mjhoy

Perhaps it is hard to discover how to, but I was about to post here and say one of the best things about nix is how easy it is to hack and add packages. It does require a bit of learning about how it works, but once you do the whole system is quite understandable. It's also very easy to test out things locally, overriding and extending the nix package collection. It is fairly straightforward to set up, build and install your own local projects as nix packages. Even I -- a mere web developer, who mostly uses OS X -- got a package definition merged into the main repository, it was that simple.

One series of blog posts that is good in this regard is the Nix pill series: http://lethalman.blogspot.com/2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you-sho...

I use it with both fastmail and gmail accounts.

If I wasn't using org, I don't think I would find it that useful. I'm not really a power user of mu4e. I don't have any complicated email workflows. I like that the search is very fast (for me, anyway -- I only have 100k emails), and, obviously, that my email is stored locally. I like that I can compose in Emacs. I also use two computers and I like that I can easily share configuration. My config, which doesn't do anything too fancy, is here: https://github.com/mjhoy/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs.d/lisp/i...

I manage all of my email now in `mu4e`. I manage all of my notes, writing, TODOs, time tracking, invoicing in `org-mode`. For interacting with git, `magit` is simply amazing.

The most important thing is how everything works together. There is the obvious window, frame and buffer management, the kill ring, the searching across all open buffers. Less obvious is that while looking at email I can hit a few keys to create a TODO, schedule it for a particular date that will show up in my agenda, and will link back to that same email (which I can now move out of my inbox). Or, in my programming notes file, I can link to a specific commit for a project I'd like to come back to later.

And, the best part, which I've only barely scratched the surface of: everything is programmable. I can write an emacs lisp function to automate almost any part of my workflow.

A bunch of (mjhoy/require-package 'package-name) are run on init, and if the package isn't present it's installed. This has worked pretty well for me for keeping my mac and my linux emacs in sync.

Look into use-package for a lot more control over how packages are loaded, as mentioned in another comment.

> The actual suitability of this kind of planet to support water and Earth-like life is a matter of intense but mostly theoretical debate. Major concerns that count against the presence of life are related to the closeness of the star. For example gravitational forces probably lock the same side of the planet in perpetual daylight, while the other side is in perpetual night. The planet's atmosphere might also slowly be evaporating or have more complex chemistry than Earth’s due to stronger ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, especially during the first billion years of the star’s life. However, none of the arguments has been proven conclusively and they are unlikely to be settled without direct observational evidence and characterisation of the planet’s atmosphere. Similar factors apply to the planets recently found around TRAPPIST-1.

Still. I see that the people who are the most afraid, the most angry, the most surprised that I would trust strangers not to kill me, are the people that watch the most news. They simply do not trust strangers, at all.

The answer, I think, is somewhere in the middle.

Bad things happen, to be sure, and it is good (I think) to stay informed of the news, but it is also good to see how kind, generous and caring most people are, and also how people not of your political, religious, or cultural ilk are not exactly the ignorant or immoral monsters you may have thought.

There have been pests, though: http://www.pressherald.com/2013/07/10/whiteflies-force-backy...

    window.is_prime = function () { return "prime"; }

I recently ran into a funny bug, however, that makes me more sympathetic to your point. In Emacs a version of TRAMP mode (which is used to connect to remote servers or to connect locally as a different user) would try to cleanup itself by deleting some sort of tramp history file after a session. And if the history file didn't exist to begin with (or if a setting disabled it, I'm not sure exactly) someone thought it appropriate to simply open up "/dev/null", throwing away all writes to the file -- OK, makes sense so far.

But in TRAMP I often connect as root to my own machine -- it makes it easy to edit files as root, or run a shell in root. And as root you have the power to delete /dev/null! So, TRAMP would delete it without my knowledge... what's odd is that it quickly gets created again (perhaps by Emacs) so that it appears to exist, except that suddenly a) it's a regular file and b) it's owned as root without world write/read permission, so that suddenly all sorts of things start to fail because they can't open /dev/null. Fun.

edit: And there's nothing wrong with key bindings being 30 years old, Vim for instance has an incredibly efficient interface. Also, I find knowing basic emacs bindings quite useful around the OS X interface (many of them work).

- Chronicles Vol 1, Bob Dylan. Inspiring, I felt very open to the world after. I loved his descriptions of Dave Van Ronk: "No puppet strings on him ever. He was big, sky high, and I looked up to him. He came from the land of giants."

- Peregrine, J.A. Baker. Intense, spiritual, like some sort of modern Moby Dick, but sparse, focused, elemental.

Next year I hope to read more Roberto Bolaño and start Elena Ferrante.

http://www.oyez.org/cases/2010-2019/2014/2014_14_556

Mary Bonauto argued it perfectly, I thought.

I have not seen any, my guess is no! Sometimes I think Monty Python comes close.