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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

I don't even know what features of Emacs I use. I have mental intents, actions, transformations, things I want to do to text, files, buffers, regions .. my conscious mind has been locked out of the tight-loop, the vicious cycle of a synapses being fired and keys chorded. It's all muscle memory. The perfect coupling of an average biological agent, and a bubbly, baroque piece of antique Lisp technology. Together, battling RSI and worse keyboard layouts, we sculpt scratch buffers to all sorts of works, many of adequate quality, but some exquisite.

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This is poetry.

Yeah, i once gave a emacs introduction in school and people asking me how i do X, Y. I needed to watch my fingers to tell them.. that was a bit confusing ;)

I have this problem with (random alphanumeric) passwords. When I needed to input my password on my phone, I actually had to draw a keyboard on a piece of paper and mime typing it, watching which keys my fingers hit and writing down the character.

But I don't get this with Vim. I think it's because Vim is a kind of composable language, so although you don't actually know at the time what you're doing, if someone were to ask you how you deleted half the line so quickly, you can work it out: "f)dt:". I think this is the reason I have trouble learning Emacs: it's not so obvious how commands are composed. There are some chains like C-h which are, but for the most part it feelings like there are just too many pieces. I've given it a good shot, and I'll probably try again, but it just doesn't feel as easy as "'d' to delete".

I absolutely agree with you on the passwords. When I once accidentally typed my password into the username field, I thought: "...this is what my password looks like? This can't be right."

I remember one password that I had committed to muscle memory. I burned my hand one day cooking, and had to have my hand bandaged up for a week (note to self: don't try grabbing the steel handle of a pan at 450°F without a mitt). I couldn't type my password from muscle memory with my hand bandaged. I even knew the phrase that it was based on, but after many tries, I couldn't reproduce the exact set of upper and lowercase letters and letter substitutions that I had used. I eventually had to give up and change out all of my passwords and SSH keys, because I just couldn't recover my own password without my muscle memory.

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