Is there a single person out there who can remember all of the features they have configured in their Emacs?
I sure can’t 😄(Joy)😮(Surprise)😢(Sadness).
Am I the only one?
Is there a single person out there who can remember all of the features they have configured in their Emacs?
I sure can’t 😄(Joy)😮(Surprise)😢(Sadness).
Am I the only one?
I have a medium sized swiss army knife. I couldn’t even name all tools without looking. I think it’s perfectly normal not to know each configured feature of emacs.
An emacs configurations often starts to get too big because one might think “That is nifty, I want to keep it” or “It took ages to get that working”. But after some time that feature is forgotten and never used again. To fix that I put these snippets in an org file I call “currently-not-in-use.org”. It’s my attic, so if I would ever need it again I can get it back without starting configuring anew. That proved to be a very practical approach.
I don’t remember all of mine, and that’s okay. 🙂 Sometimes it’s because I’ve just gotten so used to the way it works, I only realize it’s not the default when I change environments. Sometimes it’s because I shift my focus to other things. Sometimes I only find things after I reimplement the functionality and then go to put it in my config. Sometimes I only find things when I come across my own config in a search, or when someone comments or links. That’s all cool. 🙂
If there is somebody who *does* remember everything, I’m not sure I want to know them 🙂 For myself, I’m constantly surprised: usually because something that I assumed was set for all eternity, turns out to be private configuration, so it does not work in a new environment.
There is a solution. And, of course, it is in Emacs. Org-drill. I put my key bindings, self defined functions etc. in org-drill and memorize then.
Remembering a tool is the only use of having a powerful tool. Don’t miss that important step.
Although, I am shifting some of the drills to Anki cards : easier to do on mobile.