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The Emacs Problem (2005)

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16 pointsJtsummers8 comments

I went from being indifferent to emacs to becoming a hater (just because of the fan club which can get a bit annoying) to actually using emacs and loving it so much that I almost became a part of the same annoying fan club.

There's a certain elegance to emacs that takes a while to get used to but when you do, it just transforms the way you do most things on your computer. Just goes on to show RMS's genius.

I was a vi person, then I tried Emacs, then I went full-Emacs (even for email, and sometimes Web), and released some of my extensions.[1]

Then I decided to try to be in less of an Emacs OS, and intentionally moved things like email out of it, even though the non-Emacs stuff in some ways didn't work as well.

Lately, I've been moving some new things to Emacs, like calendar/todo, and it's much more effective than the GUI tools I had going for that. I'm tempted to move email back, as well (but will probably write a new MUA instead, in Rust or Scheme).

[1] https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/

How does it treat people with rsi? Out of hopes of avoiding rsi, I was considering choosing vim over emacs

You might consider evil/evil-collection/spacemacs to get vim modal editing (and keybinds) in Emacs.

Check out spacemacs

I’d suggest dealing with the issue further back, at the hardware level, with an ergonomic keyboard. Get one with “thumb-islands” and you’re set!

> Lisp still doesn't seem like the right language for doing text manipulation, and nothing I've seen from the Emacs libraries is making me think any differently. It sure beats the hell out of Java though. Maybe someday someone will write Emacs using Ruby as the embedded interpreter.

And in time, this came true, except with Javascript. VSCode is an amazing hackable editor

... is that emacs is an old OS in dire need of a good text editor?

;)

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