Some guys look at a car as going from point A and B. Some guys find they can get to B faster and more safely if they can modify the car.

Furthermore I'd say that I (presumably like most emacs users) am probably closer to 45 minutes per month, or per year, on general emacs config stuff, certainly not per day. It has still made a huge difference for me in terms of convenience and just general aesthetics.

Right, it's an extension of your life right. Some people find it fulfilling to kit out there house with exactly what they think they desire. Its just a matter of processing the stuff that makes you happy while providing _internal_ development.

Its a hardly a requirement, some people just enjoy doing it. You can just use someone else's config, lots to choose from.

The whole point of emacs is that it’s not “fiddling with config”, it’s programming. Which is an activity a lot of people enjoy.

Emacs is essentially an IDE for developing emacs.

Plus, with time it becomes more like writing programs and less configuration. I write Elisp commands like I used to write shell scripts. These commands do entirely new things. I feel that can't count as mere configuration.

Yep. Just wrote this today to prettify all the tables in a Markdown file:

    (while (not (eobp))
      (while (not (markdown-table-at-point-p))
        (forward-char 1))
      (markdown-table-align)
      (goto-char (markdown-table-end)))

I'd have no idea how to do this in vim!

A macro and a plugin installed with the markdown-table-align equivalent? Though you could also use this approach with emacs macros too.

In vim I wouldn’t know where to find that markdown-table-align exists nor how to write a macro (and I used vim for much longer than emacs). In emacs I just had to notice that pressing tab in markdown mode aligned tables (among other things), then press C-h k <TAB> to see what function that key invokes, jump to the code for it and start reading.

In my last 20 years of using emacs, I have spent about 45 minutes total fiddling with the config. (Before that I spent a little more time getting it set up.) Am I missing out on something?

For me, Emacs as a Lisp programming environment is just a lot fun! I was a big fan of the iPython REPL, but always struggled with reliably reloading modules when I made changes to functions and classes. With Emacs Lisp, I don't worry about any of that. Everything is so interactive and hands-on! It's easy to change and introspect the state of the system while it's running. The built-in debugger is pretty great too. It's a really nice way to work.

That's 28k dollars to configure Emacs, if we assume 100 USD / hour...

By that argument, watching The Irishman costs 350 USD.

Odd that you chose The Irishman (2019) to evince the opportunity cost fallacy. The toll of that schnoozer can't adequately be measured in dollars.

Where's your mercedes?

> 282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day

It's 0.43 hours a day, which is 26 minutes, not 45. (Hint: 0.5 hours is 30 minutes.)

Superb point, I did always suspect I'm an idiot but it's useful to have it pointed out sometimes!

There's a very good reason for it. I spend about an hour every month. It sharpens your tool and pays back massively over time.

When we need to quickly debug or carry out a complex operation at work? People gather around my machine. Once you're set up with things like org-mode, magit, lsp your productivity goes up a lot.

> I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

Some people like to customize their environment to their exact specifications. Others will use whatever is available and never change it.

That is not required. Although default Emacs is pretty barebones (from a modern interface standpoint, not features) one can get a pretty good kickstart by using something like Spacemacs or Doom emacs and only sprinkling a bit of configuration here and there.

I too had a pile of config accrued over years - mostly porting features from other editors to Emacs. After adding Doom, I have just a few lines, it does all the rest.

The point is - usually on other editors you need to either wait for someone to create a "plugin" to do what you need, or you need to create a full blown plugin yourself, which is not a small task. In Emacs, it's extremely easy to create functions that will do tasks for you. And that gets addictive.

>or you need to create a full blown plugin yourself, which is not a small task

That is what I thought when was motivating myself to continue diving into vim and emacs. In the end it turned out that the this this problem of "difficult extensibility" exists only in my head but not in VSCode or IntelliJ IDEA. Eventually, you can do magic on your files with sed/python/any other language in terminal and this most likely is better solution because it is editor-agnostic and good for automation.

Plus the time for writing that blog post. ;)

I have four commits to my .emacs in 2022 and eight in 2021, all fairly minor. So I guess that's about 45 minutes per year on average :)

It's part of the fun. Once you realize how much you can do within Emacs, it becomes really easy to fiddle.

That being said, I'm also one of those people that break my Emacs config often, and I have a different version on each PC I use.

Not every user is like this though! Many try to keep their setup as stable as possible.

> I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

The problem is in the terminology: Config

Replace the word with programming and it will all make sense. People who write Javascript code to build custom tools for their own use are doing the exact same thing as Emacs users tweaking their config.

These days when I have time I'm writing elisp to make it easier for me to write math notes. One org roam node per concept/definition/proof. However, I'm building a graph: If a definition of a math object involves prior knowledge, I want to link to those nodes. The default org roam interface makes this a pain, so I want an interface that prompts me for the title, and lets me select dependencies one by one. It then inserts the node, with links to all those dependencies.

Where does all this code go?

In my config.

I wrote a few functions for my emacs configuration. It's simply that I wanted the editor to work differently. And I could not do that in literally any other editor.

When I first started using emacs I spent 10 hours a day for many months customizing it.