Have you seen the Hyperbole prompt (C-h h)? It's somewhat baroque or at least terse. I associate the style with "classic" packages such as ido—it just takes one line in the minibuffer:

Hy7.1.3>   Act   Butfile/   Cust/   Doc/   Ebut/   Find/   Gbut/   Hist   Ibut/   Kotl/   Msg/   Rolo/   Screen/   Win/

Now there's two ways you could react to seeing this.

Panic. Don't understand. Quit for now, to pick it up later (probably never).

Or—

Huh. Lots of concepts I've never seen before! What could they mean? What the hell is Ebut? Ibut? Rolo? Someone must've thought they're worth the space they take in this tight prompt – soon the secrets will be mine! C-h i d m hyperbole RET

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Once in the manual, us youth zoom past things too much. Look at the introduction. This software was first copyrighted in 1989! That predates Fallout 2. The Berlin Wall stood, and there was no Web—even Netscape Navigator lay in the future.

If not all manuals, then at least this manual should be treated like sitting down to watch a good movie. You know that contentedness when everything is ready, you have your hand in a fresh batch of popcorn—

—don't immediately go about filtering for the relevant—

—you don't know what info you need so how should you filter anyway—

—take it slow. Relax your shoulders. Enjoy the intro, the license statement, the acknowledgements. The part about dead mentors who inspired the devs. The part about dedicating KOutliner to Bob Weiner's wife Kathy.

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This way of reading an #emacs manual… You don't need to be here, learning any of this in the first place. Why not treat it as the leisure it is and enjoy every step?

If you were watching a movie and got stressed, wanted to skip ahead, the people I know would say you'd better just turn off the movie – it isn't doing for you what it's supposed to do. Same situation here. If you feel the need to skip ahead in a manual, you may as well skip away from the laptop instead.

#tech

People have strong opinions about tabs. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39428409

Vertical tabs? Horizontal tabs? Both camps find the other incomprehensible. Maybe both are making a valid observation when they react that way to each other!

Having used the following design a while, it feels better in every way:

• Hide the tab bar (you can still cycle tabs with hotkey Ctrl+Tab)
• (Optional) Get an extension such as Tab List Button
  • You won't need it as often as you think – I forgot I had it for months. But it's there when you want some sort of overview.
  • Alternative: a tab sidebar that auto-hides. I don't recommend it unless you're already addicted to vertical tabs.

Why do the tabs need to be visible all the time? It's like saying the Start Menu should be constantly open.

I like seeing urls containing e.g. /news/america/, inferring the logic, then manually setting it to /news/europe/. If that URL exists, this method is much faster than to spend up to a minute navigating their website, and it is so relaxing – zero frustration incurred! Zero eyeball time on ads.

Sometimes, a website can offer no better interface than predictable URLs.

Sometimes I want to send myself a link between devices, but I have to stop and think how to do that. (Do I email myself? Will the Share button even allow—ugh.) If the URL is short, I can just type it and let my logistics subagent keep napping.

What links here

• Permanent page ID

Should I have four characters or five, for the page IDs on this homepage?

• Four is a namespace of 194,481 permutations
• Five is a namespace of 4,084,101 permutations

I could have had four characters. I tried it for a while, but as soon as I was going to post a link to a big website, my stomach turned. What if I'll have to migrate to five in the future?

See, with four, I had only had about 12 collisions for my first 3,000 IDs. That's fine, it's no effort to renew so few duplicates. But the more IDs you generate, the more often you will get duplicates, as you exhaust the namespace.

We software people know the value of overprovisioning a namespace. Lessons from IPv4 and such fiascos. It's hard to predict how much you will need.

My rate of ID generation by <2024-Feb-19> was such that I expected to make no more than 20,000 IDs over my lifetime, but what if I decide to assign an ID to every subheading inside every page? Then it'd jump to perhaps 60,000. At that point, every third new ID will be a duplicate. And what if I decide something else crazy?

So.. five it is.

What links here

• Permanent page ID