OT: long time Emacs user, but my new employer insists on everyone using PhpStorm. And don't get me wrong, that's really a great IDE. I still miss Emacs, though.
How I am deeply integrating Emacs
131–140 of 173 posts
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the thing people forget about emacs - it is primarily a lisp environment, entirely programmable. Something one can make their very own. Nothing else comes quite as close, even if the keyboard ergonomics (at least for me) do help to sell it. You can change the workspace to better the workflow in real time, that's the biggest selling feature.
And this is why, even though it is a better OS environment my grandmother will never use it. And because emacs is under socialized and under adopted the emacs user will still have to use notion or outlook or whatever corporate security requires.
I'm not going to argue that emacs if "for everyone" and there's plenty in my own life that I'm happy to accept defaults in. But that said, it's not that hard to glue emacs onto existing tools if needed. If you're in a situation where you can only send emails on a locked down email client you can still script the client through emacs and some glue code. On MacOS, Apple script does wonders and for Windows there's AutoHotKey. Linux obviously is infinitely malleable.
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#133> 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…
I think of it a bit differently: if the tool is getting in the way, this will hamper the effectiveness and raise the barrier for skilled individuals to do their best. Yeah, the absolute top-tier max-talent people can do well regardless, but if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction.
> if the tools are better quality and more "out of the way", this allows a greater pool of people to do their absolute best, with less friction.
I think YuukiRey's point is that this is not true. The bottleneck for people to do their absolute best is almost never tool-induced friction, until you've already built a strong pre-existing skillbase. Overwhelmingly it's motivation, interest, time, energy, etc.
In theory tools can help with this. In practice usually the pursuit of tooling ends up being a distraction. This is how you end up with the (overly derogatory) idea of GAS, "Gear Acquisition Syndrome." The equivalent of this for digital things is e.g. the writer who spends money and time trying to find the perfect text editor paired with the perfect keyboard paired with the perfect monitor etc, instead of just writing. There are of course exceptions where tooling is really the main unlocking feature, but those are far and few between.
In fact what I get from YuukiRey is the opposite of this:
> Yeah, the absolute top-tier max-talent people can do well regardless
Rather it's that the best tooling only really makes sense for top-tier people, because for almost everyone else the tooling is not the bottleneck.
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#134Earlier 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…
There's a ton of comments here saying the keyboard is more ergonomic than the mouse, I've never heard that before and it feels wrong on its face (it's called repetitive strain injury, using multiple forms of input should helpful). But generally, please if you believe this provide some kind of source .
It's one of the oldest forms of "programmer identity" out there, one of those shibboleths that people who culturally identify as a hacker express that's independent of its factuality. A bit of a precursor to social media which elevates in group shibboleths over data as a matter of course. Programmers were the first to invent and use social media after all.
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#135The 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.…
I'd be very curious to know more about the shortcut you describe. This workflow would work incredibly well for me. I already have my notes synced via syncthing, and capture with Orgzly Revived, but auto-transcribed captures would be a gamechanger.
It’s an iphone shortcut. Here it is: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a8a0076cc03f4e699d8ca34bd3d...
I keep the inbox.org on dropbox, that keeps it synced.
The shortcut is called “longdictate” because previously I had a version that didnt require me to press stop after finishing my thought. Instead it was set to stop recording when I stopped talking. But it misfired too frequently, cutting me off, so I added the button.
I imagine there must be something similar to iphone shortcuts on Android?
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#136The 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.…
Awesome - are you on an Android? I tried to do something similar on my iPhone, but couldn't get a reliable (or any) way to get an rsync script running. I ended up with pen and paper though, which is best for me all things considered.
Iphone, yes. I keep the file on dropbox so that is what keeps it synced.
Shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a8a0076cc03f4e699d8ca34bd3d...
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#137> 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…
Indeed. When you have superior skill, inferior tooling can be a constraint. But a superior tool will not compensate for inferior skill.
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#138A question for the heavy Emacs users: What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs? I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there. However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe…
> What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs?
If you use vanilla emacs without customization, you are going to have a very basic text editor experience. That is fine if you understand that, and understand that you'll need to start adding your own customizations (like enabling eglot for LSP, and company-mode for code completions, etc) in order to get to an experience closer to what you'd get out of the box in an IDE like vscode.
Some people might see vanilla emacs, assume emacs is just a plain text editor, and go back to their fancy IDEs. For them, distros like doom/space would be good for avoiding that initial shock/disappointment.
Another great use for doom/space is to see what is possible. Figure out what bits you like, and then figure out how to enable them in your own vanilla-based config. Essentially window-shopping for your own emacs config.
But in the end, I'd recommend you eventually get to the state I am in: I started with a completely vanilla emacs and then slowly added the bits that I wanted. That way I have only what I want, and nothing that I don't want. I don't get surprised by unexpected features. My breakages are fewer because I use so few packages. My load times are great because I am not loading a bunch of stuff I don't use. I understand everything that is enabled in my config.
You also might want to check out emacs-solo. It's a config that is built based entirely on built-in packages rather than 3rd party packages. I still use some 3rd-party packages like company-mode but it is good to see just how far you can go with the built-in stuff (for example, you probably don't need projectile, you can use the built-in project.el, and you probably don't need lsp-mode, you can use the built-in eglot): https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-solo
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not these days. Native Compilation made emacs a faster and there have been a lot of other changes. In fundamental-mode, emacs can handle really large files. When opening files literally, it's even faster. I have this 104k line org-mode file and it's reasonably responsive. Reverting it takes a while, but the UI does not hang while the buffer is being formatted according to the mode. I use a mid tier laptop CPU (6C12T)…
I’ll bite, wtf is your org file?
It's three months of text I need to refile.
Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs
#140> 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…
You made me think of this quote: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"if you want to build 100 ships, refer to the former"