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Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

(waxbanks.wordpress.com)
197 points hpaone | 2 comments | 14 Oct 25 20:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.416s | source
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alyandon ◴[21 Oct 25 15:53 UTC] No.45657313[source]▶

  They say there’s no Emacs — only your Emacs.
This hit home for me. I spent about 6 months working exclusively with emacs to get past the "this is weird/hard because it is unfamiliar to me" stage. At the end of the experiment, I went back to using vim and IDEs.

My take personal takeaways from the experience:

1) capslock/ctrl switching is helpful in so many other areas - so I kept that

2) emacs is something you want to "live in" (e.g. learning to rely on eshell) if you want to really become proficient with it

3) emacs is something you have to be willing to tweak/adjust via elisp to suite your personal preferences if you want to really really really be proficient with it

I didn't hate emacs but it also wasn't for me.

replies(2): >>45658122 #>>45663197 #
1. skydhash ◴[21 Oct 25 23:43 UTC] No.45663197[source]▶
2) I have eshell bound to a keybind, but I've never use it. I prefer shell-mode and shell-command. They make it easy to use cli utilities. TUI is something that I find myself no longer needing. And I've become so accustomed with the cli that the only two I'm using in a terminal is `less` and `top`.

3) I think the best way is to find some vanilla base config that will smooth out the rough parts, then, once you understand the internal concepts, tweak them to your liking. It's certainly a long term plan, but the pro is not having to wait on "features" from another company or group.

replies(1): >>45682831 #
2. iLemming ◴[23 Oct 25 15:18 UTC] No.45682831[source]▶
> I have eshell bound to a keybind, but I've never use it

For years, I had a similar feeling about it. And then I learned that in eshell you can pipe in and out of buffers. So you can for example grep the content of one buffer and pipe results into another. Or pipe the output of a command to a buffer, and you even can chain them pipes. That often comes extremely handy.