sqrtminusone.github.io/org/2023-04-14-emacs.org

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#+TITLE: 900 days of Emacs
#+DATE: 2023-02-02
#+HUGO_TAGS: emacs
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Poof I made my free-time disappear
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@@html:<p class="quote-title">- <a href="https://elken.dev">Ellis Kenyő</a>, on being called an "elisp mage"@@

Little did I know when on the fateful day of *[2020-10-09 Fri]* I had installed [[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/][GNU Emacs]]. I wasn't thinking about the [[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html][ethical aspects]] of free software, [[https://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/44][aesthetics of Lisp]], or these other things with which an occasional layperson explains to him or herself how an almost [[https://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html][half a century old]] program can still be in [[https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/survey/][active use]].

In fact, when considering using software X for anything, the most important question to me was: can X provide a better user experience? For Emacs, the answer to most of these questions turned out to be yes.

So, over that time, Emacs has become my programming environment, email client, window manager, knowledge base [[https://sqrtminusone.xyz/configs/emacs/][and a lot more]]. I think I ended up using Emacs for almost as many things as possible; I have even authored a few packages that implement certain parts of my workflows that weren't readily available.

Among other things, the Emacs community is responsible for my introduction to [[https://zettelkasten.de/][Zettelkasten]], RSS, Lisps... Perhaps even my English became slightly less broken because Emacs is so text-centered. Indeed, a lot has changed over the course of these short 2.5 years.

Anyway, I am writing this document because I happen to have a lot of data about how I use Emacs, mostly from projects called [[https://activitywatch.net/][ActivityWatch]] and [[https://wakatime.com/][WakaTime]]. So, primarily I am curious myself --- how much time did all of that actually take?

Also, every now and then I see Emacs people discussing their journeys through the Elisp-land, or a potential newcomer wondering whether this rabbit hole is worth investigating. If this applies to you, then you might find something interesting in the structure of my effort.

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Also, I use a lot of JavaScript here, but it's all open source. The only 3rd party library is the MIT-licensed <a href="https://www.chartjs.org/">chart.js</a>. So you need to enable JavaScript if you want to see the charts and some of the numbers that are dynamically calculated.
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* Everything goes into Emacs
It makes sense to begin with the evolution of the place of Emacs in my PC usage. Fig. 1 shows that as a Gantt chart.

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As you can see, I used Neovim for a bit more than a year. We'll get into some numbers on that later.

And it took me about 13 months to move from knowing nothing about Emacs to using EXWM.

Fig. 2 shows the dynamics of the direct screen time ratio spent in Emacs per each month, i.e. how many non-AFK seconds the Emacs window was active on average.

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It's hard to distinguish any general trend here. It seems like the ratio started at 0.2 in October 2020, was oscillating around 0.3 for about 7 months, then moved closer to 0.4 until January 2023, after which jumped to 0.45-0.5.

The three peaks in September 2021 (0.526), January 2022 (0.532) and August 2022 (0.568) may match my vacations, in which I didn't have to spend time in Chrome DevTools (I do web development as my "main" job), but I'm not sure about that.

The jump is January 2023 definitely matches my adoption of [[https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el][telega.el]] instead of the official desktop client. The time redistributes rather cleanly in the detailed ActivityWatch data.

It's also interesting that switch from [[https://i3wm.org/][i3]] to [[https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm][EXWM]] didn't seem to have any particularly distinguishable effects.

The mean Emacs screen time ratios are 0.39 since October 2020 and 0.47 since January 2023. So... that's a lot.

* Time spent in Emacs
Now let's turn to the structure of time spent in Emacs. Fig. 3 shows how many Emacs-hours per month I spent on what, Fig. 4 shows the same in the stacked form.

Contrary to Fig. 2, the time here is calculated with a 15-minute timeout preference, like [[https://wakatime.com/faq#timeout][it's done in WakaTime]]. For instance, if I do something in a project in Emacs for 10 minutes, then switch to something else for 10 minutes (i.e. no [[https://wakatime.com/developers/#heartbeats][heartbeats]] in that time), then switch back to the project for 10 more minutes, this will be accounted as 30 minutes in that project.

This is mostly so because that's the default format of the [[https://wakatime.com/faq#exporting][WakaTime export]], but I also think that's reasonable, because I may open package documentation during configuration, experiment in scratch buffers while working on a package, etc. This time really has to be included in the final tally.

Of course, this will also include all the times I was distracted to the [[https://wiki.systemcrafters.net/community/chat-with-us/][System Crafters]] Discord server, [[https://emacs.ch/][emacs.ch]] (a Mastodon instance), or whatever else. So treat the numbers below as an upper bound.

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The categories are as follows:

- *Config* (@@html:<span data-num="config_hours_total">[REDACTED]</span>@@ total hours, @@html:<span data-num="config_hours_percent">[REDACTED]</span>@@% of all time)\\
  Time spent on the actual Emacs configuration.
- *Emacs Packages* (@@html:<span data-num="package_hours_total">[REDACTED]</span>@@ total hours, @@html:<span data-num="package_hours_percent">[REDACTED]</span>@@% of all time)\\
  Time spent in other Emacs Lisp files, i.e. writing my packages or debugging other packages. See the packages section.
- *Org Mode* (@@html:<span data-num="orgmode_hours_total">[REDACTED]</span>@@ total hours, @@html:<span data-num="orgmode_hours_percent">[REDACTED]</span>@@% of all time)\\
  Time spent in my =org-mode= project, which is mostly [[https://github.com/bastibe/org-journal][org-journal]], [[https://www.orgroam.com/][org-roam]] and project management. By the way, guess the month in which I read [[https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/takesmartnotes][Sönke Ahrens' book]] about Zettelkasten.
- *sqrtminusone.xyz* (@@html:<span data-num="sqrt_hours_total">[REDACTED]</span>@@ total hours, @@html:<span data-num="sqrt_hours_percent">[REDACTED]</span>@@% of all time)\\
  Time spent doing something with this strage website.
- *Other Code* (@@html:<span data-num="other_code_hours_total">[REDACTED]</span>@@ total hours, @@html:<span data-num="other_code_hours_percent">[REDACTED]</span>@@% of all time)\\
  Doing something marginally useful in Emacs, which is mostly work, education and a few personal projects that aren't related to Emacs.
- *Misc* (@@html:<span data-num="misc_hours_total">[REDACTED]</span>@@ total hours, @@html:<span data-num="misc_hours_percent">[REDACTED]</span>@@% of all time)
  Time spent in Emacs but not in an actual project (i.e. accounted by the [[https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-watcher-window][window watcher]] of ActivityWatch but not WakaTime, which watches for projects). These are things like reading RSS, writing emails, using messengers, doing some idle experimentation in scratch buffers, etc.

* Numbers
- Total time on Config:
- Total time on Packages: @@html:<span data-num="package_hours_total">[REDACTED]</span>@@
- % time on Config: @@html:<span data-num="config_hours_percent">[REDACTED]</span>@@
- Hours on =org-journal-tags=: @@html:<span data-num="org-journal-tags_total">[REDACTED]</span>@@
- Total time on Vim config: 39 hours

* Charts

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