They say that Emacs was inspired by real LISP machines from Symbolics and more. Here are two of those Symbolics machines for sale on eBay:
A Mac with a LISP machine inside of it is pretty cool.
(defhydra help/trademark (:color blue :hint nil) " American _R_egistered Trademark American _U_nregistered Trademark American _S_ervice Mark _J_apanese Industrial Standard _K_orean Standard " ("R" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "®"))) ("U" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "™"))) ("S" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "℠"))) ("J" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "〄"))) ("K" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "㉿"))))
Via:
Wada (creator of the Happy Hacking Keyboard): because keyboards are accessories to PC makers, they focus on minimizing the manufacturing costs. But that’s incorrect. It’s in HHKB’s slogan, but when America’s cowboys were in the middle of a trip and their horse died, they would leave the horse there. But even if they were in the middle of a desert, they would take their saddle with them. The horse was a consumable good, but the saddle was an interface that their bodies had gotten used to. In the same vein, PCs are consumable goods, while keyboards are important interfaces.
The HHKB shirt says: 「馬の鞍」- saddle of a horse.
The most important keys on any keyboard for an Emacs user are the Operation Keys (I made up that term). Without them Emacs would be useless. For Techne (the new name for my Emacs keyboard project) I decided to use symbols instead of letters for them.
The operations cluster is on both the left and right side of the keyboard. Yes, that is a full twenty keys just to make life happier in Emacs! I love keyboards so dedicating twenty keys to a critical task is perfect for me. These sections live on a eight row by sixteen column layout so there is plenty of room. It’s bottom left corner is position (1,1) (Row, Column) increasing as you go up and to the right (ala Cartesian coordinates). In the table I wrote the key name and then the symbol. The picture only includes the symbol.
Legend: C# (column number)
| Row | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two | Hyper ⬖ | Super ⬙ | Meta ⬗ | Control ⬘ | Space ⭕ |
| One | Alt ⎇ | GUI ⃟ | Ultra ◆ | Shift ⇧ | Enter ⎆ |
Ultra is: C-m-S-H. Emacs can handle that including the Shift modifier along with it. In case you haven’t encountered it yet, here is how to get all of the Emacs modifiers on a modern USB keyboard.
My symbol choices started with Sun’s meta symbol. After playing around with that, reading Xah’s page on Unicode input symbols, searching for and comparing symbols with PopChar and playing around with a ton of combinations I ended up here. It is nice because it settles on the diamond theme.
An Emacs’ configuration is an Emacs Lisp (Elisp) program. Whether you write it by hand or using the Easy Customization GUI it is still a program. Some of us write it once and never touch it for years. I’ve done that and it works well. Some of us make changes daily, even hourly. I’ve done that too and it works well. When non Emacsers hear stories about this never ending program they shudder in horror and I don’t blame them. Configuring a text editor for multiple years does sound horrible! What is really happening here though, are all Emacsers sadists?
No, not really. Instead they are creators, makers, writers, and weavers of that which can be easily represented as plain text. They are programmers, too. Of course, that is the easy one! Unfortunately, that is the one that instantly kills any conversation (in some contexts). What people miss out on though is that its not just programmers who use Emacs. So do composers. So do publishers. So do finite element analysts. So do pen testers. So do screenwriters. So do hardware designers. Every Emacs configuration is an opportunity to learn something about something totally new to you! What comes to mind here is where Emacs configurations might play a role in interviews.
One of the stories going around is that during job interviews you should be able to cite an open source project so your interviewers can review it. Great idea. Does it ever really happen? (I’m looking for your feedback here). My Emacs’ configuration is a labor of love. It contains perfection, neglect, and horror. It is all a trade-off. Every single line means something to me and I’d love to share with anyone interested why I did what I did there. It is fun to share because you always learn something new. Every single time you learn something new when you mutually share.
This is my story why Emacs’s is an infinite program that would reveal more during a job interview than any personality profiling test out there.
Via here, in this example it handles the situation when you want to run Magit but haven’t got a project file open:
(let ((current-prefix-arg '(4)))
(call-interactively #'magit-status))
My configuration results in an environment where you can only evaluate code within the document and never during export or tangling. That way it is easier to understand what happens when.
Code is only ever evaluated when you execute the document. The results of execution are stored within the document. That is my workflow.
Knitr in comparison does the opposite only evaluating code during export.
Here is the easiest way to make sense of what happens when resulting in what: