Fossil files: my .Emacs
Last week I wrote about the cargo cult in a much broader context, so this week I'm going to be truthful. The file that got me thinking on the subject was the worst case scenario you've probably ever seen: I have a .emacs file that's been going around in circles that I haven't really understood since I copied it from someone else - probably Ben Scarlet whose name is in there - in the computer lab in 1994! Yes, my .emacs file is almost 30, and I still don't really understand it, not exactly.
Now, in my defense, I switched to vim as my primary editor a few years ago, but that file was used on Pentiums running pre-1.0 versions of Linux, on IBM RS machines /6000 in the aforementioned computer lab, and on a series of laptops and desktops I've owned over the years. It got me through undergraduate, graduate school, and a decade of work. It has served me well. And if I ran emacs now, it would still be there.
For those of you who don't use emacs, the .emacs file is a configuration file. It tells how to interpret different files based on their extensions, defines some special key combinations, and, perhaps most importantly, defines how code syntax highlighting works. It's basically all the idiosyncratic emacs stuff, and it's what makes my emacs mine. But I don't understand.
Why? Because it's written in LISP, for GNU's sake, and because it references all sorts of cryptic internal variables that emacs uses under the hood. I'm definitely not saying that I haven't tweaked some colors or fixed something here or there, but the scope is still limited to what I can do, without having to really learn LISP.
This ancient lime fossil testifies to two things. The emacs code base has been stable enough that it still works after all this time, but also emacs is so complicated and written in a rather obscure language that I never took the time to really understand it - the barriers are too high and the reward for effort too low. I have no doubt that I could figure it out for real, but I just didn't.
So I just dragged this file from computer to computer, without understanding it and without particularly wanting it. Except now that I'm writing this. Shit.
Featured image: "A dusty old book" by Marco Verch Professional.
Last week I wrote about the cargo cult in a much broader context, so this week I'm going to be truthful. The file that got me thinking on the subject was the worst case scenario you've probably ever seen: I have a .emacs file that's been going around in circles that I haven't really understood since I copied it from someone else - probably Ben Scarlet whose name is in there - in the computer lab in 1994! Yes, my .emacs file is almost 30, and I still don't really understand it, not exactly.
Now, in my defense, I switched to vim as my primary editor a few years ago, but that file was used on Pentiums running pre-1.0 versions of Linux, on IBM RS machines /6000 in the aforementioned computer lab, and on a series of laptops and desktops I've owned over the years. It got me through undergraduate, graduate school, and a decade of work. It has served me well. And if I ran emacs now, it would still be there.
For those of you who don't use emacs, the .emacs file is a configuration file. It tells how to interpret different files based on their extensions, defines some special key combinations, and, perhaps most importantly, defines how code syntax highlighting works. It's basically all the idiosyncratic emacs stuff, and it's what makes my emacs mine. But I don't understand.
Why? Because it's written in LISP, for GNU's sake, and because it references all sorts of cryptic internal variables that emacs uses under the hood. I'm definitely not saying that I haven't tweaked some colors or fixed something here or there, but the scope is still limited to what I can do, without having to really learn LISP.
This ancient lime fossil testifies to two things. The emacs code base has been stable enough that it still works after all this time, but also emacs is so complicated and written in a rather obscure language that I never took the time to really understand it - the barriers are too high and the reward for effort too low. I have no doubt that I could figure it out for real, but I just didn't.
So I just dragged this file from computer to computer, without understanding it and without particularly wanting it. Except now that I'm writing this. Shit.
Featured image: "A dusty old book" by Marco Verch Professional.
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