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The Emacsification of Software

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#261

Post by iLemming »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #251
iLemming wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now allow me to explain to you kindly, why you're fucking wrong here. You probably have no idea how difficult it is to write anything meaningful in English. Especially these days. For someone for whom English is not a second or even a third language, it can be an enormously hellacious ordeal. I take pride in my English. I think it's quite possible I would never write so colorfully in any other of the three languages…

> Seriously, I am a solo father with two kids, it's fucking 1:30AM and I'm having to deal with this shit How old are your kids? I ask because unless they're teens or older they need a well-rested dad.

That's beyond the point. We are all someone's father, son, etc. We all have things in life to deal with, priorities to reshuffle, bills to pay, worries to calm down. It simply is bullish and uncivilized to join a forum of professionals and instead of discussing constructively, derail the conversation passive-aggressively, with a single trolling sentence, dragging everyone down into a vain exchange that has zero practical rationale. Come on, don't we all have better things to do?

I do truly appreciate your concern though, thank you for your support. Often, a single sentence with a human touch can remind you how much of our shared humanity we've buried under the noise we've convinced ourselves matters.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#262

Post by zahlman »

edbaskerville wrote: post #35
SoftTalker wrote: post #7

"Personal Software" i.e. programs that one writes for oneself, was the original vision of home computing back in the 1960s. The PC wasn't really anticipated, but the thought was that everyone would have a computer terminal at home, and write programs to do whatever was needed. It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. We're not there yet but with LLMs we're getting cl…

The road not (yet?) taken is the full flowering of the HyperCards, the Visual Basics, the Macromind Directors and Flashes... That is, the idea that a non-expert might create interesting software in an authoring environment with good, well-thought-out building blocks and easy-to-grasp metaphors, shorn of layers of accidental or over-engineered complexity. In this vision software still requires careful logical thinking…

> an authoring environment with good, well-thought-out building blocks and easy-to-grasp metaphors, shorn of layers of accidental or over-engineered complexity.

I strive to make these kinds of tools.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#263

Post by zahlman »

noctuid wrote: post #69

Terrible analogy. Emacs has always had comparably fewer major options for packages compared to other tools, there is often an obvious option based on your needs, and it has never been my experience that people decide to just roll their own versions of everything. The author has clearly never used neovim or now pi. NPM packages in general would have also been a way better example. Edit: Sure there is some small overla…

> or now pi

I have never heard of such an editor, and the name is exquisitely unsearchable. Even if I explicitly try to tell the search engine that I'm looking for a text editor that's a variant of vim, I just get results about using vim on a Raspberry Pi.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#264

Post by zahlman »

noctuid wrote: post #85
tptacek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, your idea here is maybe you can start an Emacs vs. vi fight in the comment threads?

No one mentioned vi, I like neovim just fine, and I'm using pi daily. Nice try though. My only point is that if you want to talk about rewriting everything yourself, NIH, churn, whatever you want to call it, Emacs is absolutely not a great example.

> No one mentioned vi

But you mentioned multiple variants thereof, in the context of a thread about Emacs.

It's highly disingenuous to suppose that this doesn't count.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#265

Post by e40 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #101
e40 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have had the same emacs setup on linux, windows and macos for 15 years. Honestly, it's the best thing in my computing life.

Paralleling Linux and MacOS is pretty simple, but the last time I tried to make the same config work properly in Windows it was a nightmare b/c of the path issues.

I have some conditionalization for windows, but not that much. While I haven't used Windows as a daily driver since Windows 8, I have to use Windows for to maintain a port on Windows, and I use Emacs there and it's fine.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#266

Post by e40 »

johanvts wrote: post #185
tom_ wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever it's worth, I've always only ever used the native Windows build of Emacs, and I've never had any awful problems sharing my config between Windows, Linux and macOS. I'm sure I had to expend at least a bit of effort to make this work initially, but it wasn't enough for the process to stick in my mind, and the ongoing effort doesn't feel like it's added up to much. (I admit it's added up to more than zero t…

The problem is the dependencies, getting hunspell installed and finding the dictionary files for example. I normally only get a new computer every few years and each time stuff like that is a new pain. And dont even start with treesitter, i cant compile anything on windows and always end up using prebuild dlls.

Are you using Cygwin? That's what I've used on Windows since it was available.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#267

Post by iLemming »

shaokind wrote: post #222
iLemming wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure analogies are... well... some made up shit we use, because we have imagination. And the imagination can take you for a spin. I just disagree with why Emacs heavy users are often "blamed" to be obsessed with their tools "needlessly". What does it even mean to desire "as little maintenance as possible"? Okay, let's say I don't use Emacs (which is like I dunno over 90% of existing programmers in the world). W…

I'd like to make some points more explicit about my philosophy. 1. Yes, everything has a maintenance cost. Some choices have less. For instance, electing to choose Todoist instead of org-mode for my todo list means I no longer have to worry about syncing, merge conflicts, or whether the mobile app I've chosen fully conforms to the spec (well, whatever attempt at creating a spec existed at the time). Of course, I am p…

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Re: The Emacsification of Software

#268

Post by cestith »

There’s an old saying in the software industry. When you’re a product manager or business analyst, the hard part is building the application. When you’re a developer, the hard part is knowing the customer’s needs.

I think what we’re seeing quite a bit lately is developers are stepping back a bit from the development themselves because the AI does much of that part. So they’re managing the products for themselves, even when they are the only customer. The best people at doing this are going to be people who really understand what needs to be done, because that’s what the product manager/product owner/business analyst/customer liaison type of role has always been.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#269

Post by noelwelsh »

iLemming wrote: post #259
noelwelsh wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mpvi [1] is the video control part. I have only used it a little bit but it is incredibly good. Control the playback completely from Emacs and quickly make timestamped org notes. I don't know what the other parts are. Curious to learn! [1]: https://github.com/lorniu/mpvi

> what the other parts are Of course I can't explain in detail in a single comment everything I listed, besides, that's just a subset of things I do through Emacs. Sometimes I want to kick off a process in the external terminal - long-lived processes are better handled that way. Kitty has remote protocol. I needed bidirectionally - being able to pipe into and from an arbitrary Emacs buffer to and from the terminal, s…

Amazing! Thank you. I'll be playing with some of this.

Re: The Emacsification of Software

#270

Post by przemub »

maximilianburke wrote: post #236
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…

What would be amazing now would be a way to deploy my own Claude-built utility applications to my phone without having to go through the effort of securing a Mac developer account and going through that whole rigamarole.

In my case, PWA installed via Safari work just fine.
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