Engineering For the Love of It

Isomatter Laboratories (isomatter::labs) is an initiative to build things from the ground up, without assuming the most common practice, or the current industry practice.

Is this the most efficient way? Absolutely not.

It does, however, give an opportunity to look at problems from a new angle, and see if there is new life in old ideas, or a hidden gem of an idea in a wild tangent.

The majority of the projects built by isomatter::labs are cyber-mechanical systems, with a particular emphasis on robotics. This is unabashedly a result of personal interest and excitement. In addition, however, there are things like the Anisochromatic family of themes, or the Starmacs Emacs distribution.

Every design made at isomatter::labs is free, for any usage, forever.

Go out there and break some stuff.

Editors and IDEs

Introduction: The Pondering I’ve been doing my traditional semi-annual pondering of my tooling, and I’ve noticed that I’m going round and round on the same subjects: IDEs are a Good Idea, at their core Text Editors are a Better Solution to editing Language tooling ≫ third-party tooling The mouse is not the problem (menus are) IDEs are a Good Idea This thought mostly comes from thinking about Smalltalk1, and how much it got right.
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Same Bean, Different Burrito

It’s all just composability, do what you want The Editor(s) of a Lifetime I first started using Emacs in 2008, as a 12 year old. At the time, my reasoning was simple: I didn’t want to figure out Vim modes. I had just gotten into Linux for the first time, and was overwhelmed with excitement. I learned the basic movement commands, and I learned to save and open files, but other than that, I mostly used it like Microsoft Notepad.
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