This is why so many of us are so much into Emacs. In a time where pretty much all software around us gets progressively enshittified, there’s this 50 year old Lisp interpreter masquerading as an editor that you can make truly and uniquely yours.
Yup. Watching so many of my peers struggle with some basic tasks like grabbing a url and inserting it into a chat buffer. I mean, come on. How many times a day you do this? And you just settled with always:
- going back to the browser
- clicking on address bar
- attempting to select the link with the mouse
- switching back to wherever you want the link
- inserting it
- realizing that you missed a character - mouse is imprecise for text selection
- repeating the process
- Oh shoot. It's a markdown, I need now to grab the description of the page too. And... back to the dance again.
Shit like this, for me is just pressing a key. And it nicely formats it (for whatever markup you want), grabbing the correct description, etc. I solved the problem once, and it just works and I never have to ever spare a split second neural signalling for it - there's no attention tax.
I'm forever indebted to my younger self for convincing and forcing myself to learn Lisp and spend some time understanding Emacs. Among all sorts of skills that I picked up during my tenure - CLIs, Unix, Linux internals, networking, git fundamentals, vim, various programming languages, front-end, devops, cybersec, etc. etc. - Lisp remains enormously practical, the best skill that I'm so glad I acquired.
