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The Editor of a Lifetime

thoughtbot0 HN recommenders · 2014–2020
132K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2014-08-20

Perry Metzger, an Emacs user since 1983, gives a talk on why he has used one editor for decades. It mixes history, philosophy and speculation about Emacs's future, and teaches some Emacs fundamentals.

Mentioned in Emacs threads as a talk on long-term editor commitment and on Emacs's blocking limitations.

Testing, debugging & developer toolsHistory of computing

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3 comments from Hacker News

@pmoriarty2014 · in “Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor”

Perry Metzger talks a bit about the problems of emacs blocking starting at the 34'39" mark in his "The Editor of a Lifetime" talk[1] for the NYC Emacs Meetup. Not that his points are new, but this is just one of the first things that sprang to mind when I heard your "it works fine" claim. Here are some excerpts: "Threading. This has been an irritant for me for years. Emacs blocks all windows when you're doing computation in any window. It's an operating system, but not enough of an operating system. I myself will run three instances of Emacs to get around this. I'm slurping in my email and I can't do something at the same time because it's off in space slurping in my email. It's going off and doing some extended computation and I can't go in another window and do anything else at the same time. ... If it's doing extended computation and a lot of file IO and talking to the network, it blocks you. There's not more than one thread there." There's also this[2] discussion of lack of threading in Emacs on the Emacs Wiki. [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK]

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@elviejo2019 · in “Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository”

"Will... any other system be around in 30 years?" Yes, Emacs. "The editor of a lifetime" [VIDEO]

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@phaer2020 · in “Toward a “modern” Emacs”

> That's great and all, but people who are learning emacs for the first time don't know or care that it's one of the most successful text editors or that it's been around for 40 years. They care about being able to write code effectively. I started using Emacs ~2008 and it's longevity has been a major factor in my decision, as I thought it would likely be usable for the next 30 years as well and help me to avoid changing environments every few years with each new hype. Later I found a talk which expresses the same sentiment in it's title: "The Editor of a Lifetime" [VIDEO]

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