Emacs Carnival
Like many emacs users i can code very very fast. Shortcuts are burned into my muscle memory. It's like a playing a musical instrument, the finger motions are an extension of my thought. Don't ask me what the keyboard commands are, because i don't know! If forced to think about them, i get confused. My fingers simply type them on their own. The same thing would happen if you were to interrupt a musician in the middle of a performance and ask, "What notes are you playing?"
As i am thinking, Emacs bounces between files. My cursor jumps into the middle of lines. It finds strings as i think of them. There is no friction to my expression. Like riding a bicycle, the mechanics of operating it disappear, and your body and mind can roam freely.
i can code quickly because i can express myself quickly. But these not the same things. As quickly as i can produce a work of staggering genius, i can equally dig a hole into the ground. Some might argue, "you're shortening the development loop", or "the sooner you fail the better". Maybe. A better engineer, might, like richard feynman, first think really really hard, then write down the solution. On the other hand, sometimes you need to "play" with your materials. Solutions come by way of experimentation, omelets, and breaking eggs.
As an extensible "operating system", Emacs is infinite. After fifty years of continuous development, there are, of course, tools and environments customized for any programming language. A running lisp interpreter you can hack into at any time. Sub-systems so complete they are software in of themselves: "org mode", "magit", and "evil" (a rival editor).
The cost of all this is complexity. It's not unfair to say that Emacs has a vertical learning curve, and even experienced users will struggle to get some features working. However, for those willing to persevere, the reward is unmatched power of expression.
At the moment, the industry is trying to make sense of LLMs. They code very fast. But writing code and expressing yourself are not the same. Using LLMs, i can produce code. it's painfully slow. The cursor does not fly between buffers. i am not cutting and yanking by thought alone. Ironically, it's not fast enough! You prompt. You wait. It's unspoken, but there's actually something backward happening: ideas are presented to you, which, then must be evaluated post-hoc. That's the opposite of advancing your own thought.
To mix metaphors, if a computer is "a bicycle for the mind", then it should accelerate and give flight to your ideas. What Emacs gives you is a way to express yourself in endlessly customizable ways. Programming with Emacs is only the beginning.
