Danger of diversions in Emacs

Emacs is so delightfully extensible it can easily be a Will-o’-the-wisp in a situations like this morning:

Editing my “journal.2020.org” file as I do every day, I decided to finally remove the inconvenience of moving my fingers to the arrow keys to promote/demote structures. First I thought, “I’m just going to add this to my org-mode hydra so that I invoke it with C-c o and then hit [ or ] to change the heading level.” I did this and realized that C-c o was nearly as bad as moving my hands to the arrow keys, so I decided to just bind the keys to C-[ and C-]. Easy, peasy; no big deal, right? Then, with a result I still don’t fully understand (but is equivalent to having my fingers broken), the emacs fundamentally critical ALT (M-) key ceased to work. So I removed the package tweak, sought an explanation online for just what happened, and got back to my journaling. Easy peasy; just 40 minutes of code-and-query, catastrophic failure, and frantic recovery.

Mastering emacs requires curiosity, quickness to learn, and ability to bounce back from problems. Becoming a grandmaster means mastering discipline: knowing when to say “not now” to “one more tweak.” This morning showed why I’m not there yet.