Stevey's Tech Talk E39 -- A guided tour of Emacs

Whoa, it’s THAT Steve. How did he get 39 episodes into whatever this is before I noticed? Steve Yegge was one of the reasons I picked up emacs. His old blog articles on emacs (and [other things](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html)…) are worth a read.

(Haven't watched it to the end) I really like the emphasis he places on buffers, and how all information is "first class citizen" that you can operate on just like with a regular text file. This might also be what irritates me about some recent developments, with pop-up frames and text that appear as a side effect to some action like moving the point (thinking about lsp-ui) or when a mode is too eager to overwrite regular bindings and conventions. Perhaps controversial: Peak Emacs is not achieved in emulating and replicating foreign usage patterns and user experiences, but focusing on these basics, keeping things consistent and intuitively hackable.

It's Steve _Yegge_, dang! Back in the mid 2000s when I was using Emacs like a souped up Notepad, his blog posts clued me in to the idea that there's more to Emacs under the hood. (Whether this realization was a good thing is debatable!)

*Absolutely the* **best** *intro to Emacs I've ever seen.* Can't think of anything that should be changed (aside from minor typos like forgetting to quote the 2nd arg to `eval-after-load` ;-)). (And at 42:35 he even says *"If you go to the [Emacs Wiki](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap) you're always gonna find modes which are written for almost anything on Earth."*) Here's Steve Y on Emacs in a [2008 blog post](https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-live-xemacs.html): > Emacs is a revolutionary, almost indescribably QWAN-infused software system. Non-Emacs users and casual users simply can't appreciate how rich and rewarding it is, because they have nothing else to compare it to. There are other scriptable applications and systems out there — AppleScript, Firefox, things like that. They're fun and useful. But Emacs is self-hosting: writing things in it makes the environment itself more powerful. It's a feedback loop: a recursive, self-reinforcing, multiplicative effect that happens because you're enhancing the environment you're using to create enhancements.

> emphasis he places on buffers, and how all information is "first class citizen" that you can operate on just like with a regular text file. Yup. *Bingo!*

What are some ways to get the information lsp-ui provides that keeps things consistent like you'd prefer?

Using seperate buffers in seperate frames?

His original js2-mode saved me from so many IE parsing error headaches back in 2009 or so.