jammer

About

jammer is a tool for punishing yourself (or other unsuspecting people) for inefficiently using Emacs.

Installation

Install from Marmalade or MELPA with M-x package-install RET jammer RET.

Usage

Enable it interactively with M-x jammer-mode or by adding the following to your init file:

(jammer-mode)

Customization

jammer comes with the repeat type enabled out of the box which punishes you for repeating keystrokes too quickly. You can customize the base delay (jammer-repeat-delay), the repetition window (jammer-repeat-window), amount of allowed repetitions (jammer-repeat-allowed-repetitions) and most importantly, the type of slowdown (jammer-repeat-type). It can be constant, linear or quadratic, the latter two types increase the delay time depending on the repetition count.

Asides from the repeat type, there's also the option to constantly slow down all events (for input lag emulation) or misfiring and slowing down randomly selected events by a random amount, an effect most comparable to having spilt a small amount of a sticky liquid on your keyboard. These can be enabled by customizing jammer-type.

Finally, one can whitelist or blacklist commands. By default an empty whitelist is used. Adding a command to jammer-block-list in this state of operation will make it exempt to all delays, self-insert-command would be an useful example to allow typing normally, but slowing down other repetitive commands. Changing jammer-block-type to blacklist will change the behaviour to not affecting anything by default. If jammer-block-list were to contain previous-line, next-line, left-char and right-char, slowdowns will only happen for the use of arrow keys for text movement.

Contributing

If you find bugs, have suggestions or any other problems, feel free to report an issue on the issue tracker or hit me up on IRC, I'm always on #emacs. Patches are welcome, too, just fork, work on a separate branch and open a pull request with it.

Alternatives

This package is heavily inspired by vim-molasses which is inspired by vim-hardtime which is inspired by hardmode.

I'm not aware of any Emacs alternatives, but annoying-arrows-mode, hardcore-mode and guru-mode come somewhat close.

Motivation

Some people believe rate-limiting their bad keyboard habits is the way to go. Though, this belief seems to be rather linked to Vim, not Emacs. I intended to find out how hard it is to achieve this goal programmatically, however I've learned about a much more interesting thing, compatibility of post-command sleep with other Emacs packages. If used on its own, the package works surprisingly well, adding extra packages however can make the experience worse.

In other words, this package is not only an elaborate joke, but can be used as test for your own packages hooking into Emacs' command loop, be it by using post-command-hook or using timers for anything more complex than keeping track of your oven. If they behave as expected with it enabled, chances are their handling of input is robust enough.