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Xah writes some of the most readable guides and doc I've found anywhere. Specifically, readable in the sense that meaning is efficiently conveyed. In technical contexts it's clear nothing else matters to him. He also isn't reluctant to speak his mind about ... well, just about anything, for better or worse. Usually better, I think, even when it's wordvomit, seeing someone else willing to talk about or criticize something reinforces it however subtly as 'something some people do' and something you may in turn be more likely to do yourself. Which is a net good.

I refer to him regularly, especially when translating ideas to people who aren't in the computer jargon 'orbit'.

The extremes his opinions (and overall style) sit at also force or at least nudge others to think about and elucidate their own positions, if only to themselves. I think it's intentional, and eat it up. I've noticed a lot of people can't stand him for the exact same reasons which suggests it's working.

As a fair warning to folks who go reading Xah's work:

His style can be somewhat... Esoteric and while not abrasive, controversial in tone on occasion.

He can occasionally sound rather creepy, especially in his occasional discussions of his personal life and/or relationships with others. Nothing terrible, and remember: he's a human like the rest of us.

> he's a human like the rest of us.

Goes on racist rants while on livestream, publishes creepy AF posts about dating, women and sex. Ah, yes. A human. Just like the rest of us.

I did not know about how terribly is that: Famous Programers with Repetitive Strain Injury http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.htm...

Seems that Emacs is no good in excess!

The risk is overstated, many people have used without any issue and there is no control group as well, those programmers might have issues either way, Emacs or not.

  > there is no control group as well

VIM users?

Maybe, now there needs a case for significant differences in pain levels among Emacs vs Vim users.

To be fair, the pain that VIM users feel is not in their digits or wrists!

:wq

VIM started flirting with giving me RSI issues (mostly : and esc keys; yes, even on capslock. I have small hands) after some years. It's a comparison certainly but not a control.

> esc key

You may use Ctrl-[ instead. What do you mean about capslock? Mapping capslock to esc?

With a modern firmware or maybe software you can map capslock to be escape when tapped and control when held. I hear this is nice for vi, and it’s also nice for emacs since escape can serve as meta.

I’m going to try that with the key left of space, since it feels completely obvious that the thumb is the natural best finger for modifier keys.

I've been using this for years and can say it's very nice.

Caps2esc under Wayland and I think I used to use xcape under x11 though it's been a while. (caps2esc has a configurable framework so you can use that for a different key and it should work nicely for you)

As a heavy VIM user, that combo never made sense to me. ESC is a single pinky or other finger (I personally move my entire left hand forward and out from the elbow, and press ESC with my middle finger). Using Ctrl-[ requires using _two_ weak pinkies.

Also the problem affects the whole the meta group of coders, beyond emacs. Even in the article one of the poor RSI victims explicitly is an avid vi user and emacs hater (John Ousterhout of TCL fame).

Phew.

I used to have bad RSI using emacs, so I enabled evil (vim) mode, got a split keyboard, started lifting weights, and found a job where I could pair program all the time. Sounds extreme, but it eventually healed.

I only have issues now when writing books, since I often set myself a daily word target and that extra load seems to just add to overall strain.

I don't have RSI, but I've felt strains and transient pains from time to time after hyperfocus computering.

For me three things help a lot, to keep things "normal".

1. Avoid typing in the first place (seriously, avoiding the "Repetitive" bit is useful). Lots of typing stuff for me is thinking / revision stuff. So I do that in my head or on paper / whiteboard.

2. Put Ctrl under my thumbs as the lord intended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard so no Emacs Pinky.

3. Use chording for moving around / yank / kill etc. I also use Vim, but separately. Maybe EVIL will give similar results.

But "methods to not need to type" category of stuff is probably the main thing for me.

Also as some others note, "using body and strenghtening it" category of stuff is also fundamental to my, ah, process.

IMHO strain injuries are rooted in mechanical imbalance as much as they are rooted in overuse.

(Edit: added more detail, clarifications.)

I'm an Emacs user and I've struggled with RSI throughout my career. I don't know whether I blame Emacs particularly, but the ctrl-letter chords aren't kind on the wrists.

For me, switching the mouse to my left hand and using split keyboards (I like the Microsoft natural keyboard) has helped a lot.

It's taken about as many years as it took to get bad to get better again. If my wrists start hurting I will take a break and I might use ice on them in the evenings if it gets bad.

If your wrists start hurting get professional help before it gets really bad. I had to try a lot of things before I found improvements and the improvements are really slow. Physiotherapy can help improve things in the short term.

Would I still have RSI if I was a vi user? Probably. I think it is more a personality thing, wanting to finish the job so ignoring your body telling you that you should take a break.

The best thing I ever did for my hands was putting ctrl to the left of the spacebar where alt usually is. I hit it with my left thumb. I never have to contort my wrists. And it works across all programs, not just vim/emacs. Capslock is still using the pinky.

I also switched to Dvorak and put backspace on Capslock, which I think also helped but might be diminishing returns. But I still really like ctrl on alt for my single best ergonomics tweak.

After some ten years of Emacs use, I spent a few hours crafting less insane ways of invoking common functions, to save my wrists.

Later I just stopped typing so much so fast, and even - apostasy - gave up using Emacs altogether.

And so it goes.

Xah Lee’s tips on elisp were super useful to me. A relic of the usenet era (an infamous troll on comp.lang.lisp), but someone who has added a lot of value to a lot of lives

Long love ergomacs!

http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/_p/KickbanXahLeeFromEmacsChan...

He was banned from HN long ago too. Random long-ass thread he started on the Python un back in 2009 about this stuff I had saved an archive of for some reason:

https://www.mail-archive.com/python-list@python.org/msg23603...

He even replies for once further down in typical style complete with a classic

  Also, thanks to many supporters over the past years.
  Truly Your Superior,
    Xah

Like, yeah he is likely somewhere on the spectrum and he has some useful insights and material. But he's also kind of a raging asshole with a chip on his shoulder the size of mountain who would pop into technical groups and dump monologues out of nowhere then vanish, or at most deign to maybe add a bit more odd responses loaded with condescension and victimhood. I'm not sorry there are some colorful people like that around for a variety of reasons. That kind of personality can do neat stuff sometimes, and that he can have his own long running site and put up all his thoughts and opinions and then have entire new generations see and reconsider them down the road regardless of any bans from anywhere else is itself a testament to the promise of the internet and speech. And something I'm happy to point to by people who go ballistic about moderation on social media or the like. You don't have to be trapped by that.

At the same time I completely understand all the bans because holy crap. That kind of rant is enjoyed in strict moderation. Though that so many of us would respond seriously in retrospect is kind of nice too even if the banhammer came down afterwards when it got repetitive. Anyway, random anecdote! On reflection that too is itself part of the fascination around people like this, so many of the rest of us end up with shared recollections and stories to pass down. They become some part of the common lore of communities, the mad sorcerer/wiseman living in the cave up the mountain from the village of old. Often expelled from regular society for good reason, yet still subjects of interest and in some societies even a certain sort of respect.

I don't know if he had a chip on his shoulder. He just talks like a troll on slashdot or an old BBS board, dropping in with a few paragraphs with a fairly strident position, and says anyone who disagrees with him is stupid.

I think people got super upset because he used his real name, he's a minor celebrity, and it wasn't a BBS forum.

I think he did it because it got attention, and he didn't really care about upsetting a few people on an internet forum. I also find it a bit disingenuous when people talk about how evil and deranged he is like they've never ever seen anything a bit strident posted on the internet.

Yes, there's some correlation between internet trolling and socioeconomic tendencies. He might be the kind of guy who takes milk from the work fridge and never tosses a quarter into the tin. But the people who seem most strident about how he's a terrible person are playing the same game as him.

As far as I can tell, one of his bigger controversies were essentially roasting a certain programming community for being smug and elitist (while being smug and elitist himself, along with a lot of swearing and insults). I wonder if the huge amount of offense caused (and taken) was partly because smug and elitist people don't like to be roasted like that, especially by a guy who is mostly famous for writing introduction to emacs tutorials (thus not exactly a technical elite, in a lot of people's eyes).

> He was banned from HN long ago too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xahlee

Does not appear to be banned, just inactive?

He himself says in that thread I posted he was banned in 2009. Maybe he appealed, it was temp, he confused an automatic shadowban and enough people vouched his good elisp stuff that it was undone (was that even a thing at the start?) or he just imagined the whole thing for some other reason. I forgot my account from that time and then browsed for years before remaking a new one, and I can't really remember anymore what moderation was like under pg. Xah's stated reason makes no sense and there is nothing objectionable in his comments but there it is.

>"“Hacker News” website, at http://news.ycombinator.com/, banned me around 2009-02 or earlier."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Anyway, no deep meaning there on my part and this is all kind of a sidetrack from folks who want to talk elisp. it was just seeing the name again after so long made me think back and reflect a bit on how human society remixes old and new as technology changes. A number of communities from the old era can probably think of colorful characters like that, not trolls seemingly but genuinely neurodivergent, not necessarily welcome yet not exactly out of hand rejected either. And with pearls amongst everything else. Also echoes of different civilizations than classic western.

I hadn't heard the name in quite some time, but I distinctly remember similar behavior on other mailing lists. I think it was one of the Omni Group's Mac lists - macosx-talk or -admin or -dev, I can't quite recall.

> Truly Your Superior

I've often wondered why programmers seem to have such big egos. I've come up with a possible explanation:

It is nearly impossible to explain your program to a non-programmer. Therefore you easily get the feeling that you are smart and they are not. You understand something they don't and most of them seem to be incapable of understanding it even if you try your best to explain it.

Programmers aren't the only ones doing intellectual work or that requires some kind of talent or knowledge, making them feel smart. Thus they are not the only ones with big egos (I could think of doctors, artists, musicians, physicists, university lecturers, politicians, celebrities, etc.)

Unless thinking only programmers have a big ego is a result of this big ego :-)

No doubt about the others too. But programmers are in a special position I think, because of this:

Programmers solve problems in their head which nobody even knows they are solving. Other people don't even know they are problems.

> an infamous troll on comp.lang.lisp

Are you perhaps confusing him with Erik Naggum, cos there just happens to be a post on HN about Erik right now. And Erik could be something special when a fuse blew!

No, Xah was a troll. He trolled on groups i read, too - comp.lang.java.programmer or comp.lang.python, or both.

I remember him in comp.lang.python (IIRC for a couple of years after 2000).

Erik was also a famous troll on comp.lang.lisp. There were multiple famous trolls on usenet.

> Long love ergomacs!

I recently stumbled over, and started using (and modifying) Xah's "xah-fly-keys" emacs bindings, which are a somewhat more radical implementation of the ideas behind ergoemacs (e.g. use Emacs without any "chording", i.e. without ever having to press two keys at once apart from shift+letter).

[1] https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys

Why not just use Evil, the VIM emulation layer.

> Why not just use Evil, the VIM emulation layer.

To cite Xah [1]:

"xah-fly-keys.el is a modal editing mode for emacs, like vi, but the design of key/command choice is based on command frequency statistics and ease-of-key score. Most frequently used commands have most easy keys."

I can confirm, that the amount of work on the hands is extremely reduced with xah-fly-keys vs. vanilla emacs (depending on where you put the command mode switch), though I have no experience with evil or vi to compare against.

[1] http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/ergoemacs_vi_mode.html

This really disregards the compositional aspect of vims commands

I learned emacs lisp around 15 years ago - his tutorials were essential. The way he remains prolific is amazing.

> an infamous troll on comp.lang.lisp

And on the python mailing lists. The last I recall seeing that name was in context of crowd funding after going through some tough times. It was quite sad. Hope things are better now.

His Elisp tutorials were (and still are) invaluable to me for familiarizing myself with Emacs.

By all appearances Xah is such an extreme personality. It's this (and websites like this) which made the internet awesome.

He's an eccentric antisocial gadfly who write lots of interesting opinionated stuff about esoteric philosophical, technical, political, and emacsual topics that I enjoy reading about, can't find any where else, and a lot of which I agree with.

I'm fond and respectful of his work, but he will never convince me that Emacs Visual Line Mode a not an Evil Tool of Satan sent to suck our Precious Bodily Fluids by breaking our Beloved Keyboard Macros and Trusty Type-Ahead. But I do love it that he cares so much, no matter that he's on the side of Evil.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28187525

I'm glad Xah Lee is still around, and seems to be doing well.

(Protip: his Unicode search pages are very useful, I use them all the time: http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_index.html)

I can't comment on Xah's web page so I'll comment here about this photo of Richard Stallman at MIT dancing:

http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/Richard_Stallman_at_MIT_dancin...

Xah asked: is this image fake? ErgoEmacs asked: it'd be interesting to know what he's holding.

That's definitely real! It's RMS, distinctly recognizable by his prancing pose. He tends to just prance in place like that all the time, while swirling his hair with his fingers.

It looks like he's in Building NE43 (545 tech square) probably on the 9th floor in the machine room of the MIT AI Lab where he slept, holding the hand of Rodney Brooks' robot "COG" in his right hand.

MIT Robot Cog Moving Its Arms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWjWzDzfLBo

MIT's Cog (1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbZ9_rUZZMA

Here is RMS a few years later, with a little more beard, holding a gerbil wrapped in duct tape:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerb...

From COG's point of view, here's a photo of Henry Minsky taken from COG's video camera, with a look of trepidation about sacrificing his Dakin Bear to make s "plush" robot:

https://imgur.com/gallery/Rt43H

His political views are, how to say it politely, interesting.

This guy is unhinged in like the best of ways. First found out about him on /g/

http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/mi_pixra/mi_lunbe...

A NSFW flag would have been nice :P

Oh, is he better now?

(I don't see the plea for help on his home page)

If so, good to hear!

Xah deserves more attention and help. Is he still unemployed?

Someone should help him find a job if possible.

People like him need basic income, the rent paid and a social worker. Nothing else works.

On http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/freebooks.html a little over halfway down the page, it says:

> OpenBSD is famous for its extra concern on “security”. (the entire “security” problems in today's computing industry is a egregious insult to how things should be. Security problems are in fact created and fermented by the unix community. If unix did not exist, the computing world would harbor a lot less of hackers.)

That's a bold claim. That can't be factually true. Can it?

Unix propagates memory-unsafe languages (c), as well as inefficient and inexpressive IPC mechanisms (pipes or shmem) which lead to monolithic programs where there is only one key to the whole kingdom.

POV-Ray <3 Been a while since I used that. I think it's a shame that they stopped developing it. They say things are better, but are they really? The scripting language for it is really cool IMHO.

POV-Ray has a special place in my heart. For the vast majority of artistic tasks, Blender is a hugely superior environment that will produce better images, faster. And you can generate meshes to import into Blender with OpenSCAD if you really like CSG. It doesn't have the precision of raytracing the mathematical specification directly, but you don't really need that ever.

However, for certain very narrow categories of things, it's probably still the lowest-impedance tool for the job. Want to make a website that shows a static image of the current cloud cover + illumination of the Earth, updated every minute? Want to make some geometrical visualizations for a math textbook? Want to experiment with extremely weird and exotic camera projections? POV-Ray!

I really like the scattering media, and the mathematical figures you can do with it, such as 3D Julia fractals and noise patters to model really rough "stony" surfaces that aren't just bump maps. On top of that I don't think I've found a better way to generate various patterns and textures, even for simple 2D work. It's just such a versatile set of tools you almost wouldn't believe it's free! And the fact that it's entirely scripted (unless wysiwyg megapov etc) just makes it better IMHO. It's a scripting-first modelling language, and I really, really like that. With that comes things such as inverse kinematics and gravity (for animations) without having to learn specialized GUIs or buy expensive software.

Not related to this, but since we're talking trolls... I noticed that n-gate.com hasn't been updated in more than half a year.

I always enjoyed reading their over the top critiques of HN posts... anyone know if they're okay and maybe just burnt out -- or that something else is going on?

Apparently they are not dead.[0] They posted this a bit after their last update on their website. But yeah, probably got tired of doing an update every week.

[0]https://twitter.com/webshitweekly/status/1450563491069247489

Great! And understandable... it's a miracle the site kept going as long as it did.

Perhaps now that you've violated the Prime Directive, he'll re-appear.

I think he just got bored with saying the same things over and over again. The point was made, and so on.

Xah has contributed more to my workday well being than almost any other blogger. Love his tutorials.

Xah Lee always has really cool stuff on their blog. One of those rare Internet gold mines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com