 You guys know I love Emacs. I switched over from Vim to Emacs about two years ago and I use a distribution of Emacs called Doom Emacs Which is just truly fantastic. It uses evil mode by default. Evil mode is basically a Vim emulation So when you're editing documents, you basically have Vim inside Emacs all your Vim commands They just work. You'd never even know you weren't in Vim. It's again truly fantastic But a lot of you guys have watched some of my videos especially on Doom Emacs And you're giving it a try because I hear from you guys and you're not having a good time Or you're unsure how this thing even works. Some of you are unsure why anybody would even use Emacs So like you're just completely confused by the whole thing and I see video content creators out there Trying Emacs for the first time. It's like every week I see another video pop up in my feed. Hey, this guy's trying out Emacs for the first time And I've never watched one of those videos where that content creator had a good time trying out Emacs Because I don't think you know, I'm not one of these people that try to tell people how to use a piece of software I've never been one of those people. I've never told anybody They're using their desktop environment wrong or window manager wrong or terminal emulator text editor or whatever it happens to be I'm not one of those kinds of people. Whatever however you configure your software however your workflow is You know, it's different than mine. That's okay You know, I don't care and you shouldn't care about what other people are doing with their software either But Emacs is a special case because it's so different if you come at this thing the wrong way You're in for a bad time and I see a lot of people making what I call rookie mistakes Where they're just using Emacs quite frankly the wrong way So today I wanted to show you guys some of those rookie mistakes so you don't make them So let me switch over to my desktop here and probably the number one rookie mistake people make is they don't launch Emacs with the Emacs server the Emacs daemon I see way too many new to Emacs users when they first launch Emacs Complain that it's slow and it takes a long time to load and I'm just gonna go back to using VM or whatever They were using before because Emacs is just slow. It's because they run Emacs this way Let me launch d-menu and type the word Emacs And I'm just gonna launch Emacs just the standard way by running the Emacs command and that took 1.72 seconds to load Now do me max is optimized for speed the people that work on do me max They actually put a ton of work into making do me max fast It's actually faster than most of the other distributions of Emacs out there So do me max actually is pretty pippy and that still took almost two seconds to launch again That's because we didn't launch Emacs the proper way. So what is the proper way to launch Emacs? Well, let me launch a terminal here and clear the screen I'll zoom way in here and this is the way Emacs users typically will launch Emacs first They're gonna want to have a daemon running in the background. So Emacs has a server client kind of relationship going on So Emacs has a server. It has a daemon a process that's gonna run in the background It's always running in the background on your computer listening for any time you open a client window a client window Be like your text editor, right? So that is what we need to make sure is running We need to make sure that the emacs daemon is running You launch that with the command emacs space dash dash daemon space ampersign if I run that It should launch the server. Yeah, and now the server is running now I did the full path to emacs user bin emacs space dash dash daemon It's because I have emacs actually alias to something else So just to make sure there's no conflict with my alias, you know, I type the full path But if you don't have emacs alias to anything else, you could just do emacs space dash dash daemon So now that the server is running in the background, how do you launch emacs? Well, you launch emacs instead of just typing the word emacs. It's emacs client all one word I typically give it the following flags dash c for create a new frame meaning if I already have a emacs window open I would rather this window be in its own separate window I just like having a lot of different emacs windows open instead of everything being all in the same one frame It's because I use a tiling window manager It's just easier for me to rearrange all those windows and then give it this flag here dash a for alternate Meaning hey if for some reason the emacs server is not running and it can't launch the emacs client What would you rather us run just run the standard emacs command? So that just the non-server version of emacs if I run that look how long that took to launch now You probably thought that took longer to launch because you were probably waiting for something to appear in this window That's just an empty frame. It's a scratch buffer basically, but that actually launched rather fast I have a key binding to launch doom emacs at my dashboard So let me launch that and you guys can see that actually launches very fast Now it says emacs started in 1.59 seconds. That's not how long that window took that window open almost instantly Let me launch it again. Yeah, it still says started in 1.59 seconds That's how long the emacs Damon took because the server and that was the startup process So it's telling us how long that took these windows are loading much much faster than that though So that's the number one rookie mistake people do is they don't use the emacs server and the emacs client All of your emacs windows should be emacs clients now the number two rookie mistake I see way too many people is you know opening emacs and a terminal basically or From a file manager you go and navigate a file manager to find a file and then you open it in emacs from the file manager You don't need to do any of that stuff with terminals and file managers because emacs has terminals and file managers built into it For example, let me close that window if I wanted to I don't know Launch my bash RC in emacs from the terminal. Well, great. I have my bash RC now opened inside emacs I have this unnecessary terminal window just sitting here. I can't do anything with it because it's running emacs It's taken it's got that process running in it It's just a worthless terminal window same thing with your file manager if you did something from it you got a file manager open that you don't really need anymore and you didn't need in the first place because all you need to do if you want to Navigate your file manager for example to open a file just launch emacs and then in doom emacs space period Launches dear Ed which is the built-in file manager from there. I could navigate to wherever I'm going to navigate into my Dodex monad folder. I could find my readme tab complete works, too So you can tab complete all the paths and just find the file you want to open and there Then I didn't need that unnecessary file manager. That's just wasting space on my screen When emacs already has everything kind of built into it the same thing with a terminal if I needed to run some commands in a terminal I mean I could open a second terminal, you know a Lackety in this case But really if it's I'm only doing one or two things in a terminal just quickly You know, I could actually just do meta x alt x on the keyboard and v term The term is one of the several terminal emulators and that's built into emacs and I get this new split here Let me adjust the size here and this is v term here if I did a PWD print working directory or I could cat I don't know the bash RC Of course catting the bad bash RC won't work because I'm in dot x monad because that was the directory of the file That we were in so that's very smart of v term actually to know exactly where we were when we opened it And I know some of you guys are gonna be like hey I don't want my terminal in a horizontal split in you know I want a terminal window being its own separate window. Well, I can do that I have it key bind in my x-mone ad key bindings. I have control e followed by v opens a window its own window This is a emacs window running v term now. What's cool about this is let me hit escape to get into normal mode and close that That window that terminal window that v term went away But again, we have the emacs server running in the background and because everything you do in emacs It's its own separate buffer. I do space bi to get into iBuffer I still have v term as a buffer here And I can switch back to it if I wanted to space bi to get back into iterm And if I wanted to go back to where I had the read me dot org for x-mone ad open I could do that too or so I could do space BP for previous buffer I could do space be in for next buffer So that was the second of the big rookie mistakes is too many people are trying to Work emacs like it's vim like you know vim of course is a terminal program So it makes sense to have a terminal open do everything in a terminal when you need vim Of course, you're you have to launch vm inside a terminal emacs is not a terminal program Emacs is actually a gooey program Which brings us to the third mistake that people make is a lot of people mistakenly think emacs is a terminal program if I click this link, which is an image file Watch what happens. Oh, I get an image here in the splitter image preview and the reason I get that image preview It's because this is a graphical program Let me zoom back in if you guys notice the fonts here inside the table of contents You see the top level header table of contents that is a different font size That's a bigger font size than the rest of the the fonts here You cannot do that in a terminal emulator You can have varying font sizes in a graphical program and a gooey program Which is what emacs is you cannot do this in a terminal program Vim will never be able to have varying font sizes inside it because that's impossible to do inside a terminal Of course Vim is not gonna give you image previews and things like that if I opened the EWW browser EWW and then give it a web address I'll go to distro.tube, which is of course my website Once again just to verify that we actually get images, you know I can actually browse the web inside emacs Why? It's because emacs is able to display all that graphical goodness that you expect a web browser to be able to display so number three of the big rookie mistakes is Launching a terminal and then launching the terminal version of emacs, which I have alias to em in my config But it's actually the full path to it would be emacs space-nw for non windowing I mean you can run this in a terminal or a TTY, but I have that alias to just em and Let's open my bash rc and the terminal version of emacs Of course, I guess the emacs daemon doesn't affect that because that did take a couple of seconds to load But you know it loads fine and this is usable. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. It looks okay, right? It's just basically like Vim inside the terminal emacs inside the terminal But again, you're kind of you're not doing yourself any Justice here. You're not doing yourself any favors because again, you're not gaining anything from running emacs inside the terminal It's slower running it in the terminal than it was just running the graphical emacs client The other thing is you don't get the advantages You don't get all of the cool stuff you can do with varying font sizes and font faces and stuff like that You don't get images You don't get any of the really cool Bullets and things in org mode and things like all the graphical stuff that is really tough or impossible to do in a terminal You get all of that and gooey version of emacs So just just don't even bother with the terminal version of emacs because emacs is meant to be that gooey version, right? The terminal version of emacs is there if you don't have a graphical server If you don't have XOR on a system or Waylon, you know All you have is a TTY and you want to use emacs then you use the terminal version of emacs That's why it's there if you have a graphical display server installed like XOR or Waylon It's just kind of expected that you're gonna use the graphical version of emacs So that was just a very quick video today I just wanted to share those three rookie mistakes that I see way too many new to emacs users making this and you guys that are Trying out emacs, especially doom emacs. Let's cover this one more time Always start emacs using the emacs client Make sure the emacs daemon auto starts with your window manager or desktop and always use emacs client to launch emacs and set That to an alias put it in your bash RC your fish RC Whatever it is you're doing make sure that when you type emacs it actually launches the emacs client number two stop Navigating around in a terminal or a file manager when you know you're gonna end up in emacs, right? Just launch emacs emacs already has a terminal and a file manager built into it You're not gonna have these extra unnecessary windows on the screen that you didn't need in the first place and number three Don't use the terminal version of emacs if you're in a XOR or Waylon environment use the graphical gooey version of emacs It's just plain better now before I go. I need to think a few special people I need to think the producers of the show Devon gave James Matt Mitchell Paul Scott West a commie Alan Chuck commander angry Kurt Dioca Devin Dylan Gregory Hico Lee Maxim Michael Mike nitrix Euryon Alexander piece Arjun for door polytech raver Rip profit Stephen and Willie these guys are my last year patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode You just watch would not have been possible the shows brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well All these names you're seeing on the screen right now These are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors It's just me and you guys the community if you like the work I do and want to support me, please consider subscribing to distro tube over on patreon. All right, guys peace All the built-in emacs games run better in the gooey version too