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

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

#91

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

bjeds wrote: post #6

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…

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…

Oh, I've done both of these: I've given up customising my computing environment, and taken up exercise. It's now something like 25 years since I first installed Slackware off floppy discs, I've been there and no longer regard it as a useful use of my limited time.

The thinking environment of choice of the most productive, smartest person I've ever worked with was .. a notepad. Not Notepad, a physical A4 ruled paper notepad and an ordinary gel pen. The actual development inevitably required some typing, but the thinking process and its associated diagrams, calculations, and scribbles for the kind of maths-heavy work he was excellent at worked best on paper.

(I currently have vscode open .. and actual Visual Studio, and IntelliJ, and notepad++, each with a different set of files open in different languages.)

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

#92

Post by bmitc » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

grzm wrote: post #89

grzm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's great that we have such a variety of editors and IDEs to choose from and find one that meets best meets our individual needs. Over the years I've used BBEdit, TextMate, IntelliJ, and Emacs for development. For the past couple of years it's been switching between the last two. I'm glad you've found VS Code to be a match for you. I've spent time configuring all of them to aid in development. ust like there…

And I'll add that you don't need to limit yourself to just one. I do most of my text editing and development in Emacs, but when I'm working in Java, I'll use IntelliJ. I miss out on some of the key bindings and workflow I'm used to in Emacs, but for me the other features IntelliJ affords me when working with Java are worth it.

I actually prefer to use the de facto IDEs for most languages, only deferring to something like Visual Studio Code or Emacs when those don’t exist.

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

#93

Post by akaralar » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:15 AM UTC

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+…

Exactly my feelings, the first part just shows some good technical skills and flexibility of Emacs but it was the second part that was much more interesting. I too enjoyed the part about values and it gave me some food for thought. I also can tell the author read Sapiens as there are quite a few points that were discussed in the book. Also some of the links in the article are great rabbit holes as well, like the 80000 hours website. A+ writing overall!

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

#94

Post by spiralx » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

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…

This is exactly my journey with tooling. I still customise my environment more than the vast majority of people - and write user scripts and styles for websites I use heavily - but I don't need or want to have every single thing exactly how I envision it.

It made more sense to customise when you had a limited environment you used and never much changed, but what's really changed is I'm twice as old now :)

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

#95

Post by kagevf » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

justaj wrote: post #77

> 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?

sorry for the late reply ...

I have been using emacs for org mode and common lisp coding for about 1 year ... In my (very limited) experience I've noticed these differences:

- TUI can't display images

- Some keystroke combinations are "absorbed" by the terminal so are not available. I believe they are shift+alt key combinations. A little annoying, but not a huge deal-breaker.

... and that's all I've encountered so far.

I don't think TUI is severely crippled compared to the GUI version, but the GUI version is nicer to use.

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

#96

Post by mtrower » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

brandonmenc wrote: post #31

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…

I'm not going to die younger if I don't waste a bunch of time customizing my computer.

Objectives to customizing your computer:

+ Increase productivity (e.g. if value = work x time, and you can't increase available time, then reduce time consumption per unit of work to increase value)

+ Increase comfort during this process

- cost: available time is reduced, which you could have spent working.

Objectives to exercising:

+ Increase lifespan

+ Increase comfort(health) during this lifespan

- cost: available time is reduced, which could have been spent living

Tbh, these look pretty similar to me. In both cases, you're trading off an existing resource gambling that you'll get back more than you put in.

---

As an addendum, there's a right and a wrong way to achieve tradeoff-based objectives.

With exercise/diet, you can certainly do it wrong: latest fad diet that's placebo or maybe even actively harmful to you, latest fad routine that isn't very efficient, overwork and hurt yourself, etc.

If you're "wasting a bunch of time" customizing your computer, I guess you're doing it wrong. Certainly, don't do that.

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

#97

Post by mtrower » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #19

oblio wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly my thoughts. In the context of the posted article, one just installs the Remote - SSH extension and moves on with life.

What do you do when Remote - SSH exhibits unbearably slow behavior?

In the context of the posted article, one simply uses TRAMP (built in!) and moves on with life. The author is dealing with a situation where the "move on with life" tool is behaving pathologically.