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How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

murilopereira.com

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Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#71

Post by omaranto »

brokenwallet wrote: post #48
omaranto wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's worth noting that Emacs's built-in way to find files (project-find-file) in a project does not suffer these performance issues. Try it, C-x p f. That is your personal key binding, project-find-file does not seem to have a default key binding. (This, by I which I mean telling people that some built-in command is bound to some key while forgetting that is in my configuration and not by default, has happened to m…

'C-x p f' is a binding for project-find-file in project 0.5.3: https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/project.html Emacs 27 users can upgrade to this, or wait until Emacs 28.

I see, thanks!

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#72

Post by BeetleB »

jcranmer wrote: post #70
BeetleB wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are things listed in the article that one can do in Emacs [0]: - process their email inbox - communicate in chat - navigate the web - write code - prose - Creating a to-do item for something your partner just asked you (while you were concentrated on a task) that will show up automatically on your agenda tomorrow - Converting some text notes you quickly scribbled down into a beautiful PDF via LaTeX, uploading it…

> [0] And many, many do it. I do over half of these things in Emacs (and most of the last item). And very probably, many, many, many more don't . (This is what telemetry is good for--actually telling you how many people use various functionality in your product). Somewhat more than half of my coworkers use emacs for their daily coding, and exactly 0 of them use it for anything other than a programming editor.

And that's fine, and I would not really recommend Emacs to them (although it's OK if they want to use it). Emacs is a very good programming editor, but it's not in that arena that it shines and the alternatives may be as good if not better.

My point is that while I know many, many folks who use Linux only for SW development (at work), it would be silly to view Linux primarily as a SW development environment when it can be used for so much more. And so it is with Emacs. It's like saying "I dropped Linux for Visual Studio." The comparison makes little sense, unless you're talking to the folks who only use Linux for a small thing.

As for telemetry, I can again invoke the Linux analogy. While it would certainly be nice to get an accurate poll of what people use Linux for, I don't think many kernel developers will want to drop multimedia features from it because less than 10% of Linux users use those features (10% is really optimistic!). Emacs is an elisp development environment, and a text environment. Anything that works with these two is within its scope. It's a valid discussion on what should come bundled with Emacs vs off loaded to external packages, but that's not the discussion over here.

(Yes, yes I'm aware that Linus and the kernel folks do often drop features because they believe it's not used often, but those usually are way, way down the tail of the distribution).

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#73

Post by maria_weber23 »

humanistbot wrote: post #4

When I was first getting into programming and computer science as a student, I was so into these kinds of super-customizable rabbit holes. My whole life pretty much centered around the keyboard and terminal. I was all in on knowing everything about the entire stack and making it do whatever it was I wanted. I'd spend hours to save a few keystrokes. That wasn't so much about the productivity trade-off as it was about…

Yup, seconded 100%. I started programming on my own when I was 7 years old with a learning computer for children that supported BASIC. Until I reached work-life, everything centered around exploring everything and digging deep into whatever was interesting...

Then work happened. Right now I just can't stand it anymore. My brain is rebelling against even coding. I am still really good at it and enjoy it, but I realize that I just lack the drive I had. Some people might say that's bad. IT IS NOT. I spent almost 25 years of my life filled with coding. I am done. I want to have other people code things for me and focus on building awesome products instead. This is what drives me now. I don't care about low-level anymore. I don't care about bugs or why this stupid dependency won't work in a deployed environment. I want to ship awesome things to customers and I keep realizing that this is at the core what always drove me. I never coded for the sake of coding. It was always to build something cool, except there was no one else around to do it for me.

This is a very familiar story for many engineering managers I know.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#74

Post by alpaca128 »

oblio wrote: post #11
bjeds wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In no way do I want to come off as rude with this comment, but to me what you are saying is not at all different from "when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting". Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. None of those need to end up in a "rabbit hole". Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but…

Or you can, you know, just use VSCode, have fun coding what you actually want to code and use that spare time: a) learning Spanish to talk to that hot chick/dude b) traveling around the world c) doing whatever else you love to do besides coding

And I would, you know, if VS Code didn't feel slower than some IDEs and wouldn't have the same annoying behaviour, limitations and flaws as many other programs. It's kind of telling that some of the most powerful and flexible editors are decades old. Maybe because they didn't target the widest possible userbase as first priority.

I have fun with customization and it increases enjoyment of the coding part, so why not.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#75

Post by alpaca128 »

oblio wrote: post #26
guenthert wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200h is a lot if you think of Emacs as a tool to turn keystrokes into source code of your current project. I don't think it's a lot if you think of Emacs as a tool to help realize the ideas of your lifetime.

Summarizing: everything you do takes time and this time has an associated opportunity cost. If you can configure another tool in 2-5-10 hours to achieve 90% of the efficiency Emacs gives you and you can use the other 190-195-198 hours to actually realize those "ideas of your lifetime", it is a lot of time spent (and maybe wasted). Also: https://xkcd.com/1205/ + tinkering isn't necessarily productivity. If anything, i…

You take that linked xkcd far too seriously. Life is not about maximising productivity.

We can also save time by not caring about the color of our clothes, getting cheap fast food instead of preparing our own meals and so on, yet in the end most people don't do that because the difference is more than hours of their life.

I got better ergonomics, fewer distractions and higher comfort out of my customisation. Yes, I sunk many hours to get to that point. But on the way I learned many fascinating concepts, bash scripting, a deeper understanding of software and computers and more. Without this kind of tinkering I wouldn't even have started programming in the first place.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#76

Post by legends2k »

bmitc wrote: post #20

Articles like this really trigger the imposter syndrome for me. I just have no patience for these type of things, and seeing others' both ability and patience to power through issues like this one, I just feel like an imposter. But these types of issues are why I've always given up on learning Emacs. When I can just install Visual Studio Code and the Remote - SSH extension and whatever else extension that I want to w…

It isn't as complex as it seems. You can choose to be at any point in the spectrum of yak shaving; keep doing it vs skip it altogether. I did the latter with vanilla Emacs. It works just like a regular GUI text editor e.g. Notepad, gedit, etc. Only when I wanted more power I dropped into customizing my .emacs. I balance myself between doing it often vs not doing it at all.

Doing the above for 5 years I've a decent personal .emacs I take with me in a Git repo. Setting up takes less than 10 mins on any new machine.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#77

Post by justaj »

> TUI Emacs has the terminal emulator (and also commonly tmux) limiting and conflicting with the clipboard, keybindings, colors, and more. None of these limitations are present in GUI Emacs.

Is it me, or is this telling me that the terminal Emacs experience is just severely crippled compared to the GUI one?

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#78

Post by mpereira »

macintux wrote: post #37

It’s a shame that most of the discussion is about the first part of the essay, impressive as the troubleshooting is. His discussion of core values is quite interesting, in that it’s both relatively obvious in retrospect yet something I’ve not given conscious thought to. I’ve certainly thought about programming languages as expressions of intent, and how some attempt to be what I call “kitchen sink” languages, like C+…

I'm glad you persevered through it. Thanks for reading!

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#79

Post by mpereira »

radarsat1 wrote: post #3

I use emacs but tend to just find another way to do things (e.g. grep, & other shell things) when I run into a stumbling block like this; believe it or not, not everyone wants to start debugging their text editor when they run into trouble. Admittedly I wish I would spend a bit of time in emacs internals sometimes just so I could learn to approach similar issues, but it's just never much of a priority when I'm trying…

> TRAMP is pretty great, I wish it would not make a new connection for every network interaction though

Same. One of my wishes for Emacs in "From caching up to getting ahead" is for Tramp improvements.

These days I went back to TUI Emacs via SSH for work.

Re: How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress

#80

Post by mpereira »

brokenwallet wrote: post #55
brokenwallet wrote: post #41

This is a great post showing effective performance analysis. It's worth noting that Emacs's built-in way to find files (project-find-file) in a project does not suffer these performance issues. Try it, C-x p f. * project-find-file doesn't call expand-file-name for all 70k files (each of which involves a network roundtrip). * project-find-file will use "git ls-files" (see project--vc-list-files) rather than find (or e…

Update: I only just saw Part 2 of the post, which is fantastic too. I like how it describes different tools by the different values they prioritise. I agree with the post's thoughts in the tradeoffs involved in Emacs's development.

I'm glad you enjoyed it :)
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