Emacs, Anyone? (Solved)

[Blackfish]

I am wondering if there is anyone using Emacs with their Puppy or Quirky. I cannot find one to install for Quirky. I did install a couple of different Emacs with Precise, but they did not work. If there is anyone using Emacs with a Puppy or Quirky, please let me know which Pup and which Emacs are working well together. I have never before tried Emacs and I want to give it a go.

[6502coder]

If you mean GNU-Emacs, that absurdly bloated whale, then I can't help you. I recommend instead MicroEmacs. See my post here:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 246#687246

[tallboy]

I have used emacs for 15 years, it is still my favorite program for handling any codework, and there are thousands of add-ons and extensions that makes it do almost anything. But, it does have a steepish learning curve, and there is an awful lot of commands to remember. But, it will definitely make you very pleased to master!
I have only used it with RedHat at the uni, and with Debian at home. Because of the many possibilities you have with emacs, I personally think it belongs in a larger distribution than any Puppy, it is probably most at home in Debian. Once you feel comfortable with emacs, you probably want to explore the typesetting language LaTex, which lets you make beautyful documents and reports or books or..., all with a correct layout ready for professional printing, and then you will probably download the 4Gb TexLive DVD, and suddenly a Puppy feel very small...

Another problem with emacs in Puppy is BusyBox, which has a limited set of commands compared to the full core- and Linux utility packs, and I think you need the full setup for using emacs.

I absolutely love my LupuPlus, but for emacs? I think nooo....
For an emacs test, I suggest you download and burn a live Antix15, which is a live Debian-based distro, at ~700Mb, it just fill up a CD. I think emacs is included, if not, it is easily downloaded. I have no problems suggesting another distro, because I know you'll always come back when you miss the puppy's size, speed and versatility...

tallboy

[6502coder]

I agree GNU Emacs is way too heavy for most Puppies. On the other hand, the MicroEmacs executable I mentioned above is only 150KB. It has run happily for me on Puppy 4.1.2, Wary 5.x, Precise Puppy 5.4, and Slacko 5.6, to name just a few. Linus Torvalds uses a very similar version of MicroEmacs as his main coding editor.

If you want an editor that edits but also answers your phone, files your tax return, and makes coffee, by all means have at GNU Emacs. If you just want to edit code, I strongly urge you to give MicroEmacs a try.

[Blackfish]

Thanks for the response, everyone! Perhaps you are right and Emacs is a little much for Puppy, Quirky, and for what I want to do. I have been using Geany as my text editor ever since I came over to Linux about a year-and-a-half ago. I am happy with Geany, but I am expanding from doing a little HTML, to learning also CSS, PHP, and now some Javascript, too. I saw Notebook++ and it works and looks great, but it is available only for Windows. And nobody, I mean, nobody uses Windows!

Maybe I do need to move on over to a more mature and heavier-duty Linux distro in order to expand. But which one? That is the eternal question! It's a fun thought. I do love to play around with Linux distros! And now I need one that has full capabilities, full BASH, yet is still light and rock solid. Shouldn't be too hard to find.

[tallboy]

I will of course recommend Debian, it has it all! 43000 program packages on 3 DVDs containing some 12Gb of Linux goodies.

But I won't.

Or, maybe...

One of the problems is the massive number of programs. A program in this context may be anything from a simple command to an office suite. You'll need days to scim through the simple descriptions, years to get a full understanding of what all those programs actually do! But if you start with the basic version, recommended by the Debian gang, you can of course add to it as you recognize the need to widen your repertoire.
Another possibility is Mint, which is Debian based and have the same access to all the programs, and which provides a very mature setup, ready to meet most tasks. I have it on one HDD myself, and I believe the Mint community is growing very fast.
But I never use my Mint! I think it is an excellent OS for new Linux users coming from windoze, before they discover mama Debian, or take a Puppy for a walk! My LupuPlus is the one I use for all daily tasks, the Debian is only used for heavier work when I need more resources at hand, and the frequency for firing up Debian is rapidly descending!
Play around, have some fun, most distros have a live version that will give you an idea about their direction compared to all the others.

tallboy

[Blackfish]

I will of course recommend Debian, it has it all! 43000 program packages on 3 DVDs containing some 12Gb of Linux goodies.

But I won't.

Or, maybe...

One of the problems is the massive number of programs. A program in this context may be anything from a simple command to an office suite. You'll need days to scim through the simple descriptions, years to get a full understanding of what all those programs actually do! But if you start with the basic version, recommended by the Debian gang, you can of course add to it as you recognize the need to widen your repertoire.
Another possibility is Mint, which is Debian based and have the same access to all the programs, and which provides a very mature setup, ready to meet most tasks. I have it on one HDD myself, and I believe the Mint community is growing very fast.
But I never use my Mint! I think it is an excellent OS for new Linux users coming from windoze, before they discover mama Debian, or take a Puppy for a walk! My LupuPlus is the one I use for all daily tasks, the Debian is only used for heavier work when I need more resources at hand, and the frequency for firing up Debian is rapidly descending!
Play around, have some fun, most distros have a live version that will give you an idea about their direction compared to all the others.

tallboy

I burned Debian 8 GNOME Live and booted. This was the first time I had ever seen it. Debian runs great on this machine. I loved it. I am going to keep trying it. But with it I am now back to that business of not being able to work on my own files! When I booted the live CD, I went to my files to start work and Debian won't let me modify my own files. It is my understanding there is some password procedure one must learn with Debian in order to get to personal files. I do not know how all this works, but once I get past all of this password nonsense Debian will be just fine.

[tallboy]

Try the command su, and log in as root in Debian to access your puppy files. To be sure what you do, run su --help or man su in a terminal window, the manual pages are also available from a browser.

tallboy

[Blackfish]

All done with my Debian experiment. Cannot say I liked it much. To big of an operating system, bloated, slow, and there is all that password nonsense again! Ugh! Stoooooooopid! And it gets worse! I save all my master files on another partition, and so even when I do get in with the "su" command on the operating system's partition, I now need another piece of software from the freakin' repository that will allow me access to the files on the other partition. You need password to do this and passwords to do that. Ugh! Barf! Puke!

Then I thought I could solve my problem with Tahr Pup because it is the Puppy with the most goodies. I installed Tahr Pup and loaded all the plugins for the Geany program in order to beef up my writing and programming sessions (I got emacs, too!). But as soon as I install all the plugins and command the program to boot this and that plugin on startup, with every reboot the plugins have to be restarted. The weakling cannot even save my strftime configuration! I have to reset that every session, too! Yikes!

I love minimalist distros. It would be nice to have one that actually works and one that does not require entering a password fifty times per session. Now, I understand why Torvalds pulled the plug on openSUSE! Password/security overkill! Too much! Nuts!

[Blackfish]

I stand corrected. I do not need a more robust operating system to get everything I need for my projects. Puppy and Quirky can do it all for me. It took a long while to configure it all, but I got the job done. Hooray!

[Colonel Panic]

I used Emacs once but switched to Vim (Vi Improved) instead, so just a few words about Vim if I may.

Once you're used to Vim it's a fantastic text editor. The trouble is that it has a very steep learning curve, especially the version you run straight from the console which gives you a bare black screen when you load it up and nothing else.

I'd still recommend it though; for people who are willing to stick with it, its power and ease of use are unlike anything I've seen anywhere else.

For example, ]s gives you the spell checker, which automatically moves to the first word it doesn't recognise; then z= gives you a list of recommended words, each of which is preceded by a number which you type in if you want to substitute that word for the one the cursor is on.

[6502coder]

@Colonel Panic

I have no desire to add to the endless and pointless "vi/vim vs emacs" war, but since you specifically cite use of the spell checker with vim, I think it is fair to point out that handling formatted text is actually not a strong point of vim.

"The Vim editor is not a word processor. In a word processor, if you delete
something at the beginning of the paragraph, the line breaks are reworked. In
Vim they are not; so if you delete the word "programming" from the first line [of a paragraph], all you get is a short line."
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_25.html

"The Vim editor is not a word processor. Boy is it not a word processor."
http://www.oualline.com/vim/vim-cook.html

Yes, there is a vim command to readjust the line breaks after you have edited a paragraph. Yes, you can work up a macro to invoke this command semi-automatically. But any decent text editor (even Leafpad) does it automatically. Vim is a fine programming editor, but it is not a writer's text editor (and neither is emacs).

Well, at least we agree that LXLE is a nice distro...

[Blackfish]

As far as text editors go, I am still hooked on Geany. I have always liked it and used it ever since coming to Linux. And now that I have installed most of the Plugins--it is literally a whole new program and a whole new programming world for me. I have more than what I need. I hardly know what most of this stuff does. I doubt I will ever use it all. I think it will continue to help me expand my knowledge and training and get all my work done. We'll see.

Meantime the emacs I have downloaded is not going to be a picnic. I can see that already. I am still undecided about it. I will work some with it and see where that takes me.

The problem for me in the recent past, as I have discovered, is the habit I have fallen into of using Quirky for everything. My mistake. Quirky is great, but Quirky is... well... it's quirky. It is limited, it is still being developed, and it is hard to say what might happen next with any given Quirky flavor. The last update was a disaster for my operations and forced me to go back to Tahr Pup in order for me get all my work done. But I like Quirky best, so I will install it to a USB flash drive and keep it working for me and watch it develop. It is no longer my main operating system. It will be again one day soon, I'm sure, when enough bugs have been killed.


.

[Colonel Panic]

@Colonel Panic

I have no desire to add to the endless and pointless "vi/vim vs emacs" war, but since you specifically cite use of the spell checker with vim, I think it is fair to point out that handling formatted text is actually not a strong point of vim.

"The Vim editor is not a word processor. In a word processor, if you delete
something at the beginning of the paragraph, the line breaks are reworked. In
Vim they are not; so if you delete the word "programming" from the first line [of a paragraph], all you get is a short line."
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_25.html

"The Vim editor is not a word processor. Boy is it not a word processor."
http://www.oualline.com/vim/vim-cook.html

Yes, there is a vim command to readjust the line breaks after you have edited a paragraph. Yes, you can work up a macro to invoke this command semi-automatically. But any decent text editor (even Leafpad) does it automatically. Vim is a fine programming editor, but it is not a writer's text editor (and neither is emacs).

Well, at least we agree that LXLE is a nice distro...

I think you make some fair points here but by the same token I don't know of any Linux text editors which would qualify as writer's text editors; almost all of them are programmers' editors.

I've written this in Textpad which is a great Windows text editor and does qualify as a writers' editor IMO; I only wish there was a version available in Linux. It doesn't format text automatically but Ctrl-Shift-J takes care of it just fine.

[6502coder]

I've written this in Textpad which is a great Windows text editor and does qualify as a writers' editor IMO; I only wish there was a version available in Linux. It doesn't format text automatically but Ctrl-Shift-J takes care of it just fine.

I absolutely agree!! I have used TextPad on Windows for many years, and it is my go-to writer's editor on Windows. I second your wish for a Linux version, although I find Leafpad adequate on Puppy, and gedit works for me on LXLE. But I'm not sure why you say TextPad doesn't format text automatically. It has always done so for me, unless I am misunderstanding what you mean.

For my work, I need a paragraph to be one logical line (meaning that \n -- or in Windows \r\n -- marks the end of a paragraph), even though it takes up multiple screen lines. I have a TextPad document class for Text, associated with the .TXT extension, with "Word wrap long lines" and "Save with no breaks in lines" enabled. With those settings everything works just fine: when I edit a paragraph or resize the window, the screen lines are readjusted automatically. If I had to use Edit->Reformat or your keyboard shortcut, it would drive me nuts!

[Colonel Panic]

Thanks. If you want a text editor with a spell checker and basic text formatting capabilities, UltraEdit will do the job, but I can't see what it offers that Textpad doesn't and it's a lot more expensive. The one thing it does have is a Linux version, whereas Textpad is only available in Windows (though it will run in Wine).

There's also Boxer for Windows, which I haven't tried recently and also only comes in a Windows version as far as I know. It does have a spell checker though. Also Cream (available in Linux as well as Windows), which is based on GVim but is customised with a bunch of scripts to make it easier to use.

[Colonel Panic]

Actually I wouldn't advise using Boxer if you want to do any proper writing - the spell checker leaves a lot to be desired. I know because I've just tried it. The ones in Vim and Textpad are much better.

[Blackfish]

Well... curiosity took hold of me once more and I installed emacs24 from the repository. I have been using it for some time now, and, I gotta say... I like it! It's a lot of stuff to learn, but it has been worth it. The editing capabilites are just amazing. Glad to be using this.

I could not get the MicroEmacs to fly. But this emacs24 does not run slowly and has no problems--so far.

[tallboy]

I am glad to hear you jumped into emacs, as you say; it is amazing! I would suggest that you don't load more emacs goodies than you need for a specific task. I mean, if you are going to do some programming in c, only load the add-ons and plugins related to c, nothing else. I know from experience how easy it is to play with all those wonderful new tools that emacs can give you, and soon you end up with a monster emacs that is hard to manage! My advice is to keep it as basic as possible, and learn it well, and it will give you all you need!
BTW, there are also tiny editors for the terminal window which are running emacs commands.

tallboy