How peeking at screens shaped my Emacs

My friend mash wrote an interesting article titled "more <a> tags in the terminal".[1]

The main topic of the article, OSC8, is of course fascinating, but it made me think about what he wrote at the beginning: the influence we get from peeking at someone else's screen.

2004: Using Emacs without any customization

I think it was around 2004 when I first started using Emacs. The reason was simple: it was the standard editor at the company I had just joined. I was probably the 4th engineer there, and two out of three of my senior colleagues used Emacs.

Back then, I used Emacs in its completely default state. Looking back, I think my seniors were also using vanilla Emacs. The idea of "hacking an editor to my liking" simply didn't exist in my mind yet.

The day I was glued to miyagawa's screen

I still remember the shocking event that completely changed my view of Emacs. It was my encounter with miyagawa, who was already known as a world-class hacker in the Perl community.

At the time, I was contributing to a project he was developing called "Plagger". Whether it was a YAPC hackathon or a Plagger-specific one, the details are a bit fuzzy, but I had the fortune of working right next to him at the event.

In that moment, I couldn't take my eyes off his Emacs screen.

With unrecognizable operations I had never seen before, buffers switched instantly, and code was rewritten at incredible speed. It was a completely different beast from the vanilla Emacs I knew. I still clearly remember completely ignoring Plagger—our actual purpose for being there—and just bombarding him with Emacs questions instead lol.

The propagation of technology and hacker spirit

Triggered by this event, I fell deep into the rabbit hole of Emacs customization. I learned the joy of tweaking various settings and nurturing it into a tool that perfectly fit my hands. I consider myself to be quite particular about the software tools I use daily, not just Emacs[2], and it's safe to say that the origin of this mindset was miyagawa.

Later on, I met mash, who wrote the article at the beginning of this post. Realizing that he had picked up something from me, just as I had been influenced by miyagawa, made me think again about how fascinating it is that technology and the hacker spirit propagate from person to person.

By the way, my Emacs customization journey has had many other encounters. After mash, a pure-blooded Emacs hacker named imakado joined as a colleague, and he wrote countless useful elisp for me. More recently, I've been hugely influenced by the posts and projects from @xenodium, and a new wave of customization is crashing over me right now.

Conclusion

Reading mash's article, I realized just how much I've been influenced by so many hackers, and how my current self has been shaped by piecing together their settings and philosophies.

With the spread of social media today, the ease of this propagation has grown to a level incomparable to back then. However, I still think it's difficult to get the same level of shock from the internet as you do from directly peeking at someone else's screen.

Recently, having moved to Portland, I'm facing the issue of having very few local friends who use Emacs. The only Emacs user I know here is Jim, the author of Programming Rust. I wonder if there is an Emacs community or meetup in PDX?