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by eddieroger 3129 days ago
> pleasant to use.

That is a matter of opinion, which is what the OP before you was trying to point out. I know emacs, and use it as well when I'm in a shell environment, but I prefer to use Atom in a desktop environment where I may be copying and pasting from other apps. Pleasant is an opinion, which negates right and wrong.
2 comments
uiuiuxuxux 3129 days ago
A lot of people do not realize that they can use emacs on a terminal but also as a gui app. Also copying and pasting from other apps is possible and normal in emacs. For non ide languages i think emacs and vim are head and shoulders above any other editor, atom is really bad compared to emacs for example. The problem is that most people don't know how to use them.
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rpdillon 3129 days ago
> where I may be copying and pasting from other apps

Is Atom better with copying and pasting certain kinds of content than Emacs?

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gknoy 3129 days ago
It depends on your Atom config and your Emacs config, I imagine.

When I paste things into Atom or Jetbrains' Webstorm, my javascript usually gets auto-indented to The Right Place. Atom even did that when I _reordered_ lines, which was especially neat as I hadn't had Webstorm do it. This isn't something that my Emacs will do. I'd be _very_ surprised if there weren't some module, script, or Emacs configuration that I could use (or write) to get this same behavior. After all, Emacs' "Tab to The Right Indentation" was something that blew my mind years ago.

(Disclaimer: I have used Atom, but prefer Webstorm. I use Emacs, but only for Git things and the occasional quick edit.)

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tekacs 3129 days ago
Not that you should have to know this, but for completeness' sake:

Out of the box in Emacs (with no config or extensions) you can simply select the pasted region and hit Tab to reindent the whole area correctly (what you called 'Tab to the Right Indentation').

So in total:

* C-SPC (Mark)

* C-y (yank/paste)

* C-x C-x (select to mark, essentially)

* Tab (indent)

(https://xkcd.com/378/)

Does what you'd like. This is all compositional, no magic here (and of course you can bind this all to one key press). Naturally lots of people make this auto-indent by default.

For me the most essential thing to know about those auto-indent modes is how to temporarily turn them off (like `:set paste` in Vim), since I so often need to bypass that behaviour for one reason or another (e.g. when resolving Git merges - trying to keep the original formatting).

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