The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy • Hacker News Board

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#121

Post by lenkite » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:19 AM UTC

CalChris wrote: post #4

anyfoo wrote: post #2

I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…

With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm no…

Use pandoc

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#122

Post by mdm12 » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:23 AM UTC

_huayra_ wrote: post #79

rich_sasha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found it very difficult to pickup elisp, but the latest concerted effort worked. I found learning it to be a very fulfilling experience.

Was there any resource that help you get over the understanding hurdle?

An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp[0] is how I've been learning it recently.

[0]https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/eintr.html

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#123

Post by eulgro » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #103

eulgro wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). $ latexmk -pdf main.tex How hard is that? The only thing Overleaf adds here is a button and a 10x compilation time overhead. > I don't always remember what that magic meant. Overleaf mostly won't help you here, unless I'm mistaken. I don't mean to be aggressive here, I just don't get th…

Lol, that's not the command for making a LaTeX document. The command for making a LaTeX document fills a sheet for all the shit you have to install--half of which isn't correct on whatever documentation you're reading--and THEN you can `latexmk`. And I do mean you . I gave up after a solid week. I'll just make whatever I want in PowerPoint, save it to a PDF, and be done in 15 minutes. Yes, I said PowerPoint. Set you'…

$ sudo apt install texlive latexmk $ latexmk -pdf main.tex

I didn't try it, but it wasn't much harder than that if I recall... If you're on Windows, well, it's your loss :(

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#124

Post by moron4hire » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

eulgro wrote: post #123

moron4hire wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, that's not the command for making a LaTeX document. The command for making a LaTeX document fills a sheet for all the shit you have to install--half of which isn't correct on whatever documentation you're reading--and THEN you can `latexmk`. And I do mean you . I gave up after a solid week. I'll just make whatever I want in PowerPoint, save it to a PDF, and be done in 15 minutes. Yes, I said PowerPoint. Set you'…

$ sudo apt install texlive latexmk $ latexmk -pdf main.tex I didn't try it, but it wasn't much harder than that if I recall... If you're on Windows, well, it's your loss :(

Excuse me for being one of the 80% of working Americans

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#125

Post by eulgro » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

remexre wrote: post #97

eulgro wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). $ latexmk -pdf main.tex How hard is that? The only thing Overleaf adds here is a button and a 10x compilation time overhead. > I don't always remember what that magic meant. Overleaf mostly won't help you here, unless I'm mistaken. I don't mean to be aggressive here, I just don't get th…

How do you do package (version) management for LaTeX? There's more than a few documents I've come across that won't build on my system, giving often-indecipherable compilation errors. Overleaf at least ensures everyone involved is using the same environment without needing to ship a Docker container or the like, or try to pin down versions.

I suppose it should be fairly portable, except for missing packages maybe. In my case I have literally every common package installed so that's not an issue. But LaTeX errors are a real pain, I'll admit that.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#126

Post by robotresearcher » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

eulgro wrote: post #47

CalChris wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm no…

> With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). $ latexmk -pdf main.tex How hard is that? The only thing Overleaf adds here is a button and a 10x compilation time overhead. > I don't always remember what that magic meant. Overleaf mostly won't help you here, unless I'm mistaken. I don't mean to be aggressive here, I just don't get th…

> The only thing Overleaf adds here is a button and a 10x compilation time overhead.

Overleaf removes the need for local install. A full MacTex.pkg install is 4.4GB. I've lived in LaTeX for more than 30 years, and I love the ability to edit docs from any browser.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#127

Post by anyfoo » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

zrail wrote: post #120

anyfoo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top of my head, I am pretty sure that I can do that with a "keyboard macro" involving list-matching-lines, and delete-matching-lines (that is literally what the commands are called). "Keyboard macro" by the way is a good and a bad name at once: It does not fully describe the vastly more powerful feature, as it is much more semantic than just repetition of keystrokes, but at its surface it looks like that and helps yo…

Once you've hit C-x e once you can keep bouncing e to repeat the macro as well.

Thanks for the reminder. I knew that once, but completely forgot about it!

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#128

Post by anyfoo » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #112

anyfoo wrote: post #2

I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…

As an emacs user, I would say that emacs really didn't have competition until VSCode and modern programming languages. For example, everybody was kind of 80-90% on syntax highlighting. Some editors and IDEs were a little better at one language than others, but most weren't that great and had all manner of weird edge cases. And, if you wrote a new language, good luck because you had to write a syntax highlighter for i…

I agree that lsp is a necessity nowadays, and I was almost willing and close to give up emacs. And then emacs got proper lsp support (even in at least two forms, lip-mode and eglot), and now I'm happy.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#129

Post by chipotle_coyote » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:52 AM UTC

flurie wrote: post #113

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the current version of Emacs doesn't do fuzzy completion for M-x commands, just start-of-token completion; out of the box the completion is a little basic. I know there are packages which make this a lot better, but you have to know about the packages. :) Even so, the "sort lines" example works well with even the out-of-the-box completion. But, Emacs sometimes has its own language for things. If I didn't know th…

> Even the current version of Emacs doesn't do fuzzy completion for M-x commands, just start-of-token completion; out of the box the completion is a little basic. I know there are packages which make this a lot better, but you have to know about the packages. :) This is not quite true. The minibuffer, which is what vanilla Emacs uses for M-x command completion, has a set of completion styles, ordered by preference. Y…

Interesting! It still doesn't quite shake my suspicion that the best documentation for Emacs is "find somebody else who knows more about Emacs than you do," but to be fair that's not unique to Emacs. :)

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#130

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

lgrapenthin wrote: post #13

I am also a 10+ year GNU Emacs user. I haven't customized it beyond font size and a few settings. I even use the default theme. Other users seem to go crazy and try to make it into a spaceship. Then they claim that it takes a lot of time to customize it. It mainly is very different to operate from all programs and window managers that we are used to these days, and people perceive this as a wrong and try to "fix" it…

I can confirm this. Been using emacs for ~7 years now and my config keeps getting smaller and smaller, not bigger. While I still have my beloved config file, I'm confident that I'd be able to reproduce it within a few minutes from scratch, most of my customizations in there do not affect my workflow anymore.

On one of my machines I'm just using default emacs. Maybe going from all the customizations back to vanilla emacs was part of me "learning emacs" but I think I'd tell my past self that I don't actually have to read up as much as I did and that emacs and vim aren't as scary as many people tried to make me believe.

In the end learning to do the same old things as with other editors doesn't really take more than going through the tutorial, most people will already work as fast or faster by then, before I took the dive into vim and emacs I was very a "mouse and arrow keys" guy when it came to text navigation and editing.

There are of course many things that could be improved when it comes to emacs defaults, I wish the devs were more open to update some of the low hanging fruits.