I'm the lead developer at The Onion. When I'm not working I enjoy long moonlit walks along the beach with robots, the history of science and technology, and warm fuzzy kittens.

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein

Skills To Pay The Bills?

by Jeffrey Weston, Sun Oct 12 7:10 pm, 2008

Recently I'd started using Coda, which is a nice web editor, which smartly combines tabs, nav, and a good layout (I can't stand tons of little windows hanging around while I work on my mac, yes you Adobe). But the problem was, as good as Coda is, I could only use it on my mac and I'm on other machines. A lot. So what could I use that lives on all my machines, by default, and probably any other that I have to jump on, and not necessarily need a windowing environ? At that point, facepalm: Emacs. I've been using that program for years. Decades? Not quite decades yet. It's Emacs for Christs' sake. I'm on Emacs every day, so why did I get distracted by some new editor? You harlot, you slut. Procrastination, I think is the proper answer. Like my previous post about the box of wires, sometimes the same thing happens with software -- you just collect software you use a couple times, enjoy poking around with, but which in the long run you don't use. It's just clutter. Instead, if I'd taken the same amount of time to improve my emacs-fu: how often do I use etags, bookmarks, macros? I've poked around these, but I don't really use them. nxml mode? Ediff? Emacs and subversion? Jesus, pwsafe and emacs? There are oodles of possibly helpful things I don't regularly use in Emacs. It's old, it's solid, it's everywhere, it has the skills to pay the bills. You take your fancy new things with shiny buttons and go away now.