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How I am deeply integrating Emacs

joshblais.com

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Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#161

Post by tmtvl »

tom_ wrote: post #149
tmtvl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My petty opinion is that distributions which disable the menu bar are bad, distributions which use an edgelord dark theme are bad, and distributions which do both are terrible. Where Doom in particular is concerned I dislike the fact that it starts with Vi keybindings by default (I quite disfavour modal editing, there's a reason I switched away from Vim after 5 years) and that it changes the 's' binding so I can't ev…

One tip I read somewhere (possibly from Steve Yegge?) was that it's a good idea to disable the Emacs menu bar - and I agree. The Emacs menu bar is this kind of weird uncanny valley thing. It looks like a normal menu bar, but any time you click one of the items on it, you'll find that you're doing something that actually only makes sense if you're into Emacs already. It won't help you when you're starting out, and onc…

The Edit menu has undo, cut, copy, and paste. Is that stuff that only makes sense if you're into Emacs already? The Help menu has the tutorial and the manual. Same question. The File menu has open file, save, save as, close, and quit. If you open a file which uses a mode which has options you get a menu showing those options.

I don't think the discoverability of all those things is worth giving up in exchange for 1 more line of text, but of course everyone is different and that makes the world such an interesting place.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#162

Post by magical_spell »

YuukiRey wrote: post #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…

I think I agree that best tooling is not a sufficient condition for success.

But I don't see where the author is committed to such a thesis in the quote you provide.

As far as as I can see, they are not even committed to best tooling being a necessary condition for success.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#163

Post by chairmansteve »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #80
rusk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good carpenter takes time to maintain and procure their tools. They still have a nice phone and might listen to music on their headphones while they’re working. A chef must keep their kitchen clean and well organised. Stocked with appropriate and some obscure tools. She must season her saucepan, sharpen her knives.

My first career was as a cook and I would always sit and sharpen my knives after the last service of the week. It was kind of a cool time to reflect on the previous cycle and mentally prepare for the next. There's really nothing comparable in programming and I say this as someone who has spent hundreds of hours yak shaving emacs.

In programming anything you do (eg yak shaving) takes up your whole mind.

Sharpening knives leaves mental space for reflection.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#164

Post by iLemming »

295fge wrote: post #143
dwohnitmok wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 to…

It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools

Russian equivalent of this idiom sounds like "skillful surgeon helps a bad dancer". Even though it sounds confusing, what it really means is "a bad dancer blames his balls"

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#165

Post by seanw444 »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #157
seanw444 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love Emacs, but I can't understand why people want it to be their window manager, of all things. Emacs can be many things, but high performance it is not. And WMs definitely are a high performance area.

They’re really not. Stability matters, but a wm has very little to do with actual rendering, it’s more placement, title bar and decorations, emacs as slow as it can be would be perfectly fine unless you have some crazy extensions on top, hence running two instances.

Fair. Regardless, it just seems like an odd tool for the job.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#166

Post by thomascountz »

Does anyone have a recommendation for a learning resource that approaches emacs as a computing environment in general, rather than as a text editor specifically? I think I may have had a lot of false starts learning emacs because I've been thinking of it too much like a replacement for vim, rather than a scriptable environment.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#167

Post by antiframe »

cluckindan wrote: post #57
Aromasin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can but that doesn't neccesarily mean you should . I tried it for a while, after seeing my Eve Online friend skipping through tasks at a rate of knots without any mouse movement. My god the amount of tab pressing I had to do to get anything done was crippling. I might have to jump through 15 times to get to something that would take me less than a second to click.

Which is why most programs support alt-hotkeys.

Right, but not all, which is what makes unplugging your mouse from Windows painful. On Linux, I often forget to plug my mouse in and only notice when I want to play a game or something.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#168

Post by eternityforest »

dima55 wrote: post #120
YuukiRey wrote: post #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…

Maybe it's a fallacy and maybe it isn't. But I often hear people say "I don't use tool X because it doesn't actually increase my productivity". X is emacs or debuggers or profilers or Linux or version control or code comments or whatever. And after observing such people work over time I decided that most of them are just trying to justify their laziness. YMMV.

Emacs is in a different category from all of those, since it gives the dev more control rather than more abstraction.

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#169

Post by mikeegg1 »

rml wrote: post #124

This is a very good feature/workflow based intro As the years go by one realizes that even these “features” like Org, Dired, etc are just illusions in some sense. They’re just Elisp code someone else wrote and put a name on. You can take or leave them or write your own code that changes/advises/customizes them. It’s all up to you. You don’t need a blessed “plugin” architecture, some PM at IntelliJ’s permission etc At…

I used emacs(1) for a while as a development tool. When I went back to system administration, and before and after using emacs(1), I used vi(1).

Re: How I am deeply integrating Emacs

#170

Post by dwohnitmok »

amatecha wrote: post #152
dwohnitmok wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 to…

Right, I get that. That's their opinion, and I was expressing a differing opinion (that's why I said "I think of it a bit differently" lol) I have recorded hundreds of songs using digital audio production software since ~1999. Switching to Logic Pro unlocked the opportunity for me to work WAY more effectively than a shareware tracker software I was using before (and Fruity Loops after that), in fact allowing producti…

> Right, I get that. That's their opinion, and I was expressing a differing opinion (that's why I said "I think of it a bit differently" lol)

That's fair. I was mainly pointing out that "a bit differently" is significantly underselling it. You are basically of the opposite point of view.

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