In this post, Protesilaos answers an email by one of his readers. In the email, the sender seems to assume that Emacs is bloated by definition, and that e.g. Vim isn’t, because it comes with less stuff baked-in and works well with piping – the core way to compose in *nix command lines.
The sender asks:
This video [of Luke] really provide some good reasons why to invest on ‘coreutils’ to build a small, maintainable and decentralized system rather than investing on a giant mutable system.
Emacs being the giant, mutable system, and the pipe-able Unix command-line tools comprising the “maintainable and decentralized system”. (That way of asking is loaded with assumptions already.)
Prot does a very good job at not preaching, and actually bringing forth useful arguments.
Vim has a lot of stuff built-in, like a terminal emulator, and isn’t that different from Emacs in that way. (Plain vi is a different beast.)
Prot treats Emacs “as a layer of interactivity on top of Unix”. That’s a very good description, I think.
There is non-negligible overhead in composing a system of many independent pieces. You end up writing a lot of glue code, so to speak. (And it can be rather brittle.)
Emacs ties things together into a coherent software where you can share stuff between pieces of functionality easily. You can copy from the Emacs shell and paste in a text buffer. You can perform mass text replacement from a UI you already know instead of having to learn syntax. (Opposed to sed/awk/…)
In closing, Prot points out that the underlying issue can be binary thinking (which is rather limited and avoids entertaining opposing opinions):
This hints at the kind of thinking that treats the world in simplistic, binary terms: Unix is simple VS Emacs is complex; Arch Linux is for hackers VS Ubuntua is for simpletons… Those are stereotypes that rest on misunderstandings about the intent and the purpose of each of those paradigms, their context-specific pros and cons, as well as the potentially numerous reasons one may have to opt for a given choice.
Worth a read during this time “between the years.”
Since COVID-19 doesn’t seem to go away any time soon, I figured I might as well continue with #IndieSupportWeeks to show you what I use and can recommend.
A dev tool I use on iOS is Working Copy. Usually, I don’t interact with my project code at all from iOS, but when I do, I check git stuff with this app.
Over the past 10 years or so I’ve tried a couple git clients for light work on mobile, but Working Copy sticked with me ever since I was participating in the TestFlight beta.
For a casual git fan-person, Working Copy’s settings might be a bit overwhelming, but for developers, I think this is a very fine app to browse, search, push and pull, and even commit changes.
Now the “commiting changes from mobile” part in someone’s daily workflow is utterly confusing to me, because I cannot imagine what that’d be like on an iPad, say.
I have edited posts on my website this way to fix typos. That went well. I also used it for light maintenance of Open Source projects. But I haven’t tried to commit to my Swift projects, because I don’t see how editing Swift files without a compiler would be a good idea. Then again it’s not my job to figure out user personas for a mobile git client – I’m here to tell you that if you’re in the market for such a tool, Working Copy is good at that.
The one thing I can testament to is that it works without a hassle, and it works well. That’s not much, but that may also be all you truly care about.
Working Copy is a free download + a $19.99 one-time in-app-purchase to unlock all the features. It also has a 4.9-star rating on the App Store, so, wow!
I played around with Nicolas Rougier’s NANO Emacs configuration because it looks so hot and I wanted to try some of his tasteful settings myself. One thing that let me down for a couple days since I started eyeballing the package was performance. In my huge org files to organize app development tasks, scrolling was so-so. Pixel scrolling, which I discovered through Nicolas’s configuration ((pixel-scroll-mode +1)), didn’t work at all on my machine. I have a MacBook Pro 13” from 2020. This is a text editor. Something’s not right with my config.
Sadly it’s only for macOS11.0+, so for projects pre-Big Sur, you have bad luck. But it’s written with SwiftUI, so you may still learn one thing or another, or adapt the code to your project if you want!
I somehow found Abin Simon’s post about how he made pasting text in his Emacs “pulse”, aka temporarily highlight the pasted region. In Emacs parlance, pasting is called “yanking”. His post sadly covers only one use case: Emacs with evil-mode, which adds vim keybindings and apparently also adds a special evil-yank command in place of the regular yank.
I installed Treemacs the other day and found out, to my excitement!, that you can not only hit TAB to expand folders, but also to expand files! When you “expand” a Markdown file, you see its headings in the file explorer. That is bonkers, and so useful for larger writing projects to get a unified overview!
I don’t know about you, but sometimes, and the end of an exhausting day, I find the prospect of filling out yet another form almost frightening. At the very least intimidating. Some days, I’m just not in the mood to be bothered. Even with tracking open loops meticulously, this opens up the potential to let things stay undone for far too long.
In case you’re prone to behave like that, I don’t want you to fall into this trap for your indie app business. So here’s good news. I checked out Apple’s App Store Small Business Program enrollment.
The App Store Small Business Program is literally just a handful of checkboxes to tick. That’s it. I completed it in 2 minutes, most of it spent in the login form, I guess.
If you earn less than 1mio USD in revenue per year and want to see your App Store fees halved from 30% to 15%, apply as soon as possible.
If you apply before Dec 18th (this Friday!), your enrollment is expected to be done in time for January 2021.
It takes a handful of deep breaths to get through that. And I totally get why some of us at the moment absolutely need some breathing room as 2020 draws to a close. If yet another form to fill out is not your cup of tea, give this checkbox-based form a chance. You’ll not regret it.
