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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#131

Post by tptacek »

iLemming wrote: post #128
peacebeard wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To summarize: your claim is that choosing to spend your energy on anything other than your emacs setup is a catastrophic failure in terms of ROI, a delusion, and a sort of dereliction of identity as a programmer. My rebuttal: dude, relax.

Are you even reading what I wrote? What's with the childish tone, someone dropped your keyboard rate when you're a kid or something? Emacs is a tool, not a religion. There are plenty of talented, accomplished programmers who can relate to what I said, and never even used Emacs. There's no "Emacs setup" for me, just like there's no "ricing my browser" - I do expect my web browser to work exactly the way I want (or at…

Whoah, whoah, whoah, you two, this is a happy post, not an angry post. Nothing to get wound up over! Part of the point is that you can both just go and do you!

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#132

Post by peacebeard »

iLemming wrote: post #128
peacebeard wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To summarize: your claim is that choosing to spend your energy on anything other than your emacs setup is a catastrophic failure in terms of ROI, a delusion, and a sort of dereliction of identity as a programmer. My rebuttal: dude, relax.

Are you even reading what I wrote? What's with the childish tone, someone dropped your keyboard rate when you're a kid or something? Emacs is a tool, not a religion. There are plenty of talented, accomplished programmers who can relate to what I said, and never even used Emacs. There's no "Emacs setup" for me, just like there's no "ricing my browser" - I do expect my web browser to work exactly the way I want (or at…

"Emacs is a tool, not a religion" yeah that's my point. You framed not investing in it as a delusion. We can all agree on the importance of tooling. I am responding to the tone of the sermon you wrote.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#133

Post by olcay_ »

ontouchstart wrote: post #119
dang wrote: post #55

This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!) Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier…

> Even more importantly, what happens to teamwork? If we are all a BBM now—or rather, if we all have personal armies of BBMs, permanently locked in a manic state, springloaded at all hours to generate things for us-and-only-us—how do we work together? How do cocoons communicate, interoperate? What does a team of ai solipsists look like? It sounds oxymoronic. One example of teamwork is how the programmers and research…

If WASM succeeded in being the one universal ABI, it could be the perfect successor to the unix pipe for the AI age. Wasm modules for libraries, that double as terminal tools.. One could only imagine

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#134

Post by tom_ »

noosphr wrote: post #126

It is rather funny that the article talks about markdown when everyone who uses Emacs uses org mode instead. My .emacs file is init.el which is actually init.org, which isn't an Emacs file but a literate program that's half a guix installation script and half a regular .emacs file. Also kill all markdown. Replace it with xml or better yet SXML.

I've always found it easier to collaborate using markdown. It's much more popular than org-mode! And you can get org to export text as markdown, so interop isn't necessarily even all that difficult.

And as per the general theme of the post anyway: whatever. Because you can just work around it, whatever it is, by cobbling together some code, one way or another.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#135

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #105

Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim: * Podcast apps * Music listening apps * Feed readers * Bluesky clients * Note-taking apps * Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps * Chat and instant messaging * Time trackers * Recipe managers These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not…

[deleted]

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#136

Post by iLemming »

peacebeard wrote: post #132
iLemming wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you even reading what I wrote? What's with the childish tone, someone dropped your keyboard rate when you're a kid or something? Emacs is a tool, not a religion. There are plenty of talented, accomplished programmers who can relate to what I said, and never even used Emacs. There's no "Emacs setup" for me, just like there's no "ricing my browser" - I do expect my web browser to work exactly the way I want (or at…

"Emacs is a tool, not a religion" yeah that's my point. You framed not investing in it as a delusion. We can all agree on the importance of tooling. I am responding to the tone of the sermon you wrote.

Like the cartoon character once said: "Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad"... Re-read again what I wrote. Specifically about delusions. I can't believe I have to re-quote myself just to prove you my point about something you just made up in your head.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#137

Post by QuercusMax »

monk_grilla wrote: post #116

I can’t be the only one for whom `vim README.md` is perfectly good. I’ve never considered the monospaced font a limitation, I prefer it. Coloured rendering works great and is all the visual aid I need to parse quickly. I can see a table of contents being useful though. Perhaps if `:Toc` doesn’t exist yet, it should.

markdown tables are the only thing that's really rough to read, IMO

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#138

Post by tptacek »

bo1024 wrote: post #130
tptacek wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, hold up, if that thought lights you up I'm happy, but I don't actually think that's the common denominator. I used Things.app to track projects for a long time and ultimately fell out of love with it. Things.app didn't own my data; it's a pure UI app. But now it occurs to me: I know precisely how I work, I know what patterns are valuable to me, I know when and how I need to remind myself of things. I don't kn…

I'm not following your reasoning about the common denominator, not sure we're on the same wavelength about what I meant. I'm claiming that in order for an application to be "reclaimable", you have to be able to access and manipulate the data under the app. Some applications currently work that way now, lots of them don't. For example, we can "reclaim" non-DRM ebook readers, audiobooks, and music players that play loc…

You're talking about entire systems. That's something to be optimistic about too. But it's actually not the thing the comment you responded to was about. I'm not saying I'm excited to get out of the Apple Music ecosystem (I like Apple Music, the service, quite a lot). I'm excited to get out of Music.app, and into my own custom Apple Music player; one where playlists and play history are simple, sanely-schemaed sqlite databases.

I gotta be careful, I'm going to talk myself into staying up late tonight building that.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#139

Post by peacebeard »

iLemming wrote: post #136
peacebeard wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Emacs is a tool, not a religion" yeah that's my point. You framed not investing in it as a delusion. We can all agree on the importance of tooling. I am responding to the tone of the sermon you wrote.

Like the cartoon character once said: "Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad"... Re-read again what I wrote. Specifically about delusions. I can't believe I have to re-quote myself just to prove you my point about something you just made up in your head.

I'll re-quote it for you:

> Thinking that you're a programmer that doesn't want to constantly build software for your own sake is a delusion - it's like a cook that hopes to turn on the stove only in the restaurant, but won't touch a knife at home.

> Emacs is the cook's home kitchen.

The two sentences are adjacent. I read them as connected. If you meant them to be unrelated, I hope that this sheds light on our disagreement.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#140

Post by iLemming »

tptacek wrote: post #115
bo1024 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common denominator: the data needs to be owned by you, or at least made accessible. Companies love to create walled gardens where they own the content and control how you access it, making this kind of personalized interface impossible. Hopefully we can push back more now.

I mean, hold up, if that thought lights you up I'm happy, but I don't actually think that's the common denominator. I used Things.app to track projects for a long time and ultimately fell out of love with it. Things.app didn't own my data; it's a pure UI app. But now it occurs to me: I know precisely how I work, I know what patterns are valuable to me, I know when and how I need to remind myself of things. I don't kn…

> didn't own my data

Ownership can have different forms. Slack.app that doesn't let me easily extract code snippets from a thread - owns me. Jira that forces me to use their imbecilic, quirky wysiwyg owns me. Note taking app that keeps the data in their db and not my files - ain't my friend. The friction is the ownership. When extraction requires effort, the tool has leverage over you. It's a subtler form than data lock-in - behavioral lock-in. You adapt your workflow to what the tool makes easy, and gradually the tool's affordances shape what you even think to do. information gets buried in threads, search is mediocre, export is hostile. The "solution" they offer is to stay in Slack/Jira/Dropbox/Evernote/Notion/etc. longer, search in Slack, link to Slack, screenshare in Slack, summarize with AI in Slack, don't ever leave Slack. The tool becomes the answer to the problems the tool creates.

Plain text, local files, standard formats - they don't fight you on extraction because there's nothing to protect. That's why investing in FOSS tools is almost always paying for your own liberation rather than your own imprisonment. Even when there isn't feature parity, even when the FOSS tool doesn't have a "polished UI" and it's "maintained by a teenager in Nebraska" - still a better choice.

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