mroll

> the original engineer of Google's search engine

you mean Larry Page?

Yep. I use a dedicated paper notebook for journaling. Once or twice a month I spend like 30 minutes or an hour writing down what’s been going on, what’s on my mind, what I’m working towards. Usually I do this while watching some low effort tv show.

I love this. Have had the idea myself, but am not committed enough to make it really work. Have been hoping someone makes it happen.

I think if done right it has the potential to unlock a lot of economic value in the form of small software businesses.

You won’t get AirBnB or Tesla from this, but you would get plenty of businesses that could do more than a million ARR with a really small team.

Haha of course this already exists! Thanks a lot for the pointer, I will for sure start playing with it this week :)

Oh wow this is great. I’ve been wanting an org mode integration with GitHub for a while, and this tool might make it easy enough for me to hack together this weekend.

Basically I want to be able to pull up a buffer with a list of issues assigned to me and copy them into my org mode todo list

Hah, yeah. I used spacemacs for 2 years from summer 2018 until about two weeks ago. And you're right! It does incredible things for discoverability with the built in hydra integration.

I switched to Doom Emacs about two weeks ago because it's built to be more performant and the configuration is meant to be a thinner layer.

Even with spacemacs layers, one has to go hunting on the googles and spend a bunch of time tweaking things if the layer doesn't set things up perfectly out of the box. And it rarely does.

Overall, I think spacemacs and doom emacs are amazing. Huge steps up from the base install. I just think there is a long way to go still.

I don't think Emacs is suitable for mass usage. I think it's suitable for power users who are willing to invest time into learning to use a powerful tool. And I also think more people are becoming power users. With a well-crafted tool, you don't have to be a hacker to be a power user. I think the Superhuman email company is an interesting bet on this trend.

My guess is there are really good abstractions that can be built on top of elisp that let people configure emacs to be a powerful tool that fits their workflow like a glove, and doesn't require them to learn elisp or package internals.

Emacs.

I'm responding to the prompt in the OP, not the title.

> What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?

Emacs is the most essential piece of software in my workflow. It's probably not the worst, but it's the one where I see the most room for improvement. I lean heavily on org-mode for tracking what I'm working on, it's like my command center. I keep two emacs frames open at all times, one dedicated to org-mode.

Supported by an assortment of magical packages like helm, projectile and magit, I write code and anything else more efficiently than any other editor I've used. I was a vim user for ~5 years, and now use evil mode for modal editing in emacs.

So yeah, my opinion is that emacs is the best editor out there. But honestly it takes too much time to configure and maintain. I spend that time, because I don't feel like taking the productivity hit that I would by switching to another editor, but I wish I didn't have to.

I have a vision for a SaaS app that hosts my emacs config and provides me a nice graphical, discoverable interface for managing my configuration. It would have simple, intuitive flows for setting up the essential packages. Like maybe I could scroll through a list of the most popular packages (helm, projectile, hydra, magit, etc), and click to install.

The current state of the art in managing emacs config is googling the name of the package you are trying to configure, and trying to find someone's blog or github from which to copy/paste code from. There has to be a better way.

Hah! Thanks