I used to have a chief engineer on my team whom I loved dearly, because when I’d be in the throes of my worst managerial contortions, he’d quietly ask, “Mike, what problem are you trying to solve?” He was very good at winding things back and resetting.
At the beginning of our relationship I would feel attacked, because it’s so easy to get so far out to sea that you lose sight of that initial thing that started the process of piling up fixes and solutions and almost feel like you didn’t even know what problem you were trying to solve, you just sort of got caught up in all that change-agent energy and felt like doing something.
So, re: fiddling around with micro to make it behave more like Emacs, the real problem I was trying to solve was how to get in and out of an editor quickly without dealing with a lot of infrastructure and assumptions.
So I moved my Doom Emacs config out of the way and made a very small one.
I know, I know. We’re in Battlestar Galactica territory. This has happened before, it will happen again: Then the layering on begins and soon we have a teetering edifice of bespoke config that becomes harder and harder to manage so we cry out for help to one of the frameworks to save us from ourselves.
I think the interesting thing about the past several days of iterating on cielagonotes is that once I had it into a useful state and was not only iterating on it but using it to jot things down, I felt sort of relieved. And once I found that fzf plugin, I felt even more relieved, because just typing nbf into a shell prompt and getting to what I wanted to get to felt like a reconnection with the problem I was trying to solve. I like some of the stuff I’ve added into cn, but that plugin solves the vast majority of the problem.
And it’s not that I don’t want an Emacs-class editor in the mix somewhere. As I was writing down some stuff I’d learned yesterday I found myself missing stuff you wouldn’t think twice about in an Emacs-class editor, but that isn’t really stuff you need massive infrastructure to achieve. Like inserting another file into the current buffer.
So, here we go again.