
Two Years With Emacs as a CEO and now CTO (2018) - spudlyo
https://www.fugue.co/blog/2018-08-09-two-years-with-emacs-as-a-cto.html
======
omarhaneef
This excerpt is a relief because it feels like I got permission to stop trying
to use org-mode for to-do lists:

"# I gave up on using Org-mode for schedules and to-do lists

I spent some words in the original post on using Org-mode for schedules. I
gave up on using Org-mode for to dos and the like, as I have to coordinate
many meetings and calls every day with dozens of people, and I cannot ask the
rest of the world to adapt to my choice of tools, nor do I have the time to
transcribe or automate moving things to Org. We are primarily a Mac shop, use
Google Calendar etc., and the native Mac OS/iOS tools do a good job for
collaboration. I also use a plain old pen for note-taking during meetings, as
I find laptop/keyboard use in meetings to be rude and limiting to my ability
to listen and think. Therefore I've largely abandoned the idea that Emacs/org
can help me with my schedule or organizing my life. Org-mode is great for lots
of other things too though, and is my go-to for writing documents, including
this one. In other words, I use it largely in ways the author didn't intend,
and it's great at them. I hope someone says the same of our work at Fugue
someday."

~~~
komali2
Yea, same. I keep trying to figure it out but it just doesn't seem to have any
advantages over checking my backlog for my todos.

Maybe because I gave up trying to configure emacs on my own and ended up with
spacemacs + evil mode, thus overcomplicating org mode (and overriding some of
the keybindings people use in tutorials) beyond use?

~~~
stefco_
I found the main problem was at the interface with other people. I never got
org's iOS app working properly and generally missed the multimedia flexibility
of Notes (nothing beats scanning PDFs and instantly having them show up in
your document, ready to share with others from your phone). It's messy, but in
practice it's actually lower friction. I ended up generally dropping org mode
and just using LaTeX to-do lists based on a template I wrote.

------
vincent-toups
I'm an absolutely dedicated Emacs user. Cannot imagine moving to another
editor.

Strangely enough, about 3 years ago I nuked my huge library of custom
configurations and complicated Emacs Lisp thingamajigs and just use vanilla
Emacs (for the most part) now.

The one thing I can't do without is Paredit and ido, but other than that, its
very much just a "can't be bothered" thing anymore.

Never got into org mode. Most people with big org files that I have met have a
serious inability to let go, and their org file is actually just a giant
burden and illusion about what they are going to do in life.

My organizational philosophy is do one thing at a time until each thing is
done and never with a sense of urgency. When the thing is done, stop and think
carefully about the next most important thing. Repeat.

------
iLemming
Whatever you do, no matter what field you specialize at, if you use a
computer, you need to try to minimize the frustration. Frustration comes
(mostly) from repetitive, mundane tasks. Whatever can be automated, should be
automated.

And Emacs is an excellent tool to help you with that. Yes, it has a steep
learning curve, just like any other professional tool.

Would you get into a cabin of an industrial excavator and complain about
controls being un-intuitive? Or would you attempt to pilot a helicopter
without proper training?

Why nobody ever said: "ah, the interface of an airliner is cumbersome, we need
to make it intuitive for newbies"?

There is a strong correlation between the efficiency of a tool and the
learning curve. The more efficient is a tool in the professional setting, the
steeper is its learning curve.

Learn Emacs. But be prepared for a long (maybe a lifetime) journey. Be ready
for challenges. I promise you - one day it will change your subjective view of
the world.

~~~
tossAfterUsing
> Or would you attempt to pilot a helicopter without proper training?

No... not unless i had to.

But where does a coder find emacs gurus to teach them the ropes?

~~~
iLemming
[https://www.masteringemacs.org](https://www.masteringemacs.org) is the best
books on Emacs I have ever read. But truly, is just about doing things in
Emacs. Start using Emacs and whenever you need to get something done, just
google it. After a few days, you'd have sufficient vocabulary to navigate
yourself around. Don't be obsessed with configuring and adjusting it to your
needs at that point. Jump into that rabbit hole later, when you feel you know
what you're doing.

------
pgcj_poster
Well, I'm obviously an idiot. I saw the headline and thought that this was
going to be about Emacs being the CEO of a company.

Maybe it can't do _everything_.

~~~
ryanolsonx
M-x run-a-company

Also, There is company-mode. ;)

~~~
DonHopkins
M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead

[https://everything2.com/title/M-x+psychoanalyze-
pinhead](https://everything2.com/title/M-x+psychoanalyze-pinhead)

------
mark_l_watson
Emacs has been a daily driver for me since the 1980s. That said, in modern
times I also use alternatives. For about ten years I also relied on the
Jetbrains IDEs. I have swapped out IntelliJ, PyCharm, and RubyMine for VSCode
plus relevant extensions.

I now use Emacs and Slime for all Common Lisp development, for a lot of
Haskell work, and whenever I am working remotely via SSH on a leased server or
VPS.

Anyway, Emacs is fantastic but I don’t feel like I need to be all-in with one
choice of editing framework.

------
rgoulter
"[Emacs'] idioms are paths to discovering and creating your own, and that for
me is the definition of creativity."

What a great sentence which highlights a strength of Emacs: that it's natural
for Emacs users to be able to extend it.

~~~
agumonkey
I found out an old win95 computer with turbo pascal 7 on it. I was so amazed
about the IDE .. yet hard coded keybindings made me suffer so much. I couldn't
stop saying "if that was emacs I .."

~~~
noir_lord
Other than things like the keybindings I still maintain that TP was one of the
finest development tools I ever used, insanely fast builds (for the time) with
fantastic documentation made for a really tight closed loop.

Delphi managed to bring that to the graphical desktop and I think had it they
not screwed up with the price would have done much better.

~~~
agumonkey
yeah I was blown away by the amount of features packed into 600kB. I didn't
realize as a kid that I was compiling native code .. now I understand the
feat.

------
DonHopkins
I've heard of King George VI, and I know somebody who named their dog Emacs,
but this title sounds like there's a person named Emacs!

~~~
intuitionist
There was a person named Emack, who gave his name to the ice cream shop Emack
and Bolio’s, which the editor may or may not be named after.

~~~
DonHopkins
That's in Cambridge near MIT, and it was a favorite of the MIT-AI Lab crowd
too, so that may have influenced it! There's also a text formatting program
named Bolio.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs)

>Reynolds, Craig (1992-02-10). Wiseman, David G. (ed.). "The Emac Bolio Name
Koan". David G. Wiseman: Stories of Computer Folklore. A cocky novice once
said to Stallman: 'I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the
justifier called Bolio?'. Stallman replied forcefully, Names are but names,
Emack & Bolio's is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston town.
Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.' His question
answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him,
'Neither Emacs nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.'

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18319124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18319124)

>gumby 8 months ago on: Talking to the Mailman – Interview with Richard St...

>The Flanders and Swan song ("I'm a gnu") was not a kid's song.

>I'm not sure if Emacs and Bolio was open when the editor evolved, but the
text formatting program (like runoff) called "Bolio" was definitely named
after the ice cream store (since by the time it was written Emacs already
existed).

I wonder if there's any software named after Mary Chung's legendary Suan La
Chow Show / Suanla Chaoshou?

[https://www.yelp.com/menu/mary-chung-restaurant-
cambridge/it...](https://www.yelp.com/menu/mary-chung-restaurant-
cambridge/item/suan-la-chow-show)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suanla_chaoshou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suanla_chaoshou)

>Mary Chung's restaurant (鍾園川菜館, Pinyin: Zhōngyuán Chuāncàiguǎn) in Cambridge,
Massachusetts serves a dish called Suan La Chow Show, which are dumplings in a
spicy soy ginger sauce on top of a bed of raw mung bean sprouts. This popular
dish is different from the suan la chao shou described by Fuchsia Dunlop, who
studied at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu. Although
somewhat similar, Dunlop's recipe includes a substantial amount of black
vinegar in the sauce, making it much more sour.

------
CalChris
Longtime vi/vim user. I've tried emacs over the years (as well as Atom). I can
get work done but inevitably when I need to do some power editing, I drift
back to what I know best. I'm sure that if an emacs user went the other way,
they'd also drift back to emacs for the same reasons.

Basically, both (and other) environments are sufficient such that there isn't
a killer feature on either side that would entice someone like me over the
great divide for the duration. So for me, the editor wars are over.

~~~
melling
Emacs is a great editor construction kit. That’s its killer feature. If you
like the vi bindings, etc, you build a great vi editor in Emacs, for example.

[http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)

~~~
m463
I've always wondered how you pronounce that.

Is it space-y-macs or is it like dr spaceman (spah-chem-uhn) in 30 rock. :)

~~~
yellowapple
I've always pronounced it "space macs", both because that's intuitive and
because it fits the original meaning of "EMACS" ("Editor MACroS", so "SPACE
MACroS" in this case).

------
jhbadger
Just in case people were as confused by the reference as I was, the "Ludwig
mode" that the author's team created for Emacs is for one of his own products
called "Ludwig" rather than the machine learning framework called that.

~~~
jarboot
I had the same moment of confusion, especially when there were two (uber)
Ludwig documentation tabs open next to it.

------
Myrmornis
If you're the sort of programmer who enjoys configuring your tools using lisp
and devoting a bit of time to it then there's a happy and productive future
for you. If you're not, then I wouldn't bother with Emacs.

But let's stop discussing Org-mode when we're discussing Emacs. You don't have
to appreciate Org-mode to appreciate Emacs. Org is a bit of an antithesis to
the typical programmer's mindset -- as programmers we value modularity,
whereas Org is a vast universe of amazing kitchen sinkery. It's nice for
simple TODO lists and its beautiful table editor (available as M-x orgtbl-mode
in any other mode).

------
ggm
Good for him, making this work. I think a version of this about
Markdown/Pandoc or VI(M) would be similar; If you head to content-not-
interface focussed models, you're forced to think about what you want to say a
lot more than which transition animation to use to say it.

I found his comment about calendars/scheduling hard to believe. I've done one
Apple iCal server deployment, never want to do that again. Google calendar,
talks well to itself. Cross scheduling into O365 is a nightmare.

------
dyoo1979
I misparsed this as

    
    
       Two Years (With Emacs as a CEO and now CTO)
    

as opposed to

    
    
       Two Years (With Emacs) as a CEO and now CTO.
    

and it greatly confused me: how could Emacs act as a CEO? It's not _that_
smart, is it? (Or conversely, being a CEO can't be _that_ trivial, right?)

Perhaps rephrase to: "Using Emacs for two years as a CEO and now CTO". The
parse tree is still ambiguous, but a little less so.

------
agumonkey
I always dreamed of an Emacs as control center .. still a dream.

~~~
iLemming
Have you seen EXWM? What do you mean by "control center" anyway?

~~~
m463
I can't help but imagine Johnson Space Center with a giant Text Mode Mission
Control.

------
AJRF
I wasted two years on emacs.

I write code, so I thought emacs would be the learn-once-editor-of-a-lifetime
but it was just always an exercise in frustation and wrestling bad defaults.

If your using it to write code, emacs is, by default, worse than $IDE because
its not built for the write, debug, run cycle an IDE excels at.

I only mention this because a lot of programmers and hackers seem to hold it
up as a hallowed piece of technology and I the elitism makes you want to try
it so you can be up there amoung the gods.

Everytime I wanted to write code, I would have to cobble together little
scripts to shoe horn in build steps and it was always more work than VSCode
would make me do. I want to write code, not make my editor work in a sane way.

Org mode is oft touted as the 'killer app' \- its entirely unportable. Android
and iOS don't have clients that are useable by modern standards. You will hear
"oh but you can install this plugin and then it will automate converting your
todo list to HTML and it can then run that on a serv...". No thanks, I just
want to sign in once, and everything to be synced.

It doesn't have the idea of syncing and its totally uncollaborative. I can't
share it in any meaningful, interactable way.

The world has moved on, emacs is a relic of the old world and I finally feel
fine in saying that.

~~~
bitwize
I've been using Emacs for about 24 years now. That's 24 years of doing all of
my best work as a programmer and writer in it, 24 years of accumulated muscle
memory, know-how, and grokking the philosophy of Emacs. I've tried VSCode and
various IDEs several times now, and I might even switch once these offer me
enough of a value-add over Emacs to make me want to abandon those 24 years of
accumulated knowledge. Which is a tall order to fill, and as good as those
tools are they don't come close to filling it.

Electric indent _alone_ makes me want to stick with Emacs. I'm so used to how
Emacs does indentation that I get frustrated whenever I'm presented with an
IDE that doesn't do it that way (nearly all of them without special
extensions).

~~~
tossAfterUsing
> Electric indent

wtf is electric indent? (i'll ddg for it after i write this comment)

i've been trying to migrate my coding to emacs for 5+ years (off/on... obv)
and continuously find myself back in Sublime/Atom/VSCode land.

as a user for 24 years, could you maybe point some of us lowly noobs to great
resources to learn about Emacs workflow?

TIA

~~~
yellowapple
Basically autoindent on steroids. As one example of its niceties: if you
select all text (Ctrl-X, then H; "C-x h" in Emacsese) and press Tab, it'll
automatically indent the entire file (and likewise, if you select a specific
region of text and press Tab, it'll auto-indent that region). It'll also auto-
indent as you move to new lines (like any editor's auto-indent does, but Emacs
does it a bit smarter). Also, if you press Tab mid-line, it'll indent that
line (instead of sticking a tab in the middle of the line, which is usually
not what you want).

For most languages, said indentation is consistent with (if not exactly
complaint with) a style guide or other set of conventions. Some packages
customize/alter this (for example, I use the editorconfig package to set
indentation sizes and whether to use spaces/tabs by file extension, and
electric indent works perfectly with those settings).

Unrelated to electric indent (but something I use in conjunction with it
daily) is the ability to select a region of text and press Alt-Q ("M-q" in
Emacsese) to automatically hard-wrap a long line to 80 characters. Not all
languages play nicely with this, but it's really handy for comments, long
arrays, and paragraphs in READMEs and other docs.

~~~
yellowapple
Too late to edit: s/complaint/compliant/

------
black_puppydog
I mean, I've heard that emacs is powerful, but filling the roles of both CEO
and CTO? Kudos to the devs. I guess it is time to take another look at LISP as
a platform for general AI.

~~~
Isamu
It was really only a matter of time before Emacs reached sentience. I am
surprised this isn't about Emacs reaching out to other editors in a bid to
control cyberspace.

~~~
logicchains
Reaching out to Vim because it needs a decent text editor.

~~~
DonHopkins
The only VI command anyone ever needs to know it :q!

------
submeta
So many words about an editor as a CEO? I would like to cite Peter Drucker‘s
„The Effective Executive“:

„Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts
to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, “What
results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, _let alone
with its techniques and tools._ “

I am guilty myself falling in love with tools (Emacs, vim, iTerm, Notability,
Evernote and whatnot). But I founded and led companies myself. The time budget
of a manager is extremely tight. You need to cut back on those things that do
not contribute to your key result areas.

On the other hand you have someone like Stephen Covey who reminds us to
sharpen the saw to get better results (i.e. invest time in the infrastructure
as well).

But I try to imagine an Elon Musk writing a blog post about how to use Vim
effectively.

~~~
m463
Well, I can't help but think back to the recent post by Stephen Wolfram:

[https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-
producti...](https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-
life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/)

