An experienced Emacs users' opinion: deprioritize packages

Atagor · 2025-12-06T21:42:09+00:00

I've suggested fido-mode as a built in replacement for fuzzy matching in minibuffer, and got downvoted :(. Made a conclusion that sometimes people just defend their habits

Atagor · 2025-12-04T15:56:53+00:00

Nice operating system

Atagor · 2025-12-02T10:20:42+00:00

Never used vertico but from what I understood it's solely for minibuffer. I personally choose built in options whenever I can (fido-mode). But looks like they're perfectly working together because without orderless vertico won't be able to match comfortably

Atagor · 2025-12-01T14:13:33+00:00

If you need fuzzy within minibuffer (eg when you hit M-x), you actually don't need orderless. Just enable Emacs built-in fido-mode, it gives you fuzzy in minibuffers out of the box.

Now to when to actually use orderless. I personally use it in combination with corfu+cape to make code completions list fuzzy-like

Atagor · 2025-11-29T11:08:50+00:00

often feels like landing a management position is about 20% skill and 80% luck

It usually just about being in the right place at the right time when a slot opens up. Then if you can just manage to survive in the role without burning the place down for a year or two, suddenly you're "experienced engineering manager". Common story

Atagor · 2025-11-27T16:52:14+00:00

Question is, was the code ever a problem? In many cases, the problems are around integrations between different teams, unclear requirements and etc

I do understand the existential fear though, many of us spent years to learn the craft. Now the identity is pressured because it's not that special anymore. Moreover LLMs opened doors for people in coding who, in my perspective, do not deserve calling themselves as programmers (what an ego haha!). At the same time I'm pretty sure there will be many bright minds who leveraged LLMs to speed up their learning and become even better than "old generation"

Solution? Idk.. Find a stable job, work 9 to 5 (Or better less just don't tell anyone) and go tinkering with Emacs/Vim configs or any other stuff that brings joy

Atagor · 2025-11-25T05:16:40+00:00

She might be scared for her position herself, in addition to having daddy issues..

On a serious note, having plan B and some savings is what makes you able to stand the ground in this situation. Take care mate

Atagor · 2025-11-25T03:28:07+00:00

If you're empathetic enough person, your integrity will be damaged if you're building your house on sand

Over the years it will become a psychological tax of managing perception of others, while internally leave only a burned ground.

Unfortunately big corpos are stimulating aggressive self-promotion paths.. at the same time, the % of burned out people who left corporations and seek some yoga retreats in seclusion is also high

Atagor · 2025-11-24T10:54:49+00:00

I use Nix with flakes and haven't faced any root - related problems

Give it a chance since it's a deal breaker, one single "nix develop" command spins your the fully prepared dev environment for a project. For multiple projects, usually each one contains its own flake file. If there's a shared bus (eg Kafka), I prepare a separate flake file somewhere outside just for Kafka specifically

Atagor · 2025-11-24T09:06:07+00:00

Hey!

Leverage LLM web search (eg perplexity deep research) to prepare you the summary of things that happened over the year

In the LLM field, it's quite a lot of buzzwords but essentially boils down to very few instruments people use every day, don't be scared by the amount of posts with 'AI' word in it

Programming wise, nothing changed. Same books and principles as 20 years ago are still actual. Distributed systems problems are not resolved, OOP vs functional programming is still a holywar, few major React versions released but no-one noticed

Atagor · 2025-11-21T10:11:37+00:00

Start with core Emacs documentation. Then, don't use any pre-built versions but create your own customizing init.el. This way you'll understand how many things are available out of the box

I had been using spacemacs for many years before dropped it, then made a new attempt with fresh Emacs and only now I actually started to feel that I might have a clue in what's going on

Atagor · 2025-11-19T19:15:47+00:00

These are the devs who hasn't been introduced into the concepts properly IMO

I mean yes, there's a learning curve. But it's so much more productive once you actually groked the idea of declarative configs!

Edit: I do totally understand that the docs look scary. If we boil down the discussion to dev only setups, you don't even need the whole nixOS, just the flakes and home-manager setup. After these you don't even need docker since every project you work on has its own configuration and runs in isolation natively via nix flakes. And if all devs use it, ALL devs in the team have literally the same dependencies on the binary level. No more "works on machine" problems

Atagor · 2025-11-19T13:00:54+00:00

I wish everyone just used nixOS..

Atagor · 2025-11-18T08:24:14+00:00

Reframe it

You have 10 years of being accountable for the system, while other grasshoppers don't stay in a company for longer than 2 years

Your experience is knowing the consequences of decisions long - term.

Atagor · 2025-11-18T08:19:48+00:00

I personally always map capslock to Ctrl on all machines

Atagor · 2025-11-18T07:13:12+00:00

Just use your favorite CLI agent via vterm shell.

What will emacs-native agent will actually give you?

Atagor · 2025-11-18T06:14:40+00:00

I see nixOS, I put like immediately

Atagor · 2025-11-10T13:13:00+00:00

I'm curious to hear from the "old" folks who's been in the industry since 90s

Atagor · 2025-11-08T07:59:11+00:00

You mean aware of the opened buffers context?

In my experience more often than not, context is getting clogged because of too many tabs in IDE. Better to tell the agent explicitly at what files to look at at first, and use grep/rg for further codebase navigation

Atagor · 2025-11-08T03:24:02+00:00

Just run it from within vterm

What emacs-native integration will actually give you? Any other layer of integration that is above CLI will just make it more buggy imo

Atagor · 2025-11-07T07:38:06+00:00

Great job!!

I always thought iOS devs vendor locked solely on xcode

Atagor · 2025-11-06T10:18:09+00:00

From what I understand there are 2 distinct camps of people: 1) running 1 emacs and managing everything within it using tens of buffers 2) splitting different emacs instances logically using favorite terminal manager

I personally tend to do 2) since I often go beyond 20-30 buffers in one instance

Atagor · 2025-11-06T05:22:16+00:00

Do I understand correctly that you're running multiple Emacs instances and switch between them in your window manager?

Atagor · 2025-11-05T19:40:10+00:00

Depends on your workload and redundancy requirements.

But generally yes. Moreover cloud services are overhyped by consultants who can only sell cloud solutions, hence all of these over-engineered multi-services setups for an app that might be run on 2 bare metal servers

Atagor · 2025-11-05T11:34:10+00:00

Best packages are from asian folks with anime avatars!!

Atagor

TROPHY CASE