Emacs has this experience to it that no other software ive seen till now has, it lets you do whatever you want with it and make a workflow specific to you

Dont like some keybindings? Change it
Use a command often? Assign a keybinding
Want specific behavior whenever you open a file or go into a mode? Be my guest
I didnt really understand hooks and how useful they could be generally till using Emacs

it makes me understand the idea behind free as in libre software, it definitely takes awhile to get used to the fact that you can literally do and change anything, rather than having to follow some vision the developer put of how they want you to experience things, its hard in a lot of ways but it also does feel transformative since you actually change the software how you want it to work, its much more creative?

Also,
org mode feels so good to write in, especially the feature of capture templates, which really reduces the friction of having an idea in between doing something but you dont wanna mentally switch to write things down, so you just hit a keybinding and have a buffer to write whatever you thought
i got org-roam recently and i still dont really know how to use it properly to take notes in that graphing way with backlink, but i do love the dailies feature, its very convenient and what i use most so far
I actually feel really comfy writing stuff down on Emacs, and do it alot more than I used to in the other note taking software ive noticed

#emacs #orgmode #writing #Orgroam

@schrizoidian check out denote, it doesn’t need a separate database. Also, great post!
@mykhaylo thank you! Ive heard about denote! Im definitely planning on trying it out as i figure out what kinda note taking flow works for me

@schrizoidian

There's a lot of reasons that Emacs has become the thing it is, being pretty much 50ish years old in some form is part of it but I think mostly it's because it's structured as an operating system for managing text.

It betrays that it predates running on Unix by being so self contained and providing a toolkit for writers who were smart and liked tinkering.

Inside Emacs it behaves like an OS, you want a thingy, write a thingy, more likely use one that someone has made.

@schrizoidian

As an aside, I wish more that used technical editors used ED or similar first. Add a few lines display a page of lines (23), if it went over 23 maybe it was a bit long or confused, split, display the page again.

But that's not really about the editor used, it's just that line editors give a different focus.

It's also just an old fart muttering about bricks and straw.

@simon_lucy its a lisp machine! I love that
i wonder if the implications of Emacs being written how it is says something when designing software as a tool
In the digital world, the most fundamental flexible tool seems to be programming languages and what you can build using them
We can make code for ourselves, to maybe automate things, or to do a specific task

But when trying to build software thats meant to be a flexible tool for a task, where the user can, with their skill bend it to the suit their workflow, and by doing so, also enhance their own understanding i wonder if designing it like an OS is a necessary part of it?

so like outside Emacs scope, if you were making software to, make music or edit videos, for example, this kind of design would definitely be really useful i think?

@schrizoidian

I think the time it evolved in the 70's and its inheritance from TECO which also had macros conditioned how it continued to evolve and using Lisp to build the features (I guess because it was MIT and not DEC) was more than serendipity.

TECO probably influenced more software development than we realise.

Another TECO inherited editor was PMate which I used and coddled for almost 20 years. The best print output pre Postscript.

@schrizoidian
"if you were making software to, make music or edit videos, for example, this kind of design would definitely be really useful i think?"

They kind of are already, Supercollider, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DAW (Digital Audio Workstations) software of all kinds use either languages, macros or keyboard sequences to build upon a core, or kernel.