[roenxi]

Well... one of the things groups do to bond is they develop memes and in-jokes that are objectively nothing and exist only to show who is in- and out- of the group. One of the signs people are doing that is one word responses like "blimpy". That sort of activity is purposefully low-content because it is supposed to signal group membership and nothing more. Which is what I think this is. That turns up in every group although it can be a bit subtle at times.

But this is a bit weird because this isn't what Emacs users have traditionally bonded over. The traditional stuff is things like https://xkcd.com/378/ leaning on "Emacs does everything and has long key combinations". This is more saying the package manager is bad or something? Which isn't a traditional joke. So either this is a new group of Emacs users I'm not familiar with or there is a good joke here that I've missed.

And I optimistically asked for an explanation of the joke in case it is the latter. Based on the comments in response I think this is a wave of Emacs users I'm not familiar with doing group bonding. Which, fair enough. They do their thing. Although even then the number of people involved seems high and it'd be interesting to know where they are coming from.

[dwb]

The joke is that it's overly complicated to do a simple thing in Emacs, and you have to rely on blindly running shakily-trustworthy third-party code to do that thing for you. (I like Emacs very much, I use it every day, but there is a kernel of truth to this and I laughed.)

[roenxi]

Definitely a younger crowd. Back in my day if you blindly copied code without reading the documentation thoroughly there is no way that Emacs would be doing anything remotely useful. That was the sort of thing Emacs was mocked for, in fact - you really needed to get in amongst Elisp to customise it and nobody goes out of their way to learn Elisp.

Being able to blindly copy use-package statements has been one of the best parts of the Emacs modernisation effort.

[dwb]

Oh for sure, I agree, and I've blindly imported reams of elisp dependencies myself!

[umanwizard]

What’s a (real) example of a simple thing that’s hard to do in emacs?

[dwb]

I mean I think if you compare to, say, VSCode, writing any amount of [Emacs] Lisp to customise anything at all is "hard". I like it! It means I can customise more or less whatever I like, but it's a different universe.

[globular-toast]

I mean, surely such a thing is harder in VS Code considering you can't really do it.

[Scarblac]

It's also allowed to think up new jokes.

[actionfromafar]

I use Emacs casually, but oh dear it can get absurdly complicated for very little payoff. Yak shaving if there ever was. This blimpy plugin/module points it out in a deadpan way. It also reflects on a lot of tech in general. Who hasn’t spent a lot of time messing about with a system for no apparent benefit?

It has little twists too like indirectly bringing vi into it by supporting evil mode, furthering the futility of adding options and configurability to ostensibly “simplify” something. The video points out so many absurdities of IT life through the lens of an editor and its ecosystem.