Get things done with Emacs
labri.fr
labri.fr
I'm always impressed with Emacs users that are capable of such discipline. I've use Emacs well over forty years, with only a few years of interruption, but I have never had a stable or well organized configuration. It's inspirational to see other's use of Emacs.
I'm disorganized, and I'm a hoarder (right now, my bedroom has at least 100 books stacked on the floor in different piles). Like my fluid Emacs configuration, the books are all attractive possibilities of what to read or try out next.
Luckily emacs lets you save a bunch of useful processes and workflows in a VCS that works the same across multiple environments (modulo 15 minutes here and there to resolve major version conflicts)
> Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.
izzit me or is that total garbage? The only information of value is that which you can use, if it's in a book you've never read it's effectively nonexistent. I get text books to stuff them into my cranium, not have them sit around as handy doorstops.
Might as well leave them in the bookshop until you need them. They're just as unread and you have cash in your pocket for other things you actually need.
I say this as an Emacs user who has used org-mode for project planning and task/time management.
I did a short interview with Nicolas not long ago (very short): https://www.syntopikon.com/workflows/nicolas-rougier/
For syncing I use Syncthing.
1: https://git.sr.ht/~djha-skin/dotfiles/tree/main/item/nvim/in...
2: https://git.sr.ht/~djha-skin/dotfiles/tree/main/item/screen2...
The tablet can be used with a bluetooth keyboard if I have to do a lot of typing and have no laptop with me. And thanks to ssh I can reach any of my computers, even ones at home via reverse ssh tunneling.
That process sounds exhausting, after working through it, I think I'd want a nap rather than to go do some actual worthwhile work.
https://easyorgmode.com/blog/a-workflow-for-using-org-mode-w...
I started with GTD a long time ago, I don't even remember what digital tool I used at that time. Then I switched to Todoist, then Wunderlist, then some cli tools like Taskwarrior, then org-mode, then Evernote + various todo apps then Obsidian + org-mode (org-roam is awesome but I need GOOD mobile support) so my GTD is not even a GTD now in it the original sense.
And I still don't see any serious benefits from the process. Sure, tasks are there and I'm aware of them, I look at them and do them. But that's it. For some reason, I expected super productivity from myself while doing all this. I don't see myself productive still. Especially comparing to the author and many other authors of similar posts. I'm pretty sure I could track all those tasks in one Evernote note or Obsidian file or one Org file or even in one piece of paper (no mobile support though) and stay on the same level of productivity I am right now.
My question(s) is. Is there anyone who make notes or track tasks for a more than a year period? How often do you change your workflow? Do you find it all useful and how the tracking helps you now? Was there any time you thanked yourself for doing all this during a long period of time?
p.s. I'm of course not talking about a "project" tasks in Jira or issues on Github. I'm talking about tracking/notting of your life(todos) and thoughts(notes).
I have wondered this about productivity systems and hacks, too. With GTD, the key seems to be to get yourself over the edge of your resistance to get your tasks done. If you fundamentally resist the tasks you think you ought to be doing, GTD will probably not work long-term. For example because you hate some aspect of your job or you’re afraid about the outcomes of your tasks. If you just need a way to organize all the little actionable items because otherwise you lose track of them, GTD might work.
I also wonder if people that we normally see as productive (Nobel prize winners, etc.) need to force themselves to stick to a special GTD system, too, or if for them the resistance is weaker and their tasks end up getting done one way or another.
In any case, Emacs and Vim are great outlets for tinkering with productivity hacks. But the long-term solutions might need to be deeper.
Let me frame it another way. If you did the couch to 5k over the course of a few months and succeeded, is it the app that got you to running consistently or is it the fact that it kickstarted you into momentum. There is no ideal. There's whatever makes you feel like you did good work on the right things today and that momentum for tomorrow seems like you've got the right tools in place to get there and forgive yourself when you fall off the wagon. Don't worry about specifics other than that whatever you engage in seems to give you momentum at a pace you find appropriate.
I really like the agenda view, I'll need to reconsider using Outlook tasks (I'm using a split system between Outlook, emacs, and my corporate bug tracker). The cleaner history tracking +easy ability to add notes/reorganize makes this such a clear progress update. Might try using this as my future workplan update.
The breakouts by people is also interesting. I've not categorized my interactions in this way (I'm also not mentoring anyone directly or managing someone else's work).
Outlook notes are terrible, imo. Switched to using org-mode with org-crypt, and its worked pretty well, except I have an entry that won't decrypt anymore, and I'm not sure what has happened.
However, the main text color is lacking contrast, either the font is too thin or its color too light.
I can read it, but it is borderline uncomfortable.
I don't mind a bit of softened contrast, but in this case, this is a bit too much.
I've hesitated a lot at first, especially since migrating a decade old curated home taxonomy with symlinks, TMSU etc in the middle, it's not so easy nor much automate but in the end it pay back very well since not only add much more flexibility and much more level of indirection than symlinking/TMUS fuse fs queries but also offer the ability to search & filter for much more textual information easily.
Doing so allow integrating essentially anything else.
[1] org-id-get-create then renaming (moving) or copy etc a small set of files and directories to be linked in org-mode notes
edit: Does anyone know if this is some kind of a style framework that's available publicly or authors own doing?
It seems to be of his own authorship, not a framework.
someone put emacs in the browser.
Vim is only slightly slower but so much easier on my hands. Yes, I could get emacs evil or spacemacs or whatever but bolting on modality to an editor that was never meant for it, especially when all the docs basically ignore their existence, is not something I'm interested in. Native vim is just better.
But I do miss that you can configure emacs using lisp.
There is hope, though. I've heard there is a plug-in for neovim that allows you to write configuration files using common lisp.
Both vim and neovim (be it in TUI or GUI form) are faster than Emacs.
Vim and Emacs have different use-cases, philosophies and mechanics. Each has its own pros and cons. There's no point in debating if one has better speed, aesthetics or popularity. I suggest we stop this nonsensical debate of Vim vs. Emacs and instead focus on their strength.
What people very often miss is that both Vim and Emacs are absolutely free. Free to use, free to copy, free to change. And that freedom is worth protecting and worth fighting for. Because no matter how MSFT, JetBrains, et al. paint it - VSCode and IntelliJ are not free products. And not just the money at stake here - the entire ideology and the idea of being a hacker with control over computational power and the tools is something worth protecting. I (just like many others) am so fed up with proprietary services and corporations taking your data hostage. Tired of being locked in and losing control over my data; tired of the status quo, of that infamous: "people don't know what they want..."
I chose Vim & Emacs not because they are technologically superior to VSCode or IntelliJ (even though they are), but because I've seen the other side. I've used Jetbrains' products for many years. I loved them, blindly. Do you know what grants you a huge amount of satisfaction? Not when you see that bug ticket you filed in 2008 gets finally fixed in IntelliJ, fourteen years later (by that time you're already forced to learn how to avoid the workflow leading to that bug).
Satisfaction is what you feel when you learn Emacs to the point that even though you know there's a bug, you've accumulated enough knowledge to sit down and figure out a workaround for it, writing fifty lines of Lisp. That's freedom. That's being a programmer. Choosing to pay for a proprietary product and ecosystem (because it has emojis and pizzzaz) is like jumping into a slow melting pot; willingly checking-in into a mental prison.
Vim vs. Emacs debates these days remind me of a story I read about an F-16 pilot and an A-10 Warthog pilot sitting in a bar, debating the merits of their respective planes. At one point the F-16 pilot said something like "Come on, you have to admit that an F-16 with AIM-9 Sidewinders on its pylons is pretty badass!"
The Warthog pilot just smiled. "Do you know what the pylons on my 'Hog are meant to carry?" he said. "F-16s."
I've long considered Emacs to be the Warthog of editors: big, ugly, a little outdated, but absolutely your best friend when it comes to certain big ugly jobs (and nothing else comes close). These days it comes with a pretty decent implementation of much of Vim, so it really is like a Warthog carrying a pair of F-16s. That said, it also has in common with the Warthog that its number is coming up and it is probably soon to be retired permanently because the landscape has evolved out from underneath it.
> What people very often miss is that both Vim and Emacs are absolutely free. Free to use, free to copy, free to change. And that freedom is worth protecting and worth fighting for. Because no matter how MSFT, JetBrains, et al. paint it - VSCode and IntelliJ are not free products. And not just the money at stake here - the entire ideology and the idea of being a hacker with control over computational power and the tools is something worth protecting. I (just like many others) am so fed up with proprietary services and corporations taking your data hostage. Tired of being locked in and losing control over my data; tired of the status quo, of that infamous: "people don't know what they want..."
Most developers use Visual Studio Code. IntelliJ is still largely considered a must for development in Java-family languages. Microsoft and JetBrains are doing something right. It may be the case that people really don't know what they want. Whatever the case, if you work as a professional and do not use the tools that maximize your productivity, you are leaving money on the table.
Do you think so?
Unlike the Warthog, Emacs has also been evolving. Doesn’t LSP close a large part of the gap with IDEs?
This is actually true, but not an issue anymore. Control was near the space bar in the Symbolics keyboard, now it's in a much more comfortable position where it can and should be pressed with the left hand's palm, which is important even if you don't use Emacs. Vi uses control too.
Speed is nice, but it is not the main goal. Getting things done is (no pun intended).
I sometimes try using Evil, but every time I have to stop because my fingers become sore. I guess it's because when using modal editing I slam the keys down. That's because mistypes can be disastrous when compared to Emacs where mistypes just end up as characters in the active buffer.
Frankly, I don't even know what you're talking about. Modality is all over Emacs. It was there even before Evil. Some extensions even use modality completely differently - not like in Vim.
As an avid, hard-die Vimmer, I tend to agree when people say "there's no such thing as Vim-emulation", it's either Vim/Neovim or something half-baked.
But Emacs is an utterly different beast here. Emacs can and does vim better than Vim and Neovim. Anyone who argues differently perhaps has never gotten deep enough in either of those muds.
My friend later did try (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FbnQCNe3YY) to replicate the same thing in Vim.
Of course, it's all subjective - some may like Emacs way, some Vim. But guess what? I'm helping now that friend of mine to learn Doom.
Is this really true? Some notes at https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html indicate it was a different type of strain injury, unrelated to ctrl/meta key:
> In the mid 90s I had bad hand pain, so bad that most of the day I could only type with one finger. The FSF hired typists for me part of the day, and part of the day I tolerated the pain. After a few years I found out that this was due to the hard keys of my keyboard. I switched to a keyboard with lighter key pressure and the problem mostly went away.
> My problem was not carpal tunnel syndrome: I avoid that by keeping my wrists pretty straight as I type. There are several kinds of hand injuries that can be caused by repetitive stress; don't assume you have the one you heard of.
Sadly the ErgoDox doesn't fit my hands so it's uncomfortable to use the thumb clusters. The Kinesis does if I place it very low, but I'd like to retain the rest of my muscle memory for key location.
The next version Emacs 29.0 may get screenshot builtin and a better way to keep the configuration file manageable. See https://planet.emacslife.com
That would be sooo darn nice
So how many VS Code extensions have you written? How many workarounds have you invented to make your workflow more productive?
Do you use VS Code for automation? Does it run any tasks for you?
Can you for example open a page in your browser, send it to VS Code instance and let it collect all the links on that page and show them?
Can VS Code work as a window manager? Email client? Maybe RSS reader?
Do you read PDFs in VS Code and make notes and annotations? What about epubs? djvu maybe?
Do you do project management in VS Code? Is there a way to calculate the number of days between the two dates? Convert that to hours?
Do you test HTTP requests in VS Code? Can you send a request, then feed the results to a Python Script, then based on that - create a SQL query and send it to a DB, then transform the data with Clojure and finally create a table with the final results? Can you do that in VS Code? Because I do something like that in Emacs quite often.
Do you plot sequence diagrams in VS Code? Or do you write math formulas? Do you work with research papers? Does VS Code have support for scientific citations?
What about prose? Do you write plain text in VS Code? I'm typing this in Emacs. I have syntax and spell checkers, integration with Grammarly (I know VS Code can do that one); I have Google translate integration, have dictionaries and thesauri.
What about some advanced version control? Can you change the editor settings depending on what git worktree you're in? Can you select a few files in the directory tree and see the git log pertaining only those? Can you edit the directory tree using regexp-replace or multiple cursors, or do something like "find all the files larger than 3Mbs that were created between two days in March, and rename them all?"
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Whenever anyone claims that they can perfectly do anything that you can do in Emacs, they probably have no idea what you can do in Emacs.