8 ms·

Erik Naggum on Emacs and muscle memory

75 points by fogus 15y ago

koenigdavidmj 15y ago
What is with this guy's aversion to uppercase?
- jzawodn 15y ago
  Yeah, I guess he wasn't concerned about putting any effort into making it easy for others to read his thoughts. sigh Written text is supposed to be written to be parsed by humans. Why do people forget that?
  - bdhe 15y ago
    He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things). I remember a study that said people read based on shapes of words, particularly ascenders, descenders and edges (i.e., first and last letters). Does capitalizing the first letter of the sentence make a difference? If it does, do people that read languages like German which has more capitalization (but the same script) adapt to it?
    - Derbasti 15y ago
      How does a German adapt? Poorly. I nearly stopped reading because of that. It freakes out my wetware text parser to have two spaces before punctuation and no capitalization at the beginning of sentences. At least he did not put punctuation inside quotes...
      - xyzzyz 15y ago
        It's funny, because his capitalization and punctuation are his conscious decisions he wrote about quite a few times. He said it is easy to programmatically upcase first words of the sentences, but it is no easy to do it the other way, without losing meaning. Sentences without first word capitalized are also easier to manipulate. I personally have no problem with reading text written in a such way.
    - kjetil 15y ago
      > He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things). No, you're missing the point. Naggum didn't eschew all capital letters, only where they led to loss of information (ie. failure to separate common and proper nouns). Emacs and Lisp are proper nouns and therefore capitalized. Common nouns that happen to start a sentence are not.
- zachbeane 15y ago
  The aversion is restricted to capitalizing the initial word of a sentence. It's easier to rearrange words in a sentence and join or split sentences in a paragraph if the first word of a sentence is not capitalized. Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information. It's also helpful to identify people who focus on the trivial.
  - akavi 15y ago
    Except it isn't trivial; it materially damaged the ease with which I could read the essay. As a long-time English reader, I've internalized the idea that there will be a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. So when it's lacking, especially when the beginning of a sentence corresponds to a newline as in the beginnings of paragraphs in this essay, my immediate mental response is to assume that I've overshot the sentence's beginning, and immediately to backtrack to find it. Overriding this behavior takes mental effort which detracts from the ease with which I can read. Making it harder for your readers to consume your ideas is hardly a trivial issue.
    - jeramey 15y ago
      e. e. cummings might have a thing or two to say about a thing or two regarding the use of capitalization. It can be worthwhile to overlook or adapt to someone's stylistic peccadilloes if the ideas they have are interesting and useful. Not that I'm casting judgment in regards to that in what either Naggum or cummings wrote! ;-)
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - tincholio 15y ago
      For Emacs users: (defun capitalize-naggum () "Capitalizes text written in Erik Naggum's annoying no-caps style" (interactive) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (aux-naggum (point)))) (defun aux-naggum (current-point) "Recursively capitalize the buffer, moving sentence to sentence. Valid punctuation symbols are [.?!]" (re-search-forward "[a-z]" nil 0 nil) (if (= current-point (point)) t (capitalize-word -1) (re-search-forward "[.!?]") (aux-naggum (point))))
- cageface 15y ago
  Naggum was one of the net's all-time greatest cranks. He almost singlehandedly turned comp.lang.lisp into a minefield.
valisystem 15y ago
This is incredibly pedantic, and yet, fails to point out parts of the problem. Or maybe the guy just wanted to flatter himself in saying that people that does not want to learn how to use a text editor (can't refrain the old joke : or the editor it lacks) are necessarily stupid morons that can't have a proper opinion on the subject. I tend to orient my tool choice to one that will require the least effort and still allow to achieve the task properly, even though the least effort might be, sometimes, a huge effort. I concentrate on the least effort for a simple reason : if a better tool I could not imagine comes out, I will minimize the hard learned knowledge I'll have to discard. Putting effort in something gives you momentum, you won't let it go easily, because you make the balance difficult to evaluate. Jump between easy to switch solutions, and you are guaranteed to mostly enjoy the best tools (for its class at least) you can get.
- JoelMcCracken 15y ago
  Your second paragraph is interesting. However, the problem I see is that some tools are better based upon your skill. When you have no skill, Emacs is almost useless. When you have great skill, Emacs is unimaginably useful. This is true for many traditional Unix tools.
  - trafficlight 15y ago
    This is true of all tools.
- rwl 15y ago
  > This is incredibly pedantic, Agreed, but... > and yet, fails to point out parts of the problem. Which parts? You don't go on to say. > Or maybe the guy just wanted to flatter himself in saying that people that does not want to learn how to use a text editor (can't refrain the old joke : or the editor it lacks) are necessarily stupid morons that can't have a proper opinion on the subject. This is not the impression I got. Rather, he was expressing frustration at the concept of "intuitive" or "novice-friendly" software, emphasized by the commercial software industry, that saves initial learning time at the expense of training people to do mindless tasks over and over, instead of learning to use their computers more efficiently. I think he was saying that it is unfortunate that, due to the emphasis on this concept by commercial software, there is now a (perhaps large) segment of the population that won't accept any other kind of interface; and he was saying that Emacs development should probably not target these people. Whether the expression was pedantic or not, this seems like a reasonable thing to be frustrated about, and a reasonable conclusion to draw.
qntm 15y ago
This essay was evidently written in 1997. I don't know what the competitors to Emacs were in 1997 other than Vi, but these days there are extremely powerful text editors which are exceedingly easy for a novice to pick up and use right out of the gate and then go on to offer vast arrays of substantially more advanced tools for those prepared to explore and become experts. Just because it used to be extremely painful to become a towering expert at text editing doesn't mean it should continue to be so. It's not like riding a bicycle-- text editing actually is easy. Or at least, it can be made easy, and there is no argument for keeping it difficult. Remember, text editing in and of itself is of no value. Tools should get the hell out of the way of their users.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  >Text editing in and of itself has no value. I just don't know what to make of that. It's true, but only in an incredibly over-technical sense. Text-editing is one of the primary forces that drives the world. Pen or keyboard or voice to speech, text is primary. Yes, of course, the meaning behind the text is more important. But the meaning doesn't appear at all without some means of creating the text. It's like saying that the teeth are not important, it's the food. You can't eat the food without teeth.
  - qntm 15y ago
    I'm saying that the meaning of the text - be it prose, poetry or code - is all that is important. Text editors are tools, like paintbrushes and screwdrivers. They only important or valuable to the extent that they enable us to create stuff of actual value. You can go down the route of text editing as art, like that Vi Golf concept that was floating around. And a well-made tool is indeed valuable and beautiful to behold. Nevertheless, I maintain that a text editor is strictly as important as the text it is used to create.
    - jerf 15y ago
      Honest question: Have you ever witnessed an emacs or vi master at work? Have you ever had the experience of watching one of those guys push some keys on the keyboard and then ask yourself how the bloody hell they just did that complicated manipulation in two seconds, when it would have taken you 45? That stuff adds up, more than linearly because they'll do things you wouldn't even consider due to effort. (You won't even consciously decide not to do them, you won't even consider them as a possible option.) (The other day somebody linked a site that extracts the top 100 comments for any HN user. Somebody else started creating links to all the users on the leaderboard. I happened to catch them halfway through linkifying the people on the user board. You never would have caught me halfway through such a task, because I would have used an emacs macro to linkify one, then repeat it 99 times as quickly as I please. And I'm not very good with emacs. Many other tools can do this too, of course.) Be sure you actually know what tool mastery looks like before you downplay the importance of tool mastery. Sure, what matters is results, but tools profoundly and inescapably influence the results you get, so while "all that matters is results" is a true statement on the surface, the actual claim being made underneath about the irrelevance of tools is deeply, deeply false.
krmboya 15y ago
Great article even if it was '97'. And I found emacs easy to use after: C-h t
- loup-vaillant 15y ago
  Yes, but actually typing it is beyond the ability of most users: you have to read the presentation screen before hitting a key, and you have to guess that "C" means "the control key".
  - ajross 15y ago
    Sigh. The first (clickable!) item on the launch screen of the editor is "Emacs Tutorial". The first paragraph displayed in the tutorial after you select (with the mouse!) that item is contains: C-<chr> means hold the CONTROL key while typing the character <chr> Thus, C-f would be: hold the CONTROL key and type f. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that emacs is "easy" to learn (seriously: getting truly good at it will take months at least). But don't pretend that the documentation is hard to read. It's just documentation.
    - loup-vaillant 15y ago
      First, Oops. Second, I didn't want to say that it was difficult, but that many people behave like morons.
adavies42 15y ago
reminds me of QuickSilver talking about wu wei, and seems fairly accurate--the sequence "tap Command, pause about a quarter second, type "S", hit Space" for launching Safari feels a lot like "lean towards where you want to go" does on a bike (or maybe "steer one way and lean the other to make a tight turn without leaning the bike over as far", a more advanced technique).
dizm 15y ago
Blogs and Twitter killed the amazing Usenet rants.
- loup-vaillant 15y ago
  ?!? The rants are still there. They just moved. Or did Usenet influence its users into writing thoughtful rants in ways that blogs and agregators don't? I never used Usenet, but this seems unlikely.

75 points by fogus 15y ago

koenigdavidmj 15y ago

What is with this guy's aversion to uppercase?

jzawodn 15y ago
Yeah, I guess he wasn't concerned about putting any effort into making it easy for others to read his thoughts. sigh Written text is supposed to be written to be parsed by humans. Why do people forget that?
- bdhe 15y ago
  He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things). I remember a study that said people read based on shapes of words, particularly ascenders, descenders and edges (i.e., first and last letters). Does capitalizing the first letter of the sentence make a difference? If it does, do people that read languages like German which has more capitalization (but the same script) adapt to it?
  - Derbasti 15y ago
    How does a German adapt? Poorly. I nearly stopped reading because of that. It freakes out my wetware text parser to have two spaces before punctuation and no capitalization at the beginning of sentences. At least he did not put punctuation inside quotes...
    - xyzzyz 15y ago
      It's funny, because his capitalization and punctuation are his conscious decisions he wrote about quite a few times. He said it is easy to programmatically upcase first words of the sentences, but it is no easy to do it the other way, without losing meaning. Sentences without first word capitalized are also easier to manipulate. I personally have no problem with reading text written in a such way.
  - kjetil 15y ago
    > He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things). No, you're missing the point. Naggum didn't eschew all capital letters, only where they led to loss of information (ie. failure to separate common and proper nouns). Emacs and Lisp are proper nouns and therefore capitalized. Common nouns that happen to start a sentence are not.
zachbeane 15y ago
The aversion is restricted to capitalizing the initial word of a sentence. It's easier to rearrange words in a sentence and join or split sentences in a paragraph if the first word of a sentence is not capitalized. Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information. It's also helpful to identify people who focus on the trivial.
- akavi 15y ago
  Except it isn't trivial; it materially damaged the ease with which I could read the essay. As a long-time English reader, I've internalized the idea that there will be a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. So when it's lacking, especially when the beginning of a sentence corresponds to a newline as in the beginnings of paragraphs in this essay, my immediate mental response is to assume that I've overshot the sentence's beginning, and immediately to backtrack to find it. Overriding this behavior takes mental effort which detracts from the ease with which I can read. Making it harder for your readers to consume your ideas is hardly a trivial issue.
  - jeramey 15y ago
    e. e. cummings might have a thing or two to say about a thing or two regarding the use of capitalization. It can be worthwhile to overlook or adapt to someone's stylistic peccadilloes if the ideas they have are interesting and useful. Not that I'm casting judgment in regards to that in what either Naggum or cummings wrote! ;-)
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - tincholio 15y ago
    For Emacs users: (defun capitalize-naggum () "Capitalizes text written in Erik Naggum's annoying no-caps style" (interactive) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (aux-naggum (point)))) (defun aux-naggum (current-point) "Recursively capitalize the buffer, moving sentence to sentence. Valid punctuation symbols are [.?!]" (re-search-forward "[a-z]" nil 0 nil) (if (= current-point (point)) t (capitalize-word -1) (re-search-forward "[.!?]") (aux-naggum (point))))
cageface 15y ago
Naggum was one of the net's all-time greatest cranks. He almost singlehandedly turned comp.lang.lisp into a minefield.

valisystem 15y ago

This is incredibly pedantic, and yet, fails to point out parts of the problem. Or maybe the guy just wanted to flatter himself in saying that people that does not want to learn how to use a text editor (can't refrain the old joke : or the editor it lacks) are necessarily stupid morons that can't have a proper opinion on the subject. I tend to orient my tool choice to one that will require the least effort and still allow to achieve the task properly, even though the least effort might be, sometimes, a huge effort. I concentrate on the least effort for a simple reason : if a better tool I could not imagine comes out, I will minimize the hard learned knowledge I'll have to discard. Putting effort in something gives you momentum, you won't let it go easily, because you make the balance difficult to evaluate. Jump between easy to switch solutions, and you are guaranteed to mostly enjoy the best tools (for its class at least) you can get.

JoelMcCracken 15y ago
Your second paragraph is interesting. However, the problem I see is that some tools are better based upon your skill. When you have no skill, Emacs is almost useless. When you have great skill, Emacs is unimaginably useful. This is true for many traditional Unix tools.
- trafficlight 15y ago
  This is true of all tools.
rwl 15y ago
> This is incredibly pedantic, Agreed, but... > and yet, fails to point out parts of the problem. Which parts? You don't go on to say. > Or maybe the guy just wanted to flatter himself in saying that people that does not want to learn how to use a text editor (can't refrain the old joke : or the editor it lacks) are necessarily stupid morons that can't have a proper opinion on the subject. This is not the impression I got. Rather, he was expressing frustration at the concept of "intuitive" or "novice-friendly" software, emphasized by the commercial software industry, that saves initial learning time at the expense of training people to do mindless tasks over and over, instead of learning to use their computers more efficiently. I think he was saying that it is unfortunate that, due to the emphasis on this concept by commercial software, there is now a (perhaps large) segment of the population that won't accept any other kind of interface; and he was saying that Emacs development should probably not target these people. Whether the expression was pedantic or not, this seems like a reasonable thing to be frustrated about, and a reasonable conclusion to draw.

qntm 15y ago

This essay was evidently written in 1997. I don't know what the competitors to Emacs were in 1997 other than Vi, but these days there are extremely powerful text editors which are exceedingly easy for a novice to pick up and use right out of the gate and then go on to offer vast arrays of substantially more advanced tools for those prepared to explore and become experts. Just because it used to be extremely painful to become a towering expert at text editing doesn't mean it should continue to be so. It's not like riding a bicycle-- text editing actually is easy. Or at least, it can be made easy, and there is no argument for keeping it difficult. Remember, text editing in and of itself is of no value. Tools should get the hell out of the way of their users.

lukeschlather 15y ago
>Text editing in and of itself has no value. I just don't know what to make of that. It's true, but only in an incredibly over-technical sense. Text-editing is one of the primary forces that drives the world. Pen or keyboard or voice to speech, text is primary. Yes, of course, the meaning behind the text is more important. But the meaning doesn't appear at all without some means of creating the text. It's like saying that the teeth are not important, it's the food. You can't eat the food without teeth.
- qntm 15y ago
  I'm saying that the meaning of the text - be it prose, poetry or code - is all that is important. Text editors are tools, like paintbrushes and screwdrivers. They only important or valuable to the extent that they enable us to create stuff of actual value. You can go down the route of text editing as art, like that Vi Golf concept that was floating around. And a well-made tool is indeed valuable and beautiful to behold. Nevertheless, I maintain that a text editor is strictly as important as the text it is used to create.
  - jerf 15y ago
    Honest question: Have you ever witnessed an emacs or vi master at work? Have you ever had the experience of watching one of those guys push some keys on the keyboard and then ask yourself how the bloody hell they just did that complicated manipulation in two seconds, when it would have taken you 45? That stuff adds up, more than linearly because they'll do things you wouldn't even consider due to effort. (You won't even consciously decide not to do them, you won't even consider them as a possible option.) (The other day somebody linked a site that extracts the top 100 comments for any HN user. Somebody else started creating links to all the users on the leaderboard. I happened to catch them halfway through linkifying the people on the user board. You never would have caught me halfway through such a task, because I would have used an emacs macro to linkify one, then repeat it 99 times as quickly as I please. And I'm not very good with emacs. Many other tools can do this too, of course.) Be sure you actually know what tool mastery looks like before you downplay the importance of tool mastery. Sure, what matters is results, but tools profoundly and inescapably influence the results you get, so while "all that matters is results" is a true statement on the surface, the actual claim being made underneath about the irrelevance of tools is deeply, deeply false.

krmboya 15y ago

Great article even if it was '97'. And I found emacs easy to use after: C-h t

loup-vaillant 15y ago
Yes, but actually typing it is beyond the ability of most users: you have to read the presentation screen before hitting a key, and you have to guess that "C" means "the control key".
- ajross 15y ago
  Sigh. The first (clickable!) item on the launch screen of the editor is "Emacs Tutorial". The first paragraph displayed in the tutorial after you select (with the mouse!) that item is contains: C-<chr> means hold the CONTROL key while typing the character <chr> Thus, C-f would be: hold the CONTROL key and type f. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that emacs is "easy" to learn (seriously: getting truly good at it will take months at least). But don't pretend that the documentation is hard to read. It's just documentation.
  - loup-vaillant 15y ago
    First, Oops. Second, I didn't want to say that it was difficult, but that many people behave like morons.

adavies42 15y ago

reminds me of QuickSilver talking about wu wei, and seems fairly accurate--the sequence "tap Command, pause about a quarter second, type "S", hit Space" for launching Safari feels a lot like "lean towards where you want to go" does on a bike (or maybe "steer one way and lean the other to make a tight turn without leaning the bike over as far", a more advanced technique).

dizm 15y ago

Blogs and Twitter killed the amazing Usenet rants.

loup-vaillant 15y ago
?!? The rants are still there. They just moved. Or did Usenet influence its users into writing thoughtful rants in ways that blogs and agregators don't? I never used Usenet, but this seems unlikely.