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Howardism

Personal blog · howardism.orgprogrammingproductivity

Howardism is a personal blog at howardism.org about programming and productivity. Since 2014, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 71 times, most often “Literate Devops with Emacs Org-Mode (2014)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-12, and you can follow it by feed.

Visit the blog
71mentions?
53HN people?
2014–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 12 in 2017

Technical notes and essays about Clojure, Emacs, Lisp and the odds and ends of web development.

Most-linked posts?

  1. Literate Devops with Emacs Org-Mode (2014)
    14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2016-04-14
  2. Literate DevOps
    10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2014-12-11
  3. Emacs Is My New Window Manager
    8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-01-21
  4. Literate programming in org-mode
    4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-03-21
  5. Lots of Small Spreadsheets
    3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-01
  6. The Background for CAR and CDR
    3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-12-26
  7. Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell
    2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-23
  8. Org as a Word Processor
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-04-17
  9. /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-02-16
  10. Journaling with org-mode
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-24

What Hacker News says?

  1. ddacunha · 2016-04-14
    I think the down vote is that we see your comment as: "vim & emacs are glorified notepads". At least that is what went thru my head. But they are so much more than a way to type text, with emacs (which I don't grok) I manage my emails archive via gnus/mu/Maildir. Or do "Literal DevOps", check this out for something that still blows my mind with awesomeness: http://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    on “Vim 8.0 is coming”
  2. lelf · 2015-01-21

    Submitted Emacs Is My New Window Manager as a story · 348 points

    HN discussion
  3. taeric · 2017-04-05
    If there are examples you'd like to see written up, I'd be interested in helping out. I used to try complicated examples, which led to pages such as http://taeric.github.io/Sudoku.html . I'm now much more into writeups such as http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.htm... . (Note, I did not write the second one.)

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    on “Jupyter Notebook 5.0”
  4. gpi · 2025-12-05

    Submitted Emacs is my new window manager (2015) as a story · 229 points

    HN discussion
  5. nextos · 2020-10-27
    Yes, there's a great blog post that describes how this functionality is really helpful to manage your life as lots of little spreadsheets [1]. For me that's the true advantage of Org over Markdown. It has timestamps, spreadsheets and links with citations (e.g. a DOI link type). Plus the ability to get programmatic document views using org-agenda. I can manage my whole life in a really minimal and uncomplicated way.…

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/spreadsheet.html

    on “Org Mode's new site”
  6. tmstieff · 2018-03-10

    Submitted Literate Devops with Emacs Org-Mode (2014) as a story · 213 points

    HN discussion
  7. vbernat · 2017-03-09
    As a complement on how to use Org mode for ops: - http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.htm... (Literate DevOps) - https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2017-netops-org-mode ("same" for NetOps, I am the author of this one)

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    on “Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook”
  8. geocar · 2020-08-29

    Submitted Literate DevOps as a story · 174 points

    HN discussion
  9. prakashk · 2017-11-22
    No need for a separate preprocessor. org-mode offers org-babel which enables you to practice "literate programming" to create your init file, where you interleave text and code. Here's are couple of examples: https://github.com/howardabrams/dot-files/blob/master/emacs.... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sachac/.emacs.d/gh-pages/S... Also see: http://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-programming-tu...

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-programming-tutorial.html

    on “A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)”
  10. brudgers · 2017-07-22

    Submitted Eschewing Zshell for Emacs Shell as a story · 168 points

    HN discussion
  11. snaky · 2016-02-15
    Actually you can - http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.... All you need to do is to set up a couple of hotkeys for things that Emacs cannot do (yet), like (start-process "" nil "xdg-open" " http://some.flashy.javascript.website" )

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.html

    on “Why GNU Emacs?”
  12. lelf · 2016-04-17

    Submitted Org as a Word Processor as a story · 144 points

    HN discussion
  13. rgoulter · 2019-10-14
    Related to the process of "write down what you did", I'm reminded of this article about "literate sysadmin/devops" which used Emacs' org-mode as a way of combining prose, commands and command output. http://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    on “How to fuck up software releases”
  14. pmoriarty · 2014-11-23

    Submitted Eschewing Zshell for Emacs as a story · 121 points

    HN discussion
  15. dustfinger · 2019-08-22
    Consider using org-mode [1] as your primary word processor and committing revisions to git. I recommend org-mode because org documents are saved as plain text and therefore can be easily diffed. org-mode can also be exported to many formats [2]. If you are concerned about how the look and feel of writing in plain text might impact your experience authoring a document, there are lots of editor specific tutorials for…

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocessor.html

    on “The Most Dangerous Writing App”
  16. signa11 · 2019-06-17

    Submitted Presenting the Eshell as a story · 98 points

    HN discussion
  17. Quequau · 2019-05-08
    I use it more or less exactly how it was described here: http://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html The only real additions relate to internal tools which we developed for our work (I do sensor development and integration).

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    on “Let's Get Going with Org-Mode”
  18. tosh · 2021-12-26

    Submitted The Background for CAR and CDR as a story · 46 points

    HN discussion
  19. dleslie · 2025-10-01
    I use Emacs' org-mode to do this. Here's an article on how to accomplish this: https://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    on “Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run – Now Open Source”
  20. ivanvas · 2022-09-23

    Submitted Literate DevOps (2014) as a story · 42 points

    HN discussion
  21. Dangeranger · 2017-12-13
    Gary Schwartz[0] and Howard Abrams[1][2] both have nice explainers about org-mode which explain the advantages and how to get started. There's also a nice discussion on the Emacs Reddit page[3] about "Why Org-Mode?" [0] https://harryrschwartz.com/2016/04/29/getting-started-with-o... [1] http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/learning-org-mode.h... [2] http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/journaling-org.html [3…

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/journaling-org.html

    on “NIPS 2017 Notes [pdf]”
  22. Paul-Craft · 2023-08-01

    Submitted Emacs is my new window manager as a story · 13 points

    HN discussion
  23. merraksh · 2015-08-05
    Another Emacs-based window manager ( http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.... ) was featured on HN about 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8922359

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.html

    on “Emacs X Window Manager”
  24. pmoriarty · 2018-12-10

    Submitted Literate programming in org-mode as a story · 7 points

    HN discussion
  25. WhatIsDukkha · 2019-08-11
    I think overall its a mistake to try to over automate this process. It's brittle and the requirements are simply not the same as a server environment that needs to be simple to replicate X versions quickly, repeatedly and frequently. Automation needs fairly constant attention in the order of little tweaks week over week to fight the inevitable mismatch between the automation and the software networks that it interfa…

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    on “Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer?”
  26. pmoriarty · 2020-10-04

    Submitted Death to the Shell as a story · 5 points

    HN discussion
  27. codygman · 2018-03-10
    I use org-mode for work actually. Kind of similar to this but less devops: http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.htm...

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

    on “After over a decade of Vim, I’m hooked on Emacs”
  28. yarapavan · 2016-03-21

    Submitted Introduction to Literate Programming Using Org Mode as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  29. haylem · 2016-11-03
    There's also always this, which I found pretty cool and somewhat functional as well, though it goes beyong the bare "emacs on a kernel" concept: http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.... I one had a VM at a workplace where all I had were outdated hardware specs and outdated versions of Windows with few administrative privileges. It helped to retain some sanity. For some time.

    Comment linking /Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.html

    on “Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel (2004)”
  30. 3rd3 · 2014-12-11

    Submitted Literate DevOps: Babel and org-mode for literate server maintenance as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion

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