I’m still on i3 as it’s been convenient, but this:

this has all become very specialized over the past decade

resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it’s persistent across installations.

One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3’s config:

bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause

But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I’m in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#

CURRENT_WINDOW=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)

# convoluted command to find the intersection of two searches
ZOOM_WINDOW=$(comm -12 \
  <(xdotool search --name  'Meeting' | sort) \
  <(xdotool search --class 'zoom'    | sort))

if [[ -n "$ZOOM_WINDOW" ]]; then
    # if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM_WINDOW}
    xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT_WINDOW}
else
    # otherwise do play/pause
    playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi

and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.

[EDIT: Updated script as Zoom updated its window identities]

Yeah. Heaviest awk I’ve ever done is extracting a value to a variable from a line with one pattern and using it to populate output from later lines matching another pattern.

Great, cause we haven’t been burning enough energy jetting around the globe up to now. Glad they found a way to burn a whole lot more.

I’m not surprised Emacs users would be seeking them out

They aren’t. Someone did it, probably more than one person, but if you look hard enough you can find people who do all sorts of weird stuff. It’s not an “Emacs thing” at all.

This and the joke itself really make me wonder about bizarre Emacs (and Emacs users) that exists in people’s heads.

I see you use capital letters in your post, so you presumably used a modifier key (shift) - unless you do modal caps with CapsLock all the time. I don’t know why people find that normal and easy, but as soon as it’s Ctrl or Alt they get in a tizzy and start talking about RSI.

Funny how over the decades I’ve known many Emacs users, and many RSI sufferers, but the overlap in my Venn diagram of that is exactly one person.

Must have been the 323, before they rebranded to 3 in the early 2000s. Shame for you it was broken, they were good drivers’ cars in a modest way

It’s obviously trivial energy waste in the big picture, but it’s 100% waste if you don’t need it. Like turning on lights in empty rooms.

wasting energy to somehow stick it to the man?

Exhibit 56845 why humanity is fucking doomed.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807606899647.html is a not carefully vetted example

I was just thinking of the likes of what you get for searching for esp32 audio kit on AliExpress. About us$12. Has microphones, amplifiers, buttons etc.

Esp32 is very suitable but they jumped through a lot of hoops to recreate the ESP audio development boards you can buy for very little money with all of those parts already built in.

Not to mention an emissions decline means we’re still making things worse, but not quite so quickly.

Obviously the path to making things better would have to pass through here, but just as people thinking electric cars are a solution rather than more of the problem, the delusion that this is winning is also part of the problem.

Could you explain what he’s saying about caret (presumably cursor?) positions because I can’t make sense of it.

I naively thought it I may as well take a job using Go, as learning a new language is broadening, and some people like it, so lets find out first hand… I knew it was a questionable choice, looking at how Go adoption tailed off a while ago.

Turns out I hate Go. Sure it’s better than C but that’s a very low bar, and C was never a good alternative choice for the use cases I’m encountering. I’m probably suffering from a codebase of bad Go, but holy shit it’s painful. So much silent propagation of errors up the stack so you never know where the origin of the error was. So very much boilerplate to expand simple activities into long unreadable functions. Various Go problems I’ve hit can be ameliorated if you “don’t do it like that”, but in the real world people “do it like that” all the time.

I’m really starting to feel like there are a lot of people in the company I’ve joined who like to keep their world obtuse and convoluted for job security.

floppy drive, hard drive, sechs drive — we got building blocks. Crowd sourcing a joke could work.

Avoid categories where a lot of items have fake specs (storage devices, LED bulbs, anything that claims a runtime on a Li-Ion battery)

I’d say be aware rather than avoid. E.g I bought a $10 camping lantern that claimed 2.5 times its true capacity, but it still runs for hours and is a great, well designed, if flimsy, product for the price.

The sort option by “orders” is good for this. Far from infallible but still useful.

Excellent, the punchline is sorted, now we just need the rest of the joke.

That’s a much broader term.

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Although I came from vi (pre-vim and pre-evil) and still have the muscle memory, I don’t and haven’t used it myself.

I hear it described as a “nearly complete” and “very comprehensive”. There is definitely a solid community of people using and enjoying it, but on the other hand there are always some reports of getting tired of having to work through, and sometimes extend, an additional interface layer, so in the long run being happier to just adopt the default bindings.

I know there are a few areas where trying to follow common vim workflows doesn’t work as well. Historically the performance of line number display been weak in Emacs, though I believe it’s recently much improved. A lot of people seem to make heavy and constant use of it in vim but conversely for me (and I think it’s more common in Emacs) it’s only an occasional, transient need when some external log or error quotes a line number, so I have them only displayed when I hit the go-to-line binding.

Overall, I think the most frustrating issues people have trying to adopt Emacs from vim are due to trying to impose their specific familiar vim workflows. The most obvious example is people concerned with startup time, but for more typical Emacs workflows it’s a non-issue. Users typically stay in Emacs rather than jumping in and out of it from a terminal (and if you really want that workflow, you run one instance as a daemon and pop up a new client to it instantly). My Emacs instance’s uptime usually matches my computer’s uptime.

The draw of Emacs is not about it only being an editor so much as a comprehensive and programmable text environment. It is a lisp-based text-processing engine that can run numerous applications, the primary being an editor (the default, or evil, or others…) but also countless other applications like file managers, VC clients, subprocess management and many others. It 95% replaces the terminal for me, and many other tools. So it’s the environment through which you view and manipulate all things text that is very accessible to modify and extend to fit your needs. Hence the joke about it being an OS is pretty apt, though to believe it needs a good editor implies vim isn’t a good editor ;).