My emacs config

The joke is as old as emacs: it’s great software, if only it had a good text editor. For my use-cases so far, emacs is an easily hackable, programming-first, keyboard-first, desktop replacement. I can drop in my init.el file and get started on a new machine right away. I keep the personalised keybindings to a minimum to make sure I can also use any version of emacs. Instead I focus on lightly customising other aspects like search and a variety of modes.

Like in vim/neovim, the keyboard-first workflow is especially nice when you spend a lot of your time staring at text files and having to jump around in folder structures.

In general, I would describe my workflow as basic: generic coding tasks, like writing source code, editing config files, whether they be .csv, .lua, .yaml, or .toml. Sometimes I’ll use eww, emacs’ web browser to check documentation that I already know and just need to consult without switching environments. I also use it to write this website!

I like emacs for several reasons:

• I like tinkering with the sotfware I use, and emacs is endlessly hackable. There’s something nice about making software your own.
• It allows me to keep a consistent workflow across machines and OSes. Like I said earlier, on most machines I can install emacs, download my init.el and get going with minimal friction.
• Especially on Linux, it feels very fast.
• It’s amazing that we still have truly free software, and if we don’t use it (and support it) we’ll lose it.
• Bragging that I use emacs.

One of my family members has been a professional software engineer and overall computer nerd for several decades more than me. I was telling them about my first software engineering job and complaining that my editor of choice, Atom, was being sunsetted. They laughed and said if I wanted to be taken seriously I should use a real text editor. I asked about vim and emacs and they said “emacs obviously.” So there you have it, this is how new emacs converts are created: family pressure. Several years later I was showing them my emacs config and they tried using vim keybindings. They again laughed and said if I wanted to be taken seriously I should use vim.

After that family member recommend I learn to use emacs, I asked how to learn since it looked daunting. They said that you really needed to have someone to show you the ropes. Undeterred, and without much help, I started with the built-in tutorial, watched videos on youtube (special mention to System Crafters), read a book (Mastering Emacs), and struggled my way there. The way I approached it was to learn the movement keys first (C-n, C-p, C-f, C-b), and then progressively add commands. If I found myself using M-x to search for a command often, I would add a keybinding for it. After the first few months, I didn’t need to use the mouse anymore, but I still learn new keybindings almost every week.

In no particular order, some of my favorite things:

• Magit
• Rectangle selection (especially for quickly editing .csv files in csv-mode)
• Playing with colors
• Easy to jump around code between dired and the text editor
• The buffer system and organising your screen
• Saving a nice macro and watching the magic happen