thecleanduck

tl:dr I have finally matured enough to say that I'm in love with (mostly) vanilla emacs. And I can't believe my peers didn't force me to learn this properly sooner.

I've used vim/neovim for about a decade. I have spent countless hours adding/removing/writing plugins, tinkering with the config, etc. I was never fully happy with it, but I was content knowing that my vim motions worked very well in most programs and within my editor, and the way I worked tends to look like wizardry to the rest of my team who are still stuck relying on their VSCode, trackpads/mouse etc.

I tried many times to get into emacs. I used doom emacs, spacemacs, just evil mode etc etc. Every time I tried I got frustrated and quicky quit. I even tried going deep into org mode because that's what everybody ever talks about, but it didn't stick.

However, recently I got fed up with my environment in general. Not just vim, but everything. I got fed up of zellij and struggled relearning tmux. I got fed up with fish and zsh and alacritty and kitty and all of the linux ricing nonsense. In particular, I got fed up with having my work laptop be a crappy version of my personal one because I don't have the discipline to commit, push and pull my dotfiles over 10 different apps so that it works in all my machines (I've tried stow, chezmoi and others - I'm just too lazy or too stupid - or both).

I'm also fed up of browsers. I know we can't live without them, and V8 and co are probably engineering marvels, but the fact that the browser is neither a document renderer nor a distributed application runtime, but a mishmash of both just hurts my soul (and let's not talk about privacy and security).

And then I got fed up of my languages. Nothing much wrong with Go, but nothing much exciting about it either, but lord help me if I have to compile a Rust program. Let's not talk about npm crap show that's now even infected pypi. And finally there's lua. Lua is a great language. But it just never clicked with me when writing plugins for neovim.

And then there was lisp. I love lisp. And for years I've kept asking myself, can I replace everything with lisp? And for whatever reason it never occurred to me that this was the main reason to go with emacs. I just needed to learn how to use emacs better. And it turns out, every single thing I got fed up with... emacs solves, and it solves it beautifully. I guess only now am I mature enough to realise that.

All this massive rant just to say, I bought Mastering Emacs by Mickey Petersen and I've been sticking with emacs from vanilla. I wrote every single line in my emacs init.el and it's only about 252 lines long at the time of writing. No evil mode, no spacemacs or doom, just as vanilla as I possibly can (emacs 30 anyway). It's week 2, and as I was writing some code and running some eshell commands I kept feeling more comfortable with remembering the motions and commands and keybindings, and it felt great. I don't think I'll ever leave emacs anymore. I've just touched the tip of the iceberg, and I'm now addicted. (p.s. I'm writing this in my browser , I know - the horror. I haven't had time to set everything up in emacs yet, but I look forward to writing these, and more, in my emacs client)