I have started using Emacs a bit more lately. I spent a bit of time upgrading packages and getting CIDER to work. I would like to share a comment that was left by someone going by “maehwasu” (perhaps a disciple of Deganawida) on Hacker News on August 26, 2015 (or whatever day was 818 days ago from today).
OP is getting hate, but I write a lot of Clojure code in Emacs, and I find the following commands cover 97%+ of my usage, maybe more. For config I use Emacs Live out-of-the-box, and remap Command on OSX to be my Ctrl. That’s it.
C-a, C-e, C-b, C-f, C-p, C-n, C-v, M-v for line/screen maneuvering.
C-o for Ace-jump to go to the start of any words I see on the page.
C-d to delete. C-s to search for words not on the page.
C-k, C-y, and also how to use them with paredit to yank whole s-expression chunks.
Buffer switching and killing.
File saving and opening.
I teach the above to any friends who want to learn Emacs/Clojure/LISP, leaving out a few other features like whole word deletion and more advanced paredit. With halfway decent aptitude and a little practice, they become productive very quickly (within a few hours, which is a pretty good investment relative to “normal” text editors in my book).
Note: I have a post on Emacs buffers here.
You’re welcome.
Image from a 10th century Greek manuscript housed at Fondation Martin Bodmer (Wikipedia page here), image from e-Codices, assumed allowed under Fair Use.