If Your Car Were Emacs (2014) | Hacker News Reader

If Your Car Were Emacs (2014)

wiki.c2.com

29 pointsaficionado32 comments

...and would only be available in beige with a triangular steering wheel as RMS wants to encourage people to bring the functionality to free vehicles. You're welcome to fork the vehicle but until then only commercial vehicles have colour choices and round wheels.

I'm wholly in favour of FOSS and what it stands for but I often think RMS does more harm than good. Even when I agree with the point he's trying to make!

I don't get the vi(m) vs emacs war. Vi(m) is a great editor; emacs is a great operating system. Take the best of both worlds and enjoy spacemacs :)

Spacemacs is actually the worst of both worlds...

If you're referring specifically to evil mode I would agree with you (and this is coming from someone who loves and uses both Emacs and Vim regularly). I do enjoy what Spacemacs provides from a configuration and package management standpoint. Maintaining one file is a lot easier than maintaining entire .emacs.d.

Actually, I was talking about the configuration layers, in part: I don't know about you, but I'd like to know what my config is doing, dammit. Yes, my init.el is pretty long, but I know exactly what it's doing.

That's not really the worst of both worlds though, it's a spacemacs issue that neither emacs or vim has.

Well, I was also talking about various other things, but you're right.

So it's not only the worst of both worlds, it also has problems unto itself.

(I'm not kidding! My xinit is exec emacs :)

I'm half-considering writing an ultra-lightweight Wayland compositor that largely gets out of my way and makes it easy to launch spacemacs and Chromium, because between those, I can do basically everything I use a computer for.

Actually, there are cars like Emacs.

Their steering wheels look like this: https://www.google.se/search?q=F1+car+steering+wheel&&tbm=is...

Those are single function buttons. To be like emacs you'd have to press at least six of them at once to do something.

Don't forget pedals.

Some wheels have multi function rotary switches (Mercedes for example). You use buttons to control what rotary buttons do. And rotary switches can be used to control how gas or breaking pedals behave, so there are all kinds of Emacsy Meta happening.

Here's a link for people who don't want to run so much JS just to view a bulleted list of text

https://archive.fo/VgNuv

Yeah. With all respect to Ward and his federated wiki thing, using a webapp-ish thing for this is just plain awful.

"...a steering wheel you could move to the passenger side, for those trips to Canada"

Does someone really believe that we drive on the left-hand side of the road in Canada? Someone is really messed up in their geography.

From the article:

"Why would you want to do this? For countries that drive on the other side of the road. Like Canada. But, oops: they drive on the same side of the road, not the other side, so we see humorous bit #1: feigned American ignorance of Canada. But oops, again: assuming a left-side steering wheel is an AmericanCulturalAssumption - you might really want to change the side it's on if you're British and you're driving to Canada. That's humorous bit #2: we've caught the picky people in an unwarranted assumption (and a USAian one, at that!). Humorous bit #3 is the sheer unlikelihood of a British (or Japanese/Australian/Indian) person driving to Canada, after all.

That's the explanation. But it doesn't make the joke any funnier."

Perhaps it is implying that driving to Canada takes a long time and you would want to easily switch responsibility of driving with your passenger?

Like Canada was all by themselves in the 1900s?

They started out with French speaking parts driving on the right, English parts the left - until the 20s or 30s.

I do have Emacs for a car and I call it my bicycle.

wouldn't that be Vi?

No, I can tune my bike to fit me, rather than having to adapt to the bike.

well I guess I can tune my bike to fit me too, within limits. This principle of limitations is why I can't tune my wife's tiny bike to fit me ( without cutting metal and welding it together again I guess)

Also interesting:

http://wiki.c2.com/?IfYourCarWereVim

It would be so cool to interact with a car with a grammar instead of pointing and grunting. Drive two blocks to the roundabout, take the third exit, drive 2 km. It is a strange inversion that so many people sit in cars being given vi-like movement instructions by a computer.

> The first time you actually sit in the car, you have to ask a friend how to get out again...

I remember that day!

As a vim user, I've never understood this. Does no novice pondering how to exit vim ever try ^C (which seems perfectly natural), which outputs:

  Type  :quit<Enter>  to exit Vim

… and now you know.

I'll admit that not much else is discoverable, until you start learning to peruse :help and Google.

You're not the only one[1] to express this though.

How you're supposed to discover ^X^C in emacs, though, I truly have no idea. See also ed, and if you've not see it, Ed man! !man ed[2].

[1]: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/435555976687923200?la...

[2]: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

Sure, now, but back in the dark ages of 1992, basically nobody at my university had heard of vim, so we just got vi, which didn't have such a helpful prompt. After entering vi, I spent about 15 minutes alternately trying to do anything useful and cursing at it until a helpful grad student next to me pointed me at emacs. When I fired up emacs, by contrast, it had a helpful message telling me to type C-h t, which ran me through a nice little tutorial on how to use it, including C-x C-c to exit.

Coming from Windows, ctrl+c to exit a program wasn't all that common (cli wasn't all that common for the most part). alt-f4 was the way to go if using the keyboard, so ctrl+c wasn't baked into muscle memory.

Also, if people first tried vi rather than vim... does vi have that help text?

Another confusing one when starting out was entering the 'help' area by accident. "How do I get back out? Argh! So arcane!". I'm quite happy with vim now, but there was definitely a learning curve.

Years ago, I'd only use terminal-based editors when I had to fix XF86Config or xorg.conf.

Nano shows you a bunch of keybindings at the bottom of the screen. I once used vi and exited by toggling the power switch.

I just see a loading gif...

All I see there is a rotating "loading" animation. Is it supposed to take a very long time to load?

i think that might be the joke?

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