I mentioned Artist mode two years ago, but I’ve always treated it like a curiosity without too many actual uses. Well, it turns out it proved pretty useful after all (though you might call my case a bit contrived). A few weeks ago I needed to analyze some pretty complicated condition involving several independent Boolean flags. One tool which is quite useful to visualize things like that is a Venn diagram. I didn’t have any piece of paper handy, so I wanted to draw it on my computer. Usually my go-to tool to draw diagrams is TikZ, but my LaTeX skills got a bit rusty over a few years of very seldom use, and besides, I didn’t need anything good-looking, I needed something quick-and-dirty to help me thinking. Well, what could I do? I created a scratch buffer with some random name and fired M-x
artist-mode, grabbed the mouse (it is possible to use Artist mode with a keyboard, but it’s a bit awkward that way), drew three overlapping ellipses and typed the conditions on them. (It helps that it’s still Emacs – a text editor – so putting text on the “picture” is really simple - just place the point where you want it to be and type away.) Is it slightly silly to use Emacs for that instead of actually finding a piece of paper and a pen or pencil? Sure it is. Did it work? Sure it did. What else to ask?