Emacs

I am planning to add some hooks to org-mode to allow pushing clock in and clock out events to an external web service.

While I was thinking through whether this was worth working on, I realized something about how I approach tasks these days, and there’s actually a philosophical component to this work.

I love the idea of org-mode; I love org-roam; and I love org tasks. But for personal tasks, so much context and work does not take place in Emacs, having to go back there every time is a lot of work, and things that require a lot of work do not get done often. Context switching should generally be avoided.

There’s an argument to be made for ease of use in software. The epiphany with Apple software in the early part of the 21st century was that most users had tasks they wanted done. They did not want to use a computer to do them, per se. But if a computer could do them, that was okay.

The problem with this perspective is that it assumes a certain amount of laziness—or perhaps lack of discrimination‒on the part of the user. There are some excellent times to be lazy, but choice of tools is not one of them. Ask any accomplished carpenter if the Home Depot plane and the Lee Nielson plane is the same tool. They are not. But let us explore this analogy a bit more. It’s actually damned appropriate.

I have moved to reading and responding to all my email in Emacs. I honestly didn’t think I would ever be able to make this jump because of silly things like signatures, HTML email and my address book. But the reality of how I actually use email on a day to day basis is a big part of why this was possible.

As it happens, most of my email work is replying to other people. As an engineer on a product team I start very few email threads, and even fewer with people outside the organization. Thus, the lack of the company standard HTML signature in my outgoing emails is rarely a problem. On the once or twice a month occurrence of needing to send an external-facing email, I can pop open Gmail in a browser and take care of it.

I really did try mu4e. Really. But the setup required a custom emacs build on macos, and I am unfortunately constrained to Macs for work at the moment, so it was kind of a non-starter to jump through so many hoops to get it working. And of course, I also highly value resilience, and nothing says unresilient than not being able to successfully build a crucial feature like mail handling into your editor of choice.

After a year or so of dedicating myself to getting Spacemacs setup just right, I made a pretty substanial jump a few weeks ago. I’m now running doom-emacs which provides fewer nice surprises (missing evil-surround shortcuts by default) than spacemacs, but loads much … much faster. The other day I found myself coding while sharing my screen on Zoom and is was painfully obvious what price I was paying for spacemacs not cleaning up after itself and generally lazy loading things leading to less than fast context switching.

I was reviewing the feeds I subscribe to in elfeed this evening when it occurred to me that a lot of my feeds have to do with Emacs. I will often blow through updates on feeds, making sure to only pickup things that are truly useful. But I discovered an amazingly high signal to noise ratio regarding tips for using Emacs more effectively. This got me thinking about how I couldn’t possible remember all this stuff, so I tossed some of the things I was learning in my learnings.org file to review later. At that point, it dawned on my how important tool choice is, and how important it is to learn how to use your tools effectively and be receptive to learning new things about them.

Oh Goodreads. Your website is a cluttered mess. Your UX hasn’t been improved in years. The only value I derive from keeping my reading list on you is that my friends can see what I’m reading. Which is a neat trick, but since I’ve mostly given up on Facebook too, it not really enough to keep me.

I was an early adopter of Goodreads, but my life has taken a turn towards the personal and the text-based. I use Emacs (via spacemacs) as much as I can. Org-mode might be the single most impressive IDEA rendered into software I’ve ever seen. It simply makes the things I use on a regular basis more powerful and expressive, which is not something I can say for Word, Twitter, or Chrome. Those are merely tools. They don’t amplify my ability to document and create.

Once, I used Jekyll. Then I switched to Pelican. I’m finally here on Hugo, and hoping that this will make it easier to keep things updated. The eternal question when chosing a method to publish a blog is, why publish a blog. I don’t really have an answer for that yet. I wish I did. Honestly, I do. You don’t have to believe me, because I believe in myself, and if this is all one big simulation, you don’t matter anyway.

Emacs is very powerful. Amazingly so. But it’s so arcane, the keystrokes could take you years to master. So what’s a developer to do?

Enter spacemacs. I honestly don’t know where this idea came from, and my brain is structured in such a way that I could have ever pulled it off myself. But an emacs configured like Vim (thank you evil mode) with discoverable keystrokes … I am always flabergasted.