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Yeah, I came to it late -- actually, I came to it after my jobs stopped being "sling code all day." What brought me to it was Orgmode. I'd TRIED to use emacs b

Yeah, I came to it late -- actually, I came to it after my jobs stopped being "sling code all day." What brought me to it was Orgmode. I'd TRIED to use emacs before, 20 years ago, in my LAMP-stack days, but it was too easy to use more modern editors (for me, on a Mac, this was a mix of BBEdit and TextMate). The learning curve in emacs is intense. Then years later, I got sick of the existing to-do software I was using. I changed jobs into a MUCH busier one, and the David Allen / GTD tools like Omnifocus just weren't working for me. I realized what I really really needed was the ability to take notes and intersperse to-do items in the text, and then have some tool that would look at my notes files and show me a dynamic view of the to-dos coming up (or overdue). I mentioned this desire to a friend, and he said, in so many words, "boy do I have some good news for you, because that exactly describes orgmode." In adopting orgmode, I find myself using emacs for other tasks, too, including whatever generic coding I end up doing now where it's reasonable to do so (ie, not vba and not interacting with MS SQL Server).

User23 4y ago
> interacting with MS SQL Server I had a rather nice SQL workflow in Emacs using an inferior SBCL with SLIME and cl-sql. At the time org-babel either didn’t exist or I didn’t know about it, and it was a really nice pseudo-literate environment to explore data.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  It is an absolute truism that, if someone suggests that doing X isn't great in emacs, someone will come along and disagree. ;) SSMS is really, really useful. I cannot imagine an emacs approach would equal it, and if I have to have it around for OTHER tasks, using it for writing SQL is much, much easier than using something else.
  - User23 4y ago
    Well it suited my purposes very well, which was fetching data from MySQL and then doing transformations that were cumbersome in SQL. The thing about Emacs is that it’s rarely the best tool for the job, including when that job is text editing. Where it shines is the ability to integrate and automate entire workflows. There are some real advantages to having your email, IDE, notes, terminals, and whatever else all integrated and seamlessly working together, even if it’s not the very best at each of those things.
    - ubermonkey 4y ago
      If that's your whole use case, yeah, sure. I routinely need to do things like backup and restore, or adjust DB settings, or easily copy data out of SQL and into Excel for tasks, and SSMS is just really, really good at all those things. As for the "everything emacs" thing, I'll say this: there is near total overlap between the set of people who do this and the set of people for whom tinkering with emacs is a rewarding hobby. If you just want to get work done, it's rarely the most effective path. emacs for me is a means to an end: OrgMode. Absent org, I'd never have started using it. Once something else comes along that works as well as org and has a better mobile story, I might move on (Obsidian is interesting...). I am, generally speaking, not a fan of monolithic solutions because it leads to sunk-cost-fallacy thinking and difficulty in migrating to new tools that might serve a purpose better.

User23 4y ago

> interacting with MS SQL Server I had a rather nice SQL workflow in Emacs using an inferior SBCL with SLIME and cl-sql. At the time org-babel either didn’t exist or I didn’t know about it, and it was a really nice pseudo-literate environment to explore data.

ubermonkey 4y ago
It is an absolute truism that, if someone suggests that doing X isn't great in emacs, someone will come along and disagree. ;) SSMS is really, really useful. I cannot imagine an emacs approach would equal it, and if I have to have it around for OTHER tasks, using it for writing SQL is much, much easier than using something else.
- User23 4y ago
  Well it suited my purposes very well, which was fetching data from MySQL and then doing transformations that were cumbersome in SQL. The thing about Emacs is that it’s rarely the best tool for the job, including when that job is text editing. Where it shines is the ability to integrate and automate entire workflows. There are some real advantages to having your email, IDE, notes, terminals, and whatever else all integrated and seamlessly working together, even if it’s not the very best at each of those things.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    If that's your whole use case, yeah, sure. I routinely need to do things like backup and restore, or adjust DB settings, or easily copy data out of SQL and into Excel for tasks, and SSMS is just really, really good at all those things. As for the "everything emacs" thing, I'll say this: there is near total overlap between the set of people who do this and the set of people for whom tinkering with emacs is a rewarding hobby. If you just want to get work done, it's rarely the most effective path. emacs for me is a means to an end: OrgMode. Absent org, I'd never have started using it. Once something else comes along that works as well as org and has a better mobile story, I might move on (Obsidian is interesting...). I am, generally speaking, not a fan of monolithic solutions because it leads to sunk-cost-fallacy thinking and difficulty in migrating to new tools that might serve a purpose better.