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Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

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Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#41

Post by username223 »

frou_dh wrote: post #16

To me the charming thing about Emacs is how introspective a program it is. This goes beyond all the documentation being built-in, and being able to redefine things on the fly. For instance, it's easy to define a keybinding that does "Take me to the source code of the command that's bound to the next keybinding I type". When you use that and land at a destination, it will probably be Elisp code, but in some cases will…

That and how smooth the customization curve is, from tweaking settings, to recording keyboard macros, to writing small helper functions, to creating whole packages. Compare that to something like Eclipse or IntelliJ, where there's a huge gap between changing settings and creating plugins. It's a sweet spot between semi-configurable text editors and full-blown "living ball of mud" systems like Lisp and Smalltalk.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#42

Post by bitwize »

Man, I totally get this. I've been an Emacs user for 30 years and counting; back in the mid-90s when I started on Linux, I learned that the truly wizardly hackers usually used one of vim or Emacs and because I disliked modal editing, I chose Emacs—only to find myself tumbling down a deep, deep rabbithole that opened into an unfathomable warren network it would take me decades to begin to make any sense of.

When I open Emacs, it's like I'm five years old again, seated at my VIC-20, confronted with the infinite possibilities of the machine, challenged to explore them. Except the possibilities are so much greater because computers can do so much more and Emacs—as the programmable way to program—puts them virtually all at my fingertips. It's all a bit overwhelming, and this essay does a good job of capturing that overwhelm and the shift in perspective needed to cope.

That said, it's likely to send most people screaming back whence they came, clinging ever more firmly to their Visual Studio Codes and IntelliJs, if they be programmers at all and if not, it may turn them off programming altogether. Because that perspective shift looks like utter madness from the outside. I don't think we as a species are ready for computers yet. The possibilities, the implications.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#43

Post by sexyman48 »

_benj wrote: post #40
sexyman48 wrote: post #30

That he burned 11,000 words on his text editor tells you why emacs users are unemployable.

Since employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to, this post and emacs users in general, must be of such lesser value I guess? /s

employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to

Your words, not mine. But gene propagation is up there, and steady wages is a sufficient if not necessary condition for that to happen.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#44

Post by alyandon » 

  They say there’s no Emacs — only your Emacs.
This hit home for me. I spent about 6 months working exclusively with emacs to get past the "this is weird/hard because it is unfamiliar to me" stage. At the end of the experiment, I went back to using vim and IDEs.

My take personal takeaways from the experience:

1) capslock/ctrl switching is helpful in so many other areas - so I kept that

2) emacs is something you want to "live in" (e.g. learning to rely on eshell) if you want to really become proficient with it

3) emacs is something you have to be willing to tweak/adjust via elisp to suite your personal preferences if you want to really really really be proficient with it

I didn't hate emacs but it also wasn't for me.

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#45

Post by vkazanov »

sexyman48 wrote: post #43
_benj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to, this post and emacs users in general, must be of such lesser value I guess? /s

employment is apparently the highest achievement a person can aspire to Your words, not mine. But gene propagation is up there, and steady wages is a sufficient if not necessary condition for that to happen.

Never in my 20 years of programming, data engineering, engineering management of games, search engines, dating apps and machine learning systems I had a problem of people not wanting to hire me because I prefered Emacs (and linux).

In fact, in was the opposite.

So what are you even talking about?

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#48

Post by kragen »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #33
kragen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used grep-find or LSP, despite using Emacs for 32 years. Maybe I should; is grep-find better than M-x grep? Apparently I've sometimes improvised an equivalent: "Run grep via find, with user-specified args COMMAND-ARGS. ... This command uses a special history list for its arguments, so you can easily repeat a find command." My out-of-the-box autocomplete is M-/, which works in environments where LSP doesn't…

To be fair, running grep from Emacs is a mistake - you should be using ag, or some other parallelized version of grep :) Ardour has around 800k lines of code, and ag (not even the fastest of the new greps) can search it all more or less faster than I can type. The idea of some system that analyzes/caches/indexes the code just isn't necessary anymore.

That seems reasonable, yeah. ripgrep, etc., are definitely faster.

Somehow I never twigged that you wrote Ardour and JACK. Thanks for JACK! (My audio editing needs are very modest and so I haven't actually tried Ardour.)

Re: Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

#49

Post by kragen »

eyeundersand wrote: post #29
kragen wrote: post #19

This essay is amazing and delightful, but it is rather densely allusive, like classical Chinese literature; ultimately it is more allusion than plain language. I suspect that most people will find it somewhat impenetrable. But if you want to see Emacs explained by references to Dune, Harry Potter, Gormenghast, Star Wars, A Rape in Cyberspace , Neuromancer , The Matrix, Crowleyian magick, and so on, this essay is for…

I was shocked by the reference to Navidson's house from the House of Leaves. The ending to your first paragraph is also interesting in that HoL starts with "This is not for you."

House of Leaves is something I've been wanting to read since I first saw it, but I've never had the chance. Unlike most books, I feel that I'd be missing out on a lot if I didn't read it in physical form.

Emacs, too, is bigger on the inside.

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