helpful VS delta

If you want to programmatically create files, write to them, etc, then read the fine manual, it comes with your Emacs, has index, search and web-like navigation. It is well worth your time investing in looking up the manual, both for Emacs and for Elisp. You access the manual via C-h i. Another good thing to learn how to use is Emacs built-in help. As a minimal basic, C-h f will display information about functions, and C-h v will display the documentation for variables. You can also see where things are declared, open the source code, etc. A good alternative to built-in help is Helpful, which I suggest installing and start using too.

It tweaks Emacs GC. You can run M-x describe-variable while your cursor is at gc-cons-threshold to learn about it. If you opted-in for using "Vim bindings" (Evil mode), you can press K while in normal mode. Note that K doesn't run the describe- command in Doom, but it runs helpful-command from (https://github.com/Wilfred/helpful), which provides more context that describe- commands usually do.

The packages helpful and elisp-demos are super useful because they enhance Emacs' built-in documentation.

You can try to actually use helpful for a while. There was also a package with examples, I don't remember the name, perhaps someone else knows which I mean, that shows usage of a function where available. I remember using it and found it very useful for a while when I was learning elisp more actively. I still use helpful sometimes.

Once you got the hang of keybindings, which-key is a helpful extension (aka package) to Emacs. At this stage, there are other helpful packages and keybindings.

helpful for better help buffers

Since you seem interested, have a look at elisp-demos , too. It works in tandem with helpful.

Elisp Docs are fantastic they have documented everything while with CL most documentation is missing or only on the Web. With Emacs, one need to learn about C-h f (describe-function), C-h k (describe-key), helpful.el and elisp-demos and a new world opens. Terminology is always different, simple example: Microsoft terminology sounds like bullshit, to a Unix person.

Your primary source of knowledge will be the manual and the built-in discoverability (describe-* functions, or helpful) and of course reading the code. I'm not a manual person myself, but Emacs is one of the examples where it is truly excellent and has answers for almost everything.

Thanks for the difftastic & zoxide tips.

However, I've been using this git pager/difftool: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

While it's not structural like difft, it does produce more readable output for me (at least when scrolling fast through git log -p /scanning quickly

View on GitHub

I'm currently waiting on the integration between Delta and Difftastic:

https://github.com/dandavison/delta/issues/535

Difftastic now has JSON output, whic should make it much easier to build this.

I'm surely in the minority here. I've been using Emacs for almost a decade now, but I just can't get into the Magit workflow. I've tried several times, but always end up going back to Git on the command line. I have dozens of aliases, shell integrations, a nice diff viewer[1], etc., and interacting with Git has become muscle memory. I can commit, cherry-pick, rebase, bisect, fix conflicts, etc., in a fraction of the time it would take me to navigate Magit's UI. I'm sure with enough practice, a Magit user could do this more quickly and efficiently, but honestly, with some custom-built porcelain, Git's UI is not so bad. Though this could very well be Stockholm syndrome after using it for such a long time...

For whatever reason, Magit's opinionated workflows never clicked with me. A part of it is the concern that it will do something weird to my repo that I'll then have to waste more time undoing manually. I usually don't trust sugary wrappers around tools. And another is the fact I don't use Emacs on all machines, and setting up Git on a remote system is just a matter of copying over my config and some shell integrations.

Also, on a more personal note, I find the cultish fanboyism whenever Magit is brought up slightly offputting. Does anyone have anything bad to say about it? No software can realistically be this infallible. :)

[1]: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

For looking at diffs I still prefer the command line though, and use delta to view diffs between commits or branches.