My First Few Months With Emacs

From Vim Cultist to Emacs Believer

While this experience has been more eloquently documented in other places, I thought I’d collect some thoughts here regardless. Partly because I want to write about it, and partly in the hope that one person sees it who wants to try using Emacs!

Background

I have been a massive fan of Vim, and the terminal, for a few years now. I have a nicely configured .vimrc file, I’ve written custom functions, and even a little plugin to try and get to know my favourite editor a little more. But, as the description of the Doom Emacs framework most aptly puts it;

It is a story as old as time. A stubborn, shell-dwelling, and melodramatic vimmer—envious of the features of modern text editors—spirals into despair before he succumbs to the dark side.

The ‘envious of the features of modern text editors’ part is what really inspired me to try Emacs.

Note: I never really liked the idea of trying Doom. I really want to try and build my own config and understand it a bit more. However, I’ll probably come back to Doom when I feel like I’ve thoroughly made my own config, for other reasons.

First Contact

I started by following along with the brilliant Emacs From Scratch YouTube series by David Wilson. I was already feeling optimistic at this config file:

  (setq inhibit-startup-message t)
  (scroll-bar-mode -1)
  (tool-bar-mode -1)
  (tooltip-mode -1)
  (set-fringe-mode 10)
  (menu-bar-mode -1)

And I was almost fully invested in giving Emacs a serious go when I realised how few lines of Elisp is enough to get started with Evil Mode!

I had thought of Emacs as being a really far-away thing for some reason; something reserved for only those who had understanding or dedication to make it work for them. I was put off by the key-bindings, the UI, leaving the terminal, and more. But the more I started to dig into it, the more I realised it is what most people who use the terminal are looking for. This is when I moved from ‘making Emacs enough like vim to work for me’ to ‘wait, we don’t have that in vim…’.

Org Mode is great

Prior to playing with Emacs, I’d heard of two ‘killer packages’: the amazing Magit (git porcelain) and Org Mode. While I think both are great, org-mode, for me, is one of the best things about using Emacs.

org-babel-tangle allows you to write org-files (markdown-like documents) and tangle all the blocks of code to various files. Within a few weeks, I’d rewritten almost all of my config files, literately, and pushed them all to the same repo.

Then there’s the power of org-agenda. It’s great! See a list of all your upcoming tasks, let Emacs look in multiple folders for org-files to add to your todo-list. It’s hard to explain why it’s so good if you’ve not used it, but it’s such a good way of noting things down.

Agenda really shines with org-capture: enter a custom series of keys to capture a piece of org-text that can be templated in very complicated and useful ways. For example, I’ve been maintaining a personal journal.org file. I hit SPC c to bring up the capture menu, then j to select a journal capture. I the write a piece of org-text and upon Ctrl-C Ctrl-C (a very common binding in Emacs to confirm or run things) it gets inserted into the journal.org file under the year, month, date; like this:

* Year
** Month
*** Date
**** Timestamp
     This is an entry!

I initially synced my collection of org documents with OneDrive, but I’ve stopped that. The beauty of them being small text files is that I can just sync them with scripts and other simple solutions. I use Syncthing now, mainly, running on a server so I can connect it to my phone too (using Orgzly to get notified of events and create new ones).

Thoughts on Vim

At the moment, I’m at a strange place with Vim.

There’s a famous saying about Emacs:

Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor.

This quote has actually made me realise that whilst I love the extensibility of Vim, the core component I really love is the modal editing. It’s actually quite a relief to know that this modal editing can be so successful in editing software other than the original, such as in Emacs with Evil Mode.

Emacs really is a great combination for Vim users because the extensibility is there too. But it makes me less concerned about trying more VSCode and JetBrains Vim plugins in the future.

Another Similarity of Emacs/Term Stuff

In my first few weeks of hype around Emacs, I decided that I would be conservative about what I would and would not ask of Emacs. For example, managing mail (although I had previously used Neomutt) is something, I told myself, that was too much for me to bother to do with Emacs. However, as I get deeper and deeper into Emacs, I’m finding it harder to stick to said boundaries I’ve set.

I was initially surprised by this, but actually realised that it’s similar with vim-like things for the terminal. When I first discovered the command line, I think I set myself the ‘line’ of not using it for file management. But tools like Ranger or fff have given me pause to reconsider that line, and I’ve used them quite extensively. I think it’s just a side effect of them being so extensible.

Conclusion

This post is a bit all over the place but, contrary to this, I’m feeling quite clear about where I want to go next with my Emacs journey.

I’m working on using Eshell and Dired a bit more, trying to get more language understanding, and trying to dive even further into Org. I will probably post a follow-up to this at some point, maybe at a year after using Emacs.