4 ms·
What I discovered is that in many cases, my ability to adapt to a foreign environment without frustration is more important than the benefits of configuring a l
by moron 14y ago
What I discovered is that in many cases, my ability to adapt to a foreign environment without frustration is more important than the benefits of configuring a local environment to suit my whims.
YES. That is exactly why endlessly messing around with text-editor configuration frippery is a waste of time.
- heretohelp 14y agoI use a relatively vanilla bash shell, but I actually think the text editor is an exception here as long as you don't spend a lot of time yak-shaving. It's pretty likely you'll be in a foreign bash environment on a semi-regular basis, it's pretty unlikely you'll sit down to code in a foreign environment. My emacs env is trivially importable to any machine I happen to be on anyway.
- tikhonj 14y agoI don't know. Whenever I use my friends Windows computers--and, reasonably, Windows is the default--I'm lost. And yet this is not a good case for switching to Windows! Besides, these days, I work from my laptop. 99% of the time, I'm on my computer. Now, perhaps I'm remoting into some server, but if so I'm doing that from a local Emacs. When I need to use a new computer, assuming it's running Linux, I only need to copy a couple of configuration files over and it works exactly how I want. So the only time I have a problem is if I'm using somebody else's computer for a short time. This does not happen often, and when it does it doesn't last long. Moreover, as I said above, chances are high that this computer is either running Windows or OS X, so I'd be at a disadvantage even if I didn't tinker with my setup. Finally, fundamentally, I think configuring your system is worth doing if it makes you more productive. Most of the things I've configured in Emacs do make me more productive (as far as I can tell). Things like adding new keyboard commands for operations I often use and making Emacs automatically recognize when I'm doing work stuff as opposed to non-work stuff just make life easier for me. Configuring any individual feature is an O(1) action. Assuming it brings a benefit, this benefit is going to be in O(n) to how much I use it. Given I use both my OS and my text editor a whole lot even a significant amount of time spent configuring everything to work well pays off. I'm not wasting my time--I'm increasing my efficiency.
- groby_b 14y agoJust keep in mind that O(1) = O(1 + c). Depending on the relative size of n and c, you might want to stop and think :)
- tikhonj 14y agoHappily, this gets amortized as n increases. So I just have to use Emacs more to make it worth it. A delicious proposition. (Hey, I should totally write a mode for browsing HN from Emacs! Then I'll have no need to ever leave :P.)
- dllthomas 14y ago> Whenever I use my friends Windows computers--and, reasonably, Windows is the default--I'm lost. And yet this is not a good case for switching to Windows! Actually, I think it is a good case for switching to Windows. I just don't think it's a sufficient case.
- to3m 14y agoI've never been convinced by that! Procrastination is procrastination. If you weren't tweaking options, you'd be staring out of the window.