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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

More than anything else I'm confused by the positive response this is getting.

* Very few people use Emacs

* Anyone who nevertheless is using Emacs should be willing to read documentation. The only way to learn Emacs is through reading the docs.

* As illustrated, copy-pasting a use-package clause is an easy way to get started with something. The pain point is the alternative ways to set a package up that are distracting.

* This doesn't hit the traditional Emacs stereotypes of crazy keyboard chords, insane customisability or digs at lisp syntax.

Can anyone articulate why there is a group of people who seem to really like this video?

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one time I was in Kyrgyzstan staring down a band of armed marauders with AKs, me holding nothing but my pre-Lenovo Thinkpad. The battery had long since died (it only lasts about 38 minutes) and of course the WiFi doesn't work due to proprietary drivers but I was able to plug in the six-pound AC adapter to the back of a Unimog and after waiting for the 10 minute boot process to complete I quickly typed "C-c b" which is my personal keybind for blimpy. The marauders were so impressed that they gave me a camel and sent me on my way.

So I guess you could say that blimpy saves lives.

I’ve never seen a Unimog reference in the wild before!

What an amazing machine.

Maybe it's not very lightweight but pretty customizable, just like Emacs.

As a long time emacs user, I've definitely felt this sinking my teeth into a novel package and I imagine lots of people have felt the same.

The fact that emacs even has a coherent package story is a testament to people's dedication to making it work. On the surface, it should be impossible; the editor is so configurable that there was no particular guarantee that a coherent family of behaviors would emerge. But the fact that packages and package management not only exist but interoperate with each other speaks volumes to the dedication of the software engineers who made that happen.

> Anyone who nevertheless is using Emacs should be willing to read documentation. The only way to learn Emacs is through reading the docs.

Ah, assuming that's how people learn things these days is our first mistake. ;) Emaxs does have excellent built-in documentation... But in the StackOverflow era, I think a lot of people learn their software by hopping from solution to solution instead of digesting all of the documentation.

> Can anyone articulate why there is a group of people who seem to really like this video?

blimpy

Didn't you see that sharky blimp in the GitHub repo? Or is it a blimpy shark? I find that funny. Also, as transpires elsewhere in this thread, “blimpy” seems to be an alternative spelling of “bloated”. Could be emacs users not taking themselves too seriously for a change. Refreshing!

And the comments here, how everyone's imagination goes off with associations and interpretations? I'm not even sure there is a single consistent explanation for all of this and how it's funny. Maybe it cannot really be explained. Forget reason for a minute, if you can, and just enjoy :)

To me it's just absurdist humour, like Monty Python.

I use Emacs and this video doesn't reflect my experience at all. (I use Doom Emacs, and stuff Just Works.)

I'm with you, I don't get it. Is this an example of the emperor's new clothes where nobody gets it (because it doesn't make sense) but pretends to find it funny because they assume it must be funny if only they understood emacs?

How is that situation not funny? GNU is Not Unix…

> blimpy blimpy blimpy, blimpy blimp'y limpy b. blimpy blimpy blimpy limpy b blimp'y blimpy blimpy blimpy blimpy blimpy (limpy b blimp'y blimpy blimpy) blimpy blimpy limpy b blimpy blimpy blimpy blimpy limpy b blimpy blimpy blimpy limpy b limpy b?

Agreed

It's Neodada.

it's blimpy, actually

Looking for better ways to type blimpy in my document.

I believe it was mocking a redditor that has been spamming /r/emacs with short how to videos with somewhat complicated ways to do super trivial things.

Can you articulate why this isn't funny?

Well... one of the things groups do to bond is they develop memes and in-jokes that are objectively nothing and exist only to show who is in- and out- of the group. One of the signs people are doing that is one word responses like "blimpy". That sort of activity is purposefully low-content because it is supposed to signal group membership and nothing more. Which is what I think this is. That turns up in every group although it can be a bit subtle at times.

But this is a bit weird because this isn't what Emacs users have traditionally bonded over. The traditional stuff is things like https://xkcd.com/378/ leaning on "Emacs does everything and has long key combinations". This is more saying the package manager is bad or something? Which isn't a traditional joke. So either this is a new group of Emacs users I'm not familiar with or there is a good joke here that I've missed.

And I optimistically asked for an explanation of the joke in case it is the latter. Based on the comments in response I think this is a wave of Emacs users I'm not familiar with doing group bonding. Which, fair enough. They do their thing. Although even then the number of people involved seems high and it'd be interesting to know where they are coming from.

I use Emacs casually, but oh dear it can get absurdly complicated for very little payoff. Yak shaving if there ever was. This blimpy plugin/module points it out in a deadpan way. It also reflects on a lot of tech in general. Who hasn’t spent a lot of time messing about with a system for no apparent benefit?

It has little twists too like indirectly bringing vi into it by supporting evil mode, furthering the futility of adding options and configurability to ostensibly “simplify” something. The video points out so many absurdities of IT life through the lens of an editor and its ecosystem.

The joke is that it's overly complicated to do a simple thing in Emacs, and you have to rely on blindly running shakily-trustworthy third-party code to do that thing for you. (I like Emacs very much, I use it every day, but there is a kernel of truth to this and I laughed.)

What’s a (real) example of a simple thing that’s hard to do in emacs?

I mean I think if you compare to, say, VSCode, writing any amount of [Emacs] Lisp to customise anything at all is "hard". I like it! It means I can customise more or less whatever I like, but it's a different universe.

I mean, surely such a thing is harder in VS Code considering you can't really do it.

Definitely a younger crowd. Back in my day if you blindly copied code without reading the documentation thoroughly there is no way that Emacs would be doing anything remotely useful. That was the sort of thing Emacs was mocked for, in fact - you really needed to get in amongst Elisp to customise it and nobody goes out of their way to learn Elisp.

Being able to blindly copy use-package statements has been one of the best parts of the Emacs modernisation effort.

Oh for sure, I agree, and I've blindly imported reams of elisp dependencies myself!

It's also allowed to think up new jokes.

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