Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023 [Colorized]

Emacs OS
Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023 with Emerald McS., PhD - aired on © The Emacs.
org. air date 1990.
Programmer humor
Software humor
Elisp humor
Software tools
Retro computing
Vim vs emacs editor
Computerphile
Emacs humor
Emacs jokes
emacs vs vim
Programming memes
gnu emacs
spacemacs
emacs memes
lex friedman ide
VS Code
configuring emacs
melpa
evil mode emacs
emacs docs
Music by:
www.FesliyanStudios.com
#software #jokes #emacs

[@williamdavis3658]

Emacs takes a lifetime to learn. So the sooner you start, the longer it will take

[@yegorzakharov8514]

😂😂

[@billkendrick1]

😂😂

[@skhul2580]

I don't know why I laughed so hard at this. 🤣

[@Space_Wanderer.]

I thought it was more like "The sooner you start, the sooner you will die"

[@ICEknightnine]

Only through death can one fully comprehend Emacs.

[@benjaminli9793]

"People don't quit emacs. They just die at some point" LMAO

[@etrestre9403]

Hello

[@Geolaminar]

As a vim user....

[@jacquesdev]

@@Geolaminar I don't remember...

[@psisis7423]

Everyone has been using emacs bindings perhaps without realizing it. They're most familiar to us as terminal commands, like ^C.

[@reinoud6377]

​@@jacquesdevterminal stuff came way before Emacs. Some stuff was already in MULTICS etc

[@jsaare]

I'm in the 60+ crowd. In the earlier days of my career, I endured several variations of exactly this character. Decades later, I just would have assumed..., well..., he would have "retired". I guess some things never die..., or they never quite finish learning emacs. This was brilliant, thank you! :x

[@miraculixxs]

The bro force is strong ;)

[@dickpiano1802]

Sadly, there are people under 30 who are variations of this character as well.

[@mikebikekite1]

Do IT people actually retire?? I've worked in IT for 40 years. Obviously we were all young to start with but then I slowly started to notice I was the oldest guy on the floor. During 40 years I've never seen anyone retire. Do they turn them into Soylent Green? Does everyone over 40 go off to run organic vegan coffee bars? Perhaps being expected to listen to the deranged design proposals from top management, who all appear to be younger than your kids, just pushes sane folk over the edge.

[@FrancisE.Dec.Esquire]

I am in the 1949 proud. I am so high I can not spell Emacs.

[@myrtlealley]

​​@@dickpiano1802they're guys in ops post who reincarnated. For the indians in tech, so good deeds and you'll have several lifetimes to finish learning emacs.

[@suou7938]

“i can send it to you by ftp” every cut was so perfect😂 Emacs!

[@mikemcaulay9507]

Although, it seemed strange for him to say he'd "send" it via FTP, given how that service works. :D. Emacs and Vim are my mortal enemies. I tried Vim very early on and probably spent an hour or two trying to figure out how to save and close the freakin program. Uhg.

[@trustnoone81]

I had no idea Sia has such strong opinions on text editors.

[@viraj_singh]

her opinions are unstoppable

[@solumyt]

@@viraj_singh like titanium.

[@andmal8]

[@mohamedelidrissi810]

If you uninstall emacs from her computer, she'll jump from a chandelier

[@davideskerlot2945]

🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@koko969w]

"I spend more time customizing my computer than using it." I feel attacked

[@monad_tcp]

That's why I use Windows.

[@monad_tcp]

on Top of Xen Server with pass-through of GPUs and 5 DOMs and lots of security domains and 5 other operating systems.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I keep adding to my Emacs customizations little by little, just as I need them. My published emacs-prefs repo is currently up to about 1500 lines of Elisp code, and it took over a decade and a half to reach that point.

[@GSBarlev]

A new update for my favorite game dropped on Wednesday--I've been so excited to play it. So what have I been doing since Wednesday? Updating all of my mods and configurations to work with the new version. And when I was done with my own stuff I started opening PRs to update _other people's_ mods. Still haven't actually played the new game. It's pathological.

[@davesprivatelounge]

@@monad_tcp _gasp_

[@pangloss9]

"People never quit emacs. They just die at some point." Yep, I started using Emacs at work in 1988 and I still use it each day, but I will never die. I wrote the "M-x immortal" command and I also use that daily. Emacs gives you eternal life.

[@ppsarrakis]

wait emacs actually exists? i thought this is a joke video :P im clueless on this haha

[@JoeyClover]

​@ppsarrakis an ancient text editor but it was so customisable that it's lived on to this very day. It's almost entirely navigated with keyboard shortcuts with no mouse.

[@michalsvihla1403]

@JoeyClover that's vim you just described

[@khav99]

@@michalsvihla1403 I've used and explored Vim fully, and as great as it is an extremely stripped down version of emacs, as mention in the video it's more like an os but in reality i'ts an elisp based shell with the text editor is built in that environment so it lends to a whole suite of software packages and programmable options since it comes with it's own language e-lisp you can emulate vim, bash, games, not great ones but still games, and the text based rogue ones are pretty good. run it as a server although it's not a very good one, but the list goes on, but from what I've done and learned so far you have your entire system at your finger tips by reading the holy scriptures which is the manual, get it in print. Good luck on your journey.

[@Anriuko]

Have fun in the eternal limbo on your single thread.

[@adrycough]

My CS profs were either some sort of vi/vim wizard blasting through their files typing at 170wpm like they are competing in a speed run while they passionately explain the beauty of CS, or clunkily smacking their cursor back and forth with their touchpad using 5 year old version of IntelliJ or Visual Studio with two typos per line at 30wpm that everyone notices but doesn't point out until compiler spits back errors using a borrowed device from the institution and were only there to teach you the basics. No in-between. As long as you're teaching the material, we're cool, but man, those passionate CS profs were so inspiring.

[@juniorsundar]

The passionate ones are like artists that cast spells on their systems with arcane Vi/Vim motions. One of the reasons I bit the bullet and switched from vscode to neovim. It really pushed my productivity to the dumpster for the first week but you learn the bindings really fast and then it becomes second nature.

[@adrycough]

@@juniorsundar I agree, but I am a dvorak user(as of quarantine, "for the memes") in a qwerty world, so the qwerty-centric binds are what keep me from attempting to learn. I am fully bought into dvorak feeling much nicer than qwerty and refuse to let go of my 170wpm proficiency. It's unfortunate, but any benefits I would get from Vi would be less than a percent of my use case. Now I just spend my days daydreaming about making the next sucky editor that overpromises being better than vscode, but actually falls short in many more important ways.

[@sustrackpointus8613]

Bro its so true, my computer architecture professor hits 8 spaces in a row to get the indetation he wants when writing asm. And machine learning prof runs neovim and hyprland, he works faster than anyone can read.

[@diegomarquez3293]

Neovim

[@EscChaos]

"I used to spend hours trying to get the image on the right page. Now I use org-mode LaTeX and just accept that it's impossible." Im dying.

[@kerry7932]

This is known as the Emacs-OrgMode-LaTex paradox: It's impossible to write with it yet somehow still easier than using Microsoft Word.

[@sadface7457]

Impossible-mode centres pictures 😂

[@boomfist]

That's the line that almost caused me to burst out laughing in work while I should have been quiet

[@todds6823]

Lol, also my fav line in the video

[@shuthemoody]

I remember searching for a LaTex problem once and the top result was a blog post, "Another day wasted thanks to LaTeX."

[@franciscosanudoacosta6525]

“Emacs is not that hard, you can learn it in one day…. Everyday…” Man this is my favorite video of all your series, keep it going.

[@RickMyBalls]

i don't think that's what he meant

[@homelessrobot]

@@RickMyBalls i don't know why you think that isn't what he meant. The whole point of the video is to say shit like this to get a rise out of the audience.

[@RickMyBalls]

he said 'every day', not 'everyday'@@homelessrobot

[@homelessrobot]

*takes 45 minutes to blink once*

[@bruce-le-smith]

the binders, the rolodex, the wired peripherals, the monotone colour scheme of the set. great cinematography. i'm sure wes anderson would approve of this

[@dranorter]

Yeah, there's something about the ... lifted blacks? Lifted black point? Reduced contrast of the whole color space.

[@TheEudaemonicPlague]

The modern laptop was a bit jarring, though. I would expect something like a 80386, or even 80286.

[@GizmoMaltese]

I'm looking at all the wires coming from my USB hub

[@Galahad54]

@@TheEudaemonicPlague What's a laptop?

[@sylviam6535]

I still use wired peripherals and Ethernet.

[@AncientSlugThrower]

"I used to spend hours trying to get the image on the right page. Now I have accepted that it is impossible." I have never used Emacs, but I can completely relate to this sentiment.

[@AnthonyBullard]

If Richard Stallman ever figures out how to watch KZbin in Emacs you are gonna be in big trouble😂😂😂

[@RenatoRamonda]

I'm sure with a combination of curl, ffmpeg with the AA filter, and some spicy lisp that's doable (I suspect you can do that pretty easily with yt-dlp, but I digress)

[@ste_ph_en9018]

Depends if you count exwm as "inside" emacs

[@-Engineering01-]

​@An Obscure Tenet what ?

[@phylwx]

@@-Engineering01- Stallman was friends with a guy from MIT that frequented J.Epstein's isle, that guy died and Stallman refused to badmouth his late friend, becoming the target of people willing to believe any half assed lie on the internet in order to feel the sweet, sweet dopamine rush of fingerwagging.

[@jonathanhendry9759]

Nah, the emacs guy didn't eat something out of his toe crud.

[@KDEDflyr55]

“EMACS cured my autism” might be the funniest and most complex throwaway joke I’ve seen on YT

[@caleballen4721]

Lmao peak comedy, peak emacs user. Rare joke indeed

[@kacklerot]

I have autism and I'm laughing at this. "I only think in Elisps."💀

[@gabe7296]

@@caleballen4721 i dont get it

[@nasonguy]

@@gabe7296 That’s cuz you don’t use emacs.

[@gabe7296]

@@nasonguy so if i dont use emacs and don't have autism, does that mean if i use emacs i will get autism?

[@alkumhcounseling8634]

The maybe German, maybe Belgian, maybe swedish, but actually secretly Dutch accent is perfect here

[@BerenddeBoer]

Doesn't sound Dutch at all.

[@AdamSpiers]

I started learning emacs in 1993. Started tracking my config in CVS around 1999, migrated it to git in 2011, published it on GitHub at some point in the last 10 years (aspiers/emacs if you are curious). My love for emacs grows deeper every day, but I still feel like I haven't scratched the surface. Thanks for this excellent documentary which captures the beauty of emacs perfectly ;-)

[@StaringLongingly]

i use vim btw

[@koobapl]

In Poland we got this phrase "with emacs through sendmail" because of this line from some polish movie when hacker says "I'm in!" and the other one asks "How did you do it?", and he replies "With emacs through sendmail" 😆

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I set up an MTA for a client that identified itself to a HELO as “Sendmail 8.8.8”. Of course it wasn’t really Sendmail, let alone such an ancient version. The security auditors even made a comment when they saw that, but of course there was no actual vulnerability, so nothing they could really complain about.

[@37kuba]

Can you write the movie name and the exact quote? (In Polish)

[@mzflighter6905]

​@@37kuba It is the movie "HAKER" from 2002.

[@toadracer8935]

There actually was a famous hacking incident that exploited a vulnerability in sendmail. There's a book about it, "The Cuckoo's Egg".

[@sssxxxttt]

As I remember history this was de facto a vulnerability. You could compromise a sendmail server through it's unencrypted socket plain text interface and gain root access on the server since most email servers at the time ran with root credentials.

[@Drummerx04]

When I was attending University of Maryland back in 2014, I discovered Emacs as a part of the C programming course. While everyone else was figuring out how to edit over SFTP with sublime text, i just went full tilt into Emacs. I read basically the entire manual, wrote my own C syntax highlighter, wrote my math homework in Emacs using Latex, and basically became the Emacs guru. I'd feel pretty safe to say i was the most proficient Emacs user on the entire campus. To this day i still win thumb wrestling with my pinky. Unfortunately, the ending of this video is accurate. You never stop using emacs, you just die. Even if only in spirit.

[@waytospergtherebro]

Shame you never learned how to spell at any point.

[@vaakdemandante8772]

Are you the script writer for the video? You sure read like one ;)

[@stdcall]

>I'd feel pretty safe to say i was the most proficient Emacs user on the entire campus. you should not feel safe saying this, especially at a decent CS school with grad students..

[@bobmcbob4399]

That's pretty cool. Do you find that the mandatory use of Ring and Pinky fingers, esp stretching across to press CTRL gives you carpel tunnel syndrome? I do that for a few minutes and my hand is in pain and I have large hands too.

[@atomictraveller]

use both hands.

[@petertrei]

I've been using emacs since 1978. I'm still learning. Im not a purist, I'll use other editors when setting up emacs would be too much of a hassle, such as inside an IDE, or a Linux VM with a life expectancy of only a day. Ive met people like this guy within the past few years - they're still around, and I am on nodding terms with RMS.

[@sylviam6535]

The main hassle with EMACS is that you still have to know Vi because it’s everywhere.

[@dp7933]

I did an on site client call once. They were running some ancient version of hpux and didn't even have vi. Fortunately I knew ed (learned accidentally from learning sed).

[@blablamannetje]

"Im not a purist" ... pity!

[@franklinbenitezvelez8500]

Omg man, this is one of the most brilliant satire sketches I've ever seen. I laughed out loud for real on my office and the humor is about things so obscure it's even hard to understand for most developers I know. Absolutely loved your video, first time I see one of your videos also.

[@dirremoire]

Who says this is satire?

[@botondhetyey159]

Emacs is a great OS, it's a shame it doesn't have a good text editor

[@XxxionxX]

I didn't have any strong feelings about space until this comment sent my sides into orbit. ☠️

[@PixelOutlaw]

With M-x ansi-term you an run other editors inside it. :)

[@SiqueScarface]

There ist M-x vi-mode though.

[@tammy1001]

Just checking the comments to make sure this 30 year old gag was represented. As you were.

[@p0k314COM]

This is brillant.

[@landonmackey1091]

“Emacs reduces anxiety. Emacs cured my autism!” Another hidden banger on KZbin

[@rockapedra1130]

This is absolutely perfect. This is how I got sucked into EMACS. Now I'm stuck for life.

[@someoneinmyhead]

The best life ever:)

[@WokeSoros]

“I spent more time customizing my computer than actually using it” I relate to this, but I in no way find it shameful.

[@ayazar]

"Emacs is powerful than any OS." got me!

[@HaithamSeelawi]

"Yeah, I fought in the vim-emacs wars" this one got me in stitches 😂

[@markgreen2170]

yes, me too! ...I was in a cs student back in the '90s,

[@HenkLangeveld]

Must be a youngster. 'vim'.

[@nasonguy]

@@HenkLangeveld I feel attacked. I still call it VI and still start it by typing vi.

[@4rumani]

​@@nasonguy everyone starts it like that rofl

[@petertrei]

Another vet here. Emacs forever!

[@SilentPrayerCG]

I've never heard of Emacs, and this channel was pushed to me by KZbin. But I'm downloading fkng Emacs right now.

[@SilentPrayerCG]

Oh my god, everything backwards.. I'll stick with Notepad++

[@dirremoire]

Got news for you. Notepad++ is written in emacs.😮

[@GeofreeOFree]

I ❤ emacs. Emacs is like life. There is more to life than efficiently completing tasks. People often get a sense of fulfillment from creatively finding new ways to get things done, or how to do things that we never needed to do in the first place. Our tools then become more than tools, they become media for self-expression and discovery. I think this video makes this point, although cynically. Emacs, like life, can be something to enjoy for its own sake, not just as means to an end. Sure, it is geeky to care about finding new ways to use an editor, but then life is for the geeks.

[@someoneinmyhead]

Agree. It's still an amazing tool.

[@millax-ev6yz]

Dude, you are so spot on with these characters! Every time I watch one of your videos I swear you are only like 20 percent more extreme than a person I met in real life. You're so funny, keep it up!

[@misterrpink1]

Literally, even that two fingers lifted, with a pensive pause before giving 2 reasons for something. It’s literally something I’ve experienced from an eMacs enthusiast in the past

[@millax-ev6yz]

@@misterrpink1 I'm just nervous about when he does a character that is basically me... Not sure what those characteristics are but when I see it I'll be like......DAAAAAAANNNGGGG!

[@Mojken_yakionigiri]

Met? Dude, I AM a lot of these guys.

[@millax-ev6yz]

@@Mojken_yakionigiri congratulations?

[@DaVinci-vw7cr]

I don't remember asking your opinion

[@MahmoudAbduljawad]

"Lex doesn't use Emacs anymore! Where's my death note" ROFL 😂

[@jimiscott]

Best line!!!!!!!

[@smakfu1375]

As an Emacs person (one is not merely a "user", "consumer", or "developer" of Emacs) everything in this video is completely accurate. Also, the time has come for our final showdown with the barbarian Vim hoard.

[@robertthompson5908]

This is hysterical! BTW I’m 65 and I still use emacs. Old habits die hard.

[@IncompleteTheory]

"Emacs is more powerful than any OS" - well delivered, just like a freudian slip - loving it!

[@ovi1326]

it's not a slip

[@sinekonata]

Indeed not a slip, and also oddly implying Vim could be considered an OS.

[@princeofcupspoc9073]

Yeah, that's not a slip. I don't think you understand the joke. Emacs is not an OS, but with emacs you don't need any OS. Now, off my grass.

[@IncompleteTheory]

@@princeofcupspoc9073 Not sure who you are talking to here, but FWIW that's why I said *like* a slip. The Emacs = OS joke is ages old (as am I) and even seasoned Emacs users know it well, but still could become carried away by the power of their highly portable toy and slip a sentence like the character. That's how I read it, anyway. I may be reading too much into it though.

[@user-we5cu6eb7u]

@@ovi1326 it's a lisp

[@ygstuff4898]

Oh my....I remember an older comp.sci instructor in university that was obsessed with Emacs (and Gnu-Emacs), and would get frustrated when we didn't "understand" that Emacs was more than just an editor --- hahaha. We would do everything in Emacs and LaTex, including note handouts, exams, and simple posters. Totally blew his mind when MS Word was force-installed on all faculty computers, and people started sending him .doc files to open & look at. He passed away a decade ago, but I wonder what he would think of Notepad++, VS Code, IntelliJ and alike.

[@moritzrank01]

Poor guy, I wonder how easily one can directly edit whatever weird markup scheme ms word is using

[@jeromeglick]

@@parad0xheart I never switched over to .docx. Just didn't buy the gimmick.

[@abdulmasaiev9024]

I mean, forget Emacs but LaTeX is usually just the straight-up superior choice than Word for any real long form writing (if you've ever heard of formatting just EXPLODING in Word when you make a tiny change in a big document, you know why) - and also for math, which in CompSci is a huge factor. Doing at all complex formulas in Word is less "writing stuff" and more "performing interpretative art about the casual despair lurking just beneath the surface of the human condition"

[@haifutter4166]

​​@@parad0xheartJust doing advanced formatting in Word without using predefined templates gives me ptsd. It's so time intensive, that in retrospect I should've started with LaTeX right from the beginning. Sure it has quite the learning curve, and I forget how to do things easily, but at least it's easier to troubleshoot since it's plaintext and you don't have to find a wrong setting in a jungle of windows. Or I just could keep it simple, stick to Mark Down in Emacs, I mean in Kate or Obsidian, and ignore high level typesetting and office text editors all together.

[@itsafroggytime]

​@@abdulmasaiev9024this is PROSE....🥹 i think i teared up a little reading this. i'm going to print out your comment and frame it above my desk at the office.

[@IanSebryk]

i absolutely love this channel. it perfectly captures all programming idiosyncrasies. love love love it.

[@sepijortikka]

This whole video is pure gold.

[@netkv]

That man is absolutelly right and genius, true patriot of Emacs

[@superscatboy]

Vim: "My OS is my text editor" Emacs: "My text editor is my OS"

[@ethanoch]

I don't know how I ended up here, but thank you for this work of art.

[@jackglossop4859]

I had no idea what eMacs is and I I’ve never typed a line of code in my life but I’ve watched this randomly recommended video twice now. It’s so strangely melancholic. I love it.

[@vivaneret1249]

I need a t-shirt that says, "You know? Emacs has a package for that."

[@az8560]

So... have you found an Emacs package for ordering a t-shirt which says that?

[@michaelliepert9767]

You're unbelievable! You even got my keyboard in your film. I am a baby boomer, and half of your text could be quoted from my last 36 years with emacs.... "People don't quit emacs, they just die.". Very well observed, thumbs up! Keep up the good work!!!

[@dafelcardozo]

Amazing, really fun vid, congrats. I used Emacs in college and during my very first programming jobs, 20 years ago. I remember dreaming nightmares with it, the text cursor switching from panel to panel, and having pain editing and copy-pasting stuff.

[@adamploof3528]

The strong pinky finger bit got me. So esoteric and perfect.

[@lawrencemanning]

Its apparently possible to control a Nintendo Switch from Home Assistant. AND there is a plug-in for Emacs to control Home Assistant. So you’re prayers are answered: you can operate that Switch from inside Emacs!

[@kalebbruwer]

"I don't code, I just read papers" Don't forget demoralizing a few hundred first year CS students on the side. Per year.

[@aoeu256]

Hmm why code in low level languages why not read academic papers about programming in the year 2040?

[@Trollygag]

I worked on a system that locked the keyboard for 15 seconds if you typed 3 keys at once because it thought something hit the keyboard and didn't want you to inadvertently destroy something. I also worked with a C developer who used emacs. There was a lot of shouting, cursing, and pounding on the keyboard in rage.

[@sixstringedthing]

As someone who knows nothing of Emacs beyond what I learned from reading The Unix Hater's Handbook some time in the late 90's, this is some Deep Lore shit right here.

[@zimbot_KWB]

LOL! Thanks for taking me back. That was me from mid eighties to mid-nineties, working exclusively in HP-UX. But I eventually got sick and tired of having *none* of my essential customizations handy when working on another computer, such as the products I helped develop. I decided to bite the bullet and force myself to become reasonably adept at using VI, just for those times. Then I had to teach it, and I learned important and powerful capabilities in VI that makes it almost as nice as emacs. Then "vim" came along, which was available everywhere and even an improvement over VI. The biggest impediment to continuing to use emacs, besides my dependence on some customize Gosling bindings, was having to switch from an HP ITF keyboard to a standard PC keyboard, which put the control key in the wrong place, making emacs use non-ergonomic, to say the least. The disappearance of keyboards with reasonably-positioned control keys eventually killed my emacs use once and for all. This video is so bittersweet.

[@ColinMcCormack]

Yeah, vi is ok if you're just editing something in /etc

[@winebartender6653]

That's why our pinkies are so strong.

[@Bobbias]

​​@@ColinMcCormack or you can pick the sane choice and use nano.

[@jamesalles139]

THIS is why I could not get to use the Dvorak keyboard layout throughout my life. sigh.

[@sjsomething4936]

@@ColinMcCormack​​⁠nah, vi / vim is incredibly powerful, when used correctly. I’m not sure if you can find any videos of the vi olympics on KZbin (I did a quick search and couldn’t find any), but people who know how to use it really well can reformat a file in seconds. At the end of the day, it’s whatever you start and learn with and become proficient with that you’re likely to stick with.

[@StickySli]

INTERVIEWER: I think Vim has quite a nice tutorial. INTERVIEWEE: I don't remember... INTERVIEWER: Remember what? INTERVIEWEE: I don't remember asking your opinion. ________________________________________ That has to be the best line in the video 😂

[@malamhari_]

Yeah I agree, I'm dying on it🤣

[@thomassynths]

I liked how the wall troubleshooting tutorial involved using vim to fix it.

[@bustosadrian]

I'm definitely stealing that one!

[@apestogetherstrong341]

Emacs tutorial is way better

[@jacquesdev]

agreed, "I don't remember" is the best comment ever

[@stevenanderson7046]

This hilarious!! And clearly the guy knows his emacs. Very inspiring

[@wiskasIO]

I'm a web dev and for me the funniest was the JS Interview but I shared this with a friend I uses Emacs and he was cracking up in laughter.

[@bugswriter_]

"my whole life is a text buffer" - this one hit me hard

[@skierpage]

I'm literally😂😂🤣

[@SeanCMonahan]

Can I ctrl-zed? Just kidding. I couldn't figure out how to undo in emacs, so I fixed it by running "M-& vim"

[@king-wh7vw]

I see the inspiration for your latest vid xD good stuff!

[@sama7496]

the guy who made me use emacs is here good lord!

[@deathkeys1]

go back to making videos, not watching them! and vi is the best!

[@thomasbates9189]

The "et al" in his title was such a fantastic idea! You do great work!

[@Leadvest]

That's what got me to click on the video.

[@RaymondPeckIII]

Seriously, the key is that emacs isn't an editor, it's a LISP machine DISGUISED as an editor. It's essentially an OS with a huge suite of internal tools.

[@the_real_vdegenne]

One thing that most newbies don't understand is that emacs keybindings are inspired by unix shells. One example is C-f and C-b (to go forward or backward) try it in a terminal prompt and you'll see. So for me it wasn't really hard to learn because I learn from excitement to learn both Emacs and how to navigate in shells with more ease. But I finally migrated to Vim few years ago because for editing Vim keybindings are making your hands less sore after hours of coding.

[@kurku3725]

and the whole “mode” thing of Vim is super cool its nicely separates everything I wish more software was like this

[@MisterMobius]

The amount of joy this video gives me is insane. This popped into my brain at random times the last days and i had to giggle like an idiot, making people around me turn their heads to see what's so funny.

[@TomasAntonioLopez97]

Concurrency? You don't need concurrency, you just need to be patient and enjoy the little breaks that Emacs gives you

[@AmateurSpecialist]

In emacs' defense, it was featured in one of the most realistic movie hacking scenes (Tron: Legacy). Though, probably half the film's budget was spent configuring it...

[@olutukko2681]

Huh, I missed that. Just watched the movie. I'm pretty sure I saw him launch vi though

[@twisterwiper]

I used eMacs, LaTeX and Ghostscript when I wrote my university papers. I was really good at it. It’s many years ago. I don’t know if it is still used. You basically programmed and compiled your documents, lol. Such a pain, but incredibly flexible and consistent. Never any “Word, why is this figure jumping to the next page?!”. You knew exactly what you were going to get because you specified it.

[@SystemfehlerK]

LaTeX is still the standard for typesetting. So good scientists use LaTeX, and evil ones use Microsoft Word. It's just easier to change some configuration of your document to appease to someone else's tastes. But it's harder to get the first draft done. I never used something but dedicated LaTeX editors for it though.

[@kalasmournrex1470]

LaTeX is still very much used, but pdfTex has supplanted ghost script.

[@philscott974]

I published a paper around 2015 that I wrote entirely in Emacs org-mode and exported as LaTeX.

[@Rhenor]

Figures jumping to the next page is still a problem in LaTeX unless you painstaking control the penalties.

[@erikitter6773]

Stuff does jump, well mostly floats away, in LaTeX. Did you mean to say TeX? But indeed, after having written some tens of thousands of pages in LaTeX now, for text-dominated structured information-centric (as for example vs. a photography-centric magazine) page layout published works LaTeX is the way to go, and it is not a close call.

[@GunZFoX]

"I can send it to you by ftp" ahaha

[@mandisaw]

That was beautiful LOL

[@lawrencemanning]

“I’ll uuencode it and upload it to Usenet” would have been better. :)

[@quincyames2014]

I had a professor in college that used EMACS like two years ago, he sounded like this lol

[@mnoxman]

Shurly at only 1.5 years long that is the abridged version of the video. O'Reilly guide to VI: Pamphlet, 6 pages. O'Reilly guide to Emacs: "The abridged guide to Learning Emacs Vol 1-42, 800pp/volume"

[@butterflyvision3084]

Asssuming the ungraded log footage was intentional, that's a brilliant detail.

[@sle6423]

Love the interviewer interactions on this one!

[@GSBarlev]

Sauciest I've ever heard the interviewer. But then there's nothing that can get an otherwise level-headed person into a rage than attacking their preferred text editor.

[@Bempus]

@@GSBarlev OS*

[@jadhajali2804]

"You're a law professor?" "No, I'm a Zen monk" Hahaha

[@TheShaShow]

Dude, I had no clue what emacs was before watching this, but now I know like one grain of sand about it, and this video made me binge watch all your other ones in one day. Great stuff!

[@Anriuko]

Did you install Emacs though?

[@njsynthesis]

As a Model M-using Emacs user, I thank you for the representation.

[@abhijitkar4019]

Big fan here, please do Rust, Golang, AWS, Docker, CNCF, and all the fluffs that have become the norm. P.S. My favorite video by far is the interview with Senior JavaScript Engineer!

[@patrykK1028]

He needs to be wearing programming socks for the Rust video

[@BrotherCheng]

Rust enthusiast would be amazing. Another one I want to see is a Kubernetes (and/or Docker) enthusiast, for very different reasons lol.

[@fredhair]

"People never quite emacs... they just die at some point" - I love it.

[@kenchilton]

emacs-nox is great. It is my go-to text editor. If emacs is not installed, then I will default to vi. These old editors still do the job just as well or better than anything since, but as long as I don’t need a mouse to edit text, it works for me.

[@jonasberlin5594]

"I have a very strong pinky finger!!!" 😆This made me realize just how long I have been writing code. EVERYTHING ran through emacs in my first job, and I can still snap into it if needed.

[@madflash4079]

True veteran of vim/emacs wars 😎

[@mandisaw]

Wrote my first web site in emacs! Tried vi once, didn't inhale

[@PixelOutlaw]

Aaaaand now I have the urge to write a novelty program in Emacs Lisp. :P Hilarious video!

[@EvgeniyDolzhenko]

Emacs is turning 50 in two years, really astonishing|admirable|incredible piece of software which only gets better the longer you use|learn it. It's also completely futuristic (if you can call ideas from 80s) being futuristic since they still are not anywhere in modern software. I'm talking about being in the system and being able to take apart/modify/investigate any part of it all while it's running without any "recompilation" steps. Something Smalltalk was famous for though I never used it. Still very grateful for all the awesome people who worked on it and happy to have invested the time into learning|using it for the last decade .

[@exnihilonihilfit6316]

Get used to using proper sentences with commas and “or” or “and”s instead of “|”s or slashes. This lazy 'style' has damaged your writing. “Emacs is turning 50 in two years. Really astonishing, admirable, incredible piece of software which only gets better the longer you learn and use it.”

[@flummi6966]

@@exnihilonihilfit6316 You dont get it. This style is preneologism. It first symptoms often appear after coding ASM or other near metal. Simply by beeing annoyed that OR and XOR have not found their way into normal Human speech.

[@FrostByte112]

The “I can send it to you via FTP!” Got me quite hard 😂

[@OG_McLovin]

Ha! I had to watch the video a few times before I realized what he was saying. I thought he was saying "I can send it to you but I have to pee."

[@nikdog419]

Now I wish, back when I was 7 and I was told to learn Slackware; I was also told to learn Emacs instead of Vi. Hated Vi, basically got to the point that I memorised enough of it's functionality to compile Nano.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I put up with vi for many years, while the main part of my sysadmin work was on proprietary Unix systems. Once those went extinct and were replaced with Linux, I could now depend on having Emacs available wherever I went, so I switched to that.

[@nikdog419]

@@telleva7890 You stumbled onto a question I had on a completely different video. Someone who must've been at least 10 years younger than me, mentioned he finally tried VIM after avoiding it because of all the Vi memes and he didn't understand the memes any more afterwards. Which made me wonder, "Wait, does that mean VIM is actually usable?" Or maybe better put, is intuitive now? I guess what I'm really wondering is, is it still a game of memorising all the keyboard shortcuts? As that is the real reason I hate VI. It is definitely a featured and useful text editor, if you memorise all the keyboard shortcuts. It's also designed to utilise all of the terminal space for the text document. Sacrificing zero lines to UI, as those were limited in the 70s. Thus making it unintuitive. And there was definitely a lot of, "just memorise the shortcuts, trust me it's great", back then; but when all you're doing is random edits of config files, and you're not spending all day in the text editor programming or something, you don't use it frequently enough or even full featured enough to memorise those damn shortcuts. Especially when you came from DOS to Linux in the 90s, and you were used to Microsoft Edit. You didn't mind sacrificing 4 lines to UI, as it made for a better UX. Which is exactly what GNU Nano was born out of, make an M$ Edit clone.

[@jimbarino2]

@@nikdog419 Of course you have to learn the keyboard shortcuts - that's all there is to it. But once you learn them, (or at least most of them), it becomes addictive.

[@mikhail5002]

I love your videos so much. All the characters are amazing, I would watch all of them again and again.

[@giorgiomariani5852]

When he said "I can send it to you by FTP" I died

[@felixmerz6229]

So, I was at a CCC event that one time. Some guy asked me who I was and what I was doing, I told him I'm a programmer. He asked me about my latest project, which was some AI playground I was setting up. He was intrigued, asked me what IDE I'm using. Told him "Well, emacs, of course". He was excited and asked me to show him my work. So I typed *nvim aiplayground* and he just cussed and walked away. Great day. I don't use nvim either, by the way.

[@kadirgunel5926]

I was waiting this for a long time! That monitor reflects the real power of emacs :))

[@nimbusco8956]

Only CRTs can render an Emacs buffer as it was meant to be.

[@kadirgunel5926]

@@nimbusco8956 don't forget the emacs mug 😄

[@kadirgunel5926]

@@nimbusco8956 Don't forget the mug! Without the mug we cannot taste the emacs in 90s 😄

[@programmersarealsohuman5909]

👔merch: posix.store 💀 VIM: kzbin.info/www/bejne/b5-Ulaejr9ahebc&lc=UgyQ46uW4hQzRdgPqbN4AaABAg 🚀 Twitter: twitter.com/kailentit Consider joining George Hotz @ tinygrad.org (non-affiliated)

[@Robert-dv2ot]

Neither Swift

[@hermestrismegistus9142]

Rust is the second coming of C. C++ is the false prophet, the antiC.

[@froge4300]

c

[@Meodoc]

Omg looking forward to rust! 😂

[@Ryan-xq3kl]

EMACS SUXX, THIS POST WAS MADE BY VIM GANG

[@nikdudnik]

"I treat my whole life as a text buffer."🤣

[@markrlondon]

It took me 40 years to realize that Emacs really is the best editor.

[@tequilasunset4651]

can confirm, I learn a new Emacs every day

[@strayferal]

1:39 "Diagnosed with severe hostility towards vim users" - this kills me 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@MrSpeedFrk]

emacs almost became self aware at one point

[@JonixMaroni]

I've watched this clip at least ten times in the last few days, hilarious! It never gets boring. Please make a part 2. ♥

[@marks7502]

"...and just accept that it's impossible", I laughed so hard I actually cried. funny 🤣

[@JackRussell021]

Back in the day, people used to say that Emacs stood for "Eight megabytes and constantly swapping". These days people don't understand the joke - back then it was funny.

[@sekio64]

Escape Meta Alt Control Shift...

[@pauldwalker]

it was always “Emacs Makes All Computers Slow”. this was especially true when the source code to emacs was larger than all the source code to an entire linux distribution (early SLS days)

[@OG_McLovin]

I actually went and looked up stuff on Emacs and Vim (or VI as I'm told) just to understand the jokes in this better. Great, great vid and I've never programmed in my life.

[@hemanth.alluri]

I like this skit better than the ones before it because in this one you're not just saying the same thing over and over again. You can see that more effort went into this skit and it's paying off!

[@Galahad54]

Skit? I thought it was a historical document.

[@Steponlyone]

Emacs is not a text editor, it’s a lifestyle :)

[@bernardtalbert6729]

Emacs is the greatest text editor of all time.

[@PaulKuykendall]

I used to use EMACS back in the 90s but eventually switched to vi. I found it easier to memorize all the keyboard commands than grow the two extra fingers needed for the various command chords.

[@pauldwalker]

this!

[@Anriuko]

Vim's weakness is the stupid decision to favor memorability over ergonomics for the keybindings. Apparently Moolenaar thought that the movement and command keys should be chosen based on English mnemonics instead of e.g. proximity to categorically similar keys. The latter approach would have raised the barrier of entry slightly, but in return we'd have had a much more robust modal interface once the muscle memory takes over from silly mnemonics ("w" for "forward word" et al.) - a shift that happens soon enough that it should be a significant factor in choosing the defaults. Yes, I could customize the keybindings, but that would undermine one of Vim's greatest strength - its de facto status as the fast text editor that is available virtually everywhere. So we're stuck with idiotic defaults.

[@sinisterthoughts2896]

"people never quit emacs... ...they just die at some point." that rings so true of a lot of things.

[@davidbakin1953]

I thought you were producing humorous satiric videos here, poking fun at various programmer preferences and industry trends. Not documentaries.

[@MarkKomarinski]

I used to work with someone back in the late 90s that worked on a Sparc(5?) in text mode using Emacs.

[@vickisnemeth7474]

Very rich colorizing. Good job!

[@NeonBoneyard]

oh my fucking god. I had a chemistry teacher in HS, he was exactly like this.. except shorter silver hair. fucking obsessed with emacs...a wizard. he was the only teacher that could see through my sneaky lie for homework not being able to be turned in cause the file was "corrupted"