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

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

#21

Post by bjeds »

coldtea wrote: post #12
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…

> 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 mean…

Did we read the same article?

The author of the article customized his environment so opening a file no longer froze his editor.

I wouldn't classify that either as "slightly better ergonomics" nor "tinkering" nor "bike shedding".

He had the discipline to improve his favorite editor. Good for him.

Emacs is obviously a very powerful environment for people who know how to use it. I applaud the author for documenting how he fixed this.

The only difference between emacs and many other open source software is here you can easily solve bugs in your config file, instead of filing a pull request or submitting a patch to some git repo. The first you call "tinkering" and look down upon. The other I assume you approve of? But why the double standard?

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

#22

Post by guenthert »

oblio wrote: post #10

Cute. If I'd have to guess, that's at least 200 hours put into learning Emacs, probably more.

200h is a lot if you think of Emacs as a tool to turn keystrokes into source code of your current project. I don't think it's a lot if you think of Emacs as a tool to help realize the ideas of your lifetime.

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

#23

Post by bambataa »

I always wonder how people evolve from fiddling with package configurations to using emacs at this level.

My stunbling block is not so much knowing Elisp (I’m sure I can stumble through that) but just knowing the internal architecture and how emacs works overall.

Has anyone come across a good guide for hacking emacs? I know there is the manual. Perhaps I just need to look at that again and get going.

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

#24

Post by guenthert »

"I’ve recently joined a company that for security reasons doesn’t allow their source code on laptops. Development happens strictly on workstations inside their private networks, with some using their text editor’s support for remote file editing and others running editors on those machines via SSH."

I think using TRAMP or similar technologies is bypassing, if not the letter, then the spirit of that companies' security policy. Sure, not the whole repository is lost when the laptop is, but having an (ephemeral) copy of the files one is working on outside the security perimeter is kind of defeating its purpose. Why is that company granting access to remote file transfer? I'd think they would be better off restricting access to some form of desktop virtualization (the old SunRays were nice) if they must offer remote access.

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

#25

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

bmitc wrote: post #20

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 w…

You appear utterly convinced that VSCode will never demonstrate an obscure bug like the one discussed in TFA, or alternatively that if it does you'll be able to jump ship to some other tool. I don't share your confidence, and would prefer to know that such issues can be fixed with or without vendor participation.

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

#26

Post by oblio »

guenthert wrote: post #22
oblio wrote: post #10

Cute. If I'd have to guess, that's at least 200 hours put into learning Emacs, probably more.

200h is a lot if you think of Emacs as a tool to turn keystrokes into source code of your current project. I don't think it's a lot if you think of Emacs as a tool to help realize the ideas of your lifetime.

Summarizing: everything you do takes time and this time has an associated opportunity cost.

If you can configure another tool in 2-5-10 hours to achieve 90% of the efficiency Emacs gives you and you can use the other 190-195-198 hours to actually realize those "ideas of your lifetime", it is a lot of time spent (and maybe wasted). Also: https://xkcd.com/1205/ + tinkering isn't necessarily productivity. If anything, it's more often procrastination.

Finally, I'm not sure how you could prove that Emacs it the only thing that allows you to achieve those "ideas of your lifetime", I don't think that's even a falsifiable statement, it's just your personal opinion.

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

#27

Post by erikbye »

agumonkey wrote: post #18
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 t…

> The vast majority of things in the late 10 years felt like a planet scale tweak (phone has tilting backgrounds, css animations, ..)

Sounds like you are in a very small bubble if that is your take on the last decade's tech inventions/evolution. What about autonomous vehicles/dock yards/warehouses and reusable rockets?

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

#28

Post by agumonkey »

erikbye wrote: post #27
agumonkey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> The vast majority of things in the late 10 years felt like a planet scale tweak (phone has tilting backgrounds, css animations, ..) Sounds like you are in a very small bubble if that is your take on the last decade's tech inventions/evolution. What about autonomous vehicles/dock yards/warehouses and reusable rockets?

SDV are not there yet, reusable rockets are not mainstream.

Yeah my bubble was mostly about consumer computing and network. CRISPR wasn't included in my rant.

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

#29

Post by mainstreemm »

dan-robertson wrote: post #13
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…

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 o…

I'm too young to have used it, but I bet Borland C++ was nice, too. And I bet it was more work to configure Emacs to write C++ in the 90s than it was to just use Borland. But which one is still around?

I wonder if it's more time wasted when you have to change editors every few years because of changes in the funding model of the corporate patron of the product and relearn how to use the entire environment with "sane defaults" versus creating some custom keybindings that you like essentially one time and then using them for 30 years in an editor that has a license and community that makes it unlikely to suddenly cease to exist.

People act like there's all this extra work to using software like Emacs over corporate IDEs, or GNU+Linux over corporate OSes, but I contend that it is merely different and better-documented work. The corporate environments just make more promises, and then everyone is surprised when the promises are broken.

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

#30

Post by mlang23 »

Being able to open remote files with Tramp is convenient. However, whats even cooler is that Tramp can execute remote commands. IOW, if you edit a file in a remote directory, you can also use M-x compile RET to run a remote build process and see the output in your Emacs Compilation buffer. If the paths pritned are relative, you can even use M-x next-error RET to jump to a build error location.
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