"I have a very strong pinky finger..."

June 15, 2023 10:24 PM

Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023 [Colorized]
posted by loquacious (66 comments total)

"How do you copy?"

Confession: I've been using Emacs (not exclusively, but at least once a day) for over 25 years and I copy text by highlighting, cutting, pasting it back instantly, then pasting it elsewhere.
posted by BinaryApe at 12:17 AM on June 16, 2023 [12 favorites]

I felt the first ever symptoms of arthritis in the first knuckle of my left pinky finger when I was finalizing the LaTeX tables in my dissertation in Emacs.
posted by The Tensor at 12:18 AM on June 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

When I started my first job after school I was given a 5 minute intro to vi, a photocopy of a cheat sheet and URL of some vi enthusiast.

After complaining to our IT guy about how complicated this vi editor was he agreed to offer all the new hires a 1 day into to Emacs which we all attended.

I've been a vi user every since.
posted by flyingfox at 1:08 AM on June 16, 2023 [55 favorites]

Nano uber alles …for those of us who grew up on MS-DOS Edit and QBasic.
posted by Ryvar at 1:57 AM on June 16, 2023 [17 favorites]

I think my favourite thing about the vi vs emacs fight is that, eventually, we got a resolution: neither. In a recent Stack Overflow survey, fully 75% of respondents said that they use it. Use something that accepts mouse input.
posted by Merus at 2:30 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love this guy's videos, even though his accent and the rapid-fire editing make them a little hard to follow sometimes. One of my favorites is the interview with the Perl programmer, who keeps saying "I remember back in 19--" and never finishing the year.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:37 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

As someone who worked for a number of years writing and maintaining automated systems that interfaced heavily with FFmpeg ... his FFmpeg video is very, very funny. Really amuses me. As a very deep Linux and Open Source person who came from a Unix background and likes to laugh at himself... well the whole channel is almost personalised clickbait.
posted by samworm at 2:54 AM on June 16, 2023 [10 favorites]

I think my favourite thing about the vi vs emacs fight is that, eventually, we got a resolution: neither.

The thing is, it isn't an either/or choice. Don't know if it's still around, but back in the day there was a vi emulation package for emacs--called viper--that was friendly to all of your muscle memory keybindings in your .vimrc file.

The "best of both worlds," Reece's peanut butter cup solution for users who loved both emacs and vim.
posted by Gordion Knott at 2:57 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Eight megs and swapping.
posted by whatevernot at 3:04 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

As someone who almost exclusively uses Emacs for editing, this video hits uncomfortably close to home in some places. The joke about scrolling around an image in particular makes me sure that someone "in the know" helped write this.

The thing is, it isn't an either/or choice. Don't know if it's still around, but back in the day there was a vi emulation package for emacs--called viper--that was friendly to all of your muscle memory keybindings in your .vimrc file.

Viper is built-in, but evil-mode is what people are using these days.

Confession: I've been using Emacs (not exclusively, but at least once a day) for over 25 years and I copy text by highlighting, cutting, pasting it back instantly, then pasting it elsewhere.

M-w (by default)!
posted by nosewings at 3:12 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

But did his keyboard have a Meta key? I've been looking for mine for years.
posted by tommasz at 4:11 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Every Bi Day of Visibility I come out on social media and say that I use both. And the responses are invariably ones of horror.
posted by ocschwar at 4:12 AM on June 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

... everything above plus, shaky cam style.
posted by sammyo at 4:14 AM on June 16, 2023

I feel zero obligation to prove my engineering mettle through a mastery of 1970s text editing technologies
posted by panama joe at 4:24 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

It seems very on point that the ways of editing text that the rest of the world might use - Word, NotePad++, Notepad or whatever - are not even considered in the realm of competing possibilities.
posted by rongorongo at 4:27 AM on June 16, 2023

Every Bi Day of Visibility I come out on social media and say that I use both. And the responses are invariably ones of horror.

Every Emacs user who forgets the -m on a git commit becomes a vim user, whether they want to or not.
posted by tommasz at 4:44 AM on June 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

I feel zero obligation to prove my engineering mettle through a mastery of 1970s text editing technologies

SPOKEN LIKE A COWARD. CHOSE A SIDE, TAKE UP ARMS, THERE IS NO MIDDLE GROUND
posted by wenestvedt at 5:13 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

copy text by highlighting, cutting, pasting it back instantly

^k[ill]... ^y[ank].

That's what I always did, and someone looking over my shoulder once said "do you even know about copy?"

"Of course I do, but this way I'm sure I have the whole string before navigating to another page".

"Oh, that makes sense"

(Did the DEC VT100 terminal even support highlighting?)
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:14 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

xemacs for the win. Does parenthesis matching, can do automatic indenting of code, context-based highlighting in different color, definitely accepts mouse inpit, has menus, etc. If all one does is LaTeX with no other programming, then a wysiwyg LaTeX editor is probably easier. Or if all one does is program in some specific language that has its own good editors and coding environments, also likely easier to use the single-purpose editors. (Or, I’m a LaTeX person who dabbles in programming, but from what I recall from my student days, there are editors that are useful for multiple programming languages, just not for markup languages like LaTeX.) But if one dabbles in a variety/mix of markup and programming languages, then using a single editor saves you the time of learning the ins and outs of several different single-purpose ones.
posted by eviemath at 5:16 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I had about 4,000 lines of mlisp in my startup profile, and eventually got to a point of incredible efficiency, everybody else going "clickety, clickety, click clack, clickety clack..." and me just going "click... click".

Then mlisp was swapped out for real lisp and I never reimplemented my profile. Been meaning to get around to that for 20 years now.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:23 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

‘neither’ would be a great name for an editor.
I’m a weirdo who prefers joe, so 🤷‍♂️
posted by stobor at 5:47 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

This dude yelling "It's the Virtual Machine" got seriously burned into my brain at some point.
posted by voiceofreason at 6:15 AM on June 16, 2023

Every Emacs user who forgets the -m on a git commit becomes a vim user, whether they want to or not.

Include (server-start) in your init.el

$ EDITOR=emacsclient
In your .profile

Have emacs running before you forget to use git -m
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:18 AM on June 16, 2023

Every Emacs user who forgets the -m on a git commit becomes a vim user, whether they want to or not.

Every Emacs user should be using Magit for all of their git usage. If anything is a killer app for Emacs, that's it.

I've been using Emacs for 35 years (and I have elisp code from the 1980s that I still use daily) and you will pry it from my cold dead hands but honestly I doubt I would actually recommend it to anyone else these days.
posted by dfan at 6:22 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

In the 1980s I spent $100 of my own money to buy a copy of Lugaru Epsilon. Because it was the closest thing to emacs you could have under MSDOS. People thought i was crazy to spend money (and $100 was real scratch at the time) on an editor. What's wrong with PC-WRITE.EXE they asked.

Around 1990 sometime we started using SysV/386 and real emacs. That lasted about 15 years, until I finally had to follow the money and go to Windows development. I was forced to admit that Visual Studio had grown up and that the name completion on framework classes was too good to pass up even at the cost of using CUA key bindings.

But i still have an instance of emacs running most days, for those automated code generation tasks like turning a SQL table into a C# DTO class.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:30 AM on June 16, 2023

@dfan I think if you're going to learn emacs you need to get started pretty young. Probably if you're in your mid-20s and have already been using CUA editors for 10 years it's too late.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:33 AM on June 16, 2023

Back in the mid-1990s I was assigned by my company (Pyramid Technology) to work on-site at UNIX System Labs in Short Hills, NJ to help develop what would eventually become the multi-processor version of System V. Everyone used vi with the exception of one engineer, a real Bell Labs OG who did all his coding in ed. This guy, and I shit you not, would commit line after line after line of C code into the off-screen buffer until he felt he'd written enough to review at which point he'd finally commit it all to the file and then 1,$p.

Having a debugging session with him at his terminal always made my skin crawl.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:55 AM on June 16, 2023 [10 favorites]

yep its that special class of things that I love and would never ever recommend
posted by web5.0 at 7:00 AM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

A friend of mine started his son on emacs at age 7. Frankly the corruption of youth charges against Socrates were based on a lot less.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:19 AM on June 16, 2023 [17 favorites]

I have to admit emacs always seemed strongly antithetical to the "one job, one tool" ethos of unix. Why do you want this tool to do all those jobs? Shouldn't you have better, more purposeful and limited, tools for those jobs?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:36 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think that using Vim may be the only thing I like about my job.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:41 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

The channel got you covered.
posted by kmt at 7:43 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Emacs distributions like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs add pre-configured functionality and reduce the barriers for entry to the point where it's somewhat defensible to prefer Emacs over VSCode, PyCharm, or whatever else the kids are using these days, but there is definitely some effort involved in keeping your config files up to date when things inevitably break. I haven't yet gotten to the stage where I'm willing to jump to another editor, but every time I lose 30-60 minutes to a `doom upgrade` that broke something, I become the distracted boyfriend meme guy looking away from my trusty ol' companion toward an editor that Just Works (tm).
posted by tonycpsu at 7:53 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Use something that accepts mouse input.

You mean like emacs or vim?
posted by eruonna at 7:55 AM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Me? Oh, nothing, just updating some prod Javascript via pico
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:09 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Me? Oh, nothing, just updating some prod Javascript via pico

Not nano?

DIE HERETIC!
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:13 AM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Use something that accepts mouse input.

I don't remember asking you for your opinion!
posted by loquacious at 8:13 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

@dfan I think if you're going to learn emacs you need to get started pretty young. Probably if you're in your mid-20s and have already been using CUA editors for 10 years it's too late.


There are Emacs packages that lay CUA on top. so that the only key chords that get burned into your head are either CUA or at least useful.

Too late for me of course.
posted by ocschwar at 8:22 AM on June 16, 2023

A friend of mine started his son on emacs at age 7. Frankly the corruption of youth charges against Socrates were based on a lot less.

The real crime here is that he didn't teach his son how to build a hardware LISP machine before starting him on emacs.
posted by loquacious at 8:25 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I had sort of wondered if this was worth watching; it came across, well, all of my feeds over the last week. It's pretty good. A very high JPM (joke-per-minute)!

I love it.

(and I'm 20 years into "using Emacs" at this point, which puts me in the middle of the userbase :) )
posted by ChrisR at 8:41 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

As someone who almost exclusively uses Emacs for editing, this video

I read this as "exclusively uses Emacs for editing video" and thought, oh yeah, of course there's a mode for that
posted by Gerald Bostock at 8:43 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

just updating some prod Javascript via pico

It’s like… for crying out loud I just want to make two changes to a 12 line config file here, I’m not trying to author the Constitution or join a cult.
posted by Ryvar at 8:47 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

This was very amusing, thanks. Emacs vs. vi is the sort of partisan "warfare" that the Internet was created for – it's like arguing which sportsball team is better, but for people who only venture out into the big blue room to buy new computing equipment.

I learned vi/Vim under duress. Long story short, my boss at the time required any site updates to be made by shelling into the server and editing the front page (plain HTML) using vi.

The first three weeks of using vi were bewildering and frustrating. The next three weeks were OK. By the end of the next three weeks or so, when I had started mastering the key combos and learning "advanced' features, I was hooked. This was 1999, and I was still fumbling my way through learning Linux sporadically.

I've tried and bounced off of Emacs any number of times over the years. Just doesn't feel right, but I respect the "I can do anything inside Emacs" ethos for people who like that sort of thing.

Even now I still use Vim a lot. Muscle memory is strong, I can write fastest in Vim and Markdown for first drafts and then use Pandoc to spit out HTML or Word format to import into something else.

As somebody else noted - I don't really recommend vi to others as a primary editor, I know the learning curve is steep and for most people the reward isn't there. But I love it. So I can totally understand people who feel the same way about Emacs.
posted by jzb at 8:54 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not nano?

Probably the second or third command I type on a new linux system is

ln -s nano pico

The reason it's second or third is because one of the first commands I type is

pico /etc/hosts (or some comparable config file)

After which I sigh heavily, then create my symbolic link
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:43 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I started my first job after school I was given a 5 minute intro to vi, a photocopy of a cheat sheet and URL of some vi enthusiast.

My story is similar, except that it was my first programming internship in college at a local web development company, and it was the O'Reilly vi book. Nowadays the basic set of vi movement commands are so ingrained that it irritates me to edit without them. But rather than use a vi for everything (because I don't have the patience or fortitude to keep it configured just so), I just install the vi-keys plugin for all the applications I do use: intellij, vscode, obsidian, and zsh.

I've been using Emacs for 35 years (and I have elisp code from the 1980s that I still use daily) and you will pry it from my cold dead hands but honestly I doubt I would actually recommend it to anyone else these days.

I feel similarly, although I think of "vi" more as an input method than a specific editor. If someone wants to learn vi I think that's great and I'm happy to share tips, but I don't evangelize.

For new users, I always recommend you learn the basic motions (like hjklwb0$), and then drop into visual mode if you want to cut and paste, rather than looking at the phrase you want to copy and having to preemptively come up with the motion that will select it.
posted by jomato at 9:46 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I counted myself lucky to remember how to use vi when I had to log in to a mail server to edit a .forward file or something and the mail server had neither emacs nor pico installed. This was more than 20 years ago.
posted by heatherlogan at 10:01 AM on June 16, 2023

> I have to admit emacs always seemed strongly antithetical to the "one job, one tool" ethos of unix. Why do you want this tool to do all those jobs? Shouldn't you have better, more purposeful and limited, tools for those jobs?


It's because emacs really didn't come out of the unix world ("New Jersey style") at all - it came out of the MIT world ("the right thing") - see Worse is Better.
posted by dmd at 10:09 AM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

I feel zero obligation to prove my engineering mettle through a mastery of 1970s text editing technologies

How fortunate for you! I would hate for anyone to feel inadequate.
posted by amtho at 10:14 AM on June 16, 2023

Y'all, I just drafted a summary of a Regency-era romance in which our heroine realizes that, although Mr. Garcy seems like a model gentleman, his choice of editor clearly indicates that they could never be happy together, in spite of his apparent kindness in offering his last available floppy disk to take her friend's output to the print center.
posted by amtho at 10:18 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

It all started with an "Editors" class in university. They covered ed, vi and emacs. I used ed to write the LaTeX for my undergraduate thesis. After that, emacs seemed easy.
posted by mdoar at 10:38 AM on June 16, 2023

The thing is, it isn't an either/or choice. Don't know if it's still around, but back in the day there was a vi emulation package for emacs--called viper--that was friendly to all of your muscle memory keybindings in your .vimrc file.

Yeah nowadays there are so many hybrids. I mostly use stuff like JetBrains with vi mode plugins, plus Sublime for lighter weight editing, but there are packages that do the whole modern all-purpose editor platform thing, have vi mode, and are also built on Emacs (which I guess did kind of invent that paradigm).
posted by atoxyl at 10:43 AM on June 16, 2023

I remember explaining to someone that you could move around on the bash prompt with things like C-a and C-e. I couldn't bring myself to tell them why.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 11:03 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

samworm: As someone who worked for a number of years writing and maintaining automated systems that interfaced heavily with FFmpeg ... his FFmpeg video is very, very funny.

Funny, traumatic, the only difference is time, really.

About those ffmpeg videos that don't play in Quicktime... I did that on purpose once, because after spending way too much time experimenting with colour space encoding options in various applications, I discovered that Quicktime interprets the limited vs. full range attribute in a way that's exactly the opposite of the way that every other application - and common sense - interprets it. There are many, many questions on the Internet with people asking why their video looks washed out in Quicktime, and no good answers. That's the answer, a lot of the time. It's because Quicktime is reading the range attribute backwards.

Anyway, ffmpeg helped me figure that out. Well... it helped me figure that out after I figured out how to bypass the colour space changes that ffmpeg applies automatically when you convert from one format to another, which it doesn't tell you about unless you turn on some ungodly level of debug output...

...I mean, uh, lol! All funny here! No trauma!
posted by clawsoon at 12:00 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I used to be an emacs person, mostly for LaTex. Now, I often use (whispering)overleaf. (Mostly because many of my students prefer it, no matter how much I complain it teaches bad Tex habits.)
posted by nat at 12:31 PM on June 16, 2023

I really liked JetBrains, but sadly we just standardized on vscode.

Vscode is all the worst parts of emacs lovingly reinvented by Microsoft. Almost useless without extensions? Yup! Extensions that don't work? Absolutely. Editor features that can only be accessed by remembering some arcane sequence of keyboard commands (or letting autocomplete work in the command console)? Bring it on!
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:03 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Vscode has little icons that twinkle and move as you're editing to remind you about package updates. That's my instant reminder to get the hell out of Vscode and use a proper editor. (I have a vision processing disorder. An unexpected moving thing at the edge of my vision - like Google Docs' Saving ... flicker - is like someone suddenly screaming in my ear.)

All the vi commands I've ever needed in 30 years of using it fit on one side of an index card. And no, it doesn't say "Use emacs :-)". Which I mostly do.
posted by scruss at 1:29 PM on June 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

I have found the most useful thing to know about emacs is how to exit emacs if ever I find myself in it.
posted by skippyhacker at 4:07 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

And the vi vs. emacs wars still rage on as foretold by the prophecies.

Personally I just use split and cat for all of my editing needs. You don't really need anything more than that. Why, you can easily edit large files of obfuscated LISP in multiple places with a single command line string without ever wasting precious resources on opening an editor.
posted by loquacious at 4:26 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

This one is pure gold - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxdDVAv6QDY
posted by timlimfimbim at 4:32 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Emacs: Finally, a plausible explanation for Dr. Evil's famous signature hand gesture.

"Of course, I wrote it myself, uh-huh. I called it... 'Mini-Memacs'. Because, originally, it was so tiny. It's breathtaking, I assure you. Like Hot Pockets. You know, Frau still uses DEC EDT. I don't know how she can still source VT220 keyboards to do it, but she just likes to hold on to the Old Ways here in the vol-ca-no-lair. And of course Number Two uses JetBrains, which he has informed me is the latest and by far most profitable secret subsidiary of Virtucon."
posted by zaixfeep at 6:41 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Tangentially, dear lord, Dr Evil has a profile on LinkedIn
posted by zaixfeep at 6:53 PM on June 16, 2023

Despite having multiple emacs users as close friends during the period of time I was learning these things, I ended up more comfortable in vi, but even then it's strictly for "I need to SSH somewhere and edit a file in a small way" uses.

Outside of that I use TextMate. It remains a good editor, but it's slowly falling into obscurity. I fear the day I am forced to switch to something else. Probably VSCode, I guess.

I like the emacs shortcuts that are supported by every text box in MacOS though. I use those all the time.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:34 AM on June 17, 2023

All the vi commands I've ever needed in 30 years of using it fit on one side of an index card.
Why bother with an index card when you could just write it down on the back of a punch card?
posted by MtDewd at 4:08 AM on June 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've only just noticed that I misrepresented the Stack Overflow survey via trying not be inflammatory with my editing: 75% of users use VS Code, which is remarkable.

At this point in the thread, being accommodating is clearly a lost cause, so, anyway, there are lots of actually good options, so you don't need to use either vim/vi or emacs. Pico/nano are fine, at least they have a sensible choice for the quit command, but I don't think either vi or emacs is fit to use in the year of our Luigi 2023.
posted by Merus at 5:40 AM on June 17, 2023

flyingfox: [O]ur IT guy ... agreed to offer all the new hires a 1 day into to Emacs which we all attended.

I've been a vi user every [sic.] since.
A lot of people can't quit Vi, so use the following and get this tattooed on you if you ever go back: [Esc] :q!
posted by k3ninho at 7:41 AM on June 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you need to quit vi on your Apple Watch, amputate. It's the only way.
posted by ocschwar at 10:58 AM on June 18, 2023 [2 favorites]