{"id":9640,"date":"2021-04-20T14:04:31","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T18:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9640"},"modified":"2021-04-20T14:04:31","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T18:04:31","slug":"switching-to-emacs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9640","title":{"rendered":"Switching to Emacs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Protesilaos Stavrou has an interesting video<\/a> that boils down to a lecture on the morality of free software in general and Emacs in particular. He frames the lecture in terms of his journey from a complete computer neophyte to the accomplished programmer and user that he is today (although he modestly resists that label).<\/p>\n

The whole video is worthwhile but the part I want to write about is his thoughts about Emacs and what he learned when he switched to it from proprietary software. The first thing he learned is that Emacs will not magically make you more productive. You have to commit to learning it and put in the time to master it. As Stavrou puts it, you can\u2019t be an Emacs tourist. You won\u2019t learn Emacs in a weekend, a month, or, as some of have discovered, even years. It\u2019s a long term commitment. That doesn\u2019t mean that it will be years before you can be productive; only that mastery takes more than a weekend.<\/p>\n

Part of that commitment to learning Emacs involves reading the documentation. Stavrou claims that there\u2019s no substitute. No blog post or quick video is going to tell you everything you need to know. You must<\/i> read the documentation.<\/p>\n

All of this was interesting to me because I believe\u2014and have written\u2014the same thing. The usual reaction is \u201cThat\u2019s why Emacs is doomed and deserves to be.\u201d Sorry, but I\u2019m unrepentant: Like anything else worthwhile, mastering Emacs takes effort and commitment. Don\u2019t expect to be up and running in a couple of days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Protesilaos Stavrou has an interesting video that boils down to a lecture on the morality of free software in general and Emacs in particular. He frames the lecture in terms of his journey from a complete computer neophyte to the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-9640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9641,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9640\/revisions\/9641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}