Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

murilopereira.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 97 posts

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#11

Post by oblio »

bjeds wrote: post #6
humanistbot wrote: post #4

When I was first getting into programming and computer science as a student, I was so into these kinds of super-customizable rabbit holes. My whole life pretty much centered around the keyboard and terminal. I was all in on knowing everything about the entire stack and making it do whatever it was I wanted. I'd spend hours to save a few keystrokes. That wasn't so much about the productivity trade-off as it was about…

In no way do I want to come off as rude with this comment, but to me what you are saying is not at all different from "when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting". Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. None of those need to end up in a "rabbit hole". Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but…

Or you can, you know, just use VSCode, have fun coding what you actually want to code and use that spare time:

a) learning Spanish to talk to that hot chick/dude

b) traveling around the world

c) doing whatever else you love to do besides coding

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#12

Post by coldtea »

bjeds wrote: post #6
humanistbot wrote: post #4

When I was first getting into programming and computer science as a student, I was so into these kinds of super-customizable rabbit holes. My whole life pretty much centered around the keyboard and terminal. I was all in on knowing everything about the entire stack and making it do whatever it was I wanted. I'd spend hours to save a few keystrokes. That wasn't so much about the productivity trade-off as it was about…

In no way do I want to come off as rude with this comment, but to me what you are saying is not at all different from "when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting". Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. None of those need to end up in a "rabbit hole". Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but…

>Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good.

One is a practical endeavor of great importance for mind function, body function, longevity, performance, etc.

The other is something between slightly better ergonomics (in a non-scientific ad-hoc way), tinkering, and bike-shedding.

People have found again and again that "customizing your computer environment" is not a good in itself, but a means to an end, with quite narrow diminishing returns.

>Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but greatness requires discipline.

This includes first and foremost the disclipline of avoiding tinkering and bike-shedding with your tools, and doing real work on real problems instead (which is not a false dichotomy: many people fixate on the former to the detriment of the latter).

>This is also true with the craft and art of programming.

Which has as little to do with a focus on customizing of tools, as a hi-fi hobby has with being a music lover...

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#13

Post by dan-robertson »

bjeds wrote: post #6
humanistbot wrote: post #4

When I was first getting into programming and computer science as a student, I was so into these kinds of super-customizable rabbit holes. My whole life pretty much centered around the keyboard and terminal. I was all in on knowing everything about the entire stack and making it do whatever it was I wanted. I'd spend hours to save a few keystrokes. That wasn't so much about the productivity trade-off as it was about…

In no way do I want to come off as rude with this comment, but to me what you are saying is not at all different from "when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting". Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. None of those need to end up in a "rabbit hole". Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but…

A lot of emacs customisation ought to be unnecessary. And I think the yak shaving on one’s config isn’t really a great use of time (if you want it as a hobby then I guess that’s fine).

Some examples of unnecessary customisation is the fact that the defaults of emacs so often ought to be changed. E.g. why does M-SPC do just-one-space instead of the strictly more powerful cycle-spacing (answer: probably a combination of history, neglect, and a fear of breaking existing saved keyboard macros), why use upcase-word instead of upcase-dwim? Why does autocomplete require so much customisation?

If emacs had better defaults there would be much less reason for spacemacs or doom to exist.

One person I work with will (drastically) customise the key bindings for each new mode before using it, making it hard to use new modes. Another gave up on customising emacs and switched to spacemacs to no longer have to think about customisation.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#14

Post by coldtea »

opan wrote: post #9

>I'm not aware of similar functionality in Vim, Vim can open remote files by putting scp:// at the start. Check the vim wiki or similar for exact syntax. Works with your ssh config aliases and keys and such, so can be pretty smooth. What I don't know is if he knows of this feature and declares it not-equivalent, or if he's never seen it. TRAMP is likely more powerful, in part due to emacs itself. Like, you can view a…

>What I don't know is if he knows of this feature and declares it not-equivalent, or if he's never seen it.

I know it, but it's not even close. Almost every editor can do something like that over SCP/SSH/SFTP.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#15

Post by krbzsq »

bjeds wrote: post #6
humanistbot wrote: post #4

When I was first getting into programming and computer science as a student, I was so into these kinds of super-customizable rabbit holes. My whole life pretty much centered around the keyboard and terminal. I was all in on knowing everything about the entire stack and making it do whatever it was I wanted. I'd spend hours to save a few keystrokes. That wasn't so much about the productivity trade-off as it was about…

In no way do I want to come off as rude with this comment, but to me what you are saying is not at all different from "when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting". Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. None of those need to end up in a "rabbit hole". Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but…

I don't think this is fair. Eating healthy and working out is objectively good. Whereas for plenty of people, these customisations are just that, a "rabbit hole" that was interesting when they were younger but then it got tedious. Now they've found a setup they like, be that intensely customised or a fresh macOS install with VSCode. I wouldn't consider either indicative of greatness. A lot of people just want their computing environment to get out of their way.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#17

Post by helmut_hed »

This really captures the power of Emacs for people with Lisp skills. For coders with strong habits of high-level thinking it's a real force multiplier. Why shouldn't we apply the same analysis and effort to our productivity tools we do to our "output"?

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#18

Post by agumonkey »

humanistbot wrote: post #4

When I was first getting into programming and computer science as a student, I was so into these kinds of super-customizable rabbit holes. My whole life pretty much centered around the keyboard and terminal. I was all in on knowing everything about the entire stack and making it do whatever it was I wanted. I'd spend hours to save a few keystrokes. That wasn't so much about the productivity trade-off as it was about…

As you grow your brain optimizes off fruitless ideas. You think total control of one part will be the ultimate because younger your perspective is narrow and you focus all on it.

When I was in college I thought being a flawless typist would make me a better programmer.. (mind you I had trouble mastering dynamic programming, advanced abstractions or semantic subtleties).

I find these exhausting too now, and actually that's why I'm jaded by tech. The vast majority of things in the late 10 years felt like a planet scale tweak (phone has tilting backgrounds, css animations, ..). Deep inside I knew it was just marketing and nothing substantial.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#19

Post by bmitc »

oblio wrote: post #11
bjeds wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In no way do I want to come off as rude with this comment, but to me what you are saying is not at all different from "when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting". Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. None of those need to end up in a "rabbit hole". Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but…

Or you can, you know, just use VSCode, have fun coding what you actually want to code and use that spare time: a) learning Spanish to talk to that hot chick/dude b) traveling around the world c) doing whatever else you love to do besides coding

Exactly my thoughts. In the context of the posted article, one just installs the Remote - SSH extension and moves on with life.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#20

Post by bmitc »

Articles like this really trigger the imposter syndrome for me. I just have no patience for these type of things, and seeing others' both ability and patience to power through issues like this one, I just feel like an imposter.

But these types of issues are why I've always given up on learning Emacs. When I can just install Visual Studio Code and the Remote - SSH extension and whatever else extension that I want to work remotely and get on with life, it's really hard to justify the time one needs to spend with Emacs to bend it to your will.

Post reply on HN