Irreal

Ayrat Badykov has a short post on Why Emacs is a great text editor. The post is really about why he switched to Emacs and why he’s sticking with it. Although you won’t find anything in the post to convince a n00b, there are a couple of interesting points worth commenting on.

First, Badykov says that he was convinced to move from Sublime to Emacs when he pair programmed with a Vim user. He was, he says, blown away by how much more productive the Vim user was in his editing compared to his. The Vim user never used the touch pad; he did everything with shortcuts and had shortcuts for everything. He chose Emacs instead of Vim because Emacs was “popular” in his community and there were lots of videos and blogs about using it.

This really resonated with me. Most of you know that I’m strictly laissez-faire about what editor people use. It’s not that I don’t have strong feelings about the matter, it’s just that I wouldn’t think of imposing my views on others. I’m happy to let people use whatever editor they find is best for them. All that said, I have to admit to a bit of annoyance when people who have never used Emacs or Vim or, in fact, have never used any editor other then some menu/mouse driven abomination complain that Emacs/Vim are “old technology” and don’t look as nice as whatever it is they’re using. Badykov provides the perfect rejoinder: those Emacs/Vim users with their old editors are much more efficient than you are. They save a second or two on each operation and that can add up to hours a day. Whether or not Emacs/Vim users can actually save hours every day, there’s no doubt that we are a lot more efficient.

The second thing I found interesting about the post is that under “disadvantages of Emacs,” Badykov notes that there’s a steep learning curve and that it might take you a couple of weeks to become proficient with it. I’m as much in favor of instant gratification as the next guy but it would never occur to me that I could install Emacs and instantly become proficient. After 10 years I’m still learning and it’s not unusual for me to think, “How did I not know that?” after learning some new feature or trick.

Like anything else worthwhile, Emacs requires a commitment to become even reasonably adept at its use. If you aren’t prepared to make that commitment, there’s always nano or whatever mouse/driven editor you’re using now. Just don’t expect to be as efficient as those of us using those “outdated editors.”

Harking back to my old post on Using Emacs, I expect that Badykov is or is going to become a first rate developer. Not because he uses Emacs but because he cares about his tools and is willing to put in the effort to master them.

Update [2018-08-19 Sun 09:56]: Batsov → Badykov

Rakhim Davletkaliyev is back with another Emacs podcast. As I said in my first post about his podcasts, using a podcast to discuss Emacs may seem odd but it actually works pretty well.

Davletkaliyev starts by telling us what’s changed in his configuration and approach since the last podcast. The major changes are the addition of Helm and Projectile. With them he was able to recreate some of the functionality that he likes best in Sublime. In one case he was even able to expand on that workflow. Another example of how you can make Emacs work your way.

The majority of the podcast is about Org mode. I was a bit surprised at how much Org functionality he was able to harness as a n00b. It certainly took me a lot longer. Of course, as he makes a point of saying, there’s no need to be intimidated by the vastness of Org. You can start off with just a few of the basic functions and discover new capabilities as you need them.

The first thing he liked about Org is its ability to link to other files (or parts of other files). That makes it easy to tie together related files and topics in the usual hypertext way. He reminds us several times that the magic of Org is that it has all these capabilities but is just plain text. You can read it—or even create it—with any editor.

He especially likes Org tables. They’re easy to use and create and bring along spreadsheet capability for free. That seems like almost a throwaway but almost every Org table I create uses that functionality in some way. It’s just too convenient to ignore.

Like me, he really likes the Babel functionality. The ability to add code blocks and export (or not) the code and embed the result in your document all without leaving Org mode can not be overpraised. It’s one of the centers of my workflow.

He also talks about TODOs, one of the fundamental functions of Org. He likes how they can distributed among many different files and summarized in the agenda. He also likes that it integrates the functions of three other applications that he was using for the same thing: Things, the Mac Notes app, and iA Writer. He especially likes how all the information is available to each of the three functions in Org, which is not the case with the three separate applications.

Finally, he describes how he implemented a list of browser links and automatically exports it to HTML so that it is available to his browser. He finds that much nicer and easier to navigate than using the native browser bookmarks.

The podcast is a bit over 29 minutes so you’ll have to schedule some time. I enjoyed it; perhaps you will too.

For the last year, Matus Goljer (fuco1) has been working on a static analyzer for Elisp. Although still in its early stages, the project is promising and I’ve been following it with interest. Goljer has made good progress and can now analyze the main file in the smartparens code base. There was a problem, however.

It was slow. Very slow. Analyzing smartparens took about 42 seconds even though the smartparens.el file is only about 9500 lines. Goljer was expecting it to be a bit slow because he used EIEIO and CL generics. While they’re a natural fit for the problem, they have notorious performance issues. What to do? Goljer did what we all do: he assumed the problem was with EIEIO and generics and started changing his code. That turned out to be a mess so he did what we all promise ourselves we’re going to do in situations like this but rarely actually do: he fired up the profiler to see were all the time was going.

The answer was surprising. The problem turned out to be in a function that he would never have thought would cause difficulties. I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you what it was; you’ll have to read his post to see. In any event, he replaced the problem function with some code that accomplished the same end and reduced the running time to 5 seconds.

The moral here is what it always is: don’t assume you know where all the cycles are being spent. You’re probably wrong. Almost every environment has a profiler and they’re the go-to method for determining where your application is spending its time.

Be sure to take a look at Goljer’s post. It’s an interesting story and a nice illustration of the power of profilers.

Almost three years ago, I wrote about Josh Stella, a former programmer who had become the CEO of his company. Stella found that he really hated all the context switching required as he moved from application to application. So he decided to return to Emacs but as a CEO rather than technical user. His original post discussed why he was doing that and what his experience was like.

Now, Stella is switching roles and becoming the CTO of his company and decided to revisit his Emacs post in light of the 3 years experience he’d had using it as a company officer rather than one of the technical staff. All-in-all, he concludes that the experiment was successful and that using Emacs made him happier and more productive. He liked the way Emacs stayed out of his way and wasn’t constantly demanding his attention.

He also liked that Emacs was more ergonomic than other applications. We Emacsers don’t often hear that but Stella says that using an ergonomic keyboard combined with a much reduced reliance on mouse operations cured the RSI problems he was having. He discusses that at some length so if you’re an Emacser who’s suffering from RSI problems, you should take a look at what he did.

He also wrote that he gave up trying to use Org mode to keep his calendar and TODO lists. That, he said, was because he shares that information with many people who weren’t Emacs users. There are, of course, packages that move entries between Emacs and Google/Apple calendar but he decided it was simpler to just use Google calendar like everyone else at his company.

The post is an interesting retrospective on the experiences of a CEO using Emacs and well worth a read.