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> At the end of the day I do spend time on my configuration, but it's hardly the part-time job folks make it out to be. If you never go deep (like me) then yes

> At the end of the day I do spend time on my configuration, but it's hardly the part-time job folks make it out to be. If you never go deep (like me) then yes, it absolutely is a part-time job. Sometimes a full-time job, even. The article is very interesting regardless and I've bookmarked it but the above smelled like elitism and I had to call it out. I have no doubt that if you go deep on a tool that's widely considered mystical -- Emacs and GIT are very typical examples -- then you'll save time in the future. But I suppose those tools are never made with the other kinds of people in mind: those who want to learn the incantations with which their daily work is served and who don't want to hack on their tool or never gain hardcore proficiency with it. I stared evaluating VIM after 18 years with Emacs. I've seen less cryptic errors when I worked with C++'s STL 15 years ago. At some point enough is enough and I'm tired of being blamed that I haven't lived inside Emacs' code -- when all I want is to be able to see syntax-colored panes, edit them, and have very light IDE features.

klibertp 6y ago
> smelled like elitism and I had to call it out It's not elitism. It might be a lack of empathy, but it's not premeditated. The thing is that, being the live environment in the vein of Smalltalk is a major selling point of Emacs. Being able to interactively evaluate and debug code of the running system is meaningless if you don't use it to code and debug. It's easy to assume that if you don't want to do this, you should choose another tool. This doesn't mean that "not going deep" is somehow wrong, obviously, but it also doesn't mean that going there is elitist. And from the perspective of someone who did "go deep", debugging your config once in a while is actually not a big deal. It's certainly more pleasant than debugging most anything else.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  > It's not elitism. It might be a lack of empathy, but it's not premeditated. Sure, that's fair, but again -- what about the people who don't want to debug their config? Is it such an outrageous crime to want to have your tool work with minimal configuration? Tool fatigue is real. We are expected to learn a million things throughout our career and this learning must be kept up almost daily. At one point your brain literally pushes back and you have no choice anymore -- you can't do it even if you think you want to. Even if you try, you start drifting away, lose focus, think of something else etc. Obviously this isn't directed at you in particular. But after Emacs being around for so long I had hopes that it will become ergonomic. So far I am only seeing the reverse: entrenching. I fail to see how debugging my editor's config is even relevant to my daily work. It's like, I won't go to VS Code, no, but Emacs can be more everyday-friendly. But it seems that it won't ever be.
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    Emacs is a huge menu of endless configurability. I, for one, fancy the Spacemacs distribution for modal editing and a less 'exciting' configuration experience. But software configuration is so subjective that expectations of ergodicity (to use that elite-sounding term I just nicked from the other thread) seem premature.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      > I, for one, fancy the Spacemacs distribution for modal editing and a less 'exciting' configuration experience. Same, but it's a moving and a rather fragile target. I had to rewind commits or re-clone the repo a number of times in order to get back to a working editor. > But software configuration is so subjective that expectations of ergodicity (to use that elite-sounding term I just nicked from the other thread) seem premature. Maybe -- 50/50. You could also argue that a big disclaimer -- "This is an editor for people who enjoy endlessly configuring and debugging it" -- would be a fair announcement and maybe I wouldn't have started with Emacs at all.
      - smitty1e 6y ago
        Emacs is to editors what Gentoo is to distributions. I tend not to tinker too heavily with .spacemacs, and got off of source distros after blowing up X11.
        pdimitar 6y ago
        Good analogy, yep!
        jimmyvalmer 6y ago
        > Emacs is to editors what Gentoo is to distributions. I spent the last month futzing with Gentoo with no previous exposure. Yes, a thousand times yes.
  - tarboreus 6y ago
    So choose literally every other text editor or IDE, except possibly Vim. There's nothing wrong with not wanted to customize your environment, but don't sour grapes when people get excited about the one tool that actually lets you seriously and relatively easily modify things.

klibertp 6y ago

> smelled like elitism and I had to call it out It's not elitism. It might be a lack of empathy, but it's not premeditated. The thing is that, being the live environment in the vein of Smalltalk is a major selling point of Emacs. Being able to interactively evaluate and debug code of the running system is meaningless if you don't use it to code and debug. It's easy to assume that if you don't want to do this, you should choose another tool. This doesn't mean that "not going deep" is somehow wrong, obviously, but it also doesn't mean that going there is elitist. And from the perspective of someone who did "go deep", debugging your config once in a while is actually not a big deal. It's certainly more pleasant than debugging most anything else.

pdimitar 6y ago
> It's not elitism. It might be a lack of empathy, but it's not premeditated. Sure, that's fair, but again -- what about the people who don't want to debug their config? Is it such an outrageous crime to want to have your tool work with minimal configuration? Tool fatigue is real. We are expected to learn a million things throughout our career and this learning must be kept up almost daily. At one point your brain literally pushes back and you have no choice anymore -- you can't do it even if you think you want to. Even if you try, you start drifting away, lose focus, think of something else etc. Obviously this isn't directed at you in particular. But after Emacs being around for so long I had hopes that it will become ergonomic. So far I am only seeing the reverse: entrenching. I fail to see how debugging my editor's config is even relevant to my daily work. It's like, I won't go to VS Code, no, but Emacs can be more everyday-friendly. But it seems that it won't ever be.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  Emacs is a huge menu of endless configurability. I, for one, fancy the Spacemacs distribution for modal editing and a less 'exciting' configuration experience. But software configuration is so subjective that expectations of ergodicity (to use that elite-sounding term I just nicked from the other thread) seem premature.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    > I, for one, fancy the Spacemacs distribution for modal editing and a less 'exciting' configuration experience. Same, but it's a moving and a rather fragile target. I had to rewind commits or re-clone the repo a number of times in order to get back to a working editor. > But software configuration is so subjective that expectations of ergodicity (to use that elite-sounding term I just nicked from the other thread) seem premature. Maybe -- 50/50. You could also argue that a big disclaimer -- "This is an editor for people who enjoy endlessly configuring and debugging it" -- would be a fair announcement and maybe I wouldn't have started with Emacs at all.
    - smitty1e 6y ago
      Emacs is to editors what Gentoo is to distributions. I tend not to tinker too heavily with .spacemacs, and got off of source distros after blowing up X11.
      - pdimitar 6y ago
        Good analogy, yep!
      - jimmyvalmer 6y ago
        > Emacs is to editors what Gentoo is to distributions. I spent the last month futzing with Gentoo with no previous exposure. Yes, a thousand times yes.
- tarboreus 6y ago
  So choose literally every other text editor or IDE, except possibly Vim. There's nothing wrong with not wanted to customize your environment, but don't sour grapes when people get excited about the one tool that actually lets you seriously and relatively easily modify things.