éric 🚲 🇪🇺 :emacs: (@ericsfraga.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy)

Fraga: Elevator Pitch As you can probably tell, I’ve become obsessed with Emacs Elevator Pitch posts. I find them particularly instructive because they require the writer to boil down what they like about Emacs to its essence. The latest offering is from Eric Fraga, who I occasionally mention on Irreal. Fraga begins with the pitch proper. The strength of Emacs, he says, boils down to three of its essential properties: Discoverbility Emacs’ builtin help system means that you can always discover what every command, function, and even keystroke does. That help even includes links directly to the source code. Stability Ways of working and code you wrote years ago is likely to still work today. Malleability This, according to Fraga, is the most important aspect of Emacs. Rather than having to adapt to Emacs’ way of doing things, you adapt Emacs to do things your way. This can be as simple as changing a binding for a command or as complex as modifying or replacing one of Emacs’ builtin functions. Fraga continues his post by illustrating that last point. He uses Gnus to read his Mastodon toots via the RSS feed. The problem is that Gnus doesn’t provide very helpful information about a toot so it’s hard to know if it’s worthwhile reading it or not. Fraga solved this problem by writing his own function to display the information for each toot and replaced the Gnus function with it. Take a look at his post to see the difference. Fraga accomplished this by making basically trivial changes to the existing function and using it in place of the original one. Fraga provides the code so you can see how easy it really was. This is a nice post because it lays out the basic pitch and then illustrates its main point with an actual example. Take a look. https://irreal.org/blog/?p=13228