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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Well, I started using Emacs because I was feeling limited by my Vim+Tmux-based workflow. Like you’ve heard from others, what convinced me was the consistency in interface, and the composability that enables.

    Everything is a text buffer. When the text is drawn to screen, it might be resized, colored, hidden, replaced with images, etc, but it’s all still just text. Because of that consistency of medium, all your interactions boil down to manipulations of that text.

    What’s important isn’t the verbatim text, but what the text represents. It could be code (symbol, function, library, in any language, literately), prose (word, sentence, paragraph, or whole book), a file or directory, a button, a list, a foldable outline, a process, a container, a game tile, a typo, a secret, a git object, a pull request, the string you’re looking for, a definition, a chat message, an RSS feed/item, a web page, etc…

    Each of those has a mode (or modes) that makes interacting with those objects in a semantically meaningful way both efficient and composable (to varying degrees).

    That’s why Emacs devotees try to do everything in Emacs. Leaving Emacs means leaving that consistency and semantic expressiveness behind. In a CLI shell, yes everything is text, but it’s comparatively raw. The best you can do is define variables and color it. TUIs bridge the semantic-meaning gap, but aren’t composable with each other. (Same with GUIs, but because of administering remote systems I avoided them when possible.) You can’t add functionality to htop without recompiling the whole thing. You can’t pipe ncdu’s results to rsync. Emacs is a live Lisp machine. You can redefine (or advise) any function on a whim, without restarting.

    That’s not even getting into how everything you do to improve interacting with text improves your experience with all those text-encoded objects. Completions can be filtered and ranked by different algorithms, lines can be “narrowed” to, it has an interactive regex builder, you can autofill with simple, intelligent predictions (like, what’s under your cursor, or a prefix-matching word up-buffer), you can deeply integrate LLMs, reflow and pretty print, follow externally-edited files, transparently access remote resources

    I don’t know. Obviously it’s not for everyone, but using Emacs makes me feel liberated; in control of my software. I love it.

    Thanks for giving me a soapbox and the opportunity to put my thoughts together.













  • Please inform yourself before diminishing others’ plights.

    Diarrhoea that is characteristic of coeliac disease is chronic, sometimes pale, of large volume, and abnormally foul in odor. Abdominal pain, cramping, bloating with abdominal distension (thought to be the result of fermentative production of bowel gas), and mouth ulcers[35] may be present.

    Coeliac disease leads to an increased risk of both adenocarcinoma and lymphoma of the small bowel

    Long-standing and untreated disease may lead to other complications, such as ulcerative jejunitis (ulcer formation of the small bowel) and stricturing (narrowing as a result of scarring with obstruction of the bowel).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease



  • There are a lot of analogies but they all fail in some way. I think PBS Spacetime does the best in general, with good graphics to back up the words.

    My layman’s explanation is probably all stuff you’ve heard before. Massive objects “warp” spacetime and things that get stuck in those “wells” eventually fall to the bottom due to drag (from a variety of sources).

    You’ve also probably seen the rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the middle used to represent that warping. To visualize that in 3D, I like to imagine a 3D grid of nodes and edges (like a jungle gym of joints and bars) where the whole thing is flexed inward towards a center point. More warped near the center, less warped further out. That kind of conveys the acceleration from gravity felt by things around that center mass.