Hacker News: JackedLisp

New comment by JackedLisp in "Ditching Obsidian and building my own"

JackedLisp — Wed, 21 May 2025 04:43:46 +0000

Very impressed by Rainer König's Org-Mode tutorial series on YouTube. He manages to keep most episodes under 15min. As you progress the knowledge keeps building slowly. Highly effective. His paid courses are likely even better. During the 1st series He only touched init.el a few times. Opting instead for using Customize functionality. He used the default theme, if you can all it that. Toolbar on and menu bar and he used them during the sessions.

System Crafters tends to mostly do live streams for more a couple of hours. You learn a lot watching them. But many people don't have the patience for that.

New comment by JackedLisp in "Ditching Obsidian and building my own"

JackedLisp — Wed, 21 May 2025 04:29:41 +0000

We also should be targeting non-developers such as writers and researchers and students. I know some people who use Emacs to manage their Dungeons & Dragons games. Both as a dungeon master and as a player. Heck I use org to take notes while I am playing a complex video game.

We should espouse the wonders of Plain Text and how you'll never be locked into a proprietary file format. You can use it with Git for revision history and tracking changes. The power of Elisp enables non-developers.

We need to start a sort of grassroots marketing campaign to spread the word. In a nice way. i.e. don't bash the competition. Just show what Emacs can do in short highly focused videos. Emacs can speak for itself.

New comment by JackedLisp in "Ditching Obsidian and building my own"

JackedLisp — Wed, 21 May 2025 04:20:37 +0000

All excellent and true points. However, it is my personal opinion that first impressions matter. When a newbie installs Gnu Emacs the default theme and overall appearance of the GUI is shockingly dated and the defaults are bizarre compared to 'modern' UX. That's what happens when you create software 40 years before there were any UX standards. Heck there was no mouse and no arrow keys on most keyboards at the time. Full screen editing was brand spanking new. The vi editor came after Emacs because UNIX came after Emacs.

Most new young potential Emacs users are students and new developers being raised on VS Code or JetBrains IDEs. Which out of the box appear modern to their young eyes. So when they see vanilla Gnu Emacs the reaction may be, "Okay Boomer, whateva".

I would argue that the reason Spacemacs and Doom resulted in such massive growth of the Emacs user base had less to do with evil-mode and more to do with attractive theming and applying reasonable default settings that match how those modern UX IDE's work. Not to mention the myriad of YouTube videos about them.

I fail to comprehend why the old school graybeards refuse to update the default appearance of Emacs. Of course the out of box experience should be mostly spartan but it could look a whole lot prettier. I would like to see Emacs devs adopt Prot's standard light and dark themes, they need to replace the traditional default theme and be distributed with Emacs. The default theme can hardly be called a theme, it likely predates theming in Emacs.

I don't know anyone who sticks with the out of box appearance of Emacs.

I think we are going to need some curated video demonstrations including slow-motion and key presses being shown. Real world tasks being demonstrated. Including eshell and REPL, etc.

I too have been toying with creating some of these demos. We need to create focused compelling videos that are rather short. Showing off just how great Emacs is overall. Seeing is believing.

So many junior devs never saw Emacs and only maybe they heard something about it but never took a deeper look. It is always some rogue graybeard who shows off in front of junior dev and that dev needs to pick their jaw off the floor. similar occurs with Neovim.