With all the recent talk of how government is such an awful, incompetent beast, you’d think we’d forgotten why we chuckle at the tales of middle manager and peter principles in Dilbert and the like.

Not that I’m making an argument that government is so much better than business; just that there are substantial political, bureaucratic hurdles to overcome at many businesses, and it baffles me that we ignore that. A lot of businesses aren’t super efficient well-oiled machines. We’d all be pleased to hear that Tufte had a significant impact at some company A. But would we be surprise to hear that his presentations and advice fell on deaf ears at another company B? Really?

BUT HOW WILL YOU GRIND THE BEANS?

Just what is simplicity, anyway

Tractor-feed dot matrix printers were a lot more reliable than any inkjet I’ve ever had.

Phones used to be a lot better. Remember when you could drop them, and not worry about it?

Pencil-wise I have to go with mechanicals. Sharpening is just a click away. I like to go with either the Pilot Dr. Grip or Zebra M402. Both are solid construction and have lasted me years. If you’re going to get a mechanical pencil, invest the $5-$10 to get a good one and you’ll save yourself a bundle in the long run. Cheap mechanical pencils are worse than wooden pencils.

Thanks for the tip about reel mowers being viable still. I have some fond memories of one.

@Eric: for a residential lot, used weekly: I change the oil and air filter every other season. After every use, I broom off the loose dust. I sharpen the blade every spring.

I’m surrounded on both sides by power yard tool loving neighbors and it’s awful. One uses his leaf blower several times a week — when there’s no snow — to sweep his sidewalks and remove every scrap of leaf from his yard. The other breaks out his snow blower when there’s anything more than a dusting.

I’m with you 100% on the manual/crank pencil sharpener. In my last three houses, I’ve managed to install one somewhere. Best option was above the kitty litter and then just removed its cover — the cat loved it.

What sort of maintenance is required for a real mower? Is it difficult when you let the grass get to high?

Now don’t get me started on how much better our old, mostly analog centrifuge is compared to the newer, totally digital models.

Another place where I think low tech beats high tech is exercise equipment. You can get a lot of mileage out of a jump rope, a pull up bar, some dumbbells, and your own body. You know – push-ups, running, squats, etc… This home gym (sans running shoes) can be put together with excellent equipment for under $50.

This may have been a problem at the time, but it’s a nonissue right now.

Infrequent releases.

I find this to be an inconsistent complaint. It’s just an editor, so why the need for frequent releases? The only reason I have “needed” to upgrade Emacs lately is to run Emacs apps that are not simply text editing (e.g. org-mode, calc, etc).

Although I’ll grant this may have been a problem at some point in the past.

Vim may not be the as light as vi used to be, but emacs is a pig.

Again, not a concern ever since I started using Emacs heavily. It’s fast enough for everything I need. A few versions ago it took a long time to load a big file, but no more. Vim may still be faster, but few will notice the difference.

• Long chorded commands are a recipe for RSI. This can be worked around with remapping to Ctrl to something reasonable like Alt. The big Alt keys on a MS Natural keyboard are very easy to thumb (the strongest finger). The long-winded-do-something commands can be remapped to something short. But then you need to carry your mapping file around with you. BTW, Paul Graham, the Lisp guru, switched to Vim for precisely this reason. Vi is everywhere in the Unix world and has reasonable defaults.
• Emacs/XEmacs schism.
• Infrequent releases.
• Ugly GUI (not much of a concern, since I’ve become a devout Terminalist). Got smooth fonts only recently.
• Vim may not be the as light as vi used to be, but emacs is a pig.

The only thing that I don’t like about Vim is that it has yet another custom scripting language. Though it has bindings for Tcl, Python, Ruby, etc., most of the plugins and much of the core functionality are written in its own scripting language.

P.S. Bash commandline has a vi editing mode: set -o vi.

http://www.e-texteditor.com/

The language bundles are similar to emacs-modes and makes me able to use Textmate as my editor for everything I write (python, Java, R, php, html, css, latex …). They obviously do not cover the enormous range that emacs-modes does, but they generally work very well (I once discovered that emacs even had a mode for editing protein databank coordinate files).

@Jared: Thanks for the Mac/Windows keyboard background. That explains a lot.

@Janne: Your comment made me think it might be good to separate Emacs-the-editor from Emacs-the-Swiss-Army-knife for the sake of discussion.

@Beetle: You are correct. I started to mention that when I was writing the post, but I decided to start my timeline with GNU Emacs.

@Nemo: I understand your point about Emacs being powerful for “very smart people” but I might rephrase that as “people who are dedicated to using it regularly.” Along those lines, see my post three-hour a week language. A very smart person who doesn’t do much text editing is probably better off with a different editor.

And refreshingly, vi is an editor with ambitions to be – an editor. Not a mail client, class browser, typesetting engine or z-code interpreter.

Cygwin + PuTTY (search for puttycyg) on Windows makes Emacs nearly Linux-like. A Windows world without Cygwin and PuTTY is a painful world.

I am a regular emacs user. On linux I live in emacs and on windows I drift between Visual Studio for C++ and emacs for everything else.

My advice is to give emacs another shot. Emacs on windows is quite bearable with cygwin. You can check out my emacs configuration at github.com/skaslev/emacs.d I’ve already converted two colleagues (cg artists!) to use emacs with this. Here’s what one of them (Marin Petrov) has written: http://scroll-lock.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=143:my-battle-of-the-editors&catid=1:scroll-blog#JOSC_TOP .