> Hell yeah, you should. I just don't understand how the heck people would claim to be using Emacs for decades and still not knowing how to use the built-in profiler, edebug, apropos, macro expansion, advising system, indirect buffers, etc.
Yes I'm familiar with apropos, macros/extensions, advising, indirect buffers, and a lot of stuff. I've just never debugged elisp mostly because I haven't had a hard time just iterating on elisp to make it work and have never bothered debugging packages I've installed. I've put off learning edebug because for the most part I've used the "Lisp debugging" part of my brain on SBCL and Common Lisp. It's just one of those "do I really need to shave this yak?" kind of things and until now it's been no.
Sounds like edebug is the next elisp frontier for me, thanks.
(Btw your comment is a bit condescending sounding but I actually love reading your emacs comments on HN because your enthusiasm for emacs is great.)
> You have no idea how liberating the feeling is when you can pinpoint a problem, launch a gptel buffer and then ask Emacs to write some elisp for a hook or an advising function, you can even try the snippet in-place, without ever moving it anywhere.
Yes absolutely this though. I've been having a lot of fun with gptel and in general I have all sorts of fun bindings that do exactly what I want to do. There's a reason I don't want to give up emacs and it's this ability to write elisp and wrangle text.
> When something breaks (usually due to upstream changes), I don't even get annoyed. Identifying a problem and finding a workaround doesn't take too long - typically minutes - and it doesn't even happen very often.
I'll be honest, my interest in dealing with this kind of thing greatly varies based on what's going on in my life at the time. Sometimes I'll be locked in and go on a deep binge to optimize my environments. Other times I find it very painful. Maintaining an emacs config has always been quite annoying but I put up with it because the power and customizability of the whole thing is unparalleled.
(The fact that an editor like Cursor is a proprietary fork of an open codebase that restricts you to the team's vision is, uh, honestly pretty silly to me. Like why? I can write code can't I? Guess that means I need to maintain configuration but I'd rather do that than use Cursor any day.)
> Maintaining an emacs config has always been quite annoying
I dunno, I feel it stopped being like that for me long ago. Perhaps I'm just a "tinkerer" and maybe I never even minded improving my setup. But like I said, at some point, my workflow has become purely "goal-oriented" - whenever I see a problem, I either:
- Make a todo list item and forget about it until next time
- Or start writing some Elisp (if the problem is simple enough)
Let me share some practical examples of each.
One day I got annoyed that it was taking me more than a minute to search for my own comment on HN, around some interesting conversations. I made a todo list item. Then at some point I wrote a function, then later I published a package. I can't even tell you how effing nice it feels now - takes me seconds to find relevant stuff.
The other day I was reading a pdf, while taking notes. pdf-tools has this nice feature called pdf-view-themed-minor-mode - it adjusts the colors of the document to the colors of your theme, nicely blending the pdf into your editor. I use it all the time. I also use a package called circadian.el - using Emacs' built-in solar calendar, it adjusts the color theme based on the time of day. So, my color theme changes automatically, but it doesn't get automatically reflected in pdf documents I previously had opened. Not a biggie, I still can do it manually, yet it took me a few minutes to concoct an advising function that runs after (load-theme) and sets the colors in every pdf. Of course, why do something manually that the computer is supposed to figure out without your assistance?
Now, neither pdf-tools maintainers, nor the author of circadian.el know about my customizations. If any of them make some changes that break my beautiful zen fidgets, why would I even get mad about it? I'll try to fix it, and if it takes me longer than three minutes, I'll just remove it altogether and go back to toggling it manually - not a biggie, never was.
That has become my philosophy that probably extends beyond Emacs - my terminal, my browser, my WM, etc. The world is never meant to be perfect for everyone. But you can make it perfect just for you. I learned that it's better to apply ideas that enable you to build your perfect world, than someone else's perception of what _your_ ideal world should be. That's why for an individual programmer, choosing FOSS tools almost always yields better results in the long run. In a team setting that may be a bit difficult, but if you get inventive enough, you can always find workarounds. This is what Emacs taught me that no other tool ever did - the instinct to never settle for the status quo. Whenever something bothers me, I either discover workarounds on the spot or make it a todo item.
edebug is great! It was way ahead of its time.