mjmein

Thanks. I've tried that in the past. The problem is still that it doesn't give any feedback on progress.

I still struggle to see how people actually use this with devops on a day to day basis.

I think that some type of integration with tmux would work well - have a running tmux session, and then just queue commands from emacs to that session, instead of running directly through emacs.

Org-mode and babel sound like good ideas, but in practice I've found it very finicky to use.

My main problem with it is that, unlike with executing commands in the shell, with org you don't get any progress, and emacs seems to hang while running the command.

For example, running apt update tends to freeze emacs without any progress reporting for a few minutes.

I'm hoping that I'm doing something wrong and that someone can chime in with a suggestion, because I really like org-mode, and I really like the idea of doing devops using it.

I've been spending some time over the past few months developing a app for myself and family to help with this.

Basically, what I do is:

- make a list of books that I want to read

- over time, as I acquire the book, I have a tool to split up the book into separate chapters. These chapters are then loaded into the reading app.

- every day, I open the app and it chooses a chapter from a random book for me to read

- as I read, I highlight interesting, useful or difficult sections that I want to remember/study further

- instead of showing me a chapter, the app can also show a list of highlights from a previously read chapter. During this step it asks me to create little quizzes from the notes - either in the form of cloze replacements or simple q&a. Alternatively I can also create reflection questions or daily actions from the notes.

- in addition to the previous steps, the tool then also uses spaced repetition algorithm to review the little quizzes that I created from the books I've read

- every morning it chooses 10 of the actions that I identified and asks me how I am going to implement/practice them today

- every night it asks me how I practiced those actions

It does a bit more than this, but that's the main part. I've already seen great results from doing this, as I've always found the biggest problem with reading is that it tends to be too passive, and having the review and action steps helps alleviate that problem.

I was just looking at semantic-ui-react, and it looked great.

But then I tested their examples on my mobile phone and it looked really bad. It just seemed that it wasn't responsive at all, which really surprised me.

This works pretty well with Spacemacs and org-mode as well. The "space" key based navigation is a good fit for touch keyboard.

Not for heavy use, but for quick notes and calendar checking.

I ssh into my home server and drive my spacemacs instance from there.

My opinion is that emacs/spacemacs is more optimized for day to day work, than for the out of box experience. Personally, I'm fine with that, and there are some great editors (like sublime) that work out of the box if you prefer that.

However, the people generally working with/on emacs are not looking for that, they are looking for an editor optimized for customisation. They have already gone through the experience of setting it up, so why would they spend most of their time making it easier out of the box?

There is a cost to everything, and so far most people on emacs side have decided to spend their time on improving it's power, not it's ease of use.

That's actually a pretty good barrier to entry. With emacs/spacemacs, if installing it is too frustrating for you, then configuring and using it is going to be way too frustrating for you.

The thing to realise is that, at least is my experience, REPL based development doesn't mean your are actually typing code into the REPL.

Instead, you develop code in a file, but constantly evaluate code as you go along.

When I work on a clojure project, I very rarely open the actual REPL, but I am constantly evaluating code and experimenting with different implementations of functions.

Then, when I'm happy with the results, I ask the editor to evaluate and insert the results back into the editor. This then becomes the unit test.

My thoughts exactly. Once you are used to this way of developing, it is really difficult to be happy with less.

Thanks. Do you know if it works with the module system - for example, if I edit function definition in a module, and then send that module definition to the REPL, would any code using that module start using the new definition?