Irreal

I’ve been using Emacs for over a decade and like all of us, I’m still learning things I didn’t know about it. Still, this really surprised me. Sure, maybe I don’t know about some obscure command or key binding but a modifier key?

At first I thought the person asking the question was simply misinterpreting something. Then I read the first couple of lines of the answer and thought, “Aha! It’s simply someone trying to convince us to use Alt instead of Meta.” But no. It turns out there really is an Alt modifier and it has nothing to do with the Alt key we all have on our keyboards and map to the Meta modifier¹. It’s a completely different modifier that I, at least, had never heard of. It’s an artifact from the days when keyboards had both Alt and Meta keys. It’s seldom used these days but if you need it, the easiest way to specify it is with Ctrl+x @ a.

Perhaps I’m the last Emacs user in the inhabited universe to learn this but just in case I’m not, I’m sharing the information.

There’s a certain type of writer—mostly prose writers, I’d guess, but others too—who don’t want to be distracted by extraneous information from their editor. They don’t want to see the name of the file they’re editing, what line they’re on, or, in Emacs terms, what mode they’re in. They don’t want a mode line or anything else. The metaphor they’re seeking is the blank sheet of paper.

I remember coming across this same idea years ago; so many years ago I was still using WordStar for non-programming editing. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now. Knowledge is power, after all, and I never saw the benefit of unnecessarily doing without it¹.

Needless to say, not everyone agrees. A few years ago, Bastien Guerry showed how to achieve a blank screen in Org mode. Now Pete Corey is doing the same thing in Spacemacs (although his approach will, mutatis mutandis, work with any Emacs configuration) using Olivetti. Corey’s approach isn’t limited to Org mode. He likes the blank screen even when he’s coding so he’s arranged for his mode to be active in text-mode and prog-mode buffers.

Most folks probably wouldn’t want such a setup but if you do, Corey shows how easy it is to obtain it with the help of Olivetti.

I’ve been seeing a lot of references to Christoffer Stjernlöf’s (slightly old) post on Two Wrong about Why You Should Buy Into the Emacs Platform. It seems to me to offer a nice coda to my two posts on ancient editors. It fits in with that discussion because it looks at another reason to spend the time to learn and master Emacs.

The TL;DR is extensibility but that characterization misses the point of what Stjernlöf is saying. His thesis is that Emacs is really a framework for writing text-based tools. That means that it can be—if you like—more than an editor. You can use it to read mail, follow your RSS feed, play music, and all sorts of other things. But even considered as a text editor, the ease with which you can write editing tools is a powerful benefit.

Gosh, that fancy editor over there has this feature called multiple cursors. You don’t have to switch editors or beg maintainers to add the feature to Emacs, you can do it yourself just as Magnar Sveen did. What this means is other editors can’t be more powerful because whatever feature makes them seem that way can be added to Emacs relatively easily (Sveen had a first hack at multiple cursors working after just 2 hours). It can be added by an individual user even if no one else cares about or is interested in the feature.

Isn’t that a capability you’d like your editor to have? Different people have different needs and priorities but to my way of thinking that capability alone makes it worthwhile to spend the time mastering Emacs.

Apropos of yesterday’s post on learning ancient editors, tareefdev has a post on the Emacs subreddit on why and how he moved from one of those “modern” electron-based editors to Emacs. His problem was a simple one: he had a 6.3 MB file and couldn’t open it with his editor. Say what you will about Emacs and large files, it can easily handle files of that size as tareefdev discovered when he opened his file in Emacs with no problems. As his expertise with Emacs grew, he discovered that he could use it for more and more of his tasks and that it made his life easier.

This is a quotidian story that normally wouldn’t be worth writing about except in light of the argument discussed in yesterday’s post that young developers shouldn’t waste their time learning ancient editors like Vim and Emacs. Just stick with that flashy new editor that’s easy to learn and has a glitzy UI. Except then you find it isn’t up to the job and you have to revert to one of those dusty old editors that folks were telling you weren’t worth your time.

If you’re lucky—and smart—like tareefdev, you may find that your problem was actually an opportunity to begin a life-long relationship with a powerful tool that can lessen your workload in many ways.

I went back and forth over whether I should embed the following tweet or just extract the quote from it. My remarks are about its contents and not the tweeter, who I don’t know and is probably a fine person and developer but I decided that it wasn’t fair to just steal his words without credit. I do want to emphasize that this is not an attack on Umbel, only a statement of my profound disagreement with a particular opinion of his.

This is why I tell younger devs not to make that same mistake I have made. Sure, learn enough wi to get out of an emergency, but wasting cycles becoming an expert in ancient editors? Fine, if you want to be a historian.

— Chris Umbel (@chrisumbel) September 11, 2018

It’s easy to ignore this sort of thing and I usually do because, as I’ve said before, choosing an editor is like choosing a mate: it’s nobody else’s business. Still, I find the sentiment behind it disturbing.

On the one hand, we can take the position that, fine, this advice will ensure that its adherents remain mediocre or, perhaps, “good enough” developers who leave the path to advancement open for those who are willing to put in the effort to learn and master their tools, even the “old” tools that, by surviving, have demonstrated their value. That’s not to say, “Use Emacs or die.” It’s not about using any editor in particular. It’s about not bothering to master—or even try—a tool just because it’s old, preferring, instead, an editor that while less powerful looks “prettier” and is easier to learn.

On the other hand, I think this advice is disastrous for all of us, not just the misguided who follow it. We all benefit when our colleagues are as good as possible and following this advice strikes me as a way of ensuring that they won’t be. Again, this is not to say that unless you use Emacs or Vim you’re a bad developer. It’s more about the attitude of “why bother?” and the smug assurance that “I know better than to waste my time on this old junk.” I don’t care if you use Emacs (or Vim) or not. I’d just like your decision to be an informed one.