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I got a nice case of emacs pinky back in my early 30's. Had to take disability, get physical therapy to rehabilitate, etc. Been vi all the way since then.

I don't know how long ago "your early 30's" was, but for me this was never a question - I'm a die-hard vimmer, I use vim bindings everywhere. It's practical, why force myself to relearn my typing with every new tool I use if I really don't have to? Emacs, as it turns out, vims much better than any other concrete vim implementation. Even though I did learn some basic Emacs vanilla bindings, I'm still a vimmer. Vimming in Emacs never was a big obstacle for me.

(not the person you are replying to)

I am primarily an Emacs user, using the standard key bindings (and a whole bunch of custom bindings and functions I've built on top of it over the decades, ctrl remaped to caps lock and no Emacs pinky so far).

But I am also 80% a NeoVim and Vim user for about 15 years now, and I consider myself quite proficient with Vim keybindings. The Emacs emulation is truly incredible, but the fact that Vim implementation quality varies wildly from environment to environment is extremely frustrating to me. For example, the jupyterlab-vim plugin is so jarringly broken in a handful of ways that it completely knocks me out of the flow of whatever I was doing when I encounter those emulation failures. IntelliJ's idea Vim plugin is a pretty decent one, but even there I have encountered the occasional issue [1][2][3]. Otherwise, I strongly agree with your point about learning one way to work with text and being able to leverage it most places.

Sort of a tangent, but I think this is why Emacs users tend to end up trying to do as much in Emacs as possible: It's not really the keybindings but the fact that everything in Emacs is a text buffer. Emacs owns the input and the output, and because everything in Emacs operates on text, you can do most everything in most every mode, to most any buffer content. One example of how powerful this can be is the ability to press a key and use dabbrev-expand to autocomplete shell input I'm typing based off the shell output of a prior command.

1: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/VIM-569

2: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/VIM-636

3: https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim/pull/33


> Vim implementation quality varies wildly from environment to environment is extremely frustrating to me.

I know exactly what you're talking about. I am a die-hard vimmer and used vim plugins in every editor/IDE/browser/shell/multiplexer/WM/etc. I use vim bindings system-wide. I control my music, switch between apps, swap and resize windows - all without lifting a finger from the home-row.

I spent almost a decade living in IntelliJ. I had many direct conversations with Andy Vlasovskikh (he's the maintainer of IdeaVim then). Gary Bernhard (Destroy All Software, wat guy) once said: "there's no vim-mode, there's only Vim" in the sense that no single editor or IDE, not a single vim emulation layer properly works, they all have glaring deficiencies - to the point that it can drive any experienced vimmer truly mad.

With one notable exception. Evil-mode in Emacs is just wonderful. It's the best vim-emulation layer, to a certain degree it works even better than in Vim/Nvim. Weirdest thing - it makes you forget it's not a built-in feature of Emacs. I'm honestly very happy with it, because I don't know, otherwise, I might have never convinced myself to ever give Emacs a try.

These two ideas - vim modality and the grand idea of Lisp - are possibly the two best things that I am forever grateful to my younger self for forcing me to learn. I can't even comprehend being a professional software developer and not grokking them.


I definitely agree with this. Literally the only time I use lisp is when working on my Emacs configuration, but after almost 20 years of using it to write all sorts of functionality from big to small things, just having the exposure to lisp has really helped expand my thinking about programming in ways that working with e.g. C, Python, Rust may not have.

One last thing on the Vim emulation front: While I'm not a big fan of VSCode, the VSCode-Neovim extension[0] connects to an actual Neovim instance via Neovim's MessagePack-RPC API, allowing you to use real Neovim but native in VS Code. Pretty cool!

0: https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim


afaik, even with the extension it only affects the editor pane - any other windows still require tons of mouse use. I'm not mouse-nazi, but years of one-handed use of it have created tons of problems for me - in the neck, wrists and my back. All kinds of mice I tried didn't help - magic trackpad, vertical, ergonomic, etc. I'm sure this is pretty common.

I keep thinking of maybe I should learn to become ambidexter mouse user, and if I ever have to become a VSCoder (I pray not), I still may have to. For now, Emacs and vim and reduced mouse use are working.


True, I lived in viper-mode for quite a while.

yes and I'd like to sue whoever named that field for false advertising. when I went to school (Precambrian era - no internet) I thought computer science would be great because I wanted to learn how to program. I dropped it after the 2nd year when I realized it was more about calculus than programming. (and I sucked at calculus. well, the teachers who were supposed to teach me about calculus sucked, but the end result was the same.)


It is a misnomer because it's not really about computers, nor is it science (although machine learning has always been much more scientific IMO). But it is about programming. It's just from first principles. It's like learning to build furniture: you first have to learn about wood. Sure, most people will just put something together from IKEA, and that might be satisfying. But they don't really know how to build furniture.


I've been telling everyone who will listen for the last few months that this is the inevitable end point of software development.


What do you think comes next instead?


Mostly hunger if people don't do the nasty but righteous things that need to be done to prevent us from being trapped into the system that is being built because obviously the world's power centers could easily see this coming years ago and are building the oppression systems needed to deal with the hungry masses that will ensue from mass un-employment in the no longer majority rural (since 2008) populations, which could be placated / subdued with the FIAT system for decades but this whole AI thing will be a very heavy stress test on the system

You might not see these systems being built in less developed countries because they are already used to just plainly shoot the hungry masses whenever they revolted. E.g. the whole banana thing


Have you ever done any mindfulness meditation? I hit on a similar idea while meditating. My analogy is the brain is like the full spectrum of radio frequencies, but there's a "main station" that is "I". From time to time you lose that signal and tune into something else. And just because you're not listening to it, it doesn't mean the other stations aren't still broadcasting.

I have no idea if there's a biological origin for any of this, but it definitely fits with my experience of meditation and awareness training.


When you turn your thoughts inward you're depending more heavily on the Default Mode Network. I'm not well versed in it, but I believe conditions like anxiety and ADHD are partially caused by "too much" activity from this feature of the brain. With meditation you learn to adjust how much activity is occurring here by (not?) focusing on it.


There are myriad 3rd party camera apps that will give you RAWs straight off the sensor. Apple also has its "ProRAW" format which is a nice middle ground.


It couldn't hurt. I don't have problems like that.

mdutil -E -a

That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.

Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.


Thank you so much! I rebuilt the index and it's much better. And good to know about command-2 option; that's helpful. Thank you again!


That's a bizarre analogy. If you're actually committed to learning (vs having the LLM spit out code you don't read), using an LLM as a teacher is more like working out using weight machines vs dumbbells. Just two different methods of arriving at the same destination, with different pros and cons.


I love it! I write my own services for it all the time. You can assign global hotkeys to them as well which makes it crazy convenient to be able to select text, a file, etc and invoke some script you wrote on them.



Before I dive into the paper: the claim was that some effect was generally accepted, not that a study was performed on it and that it drew a particular conclusion. Is this actually going to establish the former or are we just assuming that the existence of a study implies general acceptance of its conclusion?


an analogy is like a garden shed: you try to eat it, it'll get stuck in your throat.

(with apologies to Mike from The Young Ones)


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