a million monkeys typing

The Great Emacs Experiment, Part 1

Posted October 8th, 2004 at 08:06am

Back just before summer rolled into Newfoundland, I embarked on a sort of technological pilgrimage. I could find no more joy in computers, and I was convinced that my technical skills were fading in the face of user-friendliness and the long-standing strain of boredom that occurs when nothing excites the imagination. I had to return to my roots, to the blinking cursor and the white letters on black that inspired a million new ways for me to dive into the Sargasso Sea of technology and surface with exciting finds. I had to leave the pretty windows and lickable interfaces far behind, and concentrate of the core truths.

I decided to spend two weeks living within Emacs, the age-old –but still very much alive– editor-cum-everything relic of an ancient age.

I documented my experience, and will post entries as I transcribe my notes and write up my thoughts and pointers. Here is the first entry….

A few months ago, I noticed that I had become far too complacent in my use of technology.

Looking back at how my technical skills developed, I realised that almost everything I’d learned was due to an obsessive-compulsive tendancy of mine: I am a tinkerer, in the truest sense of the world. I love to break things apart, put things together, create new things from various parts, make things do what they weren’t originally supposed to do. Even when I was a child, I would create wild “inventions” that would send a ping-pong ball down chutes, fly across the room with catapults, careen through funnels, and be stamped with silly faces once they reached their destination; an egg cup attached to a motor in my Mechano set that would send it back for another round. And this contraption would be be spread out across my entire room in a rickety series of tubes, Legos, bamboo sticks, rubber bands, electrical tape, blocks of wood, nylon string, and unknown stuff culled from junk drawers.

When I was twelve, I decided to learn how to program BASIC, even though I had no access to a computer. Eventually, through helping a science teacher clean up after school, I gained permission to the school’s fledgeling computer lab: eight Commodore PETs jammed into a tiny, ill-ventilated room. To assist in my fledgeling attempts to write poetry, I decided to code a screen-based editor. Never mind that the 4K memory meant I could only have space for 12-line poems: I was hooked. I dropped all interest in things mechanical, and devoted my tinkering efforts to all things silicon.

Most modern computers force you to tinker in the urgent efforts to fix things, often extremely frustrating things, sometimes very much in vain. Ask any poor Windows tech, who has to somehow resurrect Windows 98 long enough to recover hard drive data, or clean the virii or spyware out of the guts of a system that won’t even allow you to call up a command prompt without crashing. This is not fun tinkering.

Granted, modern Macs, with the Mac OS X (a UNIX-based system), are actually fun to use. When you get tired of your Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, you can jump into an honest-to-goodness terminal and write bash scripts using (gasp!) the venerable vi. And Linux, FreeBSD and the other Open Source operating systems provide the ability to tweak the system endlessly, until you get exactly the machine you want. But these operating systems also provide flashy and modern user interfaces, with plenty of buttons, menus, widgets and sprockets to assist you in almost every task. And, through using these, my technical skills went soft….

What was needed was a return to technical roots. To use a system that would challenge me without a GUI to simplify matters. To use an interface that harkens back to an age where men were real men, women were real women, and programmers could, in a pinch, program in assembly using punch cards or by flipping vast arrays of toggle switches. It would have to be a system that could still work well in the modern world, allow unfettered extensibility, have a built-in programming language, and provide functions to do everything from web browsing to email, from net-based chat to writing code, from organising my oft-chaotic life to supporting my feeble literary efforts.

In short, I needed Emacs.

Continued in part 2…