You can possibly learn some new setting you can add to your own flow.

My config is loaded with things from posts like these.

That's their value.

I mean, I get what you're saying. There's an element of that with Emacs and super bespoke setups in general, of course.

But also, consider this: maybe they just have very specific, unusual needs that you're unable to relate to because they're very different from your lived experience. I'm not saying this as a criticism. I feel like most people struggle to comprehend just how different someone else's lived experience can be from their own. I certainly do. Usually, when I read these emacs setup blog posts, I'll dislike most of their setup, but often there will be some nugget in there I'll absolutely love, and then I might add that nugget to my init.org.

Let me try to explain my singular point of view. I have very severe ADHD-C, and GUIs always felt horrible for me to use. Especially big complex GUIs. Things like MS Office, Photoshop, big IDEs etc.

Why? Multiple things:

1. Visual processing:

ADHD can include strange visual processing or spatial reasoning problems. It's very hard for me to describe this one in a detailed manner, but suffice it to say, Icons don't make sense to me. Text does. I am capable of learning some icons, certainly, but certain ones never stick. For example, the protonmail web client has the reply and forward button displayed as arrows pointing in opposite directions, I always click the wrong one. Every time. And everytime I'm positive it's the right one and click it immediately. As I'm sitting here now, looking at an HN textbox, I can reason my way into understanding that to the western mind things flow from left to right, and so left should be reply and right should be forward. But when I'm actually there wanting to reply to an email, I hit forward every time without thinking. If on the other hand the buttons just said "reply" and "forward", this wouldn't happen. I can't explain it even to myself really. That's just how my brain brains.

2. I lose my train of thought extremely easily:

You know how sometimes when you walk into a room, you suddenly forget why you're in there? This supposedly happens to most people occasionally. For me it's more like 15 times a day, not just with rooms, but any sudden sensory transition. Like a pop up window. Ah yes. I'm in some stupid baroque GUI program. I realise I need to change a setting. I locate the settings button from the dropdowns, which every program seems to have in a slightly different place, big settings window pops up covering most of the main window. I immediately forget why I'm in the settings. I try to remember why for half a minute, and fail. I close the settings window and try to remember what I was doing before. 2 minutes later I remember which setting it was. I open the settings. I forget why I opened the settings again. Ok, annoying, but not that big a deal right? Oh but you see opening the settings is just the first roll of the dice. The settings window has 15 different tabs. And some of the tabs have buttons that spawn new sub windows, and even some of the subwindows have tabs(looking at you, Microsoft. What is wrong with you people?!). I call it menu purgatory.

3. Extraneous information distracts me very easily.

This one should be self-explanatory

4. My hand eye coordination is not fantastic, so I often click the wrong thing, which then feeds back into the wrong thing, which then feeds into 2 and 3 again. Keybindings don't require coordination, only muscle memory.

On a bad day, with a shitty piece of software like that, I can spend literally half the day locked in a cognitive battle of attrition with the software instead of getting work done. That's not an exaggeration.

Because I'm so hampered by what to other people is just minor annoyances, I need software that I can configure completely arbitrarily. No change can be off limits. That is almost never the case with GUI software, at least without cloning the source and patching it, figuring out the build system, possibly learning the implementation language. With Lisp software, the config file is really just a hotpatch. And Lisp is my favourite language, so yay. I would prefer Common Lisp, but beggars can't be choosers and Elisp isn't that bad once you learn to avoid the footguns. Certainly better than vimscript, which I've always found incomprehensible.

So that's why my setup is roughly this:

Never use GUIs with the exception of Firefox(I want to use Nyxt but I could never quite get past the learning curve, and there are still key features missing) and occasionally mpv(which is barely a GUI anyway). Everything else, find a good TUI. If you can't find one, find a shitty one for emacs and bend it to your will. This keeps (auto-) defenestration at a minimum.