Ask HN: What's the weirdest/best thing you've done with Emacs?

I don't think it's really weird but using it as an http rest client for testing apis with restclient.el

Postman frustrated me because it was taking up all the memory on my computer to do really simple calls. I remembered the "emacs rocks" episode on restclient and gave it a shot. Such a nice package. Really unfortunate that the maintainer doesn't update the melpa package.

Not what I've done, but the single craziest thing I've ever seen emacs do was a mode that you could put the editor into where you could edit the Lisp atoms of the running emacs program. Using the emacs editor commands to do so.

That melts my brain.

Currently working on a speedrun split timer written in elisp:

https://github.com/progfolio/speedo

I've also written a real-time game pad input visualizer (heavily inspired by Chris Wellon's work here:

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/11/05/)

I did this for a couple of reasons. I couldn't find a decent split timer that was:

- available on Linux

- not Electron/browser based (These worked well enough, but at the cost of high CPU usage, which caused hiccups when recording gameplay)

I was easily able to set up the timer so that I can feed inputs to anti-micro, which are forwarded to Emacs. This allows me to control everything from the game pad. I also have a feature that allows me to record a mistake during a run. I have commands which can then pull out mistakes for a given range across multiple runs to analyze where I need to practice most.

Still a work in progress, but it's been fun to work on.

in the mid 90s i taught my then 75 year old grandmother on her first computer how to write LaTeX documents in emacs. i created boilerplate templates for her various document types (letters, reports, etc) and she knew how to start emacs from the commandline, load those templates and save them into new documents. and of course preview and print too, but i don't remember if she did that from emacs or from the terminal

You might be interested in a generic time tracking daemon like arbtt[1]. It takes a snapshot of your activities across all programs in much more granular and configurable interval. It stores the data in binary format which is more space efficient but ships with tools that can spit out data for further scripting.

Independent of data collection, arbtt also has a DSL that lets you tag your samples programmatically. Which means you can use logic such as conditionals and regex on data such as active program name, window title etc to mark a sample productive or distracted etc.

The weird thing I do with Emacs here is run a function every N minutes and figure out productive work ratio in that interval with help of other scripts. Then it compares the ratio to a target threshold and performs actions based on if it meets the goal or not. Usually I warn myself if I am not being productive, but when I am feeling particularly intolerant of procrastination I lock myself out of my own laptop for a few minutes, to clear up my head.

[1] https://arbtt.nomeata.de/