Hmm, I’m not taking about hacking defaults, I’m talking about hacking functionality. I’m talking about making capabilities that didn’t exist, all seamlessly part of my typical integrated text manipulation environment (that’s way broader than editing)

The unique power of emacs is it doesn’t have typical boundaries, so integrated personal unique functionality is possible. May well be a huge downfall, security wise - it rides a lot on security through obscurity.

Frankly it’s taken me decades to properly appreciate how my computer experience can be so fungible. Most computer systems don’t allow it.

Lazy about tooling? The biggest point people make is that IDEs tend to work out of the box while the likes of vim or emacs need configuration and have an initially steep learning curve.

Well, as in this discussion, some people sometimes also tend to raise a lot of features as if only IDEs have them, but that’s frequently just ignorance.

Hackability not on your list? It’s the ability to extend and adapt it to my particular needs that, above many other things, means I am too deep into Emacs to even imagine leaving.

Plugins are a very weak substitute that cannot provide that utility, and I notice Helix doesn’t even offer plugins. That sword does have the horrendous opposite edge of almost total lack of security, so perhaps I’ll regret that one day. There are so many ways I value Emacs that isn’t matched by any other text environment that none of the others are even on my radar as possible replacements.

Out-of-the-box experience is very weak on Emacs, but I’m decades past that being a concern to me directly, though it does inhibit newcomer uptake.

Other than that, for me it ticks your boxes while barely scratching the surface of its merits. At least its speed and latency is not something I notice any meaningful benefit when working with something that people praise, like vim. Come to that most of the time like now, typing into a browser text box, I’m not even bothered by latency, and that’s way worse than Emacs.

It’s biggest failing to me is working remotely when there’s significant network latency, where VSCode is clearly superior, but I have neither the time, nor probably the ability, to fix it.

Dude, your þey business immediately turns 80% of readers against any message you may be trying to convey while the rest will be saying “Okay, they may be an insufferable dweeb, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, so let’s try to give it a fair read”…

I swear some of you people think some of the most talented and productive experienced devs use vim and emacs because of some snobbery or because they haven’t noticed vscode etc exist.

It really is unique.

Well j = i + 1, and drop the equality test.

Meshtastic is fully dominant in user numbers, but is fundamentally broken by design for what most people actually want to use it for, which is a distributed zero infrastructure communication network. As soon as numbers rise it is crushed by the weight of its own administrative traffic. Also, it’s way too easy to set nodes up as ROUTER nodes, which crushes the mesh and swallows traffic ironically.

Linux does use Python syntax… in Python.

In Bash though, it uses Bash syntax.

I remember it as just beer and cider, with the addition of blackcurrant making it a Purple Nasty, and all sorts of tales of how they allegedly reacted to make a vicious drink more than the sun of the parts that I am sure was fiction.

And for Americans, this means alcoholic ciders, since they also call raw apple juice cider, and most Americans have no idea what a blackcurrant is (a delicious intense berry that was illegal to cultivate in the US for a lot of the recent past).

I wasn’t trying to give you advice, I was describing the situation in general. 🤷

It’s very hardware dependent with a few problem’s like Nvidia. For Best results go established brands that support Linux like thinkpads.

Along with “it’s sometimes hard to detect your own stink”

I know about window managers and how using them will reduce the memory usage by system a lot because they are less bloated etc.

Ehhhh… I think it’s more “not using a curated general-purpose DE”, rather than “using a WM”. All graphical systems include a WM, and a DE in some senses is more of a concept or category than a concrete thing. The choice is whether it’s one you cobble a DE together yourself, or use a pre-configured, curated one.

Many people use stand-alone WMs and then create their own DE, but quite a few of us put the WM of our choice within existing DE because we want the WM but have no interest in re-inventing all those DE wheels (and/or have >4Gb memory so the “bloat” is not an issue). In my case it’s i3 on Gnome via gnome-flashback.

Curated DEs do tend to use more resources - typically mostly memory - partly because they tend to be comprehensive for diverse users. Rolling your own minimal DE for your personal needs can often be lighter weight. If you have a very constrained system then it can be beneficial, though that circumstance is more and more unusual these days when 8Gb of memory is often considered “minimal”.

The main reasons for making your own DE is to do things exactly the way you want, at the expense of having to do it. Beware though, there will be various helpful features of DEs you may not realize you appreciate until you have realize you don’t have them. E.g. what happens when you plug in a USB drive? Nothing, by default - a DE usually manages that. SSHing into servers a lot - a credentials agent is nice - better add one of those…

A lot of rolling your own DE is months or years of “oh yeah, that is a useful thing to have; I need to find tools and configure them to do that”. Conversely, dropping your WM of choice into another DE is often a case of “huh, that happens automagically; nice!”.

I think that’s a slightly different animal. AFAIK it’s doesn’t switch config depending on the current focused window. E.g. for some programs I don’t want remapping.

I use a key remapper to give me the readline keys everywhere. Though I’ve used XKeysnail and xremap and they’re both a bit flakey, so if anyone has better recommendations that work on X11 and Wayland, I’m all ears.

I have decades as a SWE, including deep (but now out-of-date) C++ experience, a lot more recently in serious Python systems, and a fair amount of web UI dev on the side.

Now I have 1 year with Go. I came to it with an open mind having heard people sing its praises I thought it would be broadening to spend some time with a language new to me.

My advice now is do anything you can to avoid working in golang. Almost daily, I seriously contemplate whether it’d be worth quitting and being unemployed, even in this economy (US). It is a better C, but that’s a low, low bar at least for the project domains I ever work in. Where it’s an even plausible answer, Rust is probably a better one (I think? - haven’t used Rust for anything real).

That seems to be the Go way. Why put it in a library when everyone can just re-implement it themselves (and test and document it too, right? Right?).

E.g. There isn’t even a standard set object, everyone just implements it as a map pointing to empty structs, and you get familiar with that and just accept it and learn to understand what it means when someone added an empty struct to a map. And then people try to paint this as a virtue of the language.

Excellent description of the zeitgeist.

Your portrait of before generative AI is a bit hard to square with the ad driven internet, but fits ever better the further back you go.

Yeah, we’re turning it all to shit in so many ways simultaneously, it’s truly something awful to behold. Maybe there is a singularity coming after all, but it’s not one like the credulous tech worshippers imagined.

Also depends on your variant of English, because North American Biscuits are very different from the rest of the anglophone world’s biscuits. Many of them are unleavened, just as most gods don’t have a strong position on whether you should use leavening at any time of the year, let alone now.