Often it pays simply to remember what a rigidly ideological culture we inhabit.
Imagine it's 1986 and this story comes from SoViEt RuSsIa. Derek Lowe (who I hold to be adjacent to a National Treasure) would not be obliged to speculate about motives.
The entire bloviosphere would unanimously collapse into mockery.
tl;dr Big marginal gains for small marginal effort likely make it worthwhile.
The payoff can be enormous. The investment can be illegible on the front end—it depends on the skills and concepts you already have.
Open an Emacs buffer, switch to Org mode, and start typing an outline. The benefit is immediate, provided those paradigms (plain text, outline hierarchy) appeal to you.
There are many features of Org mode that complement each other powerfully but that are district enough that you can climb one learning curve at a time.
I vividly remember the manual, years ago, overwhelming me! But today there are so many good tutorials the barrier to entry is quite low. Best of luck!
Highly recommend: David Wilson's System Crafters channel, Mike Zamansky's channel, Protesilaos Stavrou's channel. There's an amazing community on Mastodon.
If you've lived through even a tiny earthquake it's much like if you've experienced a solar eclipse: even when short and mild, they elicit an otherworldly body-terror.
The people living on that peninsula right now are stressed out in a way most of us have never experienced.
[2008 me] fell in love with the "it just works" and "an actually usable GUI plus Unix under the hood" and "they actually sweat the small stuff" [...] [By 2018, say] The user-annoyance-factor difference between modern Windows and macOS is very slight.
I teach university biochemistry. After eight or ten years, I began to feel that I was no longer a novice.
“Move fast and break things” is a monument to an aberrant culture of arrogance and dismissive impatience. Based on hypercompetitive greed. (That for a generation was funded by cheap money chasing itself around I search of a drain.)
It’s no coincidence that importing this culture to education produces experiences that are superficial and brittle. It’s difficult to think of a counterexample.
She has published all kinds of different work: comprehensive surveys, biographies of key figures, memoir, the works. She’s so prolific, clear, and consistent that you can just follow your nose to whichever entry point strikes your fancy.
But there’s a kernel of an interesting idea in there. Imagine a world where all apps used by everyone were as user oriented as Emacs. Impossible, fantasy, utopian, never, and I agree. But a way to contextualize how much we’ve given up.
> Many people can contribute to the development of the system, for the most part without interfering with each other. This has led the EMACS system to become more powerful than any previous editor.
> User customization helps in another, subtler way, by making the whole user community into a breeding and testing ground for new ideas.
RMS wrote these words in 1981. Org mode was released in 2003 (! twenty years ago?!) and added functionality that for many users is much of what Emacs offers. Today there is a mature ecosystem of incredibly high quality packages, and Emacs itself continues to become even more extensible, with the underlying infrastructure helping “libraries” become even more well behaved and composable.
This part of the story alone is a staggering triumph, comparable to the success of the Linux kernel and all that it has become, absorbed, encompassed, and grown to nurture.