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The article doesn't really do justice to the composability - it provides little to no examples. So I'll try to provide some: Emacs has a lot of functionality o

The article doesn't really do justice to the composability - it provides little to no examples. So I'll try to provide some: Emacs has a lot of functionality on displaying email, handling attachments, etc. This made it almost trivial for notmuch[1] to make a frontend for their tool. If you think about it, notmuch is merely a stand alone indexer. But they quickly made a full blown email client in Emacs revolving around notmuch by borrowing most of the functionality from packages like Gnus, etc. magit has a neat menu based interface. Now many other packages make use of its interface even though they have nothing to do with git. There are multiple completion frameworks, and it's always gratifying to utilize one of them for your own needs. As an example, I wanted to keep a directory of contacts. I used org-roam to create a node for each contact, and freely put any information I wanted in there (notes about the person, etc). However, I sometimes keep meeting minutes at work (in org mode) and whenever I mention a person, I want a link to his/her contact page. So I hacked up some elisp functions to: 1. Insert a new person (and return a link to him/her) 2. Select an existing person (this is where using a completion framework comes in). Think of all the different pieces I used: 1. Org mode 2. Org-roam 3. A completion framework like vertico to show me only nodes that are people, and not all my notes nodes. 4. Calendar functionality to specify times/dates (really I'm using the functionality in org mode, which builds on the Emacs calendar functionality). Basically I built a minutes taking tool + contacts management by using various components of packages. It was not a lot of code - perhaps 1-2 screenfuls. I once had a directory with a lot of video files. I wanted to share some with friends, but needed to go through each one to decide if it's relevant to them. I wrote some simple elisp that, within dired (Emac's file manager), when I hit Enter on an mp4 file, would play the file using mplayer. If I wanted to share it, with another keybinding, it would put a link to the file in a particular org document. This is a typical example, of utilizing several different Emacs packages to achieve a custom task. [1] https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/

ashton314 4y ago
Great example! Yes, the way org-mode and the various email systems play nicely together is sheer beauty. Nothing like it.
joeman1000 4y ago
It’s a playground for text. If you dream of a feature you want and your elisp is decent, the dream can become reality. It’s a beautiful big mess of features that mostly inter-operate. It feels like you can create ‘emergent behaviour’ when you compose the features. I started off in emacs just using it to take notes at uni. I wanted to get inline previews of LaTeX equations. Previously I was doing the old ‘markdown written in vim converted to pdf via pandoc’, but I knew something was just.. off. It was a slog to add pictures to notes, I couldn’t render my equations easily, exporting was cumbersome and not the way I wanted it to look… I wanted to do MORE with my notes, have them feel like live documents, not just plaintext in a terminal. I stumbled across doom emacs 2 years ago, knowing only a paltry bit of python. Picking emacs on that day was one of the greatest choices in my whole life, without any exaggeration. It was very daunting to dive into this big, alien world and ingest so much information (conventions, package names, functions, …). I just kept finding myself amazed that, for someone who prefers to limit mouse usage, emacs contains the absolute best experience in: - note taking - document creation (org, ox) - literate programming (org-babel) - pdf viewing and interaction (pdf-tools) - time management and planning (org) - version control (vc, magit) - desktop RPN calculation (calc) - PKM (roam, denote) This was just a Cambrian explosion of creativity for me. Any number of these killer features were composable in whatever way I fancied. I was no longer held back by the poor interfaces and segregated nature of literally every other piece of software I had used in my life previously. I mentioned that I only knew a bit of python when starting… the barrier to entry for most languages drops sharply every time you increase your emacs skill. Language major-modes are the distilled knowledge of thousands of man-hours in any particular machine language. Using these (none of which I’ve even mentioned in my list above), I’ve been able to learn (on my own, while studying civil engineering): - emacs lisp - Julia - Common Lisp - Scheme - Racket - APL & J - JavaScript - R - (a few more at a cursory level) I’ve interviewed at a few engineering firms based on these skills and they’ve all asked me “how did you go about learning all of these things?”, to which I couldn’t just reply “emacs”, but I really should have. I actually was picked out of the pile of resumes/cover letters because of the presentation and formatting (LaTeX pdf export from org). I was then offered an internship because of my skills gained by using emacs for a few years. I don’t exaggerate by saying it changed my life. Anyone reading this with any spark of interest: please put aside any notions you have about emacs and just give it a chance.

ashton314 4y ago

Great example! Yes, the way org-mode and the various email systems play nicely together is sheer beauty. Nothing like it.

joeman1000 4y ago

It’s a playground for text. If you dream of a feature you want and your elisp is decent, the dream can become reality. It’s a beautiful big mess of features that mostly inter-operate. It feels like you can create ‘emergent behaviour’ when you compose the features. I started off in emacs just using it to take notes at uni. I wanted to get inline previews of LaTeX equations. Previously I was doing the old ‘markdown written in vim converted to pdf via pandoc’, but I knew something was just.. off. It was a slog to add pictures to notes, I couldn’t render my equations easily, exporting was cumbersome and not the way I wanted it to look… I wanted to do MORE with my notes, have them feel like live documents, not just plaintext in a terminal. I stumbled across doom emacs 2 years ago, knowing only a paltry bit of python. Picking emacs on that day was one of the greatest choices in my whole life, without any exaggeration. It was very daunting to dive into this big, alien world and ingest so much information (conventions, package names, functions, …). I just kept finding myself amazed that, for someone who prefers to limit mouse usage, emacs contains the absolute best experience in: - note taking - document creation (org, ox) - literate programming (org-babel) - pdf viewing and interaction (pdf-tools) - time management and planning (org) - version control (vc, magit) - desktop RPN calculation (calc) - PKM (roam, denote) This was just a Cambrian explosion of creativity for me. Any number of these killer features were composable in whatever way I fancied. I was no longer held back by the poor interfaces and segregated nature of literally every other piece of software I had used in my life previously. I mentioned that I only knew a bit of python when starting… the barrier to entry for most languages drops sharply every time you increase your emacs skill. Language major-modes are the distilled knowledge of thousands of man-hours in any particular machine language. Using these (none of which I’ve even mentioned in my list above), I’ve been able to learn (on my own, while studying civil engineering): - emacs lisp - Julia - Common Lisp - Scheme - Racket - APL & J - JavaScript - R - (a few more at a cursory level) I’ve interviewed at a few engineering firms based on these skills and they’ve all asked me “how did you go about learning all of these things?”, to which I couldn’t just reply “emacs”, but I really should have. I actually was picked out of the pile of resumes/cover letters because of the presentation and formatting (LaTeX pdf export from org). I was then offered an internship because of my skills gained by using emacs for a few years. I don’t exaggerate by saying it changed my life. Anyone reading this with any spark of interest: please put aside any notions you have about emacs and just give it a chance.