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Why Emacs

Now that I’ve joined the wonderful world of the office workplace, I
find myself missing my Emacs-based life.

I miss using Emacs to manage my day. There’s something about being
able to open a text file and type in a line to create an appointment.
It’s clean and it’s simple.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll bcc myself on event invitations and I’ll just parse
that into my calendar. Maybe I’ll install Emacs on my work computer
and figure out how other people are doing their synchronization.
(Maybe I’ll write an Emacs interface for Activities! Well, that
would be the day… ;) )

Why do I like managing my schedule in a *text editor*, when there are
perfectly good groupware clients out there?

First, I really love the keyboard-friendly interface of Emacs. Don’t
get me wrong: C-x C-c is hard to type even on my keyboard, and
keyboard combinations involving Ctrl *and* Meta at the same time are
Not Fun. But it’s easy to define new keyboard shortcuts, and the
commands themselves don’t require any mouse movements. There are no
complicated fields I need to TAB through. Everything can be done
practically without looking. This is good for me.

Second, I like the customizability of it. If I invested some time
figuring out how to extend Lotus Notes 8 and I put up with the
edit/compile/run cycle, I might be able to get the kind of custom task
sorting and schedule highlighting that I have in my Emacs. Here’s what
tweaking looks like under Emacs:

  1. Get an idea. “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”
  2. Use C-h a (apropos) or C-h k (describe-key) or C-h f (describe-function) to get to some function that does something similar to what I want to do.
  3. If the change is easily encapsulated, write some function advice in a scratch buffer. If the change requires more complicated hacking, copy the function into a scratch buffer and start playing with it.
  4. Evaluate the new function. Try it out. If it doesn’t do what I want, use edebug to find out why. Build up from small changes. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Fun stuff.

Random Emacs symbol: muse-colors – Group: Options controlling the
behavior of Emacs Muse highlighting.

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/4417

On This Day...

  • 2012: Pub nights and thinking about networking at events — One of the lessons we took home from the Quantified Self Conference in September was the importance of a pub [...]
  • 2012: Planning how to learn about validating business ideas — I’ve been taking notes at business events and sharing them on my blog. People tell me that they really like [...]
  • 2011: Weekly review: Week ending October 21, 2011 — Back to work! Transition was smooth, thanks to some weekend time spent catching up with mail and getting things ready [...]
  • 2010: Drupal Features and Drush: updating our development workflow — I’m working with two other people on a Drupal project, so we’re coordinating our work through a Subversion source [...]
  • 2009: Vacations and the introvert — What’s your ideal vacation? Many people would probably describe an idyllic retreat on a pristine beach. Others dream of action-packed [...]
  • 2008: Catching my breath — I just came back from a trip to Boston that was jam-packed with interesting conversations and connections. The cookies were [...]
  • 2007: Practice evangelist — I joined Aaron Kim and Bernie Michalik’s team in IBM last week, and I *love* what I’m doing. It’s such a [...]
  • 2006: Emacs presentation was a blast! — Had too much material (of course), but had tons of fun anyway. =) Blew people’s minds. Yay! On Technorati: democamp
  • 2006: Hello world — This is a blog entry On Technorati: democamp Random Emacs symbol: eshell-script-load-hook – Variable: *A list of functions to call when loading [...]
  • 2006: PBJ 1.0 — Kudos to the presenter for structuring the presentation for quick and early audience participation, and for taking on the challenge [...]
  • 2006: Demo Camp: Broken Tomb: The world’s first commercial Smalltalk host — Look! It’s the Demo Camp of the Living Dead Languages! =D Smalltalk is a fun language. I ran into it when [...]
  • 2006: Demo Camp: Quotiki — Quotiki has live search for quotes, which would be good if it was more responsive. For example, the search “caesar” just [...]
  • 2006: Demo camp: Online grading and code review — The online grading and code review system demonstrated by Greg Wilson‘s students from the University of Toronto is really cool, [...]
  • 2006: Excited about my DemoCamp presentation! — I’ve written a totally small-time presentation thingy that cues me thanks to Emacspeak. ;) Here’s the setup code: (progn ;; Setup [...]
  • 2005: Argh, keycaps — A book fell off my shelf and knocked off the keycap for 4. It also dislodged the keycap for T (Y [...]
  • 2004: Debian BOF — Slideshow of people from the Debian project. Debianメンテナへの道 http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~ohura/ ~40 Japanese DDs - Philosophy and procedure - Tasks and skills 公開鍵 – public key
  • 2004: Translation BOF — Lots of people use Emacs. Way cool. Edict’s apparently the best way to look up things. I had hoped that a [...]
  • 2004: OO.o demonstration — catch. Community Manager Louis Suarez-Potts Changes: Misc toolbar moved to the bottom. Toolbars now draggable and dockable, like MS Office. Tweaks to the toolbar [...]
  • 2003: /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc does not have any corresponding BIOS drive. — Got this error when installing grub. grub-install --recheck /dev/hda fixed it. Switch to 2.6 kernel and all…
  • 2003: Emacs annoyance — I’ve tracked it down – make-variable-buffer-local needs to be done..
  • 2003: Bah. mozilla-psm is segfaulting on me today. — Downgraded to testing and held.
  • 2003: Emacs weirdness — For some reason, local-write-file-hooks had the BBDB stuff in it, so cookies were getting added to my data… Hmm. Test script. (let ((old-hook [...]
  • 2003: Internet and E-Mail on a dialup using linux — http://www.hserus.net/exim.html
  • 2003: Paranoid mail servers — Our school mail server is particularly paranoid. Whenever I am on campus, I have to use it as my smarthost, but [...]

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