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Confessions of a textual loser

Confession

I have tried to write my own text editor. I succeeded, yet failed.

Lame

I mean really… who the hell, in this modern day and age, writes their own text editor?¹ Additionally, when said text editor is written, who the hell writes one with separate interaction modes? Long story short: my editor was a lame clone of the EDT editor² in vogue… well, never.

Why?

I would like to take this moment to write off my sinful ways to youthful numbskullery. That is, there was a time when I thought that I shat programmatic gold and anything written by hacker A could be improved upon by myself. Why the hell should I use Pico? I could do better than that! Nano? Gafaw! Emacs? Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping! LOL! What a human buttwipe I was.

The Results

I suppose it was a nice learning process to write my own editor and all of that noise³, but fruit of my labor has left me wanting… yearning⁴. That is, not only do I have a pile of C code that even Notepad scoffs at, but I have not taken it on myself to actually learn an editor that would happily urinate all over my sad effort. My life would have been better served had I ignored my inner dickweed and simply learned what the heck a Meta-key was.

My continual lameousity

I have since learned my lesson, scraped my horrible source code⁵, and attempted to pick up Emacs. There is one giant problem however; I am so corrupt with the ways of a thousand editors, that Emacs confuses the piss out of me. I get along alright I guess, but I have experienced that awe that most Emacs n00bs feel whenever they sit down with a true master. That is, my boss and I sat down recently to hack through some source and I was astonished to see the way in which he utterly tore through Emacs with the intensity of a 1000 ninjas on fire — I mean the guy has bucky bits coursing through his veins. I felt like crying.⁶ Think of it this way: he was fluently speaking Emacs, while I only know how to say “where is the toilet” and “I are American”. Perhaps this proficiency comes in time, but damn!

Where to go from here

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I’m actually not that old, but I am certainly mangy. Perhaps there is hope for me yet. However, I have to be much more systematic about my Emacs education:

Live in Emacs

There is a slight problem here. That is, I do 98% of my work on OSX boxen and my Emacs of choice is the lickable Aquamacs. The problem here is that it is too easy to fall into the old mousey habits⁷ this way. Therefore, it might serve to use the command line Emacs instead, or perhaps burn myself with cigarettes every time I hit Apple-S instead of Cx-Cs. Need a shell? Mx shell. Need a browser? W3.

Read about Emacs

My biggest problem with Emacs is that I have very little idea what it’s capable of. In the months that I have dabbled it appears that it can do anything. That knowledge is not extremely helpful however as I have some practical goals that need to be addressed (e.g. IDE-ness, notetaking, etc…). I have to really sit down and do some research these issues.

Extend Emacs

I had written a stupid little minor mode for my hobby language Broccoli and have found the available references on creating minor/major modes in Emacs much akin to drinking flaming Bacardi 151⁸… from a firehose. To a n00b, everyone seems like an expert.

Stop complaining

’nuff said.

-m