How to open a file in Emacs: a story about Lisp, technology, and human progress
When I was first getting into programming and computer science as a student, I was so into these kinds of super-customizable rabbit holes. My whole life pretty much centered around the keyboard and terminal. I was all in on knowing everything about the entire stack and making it do whatever it was I wanted. I'd spend hours to save a few keystrokes. That wasn't so much about the productivity trade-off as it was about an almost ideological drive I had to make the machine do exactly whatever it was I wanted. Nothing commercial off the shelf, only things I could customize down to the source code.<p>A couple decades later, I just find it all so exhausting.