I talk with Joshua Blais about Emacs and life issues

2026-03-05

Raw link: YouTube OR Internet Archive

I had a ~2-hour chat with Joshua Blais, a fellow Emacs user, over at the @JoshuaBlais YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JoshuaBlais. We covered Emacs at length and also talked about general life issues.

The first topic we cover is how to place constraints on yourself in order to avoid backsliding into bad habits. This ties in to the themes of discipline and productivity that we discuss in some further length.

Joshua asks me how I got into Emacs and how I started writing/maintaining packages for it. We talk about how Emacs provides for an integrated computing experience. Learning Emacs Lisp allows you to have better control of Emacs.

In this light we comment on Guix and how it is also configurable in a dialect of Lisp. Joshua is using Nix and I learn more about that experience.

Coming back to Emacs, we comment on its relationship to the Unix philosophy. I think Emacs is compatible with Unix. Though my main point is how Emacs empowers us to use the computer in a productive way. It augments the experience.

Simple living and financial independence is another topic we cover. Joshua wants to know how I approach this issue. I explain how it is a matter of controlling your wants. Figure out what the parts of your lifestyle that you would not sacrifice. Then you know how much money you need for that lifestyle.

Joshua makes a connection of the simple life to Emacs and Unix tools. I comment on that as well. Once you start using Emacs and friends, you learn to appreciate the essentials. This you can then apply to other parts of your life.

We move to note-taking, where I comment about Denote. I explain how it is a file-naming scheme, which can also be used to write notes. What matters is how well we can retrieve information. Joshua explains how pen and paper helps him express his thoughts.

Learning on your own is our next point. Being an autodidact myself, I comment how it empowers you. You are able to have initiative and be more independent.

We then explore how things have infinite depth. This is how everything in the world is connected. This also relates to the point about the simple living, since you can have relatively few things that you keep understanding in depth.

Joshua asks me about discipline. This is a capacity we can build up. I give some examples.

Next on our list are mechanical keyboards. Joshua and I are using a split keyboard.

Then we explore the theme of using tools the right way. One example is the Internet as a whole. Another is with LLMs. It helps to know “why am I doing this”, as then you can understand when you are meeting your goals and when you are moving away from them. We explore this in further depth.

I comment on a common mistake we make where we think that the complex must be sophisticated and profound. Whereas there is profundity in simplicity.

We connect the dots through all these as we wrap things up.

Thanks to Joshua Blais for this chat. I had a good time and wish him all the best!