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by xenodium·9mo ago·view on hn ↗
Welcome to Emacs!

- I write about Emacs things fairly frequently: https://xenodium.com

- I started making Emacs videos recently: https://www.youtube.com/xenodium

- For aggregated Emacs blogs, check out https://planet.emacslife.com

- For aggregated Emacs videos, https://emacs.tv

- The Emacs subreddit can be handy too https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs

- If on the fediverse, follow the #emacs hashtag

- Sacha Chua's Emacs News are great https://sachachua.com/blog/category/emacs-news

With respect to "modern", maybe these two posts could be of interest:

- Visual tweaks: https://xenodium.com/my-emacs-eye-candy

- macOS tricks: https://xenodium.com/awesome-emacs-on-macos

Enjoy the ride!

2 comments
Sort of side question, but why do you set the command key to be Emacs' meta key? I've sort of waffled on that myself -- the plus to doing it is that it matches Windows (which I am in too much of the time) and Linux, but the minus is that it not only breaks 20+ years of muscle memory I have with MacOS, it collides with a few other global hotkeys. (Recent collisions I've noticed are Alfred's clipboard manager, which defaults to Shift-Command-\ (M-|, shell-command-on-region), and the system-level screenshot hotkey on Shift-Command-5 (M-%, query-replace).
For the keys you don’t need to type quickly, M-x can also be typed as ESC x. For any character x.

So it works well with M-|, but not so well with M-f, for example.

Ah yes. I find the ⌘ key placement a little more ergonomic/convenient, but at the end of the day, pick whatever works for ya.

Thinking back, I prolly didn't use those two commands often enough to internalize M-| or M-% bindings, so the system-level handling didn't bother me. While I do replace things all the time, I typically use multiple cursors (I do use bindings for that). If I need querying, I just type `M-x que RET` which gets picked up by a completion frameworks (in my case ivy).

Relatedly, I also use Hammerspoon on macOS and set some global key bindings using the ⌥ key.

As a Mac vim and Obsidian user, I've normally explored Doom when I've dipped my toe in the Emacs waters. Would you recommend starting from a less customised install and build up from there?
I’d say if you feel comfortable with Doom, keep at it. Coming from vim, it may be a smoother transition. You can always reconsider at any time. Doom is Emacs just as vanilla is.