Just think how much more he could have created with vi ;)

He is only using EMacs as an OS....

I also noticed smart people type really fast (if they can touch type) and can switch between multiple windows/tabs fast too. It's not because their fingers move faster than normal people, but because their mind moves smoothly so they can produce a long string of command with stopping to think.

> as fast as any 20 year old. I I certainly hope so. Though I think it's more likely that Knuth can be as fast as other 20-year olds, but not as the 20-year old of himself.

As someone whose computing career was improved by learning to touch-type in grade school (Mom had been a secretary, saw that these "personal" computers had keyboards, and bludgeoned the high school to let me in to the summer-school typing class) it's not actually the speed that matters - though that does certainly impress people - it's that it's "automatic". If you're not thinking about letters and where they are, you aren't distracted from the entire sentence (or function) you're holding in your head - it just pours out through your hands into the machine.

(Sometimes I joke about how my hands know emacs, not my brain - but if someone asks me what keys I hit for something, my fingers move and then I work backwards from that.)

(And if you're collecting correlations - I have no musical performance talent at all and have spent maybe 10 hours total poking at musical keyboards - for me, typing is all typing, I expect musical keyboarding is a related but parallel thing, not the same thing.)

There is however a terrible effect on productivity and self-respect when you have to switch keyboard layout for any reason.

I'm still one month into switching to a macbook, and I now dread cutting and pasting. Oh, and typing "pipe", too.

I wonder how long it will take my 40+ years old brain and hands to get their act together...

I feel this in my soul. My work uses Mac and I'm not used to it. Fn and cmd keys block my reach for alt and control in my vim sessions and make it awkward to go through tabs in the browser with the keyboard.

Why not just use an external keyboard? I had the opposite problem until I bought a Magic Keyboard to use at work.

I work from home and have very limited desk space. Great idea though.

Fun fact : I have an external keyboard, but it's an MS one, so there is no more drivers, and some keys just won't work (or at least I haven't yet found anyway to remap things.)

Shrug, I guess ?

Hmm, I switched to Dvorak in about a month… you just use it till you stop having to think about it, no?

I'm an oldster who just got a split ergonomic keyboard for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I'm going through the exact same experience. It's getting better, but my typing/coding speed has been cut in half as I unlearn bad typing habits accumulated over the decades.

Even for MacBooks of the same generation, there’s a (significant, for me) hit when going from a US Mac keyboard to a UK one (enter key is all off).

Had the same issue recently, with the caveat that I grew up in the UK, then moved to US and back.

I prefer the concept of international standardisation to an American layout in pretty much all areas, with the exception of the keyboard layout; ANSI layouts are far more friendly - for programming, at least. Not just the enter key but the left shift too.

Switched to US layout on everything (because brackets and gt / lt are SO much more conveniently placed) and having to use an ISO keyboard now is just pain. My hands forgot.

Not a joke, my fingers and brain know vim and I don't. Often have to try it out to know what command I'm actually using.

One of the smartest people I met as an undergrad at Berkeley was a theoretical chemistry PhD student. He was an extremely slow typist, with mostly hunt and peck. It would be frustrating for me because it would be like 1/4 my comfortable speed (20 vs. 80 wpm?). But being slow there made him faster, because he’d spend a little more time before typing thinking about what to type.

I’ve always had the opposite experience. When I am unable to type well I am massively less effective. This happened when switched from emacs to vim, or got a new keyboard with a weird layout, or broke my thumb, or, hell, anytime I use a phone.

First there’s the cognitive overhead involved with the task itself, as opposed to letting your fingers do the work while you think about real stuff. Second, when you’re slow at typing, typing becomes the bottleneck more often, and your brain is sometimes idling waiting for your typing to catch up. Your brain has the hard part; it should always be the bottleneck. Third, typing fast gives you more options, because you don’t consider “how long will this take me to type out?” when considering different approaches to some immediate challenge. If opening a REPL and evaluating something is going to take you five minutes, you might not do it.

I suspect your friend was a fast worker despite being a slow typist. If he learned to touch-type, he could always have spent the same time thinking as he does now then less time and effort actually typing it.

I understand what you're saying and often feel that way. I think one point to be taken away is not to judge capabilities of X (say, programming) based on Y (typing speed).

However, sometimes I have the opposite desire. I can type on a normal keyboard at 80-90 wpm. On an iPhone I'm probably 1/4-1/3 of that. However, I probably spend 60-90 minutes a day reading/writing emails from my phone. Sometimes going slower allows you go to faster.

> Your brain has the hard part; it should always be the bottleneck.

Or maybe not. Lots of famous people (particularly physicists) talk about the importance of letting the mind wander i.e. the opposite of making sure it's the bottleneck.

I'm a slow phone typist but it's still easy to do. My brain can still think of the next thing to write, or wander.

Interesting - I do this but I learned the skill from sight reading music scores - you have to be playing several bars behind what you’re reading so the skill is in going into autopilot with your fingers as you read. No small coincidence then that Knuth is an organist

> No small coincidence then that Knuth is an organist

Also great on the harpsichord and piano.

Id love to listen to Knuth perform his instruments. Can this be found on youtube?

Just search Knuth organ on youtube an you get several hits

Google and Youtube often think I am a robot because of how fast I operate on their sites: typing, clicking, switching tabs etc..

I wish modern OS could keep up with my typing and window switching and app launching and ...

I'm constantly perturbed and interrupted when some app window just 'hangs' for a few seconds (some garbage collection going on, probably?). I can't pinpoint any one thing, just... everything seems relatively slow in 2022 compared to, even 10 years ago, and certainly 20. Applications weren't always phoning home to check things during bootup, which I suspect happens a lot now. Our computers are dozens of times faster than in the 90s, and, computationally, some things get done much faster, but others - around UI, it seems - apparently regress.

The worst are the modern async UIs that become responsive early and then reset their state when they fully load - so if you e.g. already typed part of your search string, you can actually briefly see it in the textbox, and then it gets cleared away. Very common on websites, somewhat common on the desktop, in my experience.

Ironically, the old apps that just "hang" for a while during initialization handle this better, because they don't process input at all, so it all just gets queued.

there is a reason linux systems with i3 window managers are getting super popular these days. It's all about the instant response

I've been using i3 for years, there's just nothing that compares to a tiling window.

If I'm in windows I use virtuawin with alt+1, alt+2, etc for switching desktops. Not nearly the same, but works so much better than the builtin crap Windows has.

Paradoxically, I don't use alt+tab in windows to switch between programs. I used to do that, but then around XP (I think) they added the ability for programs to inject themselves into the alt+tab list. That means it's no longer completely consistent, which means I now have to think and check what alt+tab actually does so it stopped being any faster than just using the mouse.

So now if I need to flip between them quickly I'll either put them on different monitors (I use 3) and/or put them on different desktops. The combination makes me effectively as productive without the use of alt+tab. And it feels similar-ish to i3, so it's a bit comfortable in that respect as well.

NOTE: Anyone thinking virtuawin is like i3, it's not. It's just the best virtual desktop on windows (imo of course). Nothing on windows comes close to i3.

This makes me wonder if real time operating systems might one day become popular as interfaces for powerusers

Because power users tired of slow userspace will want their kernel to be slow too?

Latency is the worst thing when operating any machinery. I don't know why people tolerate it so much with computers. It's one of the most important things for me when using any software. That's why a long time ago I settled on using tools like emacs, git, i3/sway etc. When I try trendy tools like VSCode etc. I can't believe the latency people put up with.

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VSCode has a pretty bad latency problem, and it's the reason I stay away and use Notepad++ or VS2022. Sublime if on Mac.

I use git on the command line. My largest bitch is when it says "invalid command. you typed 'statsu', the closest command to this is 'status'"

Kill me now - it's a non-destructive command, and you KNOW what I was trying to say!

Those mishaps don't happen in IDEs.

Preach it - my inability to figure out or control why the UI decides it's time to ignore what I'm typing in realtime while it's trying to back up a file (or whatever) is the cause of so many frustrations

I hope you never use the stock iOS calculator, which still eats keystrokes.

may we all age so gracefully. perhaps part of the secret is to work like Don.

I'd imagine it's mostly a question of having the freedom to be able to work upon subjects which very much interest you, independently and on your own schedule, without much outside pressure or coercion to produce tangible results that are useful to anyone but yourself.

There may be something to that, at least according to one study. Specifically, this article [1] indicates "embracing new mental challenges may be the key to preserving both brain tissue and brain function."

[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-aging/what-does-it-ta...

> moving between EMacs panes

Well, the editor wars are over folks.

More seriously, Don Knuth is a treasure. One of the coolest things about computing science is how all the greats in the field are either alive, or within the living memory of people who are.

These are the photos my wife took at his home. https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu...

Like the 5th picture down you can see him standing (he uses a standing desk!) and if you blow up the screen, you can see part of an emacs window on the left hand side. I believe he also was using emacs shell windows as well, but not 100% sure.

Direct Link: https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2020/04/DK_VC_...

I can't emphasize enough how incredibly nice and welcoming he is. He is bursting with enthusiasm for computers, and my wife and his wife had to almost restrain him so he would sit for his pictures, because he would start talking to me again about computer related stuff.

Hard to tell at this resolution, but it looks like he's using a fairly bare X setup with a tiling window manager and only one Emacs frame on the left. The colours and layout on Emacs look like org-mode. Does he write with org-mode? I would have expected him to write bare TeX, of course. Maybe he's doing something else with org-mode.

He's got Xeyes on the right, and the shell windows could conceivably be Emacs too, but if so, he's customised them to remove the minibuffer.

his fvwm config is public, and there's a screenshot floating around, if you want to take a closer look https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/screen.jpeg

the only mistake you won't be able to correct from observing screenshot is the "look like org-mode" thing. it's https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/color-mo... minor mode which lets you highlight arbitrary lines in a buffer.

“The best way to communicate from one human being to another is through story,” Knuth said.

Great quote and great insight. Understanding how the brain works and is stimulated augments communication. Especially important for dry, theoretical subjects.

Look how he use only a single screen and has this extraordinary device nobody uses anymore left of his screen but proves to be one of the best tool to dig deep into code.

Whose photos are on the wall? Would be interesting to recognize some of them.

The pictures are beautiful, thank you for sharing that.

Emacs windows. There are no panes in Emacs.

The Emacs window is held in a frame. The operating system calls that frame a window, but that's not what Emacs calls it.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WindowsAndFrames

As to why Emacs calls everything something else, well, Emacs was first. As to why Emacs doesn't change its names, well, have you ever tried to change Stallman's mind?

I know. I’ve been an emacs user for 30 years, but I tend to just call them buffers. In the old days when I would be using a PPP or SLIP connection into a dialup Unix, my whole screen would be Emacs in VT100 mode so it made a lot more sense to thing of them as windows back then.

learning that Knuth uses Emacs has been my proudest moment as an Emacs user.

We won! Emacs vs VI war over. It's finally over thanks to Knuth! VI users will be forced to pay reparations, and agree to cede territory back to the Emacs military alliance. :)

apparently only uses one screen too. can we (re)start some religious wars over that now? :)

I’d bet it’s also a very vanilla Emacs with little to no plug-ins bar a few custom functions and key mappings that he wrote like 30 years ago.

It is on-going. See some remarks before on whether he would be faster if he use vi.

(Sorry have to run …)

A colleague and I also had the delight of visiting him, quite a few years ago now. I'd been doing some unusual stuff with TeX, and had been in touch and showed him some examples of our work.

He had recently been working on 3:16 and showed us some of the original calligraphy that he had at home at the time.

What a lovely man, as well as being a multi-talented genius.

Imagine Don being your interviewer at a FAANG company.