[Discuss] On Rebooting (was Re: ssh issue)

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 6/21/24 08:45, Daniel M Gessel wrote:
> To make this work for me, I've added what I call "workspaces" to 
> Emacs, which are just Emacs window configurations loaded from files. I 
> have an ever growing startup set (which I even reload fairly 
> frequently to get back to a known work environment).
I hate emacs, but my fingers know it, so we have reached an understanding.

I appreciate that emacs is so good about recovering sessions??because 
sometimes things *do* crash.

One of the nice things about emacs is it is available so widely, I can 
use it on some slow ssh to a remote box and I can use it locally with 
actual drop-down menus. It can even be the same emacs: start in a 
terminal, then make-frame-on-display, over ssh, even. Start it up inside 
screen and I can even reconnect later. (But have to have emacs-lucid 
installed, else losing the X window crashes emacs.)

For the longest time I held off customizing emacs, I don't want to teach 
my fingers stuff that then isn't present in whatever-login. Well, these 
days for programming IDEs are kinda necessary, and the ones I have tried 
are mostly all terrible. Having menus isn't the same as having designed 
the UI.

So recently I have been turning emacs into my IDE. I have things working 
pretty well for Rust, recently I added C. If I find myself doing Python 
again I suppose I'll try to do it for Python, too. Fun to have the same 
program, editing both Rust and C at the same time, knowing both 
languages. I don't *do* both at the same time, but I sometimes have 
buffers from each language open at the same time.


> When I was an undergrad, Emacs was considered huge, a burden to the 
> multi-user Sun workstations in the computer lab. 

I was an early Macintosh fan (ah, the good old days?things have gone 
done hill: MS did a bad job copying the Mac, kids grew up on MS, then 
got jobs at Apple), and once upon a time I wanted multiple windows, so I 
fired up multiple copies of emacs! I killed the Sun work station.

The standard at that company was emacs on 80x25 serial port video 
terminals, it seemed the main Suns there handled that well.


> Today, compared to a web browser, Emacs is tight and efficient!

Oh, my god, yes. My emacs gets big when I have bash running in a buffer 
for a long time, but nothing compared to a web browser doing almost nothing.


-kb