigate to a project directory with cd then start editing a file in *Vim. Its consistent working directory is also handy for projects that use Makefiles, since it is necessary to stay in the root/where the main Makefile is. I have made small ammendments to this page with *Vim because of this.