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Comment by dxhdr | Hacker News Reader

Try out Doom! You don't have to use evil-mode either if that's not your thing (I don't use it), just disable :editor evil in your init.el.

Personally I kind of view it like having a custom mechanical keyboard. Why not invest some time and money into making your tools more ergonomic and enjoyable? Yeah any keyboard will work, and any text editor will edit documents.

Text-editing aside, magit and org-mode are particularly nice in Emacs. Plus there's just something comforting knowing that Emacs will always be there for me, just the way I set it up.

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> Why not invest some time and money into making your tools more ergonomic and enjoyable?

I did that for many years. After switching from one machine to the next, one operating system to the next, one IDE to the next, everything constantly changing, year after year - I found myself in a job where I had to reinstall the OS and everything on it from scratch, every two weeks, for a year, because... well. Because! By the time that was over, I had given up customizing much of anything at all, and that has been working out all right ever since.

Reinstall every other week. Haven't done that since Windows 98.

Why not keep your config externally available and reuse when setting up again? With Emacs that is easily possible.

That would not have helped much with the jobs where I needed to use some proprietary IDE, or which involved some OS on which Emacs was poorly supported.

(If I had already been an Emacs fan, I suppose I could have found some way to forcibly bodge things together and use my preferred editor regardless: but I'm afraid it's never appealed to me.)

Tangible (e.g. file- or even better text-file-based) configuration helps here—this is less a fault of customization in general and more of opaque configuration systems.

> Why not invest some time and money into making your tools more ergonomic and enjoyable?

Because unless you use just one system daily or even weekly, customizations are nothing an annoyance since it’s unlikely you can clone every customization across every system you use daily.

> since it’s unlikely you can clone every customization across every system you use daily.

But you can, even for physically distinct machines: just package-up your emacs/environment/shell/etc profile into a bash-bunny USB stick, such that the bunny uses its keyboard emulation to type-out and run the commands that load your profile into your current machine.

Not everyone works on the machine they are sitting in front of.

That's why storing your conf in a keyboard input device is so nice, works as long as you can insert your own keyboard. I think I might start doing that, but the systems I remote in to are so different can not be sure emacs/vim is there.

I would recommend a Raspberry Pico as a fake keyboard, it has 2MB of storage. But that all falls apart when you are not allowed your own USB devices...

Right, that's why I said to use a Bash Bunny: it's a USB mass storage stick that can also emulate a USB keyboard (there's a few buttons on the stick to switch modes), so you'd be at the computer, open up a terminal and open the editor for a new bash/emacs config file, then plug-in the stick in keyboard mode and press the start button on the stick and after a few seconds it should have dumped kilobytes of data into the file which you can then save locally and so take your bash/shell/emacs/etc settings with you, even without needing USB mass-storage support (given many companies disable USB mass storage to mitigate data-exfiltration but, of course, need to allow USB mice and keyboards).

Unlike most things in the comments above, I have no clue what you are talking about and highly doubt many people do.

bring your $HOME/.emacs.d around with you, pretty easy :)

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