When I met my husband 10 yrs ago, he was everything I ever wanted. We met on a freenode IRC channel. He was a Gentoo and Linux-from-scratch dual-booter who could install both systems with his eyes closed. We used to have long, romantic conversations well past midnight about tabs vs spaces and open source. Our first fight ever was about MIT vs GPL licensing. On our first date, we shared our tiling manager config files with each other (this was the first time I truly felt love for a man).

However, lately he’s changed into a husk of the man he used to be. He migrated to Linux Mint, because, and I quote, he “just wants to get work done” and he “no longer has time to fiddle with [his] system”. Then, he started using GNOME for the same reason. This was already very suspicious. I mean, if he truly just wanted to start using a full DE, he could have at least picked KDE, right? Even Xfce I’d have been ok with.

Then, the other day, our relationship hit a breaking point. Here I was, working on my 2012 NixOS thinkpad, and hubby calls me over to his office. He said he “wanted to show me something”. I sit down on his chair, and you can imagine my terror as he pulls up vim on his terminal. He had a weird smile on his face, as if something had taken him over. He spent the next few mins “showing off” a variety of vim tricks he’d just learned. I had to turn my face to the side so he wouldn’t see the tears drying on my cheeks. Let me be clear: This was NOT the man I married.

Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but I never imagined my husband would stoop so low as to become a vim peasant. I don’t know what to do. Part me says I should just start divorce proceedings and get it over with, but the other part can’t help but wonder if perhaps my husband is being afflicted by some serious, undiagnosed mental illness.

Please advise reddit, my whole life is in shambles and I don’t know what to do

I thought it was just installing a text editor. "Try Emacs," internet folks said, "it's not just an editor, it's a lifestyle." My wife even encouraged me: "Didn't you always want to improve your programming efficiency?" That was the last time she smiled at me.

I didn't choose simple VSCode or Sublime. No, I chose Emacs, as if deliberately trying to ruin my marriage. The first day, I spent 8 hours configuring my init.el file. My wife brought dinner, and without looking up, I said: "After I finish this key binding, C-x M-c M-butterfly..."

She asked if we could visit her parents over the weekend. I replied: "As soon as I figure out org-mode's scheduling system." That was two weeks ago. She went to her parents' house, while I researched how to control my coffee machine with Emacs, because apparently one editor should be responsible for every aspect of my life.

My wife tried to save our relationship. "Let's go see a movie," she suggested. I answered: "Wait, I'm writing a movie reminder plugin in elisp." She asked: "Do you remember the last time we held hands?" I countered: "OK, let me check my org journal."

Then came that fateful night. I finally achieved my ultimate goal: running an entire operating system inside Emacs. When my wife walked into the study and saw me giggling at a screen full of parentheses, something changed in her eyes. "I married a human, not a pile of brackets."

She left with just a note: "I'm going to find someone who uses Notepad. At least they know when to turn off the computer."

And I just wondered: can this divorce notice be processed with the M-x wife-mode-disable command?

Hello one and all,

I am euphoric to announce that a little project of mine, a revamp of orgmode.org is now live! 🎉
Please check it out and spread the word 😀.

Many thanks to Bastien for being open to this, and the other wonderful denizens of the mailing list who have provided invaluable help and feedback.

It is my hope that this will be able to better represent and serve the project well into the future.

A few little highlights

• Animated demonstrations of features

• A mobile-friendly design

• Embracing opengraph/twitter cards/schema.org for richer sharing and search results

• A stripped-back set of 'core' pages

• A design to give the site a distinct 'identity'

• and (of course) much more! Check it out already 😁

Enjoy!

p.s. You can see the development effort here.

p.p.s. This isn't the end either: I plan on tackling the manual and Worg next 🙂

I am excited and relieved to finally announce the release of Magit version 4.0.

More information can be found on my blog and in the release notes.

Please consider sponsoring my work!

Cheers! Jonas

I've been using Emacs since 1983; it's been my go-to editor the entire time. I've given talks on it, recorded videos, and generally have promoted it forever. I'm not quite ready to abandon it, but I am feeling pretty unhappy about r/emacs. For whatever reason, this subreddit seems to be inhabited by people who delight, when someone asks a reasonable question, in downvoting them and being as unpleasant as they can manage to be. This happened to me just today.

I'm not a newcomer, and I've been programming for decades, and yes, I used google before asking a question here, but sometimes you really do want to know what other people think about something subjective, or there's a problem that isn't quite so easily solved by o3-mini-high. It's not unreasonable in such circumstances to ask questions.

Every time you're unpleasant to people online about something they want to use, you're making the world just a slightly worse place. You're discouraging people from asking questions, discouraging them from using the software you supposedly love, making people have slightly worse associations with that software, feel slightly more like they want to be somewhere else. Expose them to that sort of "love" often enough, and eventually they softly and silently walk away.

The world works best when people try, within reason, to be kind to each other. Being unkind in the end punishes itself, but long before that, it can make whole communities too unpleasant to participate in. After a while the remaining people sit around wondering why no one wants to use their favorite thing; obviously, they conclude, it must be because most people are stupid and bad. (This isn't exclusive to software of course; I've seen companies and clubs and all sorts of groups killed by this sort of thing.)

If you feel a question is too basic or too stupid, that someone should have gone off and used Google or what have you, then ignore it, you are not obligated to say every unfriendly thing that ever comes into your head, and in fact, most of us learn fairly early on in life that if you don't have something nice to say, being quiet is often the best idea. If you absolutely can't ignore it and still feel upset that someone wants to use the software you use but doesn't know something, then perhaps stop reading Reddit; it's not doing good things for your psyche.