There are a lot of ideas that I run across in my daily life that I find interesting. This is a place for me to write them down and later share them with the world.

Zed Text Editor

https://zed.dev/ This was an episode of the source graph podcast talking with the author of tree-sitter, a library for incrementally parsing code. He and two others are now working on a text editor in Rust called Zed. I’m actually pretty interested in using it because it promises to never block the UI - which is a frustration I’ve often had to deal with while using emacs. They are also planning to use CRDTs to represent buffers to enable real-time collaboration. There’s no release yet, so I can’t judge how well these ideas have been implemented, but I’ve signed up to get an email when more details are available.

Brandon Sanderson’s Announcement

First off, go watch this video if you’re at all interested in Brandon Sanderson’s writing. If you haven’t read any of his stuff, then I’d recommend it if you’re a fan of epic fantasy.

Open this once you’ve seen the video.

For context, I went into this video worried something was terribly wrong - then annoyed at Brandon for the fakeout, and finally stupified by the ridiculous amount of books he had written. 5 novels! On top his yearly releases! The man is some sort of writing machine, I swear. Most people are proud to get one book done, let alone 5… I can’t wait to read them.

What’s really fascinating is how successful his Kickstarter has been. It was a matter of minutes before it reached the one million dollar goal, and at this point it’s over $25 million. That makes it the biggest crowdfunding campaign ever on Kickstarter, surpassing the pebble smart watch. That’s insane.

If I had to pin this on a single reason (I don’t have to but I will) it would be consistency. Sanderson consistently delivers stories that are good (even if they aren’t necessarily masterpieces), and consistently gets these books out to fans. He’s consistently communicated his current status to fans. Because Sanderson has been so consistent, he’s trusted by customers. Enough so that they’ll put down $500 on one of his products sight unseen. I’d probably be among those if my financial situation were a bit more stable.

It’s both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring, because Sanderson is able to do so much while remaining dedicated to his craft. Depressing because consistently delivering on something is super difficult for me. Right now I’m ready to believe I can make something great. I just have to start building an audience.

Emacs and Org Mode

Now that I’ve figured out how to use org mode and gotten emacs set up to handle email and rss feeds… I would say I’m hooked. I can see why some people swear by it. Using Doom Emacs is great, but also annoying because the instructions for normal Emacs don’t usually fit. But then, I think this is inherent to community projects with loose organization, like Emacs and Linux.

Org mode is super powerful. To me, it feels like a supercharged office suite. It doesn’t have the styling elements that other office suites have, but that’s a plus in my mind. When I’m writing, I want the focus to be on the text and not on the look. I’m sure there are ways to style things though.

I’m tempted to switch all of my (nearly nonexistent) time keeping and scheduling to using Org agenda. Then syncing it with my phone with Syncthing. I’ll probably be doing that by this time next week if my current rate of Emacs adoption keeps up. It’ll be bad if it does though, because I have other things I need to do.