5 ms·

Emacs chads just keep winning.

iLemming 1y ago
Younger folk and beginners keep ignoring Emacs (and Lisp in general), without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing. The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed imagination of what note-taking/knowledge work should be, Emacs+Org erases the distinction between a tool and thought through radical philosophical pillars. 1. The Medium is the Message Paradox Emacs rejects the app paradigm's fundamental axiom. Instead of being a "notes app" or "writing app", it's a meta-medium where: - Your notes can spontaneously become a calendar event → spreadsheet formula → email draft → code compiler - The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions) - Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer) 1. Agency Through Textual Primordial Soup By rooting everything in plain text + programmable buffers, you're working with the substrate of computation itself. Unlike database-driven apps that entomb your ideas in rigid schemas: - Every thought remains perpetually protean – a TODO item can morph into a API documentation generator through markup alone - You manipulate knowledge at the level of semantics (headings, tags, properties) rather than fighting GUI metaphors - The friction between "taking notes" and "building systems" disappears – your journal entries are the configuration files of your life (I manage all my dotfiles — for Linux, Mac, home and work machines via Org-mode) 1. Compounding Selfhood Specialized apps optimize for atomic efficiency; Emacs thrives on continuous identity investment. Each macro you write, each Org capture template, each minor mode becomes: - A cognitive microhabitat that evolves with your thinking patterns - Permanent infrastructure that pays compound interest (my 2010 Org config still works, while Evernote of 2010 is abandonware) - A mirror of your epistemology – the keybindings/hierarchies are your neural pathways externalized This creates an irreducible satisfaction: you're not just using tools but cultivating a personal universe where every interaction leaves permanent fertile ground for future growth. The specialized app user lives in rented apartments; the Emacs devotee walks through an ever-expanding mansion whose rooms rearrange themselves to their thoughts.
- swah 1y ago
  (Long time Emacs user, abandoned since VSCode became a thing because it hurt my wrists so much.) Do you think what you're talking about is hard to demo? "- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions) - Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)" I haven't seen an impressive demo of this kind of stuff tbh.
  - iLemming 1y ago
    No, it's not hard to demo, and I've been thinking about making some vids, but it's just difficult for me for multiple reasons. Besides, the whole topic feels too grandiose to cover easily and make it satisfying for every level of expertise — newbies and seasoned veterans. I'm a regular dweller of https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx. We meet every first Wednesday of the month - if timezone permits it, come talk to us if you have specific questions. I will promise you though to make an effort to produce some demos and publish them.
    - JackedLisp 1y ago
      Very impressed by Rainer König's Org-Mode tutorial series on YouTube. He manages to keep most episodes under 15min. As you progress the knowledge keeps building slowly. Highly effective. His paid courses are likely even better. During the 1st series He only touched init.el a few times. Opting instead for using Customize functionality. He used the default theme, if you can all it that. Toolbar on and menu bar and he used them during the sessions. System Crafters tends to mostly do live streams for more a couple of hours. You learn a lot watching them. But many people don't have the patience for that.
      - iLemming 1y ago
        Rainer is indeed great and he also published an Udemy course on the topic. I've never tried it, by the time he released it I already was well-versed in Org-mode. He does a good job of showing some interesting features of Org-mode, yet he doesn't provide any insights of how cross-referencing things in a real workplace scenario may look like, how does Org-mode/Emacs help you to communicate with your colleagues. How it allows you to investigate failing http endpoint or document some investigation where you need to dig into a sql db. How Org integrates with other packages, like Anki, Pomodoro or Noter (for pdf annotations). Wilson's vids also great, but that too, doesn't work as "marketing material", it's mostly "preaching to the choir" and unlikely to bring attention outside of the Emacs-world, still, those videos are very good. The point I'm trying to make — there are great videos and tutorials for specific things — Org-mode, text-editing features of Emacs, version control, etc. There aren't many vids to demo "the point of Emacs holistically", with the emphasis on "Always bet on text" https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html, I'm just gonna throw a random quote from that great article: "Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else." That is the greatest selling point of Emacs. That's what actually makes a huge difference. When it comes to manipulating text - fetching, processing, searching through, dicing, slicing, summarizing, converting, publishing, etc. — Emacs truly is the unmatched king of that prose.
weavie 1y ago
Emacs can be a curse too. Once you get into it, it's really hard to use anything else..

Younger folk and beginners keep ignoring Emacs (and Lisp in general), without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing. The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed imagination of what note-taking/knowledge work should be, Emacs+Org erases the distinction between a tool and thought through radical philosophical pillars. 1. The Medium is the Message Paradox Emacs rejects the app paradigm's fundamental axiom. Instead of being a "notes app" or "writing app", it's a meta-medium where: - Your notes can spontaneously become a calendar event → spreadsheet formula → email draft → code compiler - The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions) - Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer) 1. Agency Through Textual Primordial Soup By rooting everything in plain text + programmable buffers, you're working with the substrate of computation itself. Unlike database-driven apps that entomb your ideas in rigid schemas: - Every thought remains perpetually protean – a TODO item can morph into a API documentation generator through markup alone - You manipulate knowledge at the level of semantics (headings, tags, properties) rather than fighting GUI metaphors - The friction between "taking notes" and "building systems" disappears – your journal entries are the configuration files of your life (I manage all my dotfiles — for Linux, Mac, home and work machines via Org-mode) 1. Compounding Selfhood Specialized apps optimize for atomic efficiency; Emacs thrives on continuous identity investment. Each macro you write, each Org capture template, each minor mode becomes: - A cognitive microhabitat that evolves with your thinking patterns - Permanent infrastructure that pays compound interest (my 2010 Org config still works, while Evernote of 2010 is abandonware) - A mirror of your epistemology – the keybindings/hierarchies are your neural pathways externalized This creates an irreducible satisfaction: you're not just using tools but cultivating a personal universe where every interaction leaves permanent fertile ground for future growth. The specialized app user lives in rented apartments; the Emacs devotee walks through an ever-expanding mansion whose rooms rearrange themselves to their thoughts.

swah 1y ago
(Long time Emacs user, abandoned since VSCode became a thing because it hurt my wrists so much.) Do you think what you're talking about is hard to demo? "- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions) - Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)" I haven't seen an impressive demo of this kind of stuff tbh.
- iLemming 1y ago
  No, it's not hard to demo, and I've been thinking about making some vids, but it's just difficult for me for multiple reasons. Besides, the whole topic feels too grandiose to cover easily and make it satisfying for every level of expertise — newbies and seasoned veterans. I'm a regular dweller of https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx. We meet every first Wednesday of the month - if timezone permits it, come talk to us if you have specific questions. I will promise you though to make an effort to produce some demos and publish them.
  - JackedLisp 1y ago
    Very impressed by Rainer König's Org-Mode tutorial series on YouTube. He manages to keep most episodes under 15min. As you progress the knowledge keeps building slowly. Highly effective. His paid courses are likely even better. During the 1st series He only touched init.el a few times. Opting instead for using Customize functionality. He used the default theme, if you can all it that. Toolbar on and menu bar and he used them during the sessions. System Crafters tends to mostly do live streams for more a couple of hours. You learn a lot watching them. But many people don't have the patience for that.
    - iLemming 1y ago
      Rainer is indeed great and he also published an Udemy course on the topic. I've never tried it, by the time he released it I already was well-versed in Org-mode. He does a good job of showing some interesting features of Org-mode, yet he doesn't provide any insights of how cross-referencing things in a real workplace scenario may look like, how does Org-mode/Emacs help you to communicate with your colleagues. How it allows you to investigate failing http endpoint or document some investigation where you need to dig into a sql db. How Org integrates with other packages, like Anki, Pomodoro or Noter (for pdf annotations). Wilson's vids also great, but that too, doesn't work as "marketing material", it's mostly "preaching to the choir" and unlikely to bring attention outside of the Emacs-world, still, those videos are very good. The point I'm trying to make — there are great videos and tutorials for specific things — Org-mode, text-editing features of Emacs, version control, etc. There aren't many vids to demo "the point of Emacs holistically", with the emphasis on "Always bet on text" https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html, I'm just gonna throw a random quote from that great article: "Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else." That is the greatest selling point of Emacs. That's what actually makes a huge difference. When it comes to manipulating text - fetching, processing, searching through, dicing, slicing, summarizing, converting, publishing, etc. — Emacs truly is the unmatched king of that prose.

weavie 1y ago

Emacs can be a curse too. Once you get into it, it's really hard to use anything else..