7 ms·
it's amazing what people will do to avoid using emacs
by maydup-nem 5y ago
it's amazing what people will do to avoid using emacs
- NeutralForest 5y agoEven if you prefer markdown over org-mode, there's stuff like https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/ which works really well
- totetsu 5y agoZotero integration would be a plus over orgmode too
- NeutralForest 5y agoThere's emacs-zotero and zotxt you can use with org-mode. Add org-ref into the mix and it's all good.
- totetsu 5y agoThanks
- lifty 5y agoit's amazing what people will do to avoid writing a novel
- torh 5y agoit's amazing what people will do to avoid reading a novel
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoI think it's amazing people read novels. Even if I had infinite time I'm not sure I would. Not that I'm against them! A great novel is a beautiful thing, and I'm glad someone is out there to enjoy them.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoAudiobooks are a good middle ground if the voice actor matches your perception of the narrator.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoI'm a voracious consumer of podcasts and the audio edition of the Economist. Alas, it leaves me no time for fiction.
- torh 5y agoI might. But for now, I found that I prefer to read biographies. They just seems to give me more joy.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoGreat point. I love biography. The myriad details that don't matter at all to me if someone made them up are absolutely fascinating when they're (more likely) real.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoThe crucial ideas in a piece of fiction, I find I generally can absorb much faster in some other format. It's true that the flavor of the world and the human interactions is lost. But I have an actual world to provide those. I can see the argument that my experience of human interactions is a biased and incomplete sample. That's clearly true. But they are the relevant ones to my experience. And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the important drivers of what people do. Damn, I should write a novel.
- Jtsummers 5y ago> And I'm always disappointed at the bias in the human interactions portrayed by novels. They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life. Most conflict is between people none of whom can be well characterized as evil. There is substantial variation in peoples' values, and in the information they have, and those are the important drivers of what people do. This very much depends on both the author and the genre of fiction. Not every fiction novel even has a notion of "evil" (or outright evil, there may be characters who are "bad" in some sense or the antagonist, but not outright evil in their nature or quality in an over-the-top fashion). From your description of fiction it sounds largely like the fantasy genre in particular which is very often written as good vs evil kind of stories (though not universally, just very common). Other genres or other writers within that genre are often more interesting.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoYou're right, evil is not a universal plot driver. But at least one of exceptional evil or exceptionally high stakes drive the majority of fantasy, sci-fi, crime, horror, and political novels. And not without reason -- if you want drama, they give you that. But I don't think they often do much to usefully inform a person about anything.
- sicariusnoctis 5y agoThis is a strange way to say "stubbornly use an editor that is inferior to vim". :P
- RealStickman_ 5y agoMaybe he uses Evil-Mode
- maydup-nem 5y agoI do : )
- Grimm665 5y agoGenuine question: as a long time Emacs user, and someone with 0 hours writing novels, I feel I would already have a general idea of how to set up Emacs org-mode to be comfortable for novel writing. How would you approach this task in vim? I use vim extensively, but only on remote servers and without configs or plugins. What plugins or settings would you use to set up vim for novel writing?
- bitexploder 5y agoLong time emacs user. I have been enjoying vscodium with some Emacs and markdown plugins for almost all writing and note taking. Been using PyCharm for Python dev. Just felt I didn’t have time to fiddle with my lisp code and Emacs setup the last few years. I still hop in for org mode once in a while, otherwise, I have moved on. VS code is kind of this generations Emacs. I think it does most things better for most people.
- olivierestsage 5y agoVscode/vscodium may be nice for a lot of tasks, and probably preferable for many users overall, but I think there will always be a certain mindset of developer/writer/person who prefers the Emacs approach. When I tried Emacs after Vscode I was blown away by the ability to write my own customizations that can affect every level of how it operates (and I'm not part of a generation that learned Emacs by default).
- bitexploder 5y agoI do agree, ultimately it comes down to a few factors: inclination and time being chief among them. Does tinkering in Emacs actually save me time or is it something I am doing because I like doing it. There is a non-trivial cost to living in the Emacs ecosystem. That’s why I caveated things. I have used Emacs a long, long time and I still do, but I have simplified my setup and backed off of it for many editing chores. I don’t think the utility is there for someone to spend the man hours customizing an editing environment for say Python dev when something like Pycharm exists, for example. Even vscode with a few extensions is very powerful and reaching IDE levels of capability. Emacs and living in its lisp machine is amazing and Zen and something I leveraged when I enjoyed the whole process. These days I simply don’t have time :)
- eointierney 5y agoWith org-mode and writeroom I use these for my D&D campaigns and they're _amazing_ What's a roleplaying campaign but a collaborative novel with a few too many dice?
- toyg 5y agoThat should tell you something about the general usability and friendliness of emacs.
- maydup-nem 5y agogeneral usability? emacs is as usable as you make it. friendliness? emacs doesn't need friends, it needs power users.
- toyg 5y ago> general usability? emacs is as usable as you make it. Lol, I have to remember this line... "yeah, this house has no bathroom, but you can build one yourself that it's as good as it gets!"
- allarm 5y agoIt’s not a correct analogy though. In case of Emacs the house has a bathroom for you, a sauna for your whole family, separate bathrooms for your cat and your dog and at least one bathroom for an extraterrestrial entity that breathes helium. And yeah, in case you’re not satisfied with that amount of bathrooms you can build up your own after some training.
- mhd 5y agoHow an actual author (Vernor Vinge) uses Emacs: https://i.imgur.com/G6HXGCw.png https://i.imgur.com/G6HXGCw.png (CW: Emacs^2)
- dubya 5y agoThis illustrates what I miss using WYSIWYG programs like MS Word or Google Docs: the ability to easily comment out lines without deleting them, or leave notes to oneself.