The journal I (barely) kept while on my 1 week Emacs challenge

emacs-journal.txt

Mon Aug  4 11:09:40 2014
Finally got YASnippets working, spent the last half an hour I guess.

Moved some of the snippets I have from Vim.  Still not quite sure how it works so
that I just have to press tab after writing the snippets name, without breaking
the tab character which currently outputs 3C3EB0 for some reason...

[Mon Aug  4 14:11:29 2014
Deleted the original character for that "wrong tab" that was appearing.
Emacs rendered it as a square with the following characters in it: "3C3EB0"
It was causing trouble when saving the file so I just removed it.]

And also I made a snippet to insert the current day and time, so that I can skip
that part of the hard work of keeping a journal.

Mon Aug  4 11:44:29 2014
Researching how to make a tab works like a tab that's sane and not some crazy
thing.  Making it work like a tab is easy, making it not break with YASnippet,
that's hard.

Mon Aug  4 12:32:20 2014
Found this: http://www.pement.org/emacs_tabs.htm
In the end it doesn't seem like there's a really good solution.

Mon Aug  4 13:40:18 2014
Thought of an idea to solve the problem with soft and hard tabs and stuff.  I
won't configure any tabs in my config file, instead I would use the EditorConfig
plugin and just have a file for each project.  Which is a good idea to do anyway.

Mon Aug  4 14:01:34 2014
That seems like it would work just fine!  I'm just so great.  :P

Tue Aug  5 11:34:36 2014
I decided to use Evil as little as possible, only use it whenever I feel
desparate for speed.  Because I am not used to normal Emacs language yet I will
be using one ore more cheat sheets, which I should probably do anyway.  This is
being written in normal Emacs BTW.

I am realizing I really need to find some goto-last-line and goto-first-line,
really miss this from Vim, I remember reading a solution somewhere.

Tue Aug  5 12:24:01 2014
Found out about M-< and M-> for go to beginning and end of file.  Forgot about
that.

Tue Aug  5 14:35:16 2014
I found out that M-m goes to the first non-whitespace character in the current
line.  Very useful, gonna use it from now on.

Wed Aug  6 10:08:37 2014
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Forgot to mention that I am working on changing to el-get from using Melpa.
It is quite straightforward once you understand it.

Wed Aug  6 10:31:44 2014
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Finished migrating to el-get.  That was fun.

Wed Aug  6 10:55:12 2014
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Noticed I have been getting more and more comfortable with editing text inside
Emacs, of course not yet as comfortable as Vim, but at least I don't fumble
around too much, anymore.

Wed Aug  6 17:33:07 2014
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Finally figured out how to have a --reverse-video effect on my GUI Emacs, without
having to launch it from the terminal with --reverse-video.

Also just noticed when I ran the indent-region command on a region I selected, in
the echo area a tip appeared telling me I could use C-M-\:

    You can run the command `indent-region' with C-M-\

That's a nice touch, and I can actually learn very quickly with something like
this.

Thu Aug  7 19:30:06 2014
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Paredit is very useful, had a chance to try it yesterday.

Thu Aug  7 20:35:54 2014
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Chat with Raam:

    One thing I am realizing though, now that I am living it and seeing other
    people talk about it, etc., Emacs is for the people that want to customize
    their text editing experience to the limit. While I love customizing my
    environment, I prefer to leave the editor "defaults" alone.  Like on Vim
    there aren't a lot of default keys that I customize, if anything I replace
    them with a better version of themselves, for example.

Fri Aug  8 09:31:52 2014
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Day... 6 or 5... 5. Looking forward to Vim, as I feel like I've got a good grasp
now on what using Emacs is like.

Sat Aug  9 20:21:39 2014
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I've noticed I've just stopped coding since I switched to Emacs.  Not completely
of course, but my personal projects for example, I don't code those anymore.
Just waiting for the week period to end so that I can start coding productively
again...