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

31–40 of 97 posts

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

#31

Post by brandonmenc »

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'm not going to die younger if I don't waste a bunch of time customizing my computer.

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

#32

Post by coldtea »

bjeds wrote: post #21
coldtea wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Did we read the same article?

I didn't respond to the article, I responded to your particular comment, which seemed to imply that customizing your programming environment in general is something great and necessary.

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

That doesn't clarify as "customizing my environment" is more like "fixing fundamentally broken shit".

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

#34

Post by macintux »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #25
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.

That seems an ungenerous and quite broad interpretation of a fairly simple assertion.

Even as much as I love Emacs, I would never fault someone for choosing a more productive tool now even if there’s a non-zero risk of something breaking in the future...because there’s always something that will break on any platform. Time spent being productive now is usually worth that risk.

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

#35

Post by macintux »

mlang23 wrote: post #30

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.

Running remote commands is almost entirely what that part of the article is about.

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

#36

Post by nn3 »

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 super customized system is more like a pet. A mostly standard system with very limited tweaks is more cattle.

Like the OP I used to be in the having "pets" category (including gigantic ~/.emacs), but these days I prefer cattle (defaults as much as possible)

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

#37

Post by macintux »

It’s a shame that most of the discussion is about the first part of the essay, impressive as the troubleshooting is.

His discussion of core values is quite interesting, in that it’s both relatively obvious in retrospect yet something I’ve not given conscious thought to.

I’ve certainly thought about programming languages as expressions of intent, and how some attempt to be what I call “kitchen sink” languages, like C++, Java, or JavaScript, while others are much more opinionated about their purpose, like Erlang, Forth or APL.

Also reminds me of the old description of UNIX as user-friendly, just picky about who its friends are.

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

#38

Post by brokenwallet »

bambataa wrote: post #23

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.

The Elisp reference manual describes Elisp the language, and Emacs's Elisp API: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/in...

e.g. here is describes keymaps: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ke...

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

#39

Post by ernst_klim »

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…

> I just find it all so exhausting.

So do I, and yet I use Emacs. I think there is a middle-ground. There are things worth customizing and improving, in particular the tools I work with, and there are things that I expect to "Just work"™.

Hence I use Gnome and Emacs for important workflow, such as programming, TeX, email, git, shell etc. It's and IDE, if you wish, but with more stuff since email is also part of the workflow.

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

#40

Post by lproven »

abhinav22 wrote: post #2

Wowsers! That was a long read, I skimmed through a bit of it. Kudos for dedicating time and effort to high quality long form articles - this is something that online needs to revert to. That said, can you give us a TL;DR if you have a moment :D

Can it be summarised? No.

Can it be described? Well, this is how I did it in a tweet, and the author like it and thanked me.

« Fascinating, very long essay which starts with a discussion of text editors, wanders through software development models & the issues of modernising very old software, & turns into a discussion of intelligence, language & computing. »

Post reply on HN