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Does anyone else not understand what people mean when they refer to the "friction" supposedly inherent to these power user tools? Almost none of the configs/scr

by squigz 5mo ago

Does anyone else not understand what people mean when they refer to the "friction" supposedly inherent to these power user tools? Almost none of the configs/scripts/etc I use for my heavily-customized and terminal-heavy setup get changed for years at a time.

viksit 5mo ago
> heavily-customized and terminal-heavy setup this exactly. most people can’t set it up that well.
pavon 5mo ago
If you are frequently having to use other computers, a heavily customized setup has much more friction either to setup the machine like you want, or remember how to do things without all the customization (if you can't customize or it isn't worth the time). When I graduated college I used Dvorak and Emacs on Linux. Six months of having to use shared Windows lab computers extensively beat me down to surrender all of those points - my brain just couldn't handle switching, so I conformed my desktop to match. Then later I switched jobs to a group that was all Unix, but of many varieties most of which only had vi, not Emacs. And so I learned vi. Sometimes minimizing friction means going with the flow.
arikrahman 5mo ago
Arguably NixOS is the most config heavy platform but it solves the pain point of having to reconfigure on different systems. Especially in the LLM era where I can configure Emacs and my OS decoratively.
- kqr 5mo ago
  How do you nixify your Emacs configuration? I've looked into it but at the time the advice was to specify dependencies both in Nix and in .emacs.d, which seemed redundant to me. Is there something like callCabal2Nix for Emacs? Edit: Or do you mean "declaratively" in the sense of using something like straight.el?
  - arikrahman 5mo ago
    I do it declaratively, however I specifically use an unstraightened version. [[https://github.com/marienz/nix-doom-emacs-unstraightened https://github.com/marienz/nix-doom-emacs-unstraightened][marienz/nix-doom-emacs-unstraightened: Builds Doom Emacs using Nix]] I use a doom emacs overlay that uses pgtk so it works flawlessly on wayland, since I only learned recently that it uses X by default. You can inspect my dotfiles here: [[https://github.com/ArikRahman/dotfiles https://github.com/ArikRahman/dotfiles][ArikRahman/dotfiles: Arik's Dotfiles]]
farfatched 5mo ago
A heavily-customised setup is very comfortable. It's so comfortable that it acts as an impediment to change, since some types of change are uncomfortable. This can feel like friction to me. When I remove customisation, I am more "open to experience", and often find preferable tooling.

by squigz 5mo ago

viksit 5mo ago

> heavily-customized and terminal-heavy setup this exactly. most people can’t set it up that well.

pavon 5mo ago

If you are frequently having to use other computers, a heavily customized setup has much more friction either to setup the machine like you want, or remember how to do things without all the customization (if you can't customize or it isn't worth the time). When I graduated college I used Dvorak and Emacs on Linux. Six months of having to use shared Windows lab computers extensively beat me down to surrender all of those points - my brain just couldn't handle switching, so I conformed my desktop to match. Then later I switched jobs to a group that was all Unix, but of many varieties most of which only had vi, not Emacs. And so I learned vi. Sometimes minimizing friction means going with the flow.

arikrahman 5mo ago

Arguably NixOS is the most config heavy platform but it solves the pain point of having to reconfigure on different systems. Especially in the LLM era where I can configure Emacs and my OS decoratively.

kqr 5mo ago
How do you nixify your Emacs configuration? I've looked into it but at the time the advice was to specify dependencies both in Nix and in .emacs.d, which seemed redundant to me. Is there something like callCabal2Nix for Emacs? Edit: Or do you mean "declaratively" in the sense of using something like straight.el?
- arikrahman 5mo ago
  I do it declaratively, however I specifically use an unstraightened version. [[https://github.com/marienz/nix-doom-emacs-unstraightened https://github.com/marienz/nix-doom-emacs-unstraightened][marienz/nix-doom-emacs-unstraightened: Builds Doom Emacs using Nix]] I use a doom emacs overlay that uses pgtk so it works flawlessly on wayland, since I only learned recently that it uses X by default. You can inspect my dotfiles here: [[https://github.com/ArikRahman/dotfiles https://github.com/ArikRahman/dotfiles][ArikRahman/dotfiles: Arik's Dotfiles]]

farfatched 5mo ago

A heavily-customised setup is very comfortable. It's so comfortable that it acts as an impediment to change, since some types of change are uncomfortable. This can feel like friction to me. When I remove customisation, I am more "open to experience", and often find preferable tooling.