How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
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Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#2Wowsers! 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
Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#3I use emacs but tend to just find another way to do things (e.g. grep, & other shell things) when I run into a stumbling block like this; believe it or not, not everyone wants to start debugging their text editor when they run into trouble.
Admittedly I wish I would spend a bit of time in emacs internals sometimes just so I could learn to approach similar issues, but it's just never much of a priority when I'm trying to work on what I'm actually working on. I rarely get distracted by trying to optimize my config, as a result I use almost the vanilla defaults and I'm mostly happy with that. TRAMP is pretty great, I wish it would not make a new connection for every network interaction though. Setting ControlMaster on ssh helps a bit but it's still not as fast/transparent as I'd like. There are far too many "blocking" operations in emacs, as much as I love working in it, there is the non-zero times that it locks up on me and it drives me crazy when that happens.
If it was ever the case that I had to wait 30 seconds to open a file, I'm sure I would abandon emacs instead of trying to debug it. That said I can't imagine working on a 70,000-file repo. That sounds like a terrible idea.
Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#4When 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 an almost ideological drive I had to make the machine do exactly whatever it was I wanted. Nothing commercial off the shelf, only things I could customize down to the source code.
A couple decades later, I just find it all so exhausting.
Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#5When 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 had the exact same experience, but I feel grateful since it’s what got me into programming. I first learned C in order to customize the dwm tiling window manager on Linux. Over time, my priority became simplicity and overall cohesive design over customization, though still in an entirely impractical way (I moved to BSD and briefly Plan 9/9front). Now I’ve settled on a dead-stock macOS setup and spend zero mental bandwidth on customization, but I think going down the customization rabbit hole taught me a lot about software design, UI/UX, and even philosophy in a weird way.
Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#6When 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 greatness requires discipline. This is also true with the craft and art of programming.
Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#7When 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 absolutely know what you mean.
> I was so into these kinds of super-customizable rabbit holes
I did this too. I spend days customizing my xmonad (I dont speak haskell), but thats nothing in comparison to the time I spend tuning my emacs.
On the other hand, i pretty much use the same environment like a decade ago. My same .emacs, my same xmonad.hs. I was looking at my WM and if there is a way to get rid of ghc on my machines (I use gentoo, updating ghc is an expensive task, especially on older machines) but every other WM felt like a downgrade so I went back to xmonad, to my old config.
I feel home everytime I open my notebook or booting linux on my desktop.
Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#8When 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…
It feels a little closer to "when I was young, I used to spend so much time arranging my kitchen gadgets [or exercise equipment]". Not doing the useful part of it, but frittering around the edges.
Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#9>I'm not aware of similar functionality in Vim,
Vim can open remote files by putting scp:// at the start. Check the vim wiki or similar for exact syntax. Works with your ssh config aliases and keys and such, so can be pretty smooth.
What I don't know is if he knows of this feature and declares it not-equivalent, or if he's never seen it. TRAMP is likely more powerful, in part due to emacs itself. Like, you can view a remote dir in dired and open an image and see it inside your emacs. I don't know if gvim can view images, I only use regular vim or neovim, but I typically use a graphical emacs.
Mostly unrelated, you can open a web url in neovim like it's a file. I've done this to read a page with a bad layout before. A bit like w3m, but then you can easily delete chunks or save parts to another file if you want. You are just seeing the raw html, but usually the paragraph tags are fairly readable.
Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
#10Cute. If I'd have to guess, that's at least 200 hours put into learning Emacs, probably more.