How I Am Deeply Integrating Emacs

A lot of people hate that, they want a tool that has all relevant to their tasks front and center, all irrelevant invisible or nonexistent, and zero options to tinker with. It should just work, and preferably never change.

A middle ground are the browsers that just work out of the box, but can be heavily customized by extensions. MS Office is another example.

Don't waste my time with 70s "ergonomics" (if it can even be called that)

The comparisons with art seem almost to the point of offense to me. You're not building art, you're just building another yet plugin for emacs to do what other people do in maybe 5% less efficient ways but won't spend 2 days automating it

For someone not good with the keyboard, it's probably a nightmare. I suppose it's good for power users and terrible for casual users, and I don't know if there's any way to really build one user interface that works equally well for both, it's usually a compromise.

The next best thing I love about Emacs is that I can do anything conceivable with code. This one is an even larger gap between power users and casual users.

I think tools like that are just fated to only attract a select few.

I still can't believe we have IRC for grandma (slack) but not emacs for grandma.

People get tied up in the program-ability of it but it's UI and the concept of jettising both the desktop and tty paradigms.

I have a hope for the Common Lisp based Lem. All we need is to coordinate enough signal for potential users to feel it's the right time for their actions. Go star Lem https://github.com/lem-project/lem

I feel the same way about org mode. Nice. Can I use it on a team? Get real. I'd like more embedded data functionality in markdown. It's not XML, and that's good. Org is just weird. AFAIK it's still trying to figure out inline data embedding, so the embedding isn't even that strong. Doing something like exporting with a CSS class around a specific word probably uses some awkward literal syntax instead.

There are consequences to the monastic culture around Emacs. It's really good at holding itself in place. If you don't buy that tradeoff, you need to keep shopping.

Step 2. People complain that it's bloated, that they don't want 99% of the optional features in the editor, and that the codebase is a nightmare to maintain.

Step 3. A thousand more editors are created.

At first, it is also a good practice not to install any package, and use the built-in capabilities (`magit` and `org-mode` are now part of the default installation) for a while, the time to discover what comes with the "factory defaults".

Also, for some inspirations, watching videos from `System Crafters, Howard Abrams, Emacs Rocks` to see how some people use it.

It can take a while to get used to everything, or to install packages and customize it to what other editors comes with by default, but the reward is worth.

Personally, I am using Emacs for everything related to plain text files. I have benefited at previous jobs massively from already having solved some issues on my own time.

It took me about 2 weeks to get productive at first (this was in 2018), and now I use Emacs every day for a wide variety of tasks (programming and notes, mostly).

I've tried both Spacemacs and Doom (and others like Witchmacs and Bedrock) and now I'm just using my own 800 line init.el (which does include comments and whitespace so the actual LOC will be lower) and 110 line custom.el (if you set the custom file to a different file than your init then using customize to change settings won't mess things up if you manually edit your init).

If you really like Doom you can try reading its code base, if it's just too much then maybe it would be better to try setting up your own configuration from scratch.

I've since switched to Vanilla and I've been using ChatGPT to gradually explain and help me integrate the Doom features that I like, so that I end up with a similar base that I actually understand and which I can deviate from where I want to.

But ultimately it's all about tradeoffs and what works for you. You don't necessarily need to go beyond your distro, but if you want to or need to, then that's a good sign to try it

Trust me, move to Google Docs.

This is simply a whole larger and easier universe compared to anything Org-mode will ever evolve to be. Its also backed up online, pictures are embedded in the document itself. And several other features come out of the box. You also don't have spend years learning to use it, and can get productive from minute 1.

I would say use both. You can run multiple emacs configurations, and you could have your vanilla config which you slowly build as well as Doom/spacemacs where you can see what is possible.

If you use vanilla emacs without customization, you are going to have a very basic text editor experience. That is fine if you understand that, and understand that you'll need to start adding your own customizations (like enabling eglot for LSP, and company-mode for code completions, etc) in order to get to an experience closer to what you'd get out of the box in an IDE like vscode.

Some people might see vanilla emacs, assume emacs is just a plain text editor, and go back to their fancy IDEs. For them, distros like doom/space would be good for avoiding that initial shock/disappointment.

Another great use for doom/space is to see what is possible. Figure out what bits you like, and then figure out how to enable them in your own vanilla-based config. Essentially window-shopping for your own emacs config.

But in the end, I'd recommend you eventually get to the state I am in: I started with a completely vanilla emacs and then slowly added the bits that I wanted. That way I have only what I want, and nothing that I don't want. I don't get surprised by unexpected features. My breakages are fewer because I use so few packages. My load times are great because I am not loading a bunch of stuff I don't use. I understand everything that is enabled in my config.

You also might want to check out emacs-solo. It's a config that is built based entirely on built-in packages rather than 3rd party packages. I still use some 3rd-party packages like company-mode but it is good to see just how far you can go with the built-in stuff (for example, you probably don't need projectile, you can use the built-in project.el, and you probably don't need lsp-mode, you can use the built-in eglot): https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-solo

Vim is the magic that lets me use all of those for what I want without having to change muscle memory, and Doom just happens to aligns with my needs perfectly on that regard.

I think anyone trying to master Emacs within the lines of this article will be trying to bend it to their particular needs and likely will be annoyed at any opinionated configuration.

The answer to your question will depend if you want to add community extensions beyond what Doom integrates or if you want to personalize Emacs by yourself. The latter will work just fine with leader keys as long as you map them, all Elisp should be still available in pretty much the same way. The former will probably be much harder.

This was my aha! moment where I actually watched someone install and use packages and was like oooh yes, this is both nice and will actually be very helpful. And I have been using emacs since 1998! I find most package pages tell you a lot about the how, but very little about the why on you would want to use them.

I really want to make my web apps as accessible as possible for the blind.

Could you tell me what are the worst and best practices in this regard?

Any article you recommend?

And how could I test accessibility of my web apps, for the blind? Perhaps try to navigate it with screen reader and keyboard only?

A really good guitar is easy to miss notes on. Precisely because good guitarists don't typically miss.

Now, I think you could reword a little bit. The best performers know their tools very well. So well, that they often "just disappear" for them. This does require some level of quality in the tool. But requires a ton of effort from the performer, too.

"If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution."

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.

E.g., quick high-level examples: Photograph invented led to Impressionism, Andy Warhol's entire oeuvre. Today one of the most talked about artists is Beeple (technology-forward in distribution medium, tooling, and even practice techniques [e.g., "dailies"]).

Music is probably where this is the most profound, take the trajectories of Miles Davis and the Beatles, both started their career with a fledgling recording industry, ended it record in sophisticated studios using instruments and studio techniques that didn't exist a mere 5-10 years earlier.

In electronic music this is even more pronounced, e.g., Native Instrument's Massive synth facilitating dubstep is a nice clean example, but if you've followed electronic music overall the connection is obvious. E.g., what dates most pre-2000s era music is that today musicians use DAWs whereas before it was less powerful hardware devices that had a more specific sound (and other arrangement and composition limitations).

This actually feeds into one of the points you made: Being successful at art (or anything really) has a lot to do with how excited and motivated you are to pursue it. It's easier to be excited if you feel like you're exploring new territory, ripe with untapped potential, and that's historically often been unlocked by technology. Whereas if you keep comparing your solos to John Coltrane when you're learning the saxophone, that's going to be demoralizing and you'll feel like you'll never get there so why bother trying. There's also diminishing returns, e.g., that music territory has been so thoroughly explored now, so the ROI on developing that specific skill (playing jazz at that level) has been reduced, because so much of that artistic space has already been explored.

If you tie that all back to the art itself, I'd assume today that we already have saxophone soloist who are more technically skilled than John Coltrane, e.g., the music theory is better understood, and we've had decades of iteration to improve practice techniques (there are tons of books and studies on this subject now). But you can't replicate the sheer excitement that those musicians must have felt as they unlocked new music possibilities by iterating on music theory (a form of technology), and recording as a new medium to share and learn from.

To be clear, most of what you've said I'd agree with, but I'd add more nuance like: Leverage technology to make the act of creation as exciting for you as possible, but the main goal of the excitement is to keep yourself practicing and improving. And also look for untapped potential (e.g., a specific example that's relevant today, I think GPU-based rendering is still under-explored today Beeple has been able to leverage this in his art, but I think the big barrier of entry [probably ~$10,000+ for hardware/software over the course of a career] means there's untapped potential there.

E.g., Daft Punk on well-tread territory due to the accessibility of technology https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/9277-the-yea...:

> Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, which is great. But on the other hand, when everybody has the ability to make magic, it's like there's no more magic—if the audience can just do it themselves, why are they going to bother?

I think the point of the author in your quoted text is that you want to avoid the tools getting in your way. If you're a writer, you become successful by writing good stuff. That's harder to do if your OS crashes and you have to click through a bunch of menus while you're writing. That's the reason so many bloggers adopted markdown 10-15 years ago - writing in plain text meant the tools got out of their way. It's not about the tools making you more productive, it's about using tools that don't make you less productive.

I tried to do something similar on my iPhone, but couldn't get a reliable (or any) way to get an rsync script running.

I ended up with pen and paper though, which is best for me all things considered.

My solution is a twilio text number that automatically inserts any texts it receives into the top of my todo.md file. Previously todo.org, until about a year ago.

iOS has ubiquitous support to quickly share to SMS from any/everywhere. It’s easy to send a text to this contact from a Home Screen shortcut, but also also from the share sheet in most every app.

With that requirement going away, I left Emacs behind.