Rakhim Davletkaliyev is back with another Emacs podcast. This episode is mostly about trying to achieve software minimalism and how he leverages Emacs to do that.
Towards the beginning he has an interesting vignette on how Emacs and Org mode helped him solve a problem in publishing his cartoon site. As he points out, what seems natural and easy in Emacs would require a kludgy hack to accomplish otherwise. It’s another example of how Davletkaliyev’s assimilation into the Emacs Borg is almost complete. Although he said in the early podcasts that he was just “fooling around” with Emacs and didn’t intend to use it as his main editor, he finds that he is moving more and more of his workflow to it.
Most of this podcast discusses his desire to reduce the complexity of the software he uses and to avoid the gratuitous changes that characterize the majority of today’s software. Emacs, he says, is different in that its UI is basically the same as it’s always been. Sure, there are improvements and some changes have required tweaks to the UI but Emacs has avoided changing things for the sake of a “fresh” user experience. Were a user of an early version of Emacs transported through time to the current age, his Emacs workflows would still (mostly) work as usual.
As part of his search for software simplicity, he’s changed his mind about making lots of customizations to the keybindings in favor of using the defaults. That makes avoiding conflicts easier albeit at the expense of having to retrain his muscle memory.
It’s an interesting talk and worth spending the time to listen to. The podcast is just under 42 minutes so you’ll have to do some scheduling.