5 ms·

In no way do I want to come off as rude with this comment, but to me what you are saying is not at all different from "when I was young I used to work out and

by bjeds 6y ago

In no way do I want to come off as rude with this comment, but to me what you are saying is not at all different from "when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting". Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. None of those need to end up in a "rabbit hole". Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but greatness requires discipline. This is also true with the craft and art of programming.

nn3 6y ago
A super customized system is more like a pet. A mostly standard system with very limited tweaks is more cattle. Like the OP I used to be in the having "pets" category (including gigantic ~/.emacs), but these days I prefer cattle (defaults as much as possible)
- tom_ 6y ago
  Put your Emacs config in a git repo, and this problem goes away. You don’t even have to stop there. I have a repo for my Emacs config, a repo for my Windows bin folder, a repo for my Unix shell stuff, and a repo for a bunch of cross-platform Python scripts I’ve written. Every computer I use regularly is super customised in exactly the same way as all the others. Takes about 10 minutes to get up and running.
brandonmenc 6y ago
I'm not going to die younger if I don't waste a bunch of time customizing my computer.
- mtrower 6y ago
  Objectives to customizing your computer: + Increase productivity (e.g. if value = work x time, and you can't increase available time, then reduce time consumption per unit of work to increase value) + Increase comfort during this process - cost: available time is reduced, which you could have spent working. Objectives to exercising: + Increase lifespan + Increase comfort(health) during this lifespan - cost: available time is reduced, which could have been spent living Tbh, these look pretty similar to me. In both cases, you're trading off an existing resource gambling that you'll get back more than you put in. --- As an addendum, there's a right and a wrong way to achieve tradeoff-based objectives. With exercise/diet, you can certainly do it wrong: latest fad diet that's placebo or maybe even actively harmful to you, latest fad routine that isn't very efficient, overwork and hurt yourself, etc. If you're "wasting a bunch of time" customizing your computer, I guess you're doing it wrong. Certainly, don't do that.
bitwize 6y ago
Whoa. I had a brain wave. What if there were a Silicon Valley company whose entire business model was selling a computing environment that didn't need to be customized? Like, at all? What if they did a whole bunch of psychological research, and found that most humans work pretty much the same way, and designed this environment in such a manner that they could get 98% or so of the way toward optimum productivity, right out of the box? Knowing the Valley, they would give themselves a silly name, one having nothing to do with computers or data or anything. Like a fruit or something. But multiply the base price by billions of potential users... the idea could be worth trillions!
- modo_mario 6y ago
  Turns out that company doesn't exist because apple doesn't exist in these general purpose editor wars and i haven't heard much good about the editors they do use to begin with. Additionally guess what. Most humans wouldn't prefer something like emacs even if it had sane defaults that would bring all it's users and the vim people and the like togheter. It's why a lot of it's features aren't a thing in popular ide's and such. Yet this niche still exists. Because some like a keyboard centric layout and don't mind learning a bunch of of keybindings to work faster down the line
BeetleB 6y ago
I think a better analogy is: > when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy at the level of an Olympic athlete ... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting and don't do any exercise and eat only convenient packaged foods. The original comment is arguing as if only these two extremes exist.
pjc50 6y ago
Oh, I've done both of these: I've given up customising my computing environment, and taken up exercise. It's now something like 25 years since I first installed Slackware off floppy discs, I've been there and no longer regard it as a useful use of my limited time. The thinking environment of choice of the most productive, smartest person I've ever worked with was .. a notepad. Not Notepad, a physical A4 ruled paper notepad and an ordinary gel pen. The actual development inevitably required some typing, but the thinking process and its associated diagrams, calculations, and scribbles for the kind of maths-heavy work he was excellent at worked best on paper. (I currently have vscode open .. and actual Visual Studio, and IntelliJ, and notepad++, each with a different set of files open in different languages.)
Thrymr 6y ago
It feels a little closer to "when I was young, I used to spend so much time arranging my kitchen gadgets [or exercise equipment]". Not doing the useful part of it, but frittering around the edges.
- bitwize 6y ago
  And yet articles called "Always Be Knolling" bubble to the top of Hackernews...
oblio 6y ago
Or you can, you know, just use VSCode, have fun coding what you actually want to code and use that spare time: a) learning Spanish to talk to that hot chick/dude b) traveling around the world c) doing whatever else you love to do besides coding
- bmitc 6y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. In the context of the posted article, one just installs the Remote - SSH extension and moves on with life.
  - mtrower 6y ago
    What do you do when Remote - SSH exhibits unbearably slow behavior? In the context of the posted article, one simply uses TRAMP (built in!) and moves on with life. The author is dealing with a situation where the "move on with life" tool is behaving pathologically.
- madhadron 6y ago
  I hesitate to do this mostly because I'm confident Emacs will be around in two decades. I don't know about VSCode. At the same time I don't feel like investing in Emacs is a great use of time. So I mostly just leave everything as it is.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  The tools that you use in your profession are a way to express yourself. That's true for guitarists who customise their guitars, truck drivers who customise their truck, tennis players with custom rackets and woodworkers with unique tools that often take countless of hours to make. What they all have in common is that this level of customisation looks silly to the outside. Of course they could be 98% as good with something they bought off a quality store, but what they do is part of who they are and there arguably is a deeper satisfaction in that then going around hitting on hot dudes on holiday trips.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  Here are things listed in the article that one can do in Emacs [0]: - process their email inbox - communicate in chat - navigate the web - write code - prose - Creating a to-do item for something your partner just asked you (while you were concentrated on a task) that will show up automatically on your agenda tomorrow - Converting some text notes you quickly scribbled down into a beautiful PDF via LaTeX, uploading it to S3, and referencing the URL in a reworded existing git commit message? I could make the list much longer from my own experience, but this is just straight from the article. I'm not a VSCode user, but I often hear about it only in a programming context, so it always surprises me when people suggest ditching Emacs to use VSCode.[1] I'm genuinely curious: How many of the above tasks are doable in VSCode? If not most of them, then I suggest people stop comparing the two programs - there is no point in asking people to stop using Emacs and use something that doesn't do what is needed. If VSCode can do it, I'd love to look up the plugins/extensions needed. [0] And many, many do it. I do over half of these things in Emacs (and most of the last item). [1] Easily over 70% of my Emacs usage has nothing to do with programming.
coldtea 6y ago
>Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. One is a practical endeavor of great importance for mind function, body function, longevity, performance, etc. The other is something between slightly better ergonomics (in a non-scientific ad-hoc way), tinkering, and bike-shedding. People have found again and again that "customizing your computer environment" is not a good in itself, but a means to an end, with quite narrow diminishing returns. >Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but greatness requires discipline. This includes first and foremost the disclipline of avoiding tinkering and bike-shedding with your tools, and doing real work on real problems instead (which is not a false dichotomy: many people fixate on the former to the detriment of the latter). >This is also true with the craft and art of programming. Which has as little to do with a focus on customizing of tools, as a hi-fi hobby has with being a music lover...
- bjeds 6y ago
  Did we read the same article? The author of the article customized his environment so opening a file no longer froze his editor. I wouldn't classify that either as "slightly better ergonomics" nor "tinkering" nor "bike shedding". He had the discipline to improve his favorite editor. Good for him. Emacs is obviously a very powerful environment for people who know how to use it. I applaud the author for documenting how he fixed this. The only difference between emacs and many other open source software is here you can easily solve bugs in your config file, instead of filing a pull request or submitting a patch to some git repo. The first you call "tinkering" and look down upon. The other I assume you approve of? But why the double standard?
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Did we read the same article? I didn't respond to the article, I responded to your particular comment, which seemed to imply that customizing your programming environment in general is something great and necessary. >The author of the article customized his environment so opening a file no longer froze his editor. That doesn't clarify as "customizing my environment" is more like "fixing fundamentally broken shit".
dan-robertson 6y ago
A lot of emacs customisation ought to be unnecessary. And I think the yak shaving on one’s config isn’t really a great use of time (if you want it as a hobby then I guess that’s fine). Some examples of unnecessary customisation is the fact that the defaults of emacs so often ought to be changed. E.g. why does M-SPC do just-one-space instead of the strictly more powerful cycle-spacing (answer: probably a combination of history, neglect, and a fear of breaking existing saved keyboard macros), why use upcase-word instead of upcase-dwim? Why does autocomplete require so much customisation? If emacs had better defaults there would be much less reason for spacemacs or doom to exist. One person I work with will (drastically) customise the key bindings for each new mode before using it, making it hard to use new modes. Another gave up on customising emacs and switched to spacemacs to no longer have to think about customisation.
- mainstreemm 6y ago
  I'm too young to have used it, but I bet Borland C++ was nice, too. And I bet it was more work to configure Emacs to write C++ in the 90s than it was to just use Borland. But which one is still around? I wonder if it's more time wasted when you have to change editors every few years because of changes in the funding model of the corporate patron of the product and relearn how to use the entire environment with "sane defaults" versus creating some custom keybindings that you like essentially one time and then using them for 30 years in an editor that has a license and community that makes it unlikely to suddenly cease to exist. People act like there's all this extra work to using software like Emacs over corporate IDEs, or GNU+Linux over corporate OSes, but I contend that it is merely different and better-documented work. The corporate environments just make more promises, and then everyone is surprised when the promises are broken.
- klodolph 6y ago
  > A lot of emacs customisation ought to be unnecessary. And I think the yak shaving on one’s config isn’t really a great use of time (if you want it as a hobby then I guess that’s fine). I totally agree. The only reason I justify my Emacs customization is because I customize it very slowly, over years, and periodically remove things I don’t use any more. It’s getting harder to justify now that alternatives like VS Code have a bucketload of features and working autocomplete without futzing around too much. It’s just that VS Code is so damn slow. Maybe better language server support will bring me back to Emacs as my daily driver in a couple years, or maybe I’ll be paying for CLion.
krbzsq 6y ago
I don't think this is fair. Eating healthy and working out is objectively good. Whereas for plenty of people, these customisations are just that, a "rabbit hole" that was interesting when they were younger but then it got tedious. Now they've found a setup they like, be that intensely customised or a fresh macOS install with VSCode. I wouldn't consider either indicative of greatness. A lot of people just want their computing environment to get out of their way.

by bjeds 6y ago

nn3 6y ago

A super customized system is more like a pet. A mostly standard system with very limited tweaks is more cattle. Like the OP I used to be in the having "pets" category (including gigantic ~/.emacs), but these days I prefer cattle (defaults as much as possible)

tom_ 6y ago
Put your Emacs config in a git repo, and this problem goes away. You don’t even have to stop there. I have a repo for my Emacs config, a repo for my Windows bin folder, a repo for my Unix shell stuff, and a repo for a bunch of cross-platform Python scripts I’ve written. Every computer I use regularly is super customised in exactly the same way as all the others. Takes about 10 minutes to get up and running.

brandonmenc 6y ago

I'm not going to die younger if I don't waste a bunch of time customizing my computer.

mtrower 6y ago
Objectives to customizing your computer: + Increase productivity (e.g. if value = work x time, and you can't increase available time, then reduce time consumption per unit of work to increase value) + Increase comfort during this process - cost: available time is reduced, which you could have spent working. Objectives to exercising: + Increase lifespan + Increase comfort(health) during this lifespan - cost: available time is reduced, which could have been spent living Tbh, these look pretty similar to me. In both cases, you're trading off an existing resource gambling that you'll get back more than you put in. --- As an addendum, there's a right and a wrong way to achieve tradeoff-based objectives. With exercise/diet, you can certainly do it wrong: latest fad diet that's placebo or maybe even actively harmful to you, latest fad routine that isn't very efficient, overwork and hurt yourself, etc. If you're "wasting a bunch of time" customizing your computer, I guess you're doing it wrong. Certainly, don't do that.

bitwize 6y ago

Whoa. I had a brain wave. What if there were a Silicon Valley company whose entire business model was selling a computing environment that didn't need to be customized? Like, at all? What if they did a whole bunch of psychological research, and found that most humans work pretty much the same way, and designed this environment in such a manner that they could get 98% or so of the way toward optimum productivity, right out of the box? Knowing the Valley, they would give themselves a silly name, one having nothing to do with computers or data or anything. Like a fruit or something. But multiply the base price by billions of potential users... the idea could be worth trillions!

modo_mario 6y ago
Turns out that company doesn't exist because apple doesn't exist in these general purpose editor wars and i haven't heard much good about the editors they do use to begin with. Additionally guess what. Most humans wouldn't prefer something like emacs even if it had sane defaults that would bring all it's users and the vim people and the like togheter. It's why a lot of it's features aren't a thing in popular ide's and such. Yet this niche still exists. Because some like a keyboard centric layout and don't mind learning a bunch of of keybindings to work faster down the line

BeetleB 6y ago

I think a better analogy is: > when I was young I used to work out and eat healthy at the level of an Olympic athlete ... a couple of decades later, I just fund it all so exhausting and don't do any exercise and eat only convenient packaged foods. The original comment is arguing as if only these two extremes exist.

pjc50 6y ago

Oh, I've done both of these: I've given up customising my computing environment, and taken up exercise. It's now something like 25 years since I first installed Slackware off floppy discs, I've been there and no longer regard it as a useful use of my limited time. The thinking environment of choice of the most productive, smartest person I've ever worked with was .. a notepad. Not Notepad, a physical A4 ruled paper notepad and an ordinary gel pen. The actual development inevitably required some typing, but the thinking process and its associated diagrams, calculations, and scribbles for the kind of maths-heavy work he was excellent at worked best on paper. (I currently have vscode open .. and actual Visual Studio, and IntelliJ, and notepad++, each with a different set of files open in different languages.)

Thrymr 6y ago

It feels a little closer to "when I was young, I used to spend so much time arranging my kitchen gadgets [or exercise equipment]". Not doing the useful part of it, but frittering around the edges.

bitwize 6y ago
And yet articles called "Always Be Knolling" bubble to the top of Hackernews...

oblio 6y ago

Or you can, you know, just use VSCode, have fun coding what you actually want to code and use that spare time: a) learning Spanish to talk to that hot chick/dude b) traveling around the world c) doing whatever else you love to do besides coding

bmitc 6y ago
Exactly my thoughts. In the context of the posted article, one just installs the Remote - SSH extension and moves on with life.
- mtrower 6y ago
  What do you do when Remote - SSH exhibits unbearably slow behavior? In the context of the posted article, one simply uses TRAMP (built in!) and moves on with life. The author is dealing with a situation where the "move on with life" tool is behaving pathologically.
madhadron 6y ago
I hesitate to do this mostly because I'm confident Emacs will be around in two decades. I don't know about VSCode. At the same time I don't feel like investing in Emacs is a great use of time. So I mostly just leave everything as it is.
Barrin92 6y ago
The tools that you use in your profession are a way to express yourself. That's true for guitarists who customise their guitars, truck drivers who customise their truck, tennis players with custom rackets and woodworkers with unique tools that often take countless of hours to make. What they all have in common is that this level of customisation looks silly to the outside. Of course they could be 98% as good with something they bought off a quality store, but what they do is part of who they are and there arguably is a deeper satisfaction in that then going around hitting on hot dudes on holiday trips.
BeetleB 6y ago
Here are things listed in the article that one can do in Emacs [0]: - process their email inbox - communicate in chat - navigate the web - write code - prose - Creating a to-do item for something your partner just asked you (while you were concentrated on a task) that will show up automatically on your agenda tomorrow - Converting some text notes you quickly scribbled down into a beautiful PDF via LaTeX, uploading it to S3, and referencing the URL in a reworded existing git commit message? I could make the list much longer from my own experience, but this is just straight from the article. I'm not a VSCode user, but I often hear about it only in a programming context, so it always surprises me when people suggest ditching Emacs to use VSCode.[1] I'm genuinely curious: How many of the above tasks are doable in VSCode? If not most of them, then I suggest people stop comparing the two programs - there is no point in asking people to stop using Emacs and use something that doesn't do what is needed. If VSCode can do it, I'd love to look up the plugins/extensions needed. [0] And many, many do it. I do over half of these things in Emacs (and most of the last item). [1] Easily over 70% of my Emacs usage has nothing to do with programming.

coldtea 6y ago

>Customizing your computer environment is good. Eating healthy is good. One is a practical endeavor of great importance for mind function, body function, longevity, performance, etc. The other is something between slightly better ergonomics (in a non-scientific ad-hoc way), tinkering, and bike-shedding. People have found again and again that "customizing your computer environment" is not a good in itself, but a means to an end, with quite narrow diminishing returns. >Everyone can be tired of life and give up due to exhaustion, but greatness requires discipline. This includes first and foremost the disclipline of avoiding tinkering and bike-shedding with your tools, and doing real work on real problems instead (which is not a false dichotomy: many people fixate on the former to the detriment of the latter). >This is also true with the craft and art of programming. Which has as little to do with a focus on customizing of tools, as a hi-fi hobby has with being a music lover...

bjeds 6y ago
Did we read the same article? The author of the article customized his environment so opening a file no longer froze his editor. I wouldn't classify that either as "slightly better ergonomics" nor "tinkering" nor "bike shedding". He had the discipline to improve his favorite editor. Good for him. Emacs is obviously a very powerful environment for people who know how to use it. I applaud the author for documenting how he fixed this. The only difference between emacs and many other open source software is here you can easily solve bugs in your config file, instead of filing a pull request or submitting a patch to some git repo. The first you call "tinkering" and look down upon. The other I assume you approve of? But why the double standard?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Did we read the same article? I didn't respond to the article, I responded to your particular comment, which seemed to imply that customizing your programming environment in general is something great and necessary. >The author of the article customized his environment so opening a file no longer froze his editor. That doesn't clarify as "customizing my environment" is more like "fixing fundamentally broken shit".

dan-robertson 6y ago

A lot of emacs customisation ought to be unnecessary. And I think the yak shaving on one’s config isn’t really a great use of time (if you want it as a hobby then I guess that’s fine). Some examples of unnecessary customisation is the fact that the defaults of emacs so often ought to be changed. E.g. why does M-SPC do just-one-space instead of the strictly more powerful cycle-spacing (answer: probably a combination of history, neglect, and a fear of breaking existing saved keyboard macros), why use upcase-word instead of upcase-dwim? Why does autocomplete require so much customisation? If emacs had better defaults there would be much less reason for spacemacs or doom to exist. One person I work with will (drastically) customise the key bindings for each new mode before using it, making it hard to use new modes. Another gave up on customising emacs and switched to spacemacs to no longer have to think about customisation.

mainstreemm 6y ago
I'm too young to have used it, but I bet Borland C++ was nice, too. And I bet it was more work to configure Emacs to write C++ in the 90s than it was to just use Borland. But which one is still around? I wonder if it's more time wasted when you have to change editors every few years because of changes in the funding model of the corporate patron of the product and relearn how to use the entire environment with "sane defaults" versus creating some custom keybindings that you like essentially one time and then using them for 30 years in an editor that has a license and community that makes it unlikely to suddenly cease to exist. People act like there's all this extra work to using software like Emacs over corporate IDEs, or GNU+Linux over corporate OSes, but I contend that it is merely different and better-documented work. The corporate environments just make more promises, and then everyone is surprised when the promises are broken.
klodolph 6y ago
> A lot of emacs customisation ought to be unnecessary. And I think the yak shaving on one’s config isn’t really a great use of time (if you want it as a hobby then I guess that’s fine). I totally agree. The only reason I justify my Emacs customization is because I customize it very slowly, over years, and periodically remove things I don’t use any more. It’s getting harder to justify now that alternatives like VS Code have a bucketload of features and working autocomplete without futzing around too much. It’s just that VS Code is so damn slow. Maybe better language server support will bring me back to Emacs as my daily driver in a couple years, or maybe I’ll be paying for CLion.

krbzsq 6y ago

I don't think this is fair. Eating healthy and working out is objectively good. Whereas for plenty of people, these customisations are just that, a "rabbit hole" that was interesting when they were younger but then it got tedious. Now they've found a setup they like, be that intensely customised or a fresh macOS install with VSCode. I wouldn't consider either indicative of greatness. A lot of people just want their computing environment to get out of their way.