Bad Emacs Advice • Hacker News Board

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#21

Post by drothlis » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

distantsounds wrote: post #3

so let me get this straight: - read the manual - follow the tutorial - customize it to your liking wow, what enlightening advice! this must be unique to emacs and not _any_other piece of software! once again, all you need to get FP'd on hackernews is to put the word "emacs" in your title. zoom! to the front page!

I suspect it's because so many Emacs tutorials out there cover the same material as the built-in tutorial. And so many pre-packaged Emacs configuration files disable the menu-bar for no good reason other than that's what everyone else seems to be doing.

e.g. "Emacs Prelude", one such configuration or "distribution" of Emacs, used to disable the menu-bar by default as recently as a year ago: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/commit/878cffb

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#22

Post by esclerofilo » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

Naga wrote: post #19

Yuioup wrote: post #2

just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice. I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious!

Hawaiian pizza (cheese, ham and pineapple) is normalized here in Canada. I'm not personally a fan, but I have always had a hard time finding it unusual.

Despite the name, it originated in Canada, you'd expect it to be normal there.

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#23

Post by rincewind » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #15

toyg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because it was not a thing in Italy, so accepting it was seen as the sign of being out of touch with "real pizza" traditions. Sadly, a natural reaction of disgusted rejection by Italians has been adopted by snobs all over the world. Nowadays you'll find it even in Italy, because tourists demand it and they pay hard cash, so fuck it all anyway.

> it was seen as the sign of being out of touch with "real pizza" traditions. ...by people who don’t know where what they think of as “Italian pizza” actually comes from. Look up “pizza effect.”

I have tried to find the roots of this "pizza effect" myth, but all I could find is somebody making a point about mindfulness meditation and yoga, and I am not even sure how it holds up WRT yoga, because Indian yogis who do not-Western yoga are still a thing.

WRT pizza, it's clearly false. Pizza was a thing in Italy before World War II and it spread through Europe from Italy, not from the USA. You can trace the history of many pizzerias in Italy back far further than the "pizza effect" would have you believe, so you can easily de-bunk it by going to the web site of a pizza place in Napoli.

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#24

Post by mickeyp » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

drothlis wrote: post #18

Years ago I wrote the Emacs tutorial I wish had existed when I was learning Emacs: https://david.rothlis.net/emacs/tutorial.html It follows a similar philosophy as the OP: Start by reading Emacs's built-in tutorial, and then my tutorial shows you how to leverage the built-in help system to figure out how to achieve what you want to do.

I'm the OP. That's a nice tutorial, and I agree with your sentiment that you should build on Emacs's ability to query it to figure out what to do. That's the main focus of my book, too, for the exact same reason.

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#25

Post by _jal » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

prussian wrote: post #12

toyg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because it was not a thing in Italy, so accepting it was seen as the sign of being out of touch with "real pizza" traditions. Sadly, a natural reaction of disgusted rejection by Italians has been adopted by snobs all over the world. Nowadays you'll find it even in Italy, because tourists demand it and they pay hard cash, so fuck it all anyway.

>It's because it was not a thing in Italy I'm pretty sure even Tomatoes weren't. I hope this isn't the reason for the disdain.

I'm fine with disdain. If pizza were French, there'd be legislation about it.

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#26

Post by aww_dang » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

Feels like these problems mostly relate to the tech-wizard elitism theme. By all means use the help features and GUI menus if that's what you need. I believe when you run these commands via GUI you also get feedback explaining the equivalent keystroke sequence.

Reminds me of the old days of IRC posturing, newbie bashing and RTFMing. Today most info can be obtained by a well crafted search query.

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#27

Post by mickeyp » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

Yuioup wrote: post #2

just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice. I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious!

OP here. I just like funny quips; it's just there to break up my rambling monologuing :-)

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#28

Post by 0xdky » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

Another lesson I learned from almost 2+ decades of using Emacs:

Track your customizations in a version control. Using customize package and reading the diff in dot Emacs file has taught me quite a bit about certain aspects of the package.

Side note: It would be awesome if Emacs could do the versioning as part of saving the customizations - build Emacs with libgit2 and make it a native git client.

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#29

Post by ycombinete » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #6

Yuioup wrote: post #2

just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice. I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious!

It's because it was not a thing in Italy, so accepting it was seen as the sign of being out of touch with "real pizza" traditions. Sadly, a natural reaction of disgusted rejection by Italians has been adopted by snobs all over the world. Nowadays you'll find it even in Italy, because tourists demand it and they pay hard cash, so fuck it all anyway.

Also some of us just find the taste of things like pineapple on pizza and burgers, or maple syrup with bacon etc. disgusting

Re: Bad Emacs Advice

#30

Post by ravi-delia » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 3:00 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #6

Yuioup wrote: post #2

just like pizza with pineapple, people do occasionally give out downright bad advice. I really don't understand this pineapple on pizza meme. I think it's delicious!

It's because it was not a thing in Italy, so accepting it was seen as the sign of being out of touch with "real pizza" traditions. Sadly, a natural reaction of disgusted rejection by Italians has been adopted by snobs all over the world. Nowadays you'll find it even in Italy, because tourists demand it and they pay hard cash, so fuck it all anyway.

I feel like it's probably because a typical American pizza has savory toppings, and pineapple is unusual in that respect. At least, that's why people around me complain about it. The Italian pizza ship sailed a looong time ago.