DistroTube gets lost in the sauce because he has so many arcane keybindings that he instinctively neglects to mention because of his muscle memory.
Agreed, I struggled a bit to even understand the appeal of Emacs when I watched his videos. But I have to credit the bald boomer, if it wasn't for DT I'd never try out Emacs.
I started with Doom Emacs, thought it was cool, but ultimately didn't have any use-case for it and stopped using it for around 3 or 4 years. I think the fact that it's a massive multi-tool with 90% shit you don't need didn't help me either.
I recently was considering note-taking software like Obsidian, but I ended up saying "fuck it" and installed Emacs from scratch with one of his playlists and tried again. It's now helping me solve a problem I personally have as a software dev, where I didn't really have a good method to write down tasks and quick notes on my PC.
Sure, I could use Notepad/Notepad++ and have some text files, but they would ultimately lay disorganized on my Desktop folder or be lost somewhere in other folders. Also, sure, I can keep a notebook for handwriting notes, which I do, and it does admittedly help with memory retention, but sometimes you just want to keep you hands on the keyboard and slam away notes fast.
With Org's built-in "org-capture" templates, I'm quickly writing timestamped tasks that have a status that can change (TODO->LIVE->DONE), and each change is automatically timestamped within the task notes. The tasks can also have tags for quick filtering.
With org-roam, I keep knowledge on associated things such as noteworthy server IPs/ports/services and whatnot that is nice to have stored somewhere instead of constantly looking up online.
It's not perfect, but it's mine, and it can be reworked and improved as I need it to be. It's especially not perfect because I'm running this on a Win11 work laptop, and Emacs feels remarkably slower and jankier compared to a Linux Emacs, but I think I was able to fix some of the jank by getting binaries for rg and fd. Any performance boosting tips would be greatly appreciated.
I always wanted to try the system crafters setup but I'm not really a programmer and I don't really care about lisp or schem
Yeah don't worry me neither. I've been using ChatGPT to help me write some custom functions, but it tends to get shit wrong about Emacs variables/functions. It's always best to have the
Org,
Emacs and
Emacs Lisp manuals on hand for consulting the basics and niche utilities. Emacs also has the benefit of having an internal documentation for every variable, function and whatnot, and you can rapidly look it up and confirm where it comes from and check the source code.