Kai Lentit
14 HN mentions · mentioned in 10 months, 2023–2026
8:50 · 1.7M views · Jun 10, 2023
Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodies a retro documentary interview with an Emacs enthusiast, joking about Emacs's endless configuration and devotion.
Shared as a joke whenever Emacs obsession and configuration come up.
14 comments from Hacker News
>Functional + universal data structure + homoiconic = power >It everything used TSV or tabular data, But is not the case. With lisp you can always be sure. basic unix kit is built around line-separated lines which are field-separated and you even get to choose your own separators and not get locked into tab. You can use this kitset, a common one, or other different kit. But with this kitset, yes, everything is indeed a table Re: emacs this video
I knew mentioning EMACS would get the HN crowd riled up, that's the point. :) For laughs: Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023: this video And to keep things fair and balanced, an Interview with a VIM Enthusiast: [LINK] "I actually wrote a vim versus IDE comparison. Do you know how much faster vim was? 4.3 seconds! 4.3 seconds I saved every day! All those months learning were totally worth it."
I've been a fan of Kai Lentit ever since he accurately portrayed me (Emerald McS. et al, PhD) in my office at the University of Texas Instruments a while ago. [ this video ] The sad thing is a) TI had an amazing LISP team in the 70s and 80s and b) while Emacs users are perhaps not that weird, we do get a little excited about the cool things we can do with our TEXT EDITOR .
I think Emacs definitely has a certain uncool vibe about it. Like, this comedy video from "Programmers are also human" sums it up pretty well: this video . And I think this mental image would have to give way for Emacs to become more popular. Now whether or not popularity for popularities sake is a good thing is another question.
I'm basically this guy once I sit down at the computer. this video So I've invested more times in Emacs than I'll probably ever get back in timing savings from ripgrep'ing through my notes. However, they're nice to have when I need them.