I too use iTerm's profiles to change background colors, fonts etc. to indicate where I am.

Reduces number of fat fingering disasters.

>I would really like it if Magit was a standalone program, rather than an Emacs package, so that I could just switch to a more reasonable editor.

Magit (for me) has so much value _because_ it is part of Emacs , where I edit all my code.

> Magit (for me) has so much value _because_ it is part of Emacs , where I edit all my code.

Same. I'll never ever understand people saying "I use Emacs but only because of org-mode" or "I use Emacs but only because of Magit".

I use for Emacs for many things, hence org-mode and Magit have a lot of value to me. But they're not that amazing in themselves as to put up with Emacs only for one of these two.

Emacs is quite something: I don't think it's reasonable to use if only for either org-mode or Magit. You risk feeling bitter about it like GP.

I’m one of those “I use Emacs but only because of org-mode” people. I’m an associate professor, so I write a lot: research notes, lecture notes, course exercises, academic papers, task management, etc. Org lets me handle all that in an intuitive, plaintext-backed, keyboard-driven way. I haven’t been able to find something equivalent outside of Emacs, and believe me I’ve tried; the closest was Logseq but it doesn’t have the same editor functionality underneath, and orgmode.nvim + org-roam.nvim but there’s just too much missing still (for example, an equivalent to org-cdlatex-mode and a better table mode) and some features are blocked by issues in Vim and NeoVim themselves (e.g. the long-standing unresolved bug when combining “conceal” with soft-wrapped lines, which makes link hiding unusable). So I use Emacs, because this is a huge part of my workday and its best in Emacs.

But I’m really more a Vim guy. I’ve used it since the mid-2000s, still regularly use it, and all the keybindings and workflows just make sense to me. I even like vim9script as a language (I prefer it over Lua, but I do for sure like Elisp better). If it wasn’t for Org-mode I’d still be using Vim full-time.

don't tell this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421245

It boggles my mind what could have been if he had lived to a ripe old age.

Herbert was very clever in the sense that his made up words were close to real words. They were easily guessable.

Not sure if this is sarcasm or trolling.

If trolling, it is not very subtle. :-)

Compared to other languages, 'lisp syntax' is very minimal. It is just a prefix notation with parenthesis for enclosing expressions, the first item usually being a function. There are only a handful of special forms to learn, which deviate from this.

The real power of lisp IMHO lies in:

  - Repl driven, dynamic development. This is hard to explain. Its like chocolate. You have to try it. You either love it or hate it.

  - Macros. This is again enabled by the 'lisp syntax. Actually lack of it...'. 

Here is an example I recently ran into when checking out Hy

https://github.com/hylang/hy/discussions/2608#discussioncomm...

This shows how much you can abstract, hide the noise without any runtime penalties..

This is what I believe as well. Also throw in some Functional Programming (isolating pure functions and side-effecting functions) for extra benefits.

Both excellent points, and I would add a recommendation for high level organization: to consider the data then the process. If you can draw a graph where every data structure is only connected to a process, and vice versa, and that processes may take multiple inputs but only produce a single output type, it will make holding the entire system in your head a lot easier, even for very scaled-up systems.

Bonus points if you can distinguish between essential state and circumstantial state.

How does the slack integration work? Do we need anything on the Slack side?

Nothing needed on the Slack side. Login with your Slack credentials through the OAUTH flow, grant access to your workspace and it'll start crawling. Drop me a mail on adityaATwasudeo.com or discord (https://discord.com/invite/RbYYU6mU) in case you run into any problems.

In the 90's there was 'Google Desktop' which can do such things.

Still miss it.

2000s, but yes, I miss having that. Though Raycast is a million years ahead of this product, and allows you to do a search that searches gmail on web etc, or if you email client supports apple script that can do there as well, and of course lots of chatgpt integrations and gemini for searching outlook, gmail etc.

Same here!

Somehow my brain doesn't work like that (short aliases).

I usually use long form commands and parameters. I use ZShell history + FZF to get at commands with minimal keystrokes.

Don't really have to remember anything. Some vague snippets will narrow it down really fast.