Emacs Power: Can your editor do THIS!

Emacs with orgtbl mode used to create a HTML table.

Creating HTML tables by hand can be painful, however thanks to orgtbl mode (which comes with org mode) Emacs users can edit tables in friendly way and later "send" (as org mode calls it) the data into a HTML source code. Inserting new columns and rearranging them is a single key binding!

What makes org (and orgtbl) mode even more powerful is the spreadsheet capabilities. You can define formula which will be used to calculate values of given cell or a group of cells (ie. a column). And because the underlying evaluation mechanism is Emacs' calc mode you can calculate almost anything! That includes integrals, differentials and Taylor's functions!

What else has been shown on the video is the spell checker and auto completion.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• emacs
• org
• mode
• linux
• editors

[dragonexblaster]

No - my editor can't do that, but it can edit and i need only one hand to do anything in it.

[mina86ng]

@dragonexblaster, sorry, but why would you type with one hand? I cannot see benefits of that.

[davidrhoskin]

If you leave the source table there, won't all the extra dashes break the SGML comment?

[mina86ng]

@davidrhoskin Yes, it is a valid concern, I haven't thought about it. In practice though, I'm yet to find a web-browser that would have troubles with multiple minus signs inside the comment.

[mina86ng]

@AtheismandSkepticism I'd say 134 hours is rather small estimate for learning all the features of Emacs. Nonetheless, one learns such things in the course of just using Emacs (I found built-in tutorial enough to get me started with just editing) and once you know certain tricks you can do things that would otherwise take you "0.5 hour" in an instant. What you're missing is that the "134 hours" are not spent learning the one trick but rather gazillion different trictks.

[thekilon]

@dragonexblaster note that emacs is perfectly capable of being used with one hand and zero shortcuts. The main problem here is that your editor is limited so it does not need the complex shortcut system of emacs. The way emacs works like this is because if it has chosen to go menu dive approach the user would be buried in a mountain of menus as emacs has tons of functionality that goes far beyond any editor or IDE out there. So what feels weird in the start makes perfect sense later. 

[rkr1410]

@mina86ng Unless you only have one hand.

[JohannLau]

@mina86ng so you can masturbate to the awesome code you're writing *while* writing it, isn't that obvious? endorphines increase productivity by up to 327%, which more than makes up for the loss of 50% of the digits used for typing.

now that you do know the benefits, use them wisely.

[estiedesacrament]

yes it can, and way more. your editor is old generation already

[PompaTG]

@mina86ng One handed typing is surfing for porn, no? ^_^

[TargenTheNerd]

Neat. How many hands did you need to do that?:wq

[wisteela]

Very impressive

[ArneBab]

I love doing things in emacs, because at the end almost all things I create with it are plain text, so if ever I cannot use emacs, I can still read the files with any other program - including cat, if need be. And then get back all the power when I have emacs again - and keep the changes I did with the simpler programs.

That’s something I cannot do with most of the graphical stuff. And if you ever had to program over an SSH connection you really value that emacs works in the terminal, too.