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Comment by vilhelm_s | Hacker News Reader

Written in Emacs, so you know it's good! https://imgur.com/G6HXGCw

Ok I was initially going to ask why this book is on archive and posted here. Is it out of copyright? It was only written in 1992?

Anyway, I'm less curious about that now and more curious about the absolute eye blast this emacs picture is. I write short stories and grand adventures in Scrivener. I'm familiar with emacs, I don't use it or vi/m I'm an IDE person but this just.. I have no idea whats going on.

Is this an editor(s) and the author communicating via emacs notation? Like, what are these -

d2 -- editor? it/they/them seem to be making bullet points and spelling corrections. But then, what's PRB? What's ID?

CHK? d0 jrf?

then d2 comes back and does a d2 STOP and d2 START ??

CHK is back but it's CHK AFUD BKG

FRAG shows up

d0 jrf is back .. ok d0 jrf definitely sounds like an editor now

Well at the end here I think I answered my own question and these are various editors but if I'm wrong would love to hear. This looks like an absolute nightmare this is like.. 1 or 2 pages and that book was 624 pages. Also, reee, I bought that book in 2009. wow.

My guess was: drN is notes from "draft N", CHK is things to check, FRAG is a note about a fragment that may be useful but doesn't have a home -- then some compilation software/scripts would pull out various bits at a time for different views.

That's probably a really good call I didn't consider this possibly being one persons TODO: messages. And here I am just TODOing everything.. huh. Do any of you do verbose/specific TODOs like this? I can't really think of what I'd make the topic. I use a TODO plugin that highlights TODO and FIXME but honestly only use TODO..

https://github.com/Gruntfuggly/todo-tree

edit: I'm reading comments posted above I had no idea that Vernor Vinge was a professor of math and compsci at sdsu. That explains quite a bit.

I just did a bit of a dive into his annotated writings, I'm still like 1% deep but this was on literally page 2 of a page where he describes how he writes (which is in another comment if you're curious) https://i.imgur.com/m2nO2Am.png You're quite accurate

He's talked about the custom format he uses for the text files containing his stories [1]. He has a bunch of text processing tools that help him connect story lines and make notes to himself regarding them.

There's also out there a version of A Fire Upon the Deep that includes at least some of his annotations. I'll update with a link when I find it again.

Check out this thread [2] right here - it has a link to the annotated version on archive.org, and the discussion includes references to scripts to format it more nicely.

[1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872593

Thanks for these links this is fascinating.

I'm going through his archived file on this Hugo and Nebula Anthology 1993 which contains his annotated A Fire Upon the Deep - https://archive.org/details/hugo_nebula_1993

So far I'm only at his intro.rtf file - it's a weird mixture of .rtf and .txts I'm not sure the rhyme or reason yet.

Regardless the intro.rtf first page is this which does a little dive into his process https://i.imgur.com/HuhBOAk.png

I wonder if he's absolutely obsessed with Obsidian now or maybe he has an absolutely interesting emacs config.

edit: He just answered all of my questions on page 2.. wow. https://i.imgur.com/m2nO2Am.png

Three-letter abbreviations are quite possibly the initials of reviewers.

In case you miss it I came across his thesaurus https://i.imgur.com/m2nO2Am.png

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