Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

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I needed to hear that; articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me. It wouldn't be the first task tracking application I'd be trying.

Right now I use intellij for my main development work; I use some keyboard combinations where applicable (and changed the keymap to Sublime Text because I've used it and its derivatives (vs code mainly) for the better part of my career.

I don't have a dedicated flow for task tracking. Right now for work we use Phabricator, it's a bit awkward because it's a heap of independent modules built on top of each other, but it met our requirements (free, open source, self-hosted, not shit).

For a while I used a todo.txt addon in Sublime Text, which worked great; haven't been able to find a good alternative to it.

Used Wunderlist for a while, but I couldn't find my finished tasks without paying and it's been discontinued. Same with Todoist, minus the discontinued-ness.

Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me; I'm pretty good at typing if I do say so myself (~120wpm according to online tests / typeracer and co), but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim.

I also didn't grow up with *nix systems, commandline only became a thing once I started my education and career ~15 years ago.

> articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me

Lisp is great and you should learn it. (If you want.)

You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect. This approach is also way more fun.

If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp.

> Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me

Honestly, me neither.

At least, not the way they were when I used emacs as my "daily driver." Why? Because the MacBook trackpads are so precise and fast that "using the mouse" is no longer an impediment.

If you ever try to use a pre-2000 mouse and operating system with their horrible (compared to now) tracking and accuracy, the claim that mice slowed a developer down makes total sense. Nowadays? Not so much.

[0] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa14/assets/interprete...

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

> Because the MacBook trackpads are so precise

But you to have to know where to click. And that's the biggest problem with so-called "modern" UIs - it lacks discoverability. Either you memorize all menus and dialogs, or you have to seek out the functionality you need each time you can't remember anything. And sometimes these dialogs change, so you have to rediscover everything once again.

In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys.

> You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect.

One of the main reasons I moved to Emacs (11 years ago) was Common Lisp and SLIME.

> If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp.

A real(world) Lisp is Clojure these days

> In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys.

afaik every modern IDE has this discoverability functionality. I use shift-shift and control-control autocomplete command menus all the time in JetBrains.

> but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim.

In Emacs - you don't have, there are a lot of packages which make the discoverability a breeze - counsel-M-x, helm-M-x for exploring all commands with corresponding shortcuts and also which-key, which allows you to automatically pop up the "next steps" in your current state.

How about having a mental capacity to remember all menus/dialog boxes in your IDE?

> > I am afraid I'm missing something. > You are not

You are missing an entire world treated as text and a consistent and an endlessly configurable interface for everything you can pull into your emacs Borg.

See this comment too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299

Note, many still use emacs for what the GP described and more.

Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO.

There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer.

Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv.

> Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person.

Yeah? I'm not sure how meaningful this argument is here since you can just get by with nano and a terminal.

> Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO.

I frequent the places that the "cultists" would most likely be and the prevailing theme is "if your workflow works, keep it, but emacs could do X for you".

> There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean Emacs wouldn't make them less or more productive.

I don't think I've seen the "you need emacs" strawman your arguing against in practice.

> And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer.

Would those people be more or less productive without emacs? I find answering questions like this for myself difficult, I can't imagine trying to decide others would be better off not using an editor.

Isn't saying lots of people exist that would be more productive without the kind of presumption that annoyed you from the Emacs cult?

> Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv.

Right, which is why I commented what the other user was missing and not "you need this".

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