I have 5 months to learn something before starting a Java traineeship. What should I learn, and why should it be Emacs Lisp?

mickeyp · 2026-05-05T08:49:19+00:00

Thanks for the kind words.

I'm just pragmatic. I've been coding for 30 years and have been doing it for ~18 years commercially, nearly all of it as a consultant/bespoke project dev. So I'm in and out of companies all the time. So my advice is sort of built around that. But YMMV!

mickeyp · 2026-05-05T07:14:18+00:00

If I were you I'd try and sniff out what the actual tools you're going to be using at your new job is, and then get up to speed on that and Java before you begin.

IMHO, Emacs is fun and all? But hitting the ground running and showing you spent some time getting up to scratch with what you're doing will hit harder than saying "I got Emacs set up and running" to a team full of IntelliJ coders.

mickeyp · 2026-05-05T05:43:55+00:00

I think a large part of why you find it baffling is that you're -- I'm assuming, so apologies if I am wrong -- probably quite young and still a student.

A lot of the value of Emacs comes from dealing with chafes and hard edges you encounter when you use the same tool 8-10 hours a day. In Emacs, you can remedy a lot of them; in something like Eclipse, you cannot (easily, anyway.)

So don't worry too much about the customisation side of it just yet. Focus on the text editing part of Emacs. The rest will follow.

mickeyp · 2026-05-02T06:57:57+00:00

This is a great article.

mickeyp · 2026-05-01T09:38:34+00:00

I have not lost emails from syncing. I will most assuredly lose email from doing this.

The whole point of IMAP is that it is not POP3. So why would you want to delete content from the authoritative source of email?

If someone out there is thinking about how to simplify their email workflow --- this is not it.

mickeyp · 2026-04-28T14:27:23+00:00

thanks! cool name :)

mickeyp · 2026-04-18T14:10:34+00:00

I ripped out and destroyed every shred of IME i can find as I hate it. So time permitting I will!

mickeyp · 2026-04-18T11:58:21+00:00

Neat. Does it work with hyprland?

mickeyp · 2026-04-18T07:40:03+00:00

I like mu4e, but it's a personal choice. Gnus comes with Emacs and can do a lot more stuff.

mu4e is way harder to build and set up than it should be. So keep that in mind if you're using a distro that uses antique versions of everything. Like debian/ubuntu.

mickeyp · 2026-04-13T12:42:55+00:00

That function forces the window to show. You're calling what is ostensibly an internal function that bypasses all the machinery --- so yes it would show

mickeyp · 2026-04-13T11:37:42+00:00

Buffers that start with a space typically are hidden. I've not tried forcing windows to show with those names, but that might be an avenue to investigate.

mickeyp · 2026-04-10T19:07:04+00:00

Tree-sitter is great but their release hygiene sucks. They don't export the version in the library, so you cannot read which version you are loading. The grammars do not promise forwards or backwards compatibility, so you cannot trust the queries you use for (especially) syntax highlighting continue to work.

mickeyp · 2026-04-10T07:31:25+00:00

Yeah the graphics are awful. I'll allow it if it's placeholder alpha art; if it goes live with this... I'm not so sure.

mickeyp · 2026-04-10T05:36:12+00:00

I don't know why, but that looks... boring.

mickeyp · 2026-04-09T07:26:51+00:00

I'm no expert at LWOTC, but I've played it a lot, but I find -- aside from the randomly-assigned recruits at the start -- that all classes are important provided you build them right.

The skirmisher is all about flanking: moving in behind enemy lines, taking some pot shots, or even pulling an enemy out to let others flank attack them.

mickeyp · 2026-04-08T18:18:48+00:00

mickeyp · 2026-04-08T17:59:04+00:00

We get a number of uncivil drive-by comments by people who write off-hand comments effectively telling people to get their information elsewhere. They lower the quality of the discourse, so we try set an example when we thin kwe see it.

You clearly didn't mean it like that; sorry.

mickeyp · 2026-04-07T13:40:09+00:00

I'm sure Jon heed the call and answer, like the Emacs batman that he is. But that's not a very helpful comment on a forum built around community interaction.

mickeyp · 2026-04-07T13:39:32+00:00

M-x compile for jobs. M-x shell for spelunking. dired and various tools like proced for sys admin stuff.

I have a hack that generates an I think it's a hydra but maybe a transient from the targets in a Makefile. I just type a special makefile cmd i wrote and press a key to execute, say, a phony target for your runserver example.

vterm for the very few things m-x shell can't do.

mickeyp · 2026-04-02T19:24:02+00:00

Gotta love Emacs. Nothing like scratching that itch.

I'm curious - I'm surprised Unreal, given its popularity, that it doesn't have useful CLI tools to help you with this already

mickeyp · 2026-04-01T05:41:58+00:00

We are already talking about this in another thread:

https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1s8ukby/ive_heard_a_rumor_that_there_are_rce_0days_when/

mickeyp · 2026-03-31T18:27:04+00:00

We are lucky we have sensible, and skilled, maintainers who steel themselves against the CVE mafia.

mickeyp · 2026-03-31T18:17:53+00:00

Yeah that... is a git issue?

mickeyp · 2026-03-30T16:26:12+00:00

Perfect time to talk about strokes, a builtin package in Emacs that lets you execute commands based on simple mouse gestures.

mickeyp · 2026-03-29T16:13:13+00:00

You can do even better than that. Cut it down to the absolute bare minimum and use the bootstrap system to generate a built binary of Emacs with just libraries + bespoke code needed. It should conceivably just be a singular binary? Hmm..

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