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How I am deeply integrating Emacs

joshblais.com

81–90 of 173 posts

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#81

I like eMacs but I feel the whole workflow is wrong. Buffers are a stacked tiled window manager inside your window manager. Your browser is a tabbed window manager, and many other applications are also window managers. I wish any sub buffer of any application was for all intents and purposes a dedicated window, so the WM can take care of the rest. Maybe it’s an adjustment that I could make in my workflow, but a globa…

EXWM + Qutebrowser can work like that. The individual tabs of Qutebrowser become Emacs buffers.

I've used the no-tabs extension also for firefox when I used sway to integrate firefox into the WM. You can modify the userchrome to hide the tab bar completely. It worked really nicely, and should also work with exwm.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got into emacs 20+ years ago the "use only the keyboard" thing was a huge point of pride and to this day I don't understand why. Who cares? I use emacs because I can code the entire environment. Fundamentally the mouse is just a form of modal editing. Emacs supports this in spades of course, and god-mode is my modal input minor mode of choice, but clicking to jump to a position on screen can often be a lot fas…

> Who cares? People with RSI from constantly reaching for a mouse.

Ah, like my eMacs pinky and thumb? ;)

I literally went to an orthopedic specialist recently for overuse of the left alt key causing me pretty notable pain in my thumb.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#83
I’m exploring a similar implementation and am honestly torn between NixOS and a more monolithic experience like Debian or OpenBSD.

As much as I love the idea of declarative builds, I’m struggling to justify the investment of learning and maintaining Nix for an individual setup. I’ve dabbled with it and mostly encountered footguns.

Whatever makes a nice, clean slab is what I’m after.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#84

I’m exploring a similar implementation and am honestly torn between NixOS and a more monolithic experience like Debian or OpenBSD. As much as I love the idea of declarative builds, I’m struggling to justify the investment of learning and maintaining Nix for an individual setup. I’ve dabbled with it and mostly encountered footguns. Whatever makes a nice, clean slab is what I’m after.

I've greatly benefited from investing just a few hours then utilizing LLMs. I was very unfamiliar to a lot of the syntax from the nix language, so I spent most of my time getting an overview. It was less than 8 hours total. Another thing that helps a lot is to browse other people's codes on Github.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#85
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who cares? People with RSI from constantly reaching for a mouse.

Ah, like my eMacs pinky and thumb? ;) I literally went to an orthopedic specialist recently for overuse of the left alt key causing me pretty notable pain in my thumb.

An ergonomic keyboard can help. I like the Kinesis Advantage but it's expensive for a keyboard.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#86
> I have seen what people are capable of doing when their tools get out of the way, and they are free to just create. This is how world class athletes, musicians, artists, writers, and of course programmers take what is in their mind and translate it into reality.

I think this is a fallacy. If you approach the question of how these people achieve the things they do with a bias towards tooling then you'll come to the conclusion that it plays a big role in their success.

In reality, many of these folks start with a very strong drive to achieve something and then the rest sort of follows. If you want to be a world class musician, start practicing an instrument. Ideally fall in love with music. The rigorous and meticulous practice routine comes later.

In other words: you can have the world's best tooling that gets out of the way, but you're still as unmotivated to do anything as before.

I think it's a cool idea and it sounds like a fun and creative endeavor. I don't want to talk it down. But I also wouldn't want folks to get the, in my opinion, misguided impression that "tooling -> success" is the correct order.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#87
The most seamless capture-from-anywhere workflow I struck upon is to have a shortcut on my phone's home screen. When tapped, it takes my dictation, transcribes it, and saves it to an inbox.org file with an org-syntax timestamp, synced to my main computer.

Basically the notes have the same format that org-mode uses to save notes placed in the logbook. But you can also make them as individual TODO headings or whatever. It's all plain text anyway.

I try to empty the inbox.org every morning, I typically have 20-30 entries to go through. Some things matter and are revised and refiled appropriately. The rest gets dumped into a chronological log file for just in case.

edit: btw, it would be cool if I also made a version that would append the content of the phone's clipboard to the transcription, so that I can also catch links and/or bits of text. Or maybe even multimedia, thought I am not sure how I would accomplish that.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#88
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who cares? People with RSI from constantly reaching for a mouse.

Ah, like my eMacs pinky and thumb? ;) I literally went to an orthopedic specialist recently for overuse of the left alt key causing me pretty notable pain in my thumb.

As the sibling comment put it, that’s when I look into ergonomics accessories.

My primary mouse is a trackball one, because I have pain in my arm (elbow and shoulder) when I use a regular one on a desk.

I will maybe get a split keyboard in the future. But I did get a mechanical one because of key travel. And I touch type, so I spend less time on the keyboard itself.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#89

> I have seen what people are capable of doing when their tools get out of the way, and they are free to just create. This is how world class athletes, musicians, artists, writers, and of course programmers take what is in their mind and translate it into reality. I think this is a fallacy. If you approach the question of how these people achieve the things they do with a bias towards tooling then you'll come to the…

Agreed. You can have all the best tools and you still aren't guaranteed "success"

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#90
post #14
post #4

The more I learn about emacs the more I feel we took the wrong fork on road in terms of the desktop metaphor decades ago.

For me, the power of Emacs is mainly that I can do everything with the keyboard, which is not only much faster, but also - to me - much more enjoyable than going through visual menus with the mouse. For someone not good with the keyboard, it's probably a nightmare. I suppose it's good for power users and terrible for casual users, and I don't know if there's any way to really build one user interface that works equal…

> The next best thing I love about Emacs is that I can do anything conceivable with code.

you already could though, no? emacs didnt allow you to execute lisp for the first time

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