Comment by alexkehayias
2 days ago
Having used emacs for many years, OP's description of "doing things wrong" is exactly the way I use emacs.
I seldom care about the inner workings of emacs and will do the absolute minimum to get it to work the way I want and then move on. I'm reminded over and over again that Emacs patinas really nicely with poorly written elisp in an init file over time.
Case in point, I found that org-export is super slow. After profiling it, I found the slow function, copied it, removed the slow part, and advice-add it right back in there[0]. Might this break some other deeply intertwined behavior someplace else? Probably. Does it matter if I'm the only one using it? Nope.
[0]https://github.com/alexkehayias/emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#...
I've got a handful of little personal optimizations like this, too, they're great
> Does it matter if I'm the only one using it?
Yes, you yourself can also suffer from that breakage, and worst of all, might no even notice it right away, so have a period of silent issues
That’s directly true of all FOSS. Any time you fork something, you have to keep adapting to changes in upstream.
This isn't about adapting to future changes, but noticing breakage in the current system.
But also, even in FOSS there can be projects that value stability and isolation, so if you fix some plugin that misbehaves you don't need to adapt because the underlying editor APIs that plugin relied on are stable and also isolated in a way where your changes can't break other users
Eh, Emacs isn't really a system where broken behaviour goes unnoticed. It either works as you expect or something isn't working correctly.
There is no magical system that can ensure no bug goes unnoticed
> or something isn't working correctly.
the issue isn't whether a bug exists, it's whether/when you notice this
2 replies →