Configuring Emacs is a nightmare
When I started using Emacs a few months ago I went through some effort to configure it to my liking. There were a couple of issues I wasn’t able to resolve back then. I decided that it’s time to get them fixed. That’s how I wasted two days doing something that should take no longer than an hour.
About 90% of my time went to configuring Emacs running under
Tmux. While Emacs runs fine under terminal
emulator (I’m using Konsole for that) it turned out that running it under Tmux
causes numerous problems: some key combinations don’t work and even worse the
colours get screwed up. I am using Tmux always when working in console and at
first I wanted to blame Tmux for all the problems. Soon I realized that all
other applications work correct and only Emacs is causing problems. Problems
with key combinations were solved using
xterm-extras add-on. I am not
exactly sure what is causing issues with colours but this is related to TERM
environment variable. Within Tmux this is set to screen, while my terminal
emulator sets it to xterm. If I understand correctly Tmux takes care of
translating between these two different modes, but it looks that Emacs is still
affected by this difference. Of course I tried changing values of TERM in all
possible ways, but things only got worse. I tried improving Emacs’ colours by
using color-theme but under my terminal
emulator this breaks completely. I enabled 256 colours (by default there’s only
8!), but still I mostly got garbage when applying different themes. Oh well, I
can live with 8 colours just fine. This was day one.
On the next day, when things were more or less working fine, I decided to upgrade Emacs to version 24.2. I was tempted by Emacs’ built in package management system and a promise of better compatibility with terminal emulators. This was a mistake. I spent another day trying to figure out why configuration that worked fine under 23.2 breaks under 24.2.
I acknowledge the fact that if I had arcane knowledge of Elisp all my issues would be much easier to solve. Without that knowledge I have to resort to googling and voodoo programming. Well, I am just an ordinary user who just wants to use a text editor. I need a text-based editor so I can do almost all of my work using console. Emacs meets that requirement, which makes me more productive but I seriously doubt that this increase in productivity justifies time needed to configure editor to my needs. I guess I would be proud of myself had I managed to solve all the problems. I didn’t and there are still unresolved issues:
How can I manage keyboard shortcuts in a sane way? I install some expansion only to realize it is not working because keyboard shortcuts collide with the ones from different expansion. I can remap the keys, but then again I run into risk of colliding with other shortcuts.
Can I have a block mode in Emacs similar to one offered by Kate (under KDE)? I found that rect-mark allows me to mark a rectangle area and cut it, but pasting doesn’t work the way it should.
Emacs’ undo is clumsy. I managed to improve it by using undo-tree, but still it has rough edges: every delete is seen as a single operation. If I hold backspace and delete 30 characters Emacs sees that as 30 separate operations! Undoing that is a real pain.
Solving these issues would make Emacs a very decent editor to work with Haskell (though not as good as Eclipse is for Java). Perhaps one day I’ll find patience and energy to resolve the remaining problems. Until then I steel myself for using Emacs the way it is.