Irreal

James Gill has a nice tweet about the community of Emacs users:

I’ve never encountered a community like that of #Emacs users. So many with 10, 20, 30+ years using the tool, endless resources and helpful people. And so delightfully ‘old school’ and modern at the same time.

An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

— James Gill (@IamJamesGill) August 21, 2018

Like most of you, I belong to several tech communities. Not all of them have as nice a reputation. The Lisp community, for example, can be notoriously hostile to n00bs. A lot of that is residual grumpiness about the fact that the first thing many n00bs do when they arrive is suggest some scheme for doing away with parentheses. If you heard that as often as the typical Lisper, you’d be grumpy too.

Still, there’s no denying that the Emacs community is exceptionally welcoming to n00bs and that, as Gill says, we have a lot of people with extensive experience who are willing to help n00bs as well as more seasoned users. We also have folks like Mike Zamansky, Sacha Chua, and Rainer König who spend hours of their own time making instructional videos and doing other chores that benefit us all.

I think Gill has it exactly right: We’re old school and modern at the same time. Old school because we’re employing an editor that’s older than many of its users and modern because that same tool is more powerful and adaptable than its more “modern” competitors. In any event, it’s a great community and I’m proud to be a member.

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.