Trying out Emacs, first thoughts, I hate my life.
For a long time, I used neovim as my text editor. Although I liked it, I still was in the search of finding new text editors to do more and Emacs is quite popular around Linux community. And I tried to switch knowing that I do a lot of things that I could integrate with my Emacs workflow, but I failed 3 consecutive times. That being said, right now I am writing this blog on Org-Mode, in Emacs, with my over 600 lines of init.org file, and apparently, the font which I use to render my org-mode texts doesn't support italic texts, how fun!
Anyways, let's talk about real problems and my thoughts about Emacs as a novice user.
Emacs is not for the weak, nor the sane.
I told myself oh so many times that I didn't need to switch to a new text editor, and I still stand corrected by my opinion because neovim or even micro (which I love) did their jobs. And they were great.
One thing you should understand is Emacs is not a text editor, yes, it contradicts the definition of Emacs, I know, but Emacs is not a text editor as in a way that vim, vs-code or micro/nano is. Emacs is a suite, way bigger then an IDE, way bigger then Ulysses or any other text editor.
But, one thing you definitely know is that it is not for a lot of people. This is simply due to the fact that Emacs requires you to build your own highly-customized text editor. And it takes a lot of time, and you need to learn a new programming language called emacs-lisp (or elisp) and learn bunch of keyboard shortcuts (and create bunch of them too) and then find out there is another mode (org-mode, for example) exists and you need to learn another one hundred new keybindings, just to configure them again and again, which takes hours.
There is no need to go through this unless you are either (A) really uncomfortable with other options or they bother you, (B) you are an hobbyist or (C) you want an integrated system and have a surplus amounts of time. I am sure that other options are available but the reality is I think that you can boil down all reasons to these three categories.
For example, I spent over 10 hours (for reference, that is nearly equal to my Anki French deck time, which I simply learned 1050 words in 11 hours) and have a 650 line configuration file, and I am not nearly done. I still haven't fully configured Org-Mode, Org-Roam, Org-Drill and so much more.
This being said, if done correctly, Emacs can be your second (or even first) brain.
My workflow vision
Ultimately, I want Emacs to be a tool like Notion + Obsidian + Anki + IAWriter + Feedly and some more things that I don't know if I can do them yet.
And the good thing is, it is doable and it makes me insanely happy. Today, I joined my Mandarin class with my current Emacs setup (which is not done, btw.) and I felt like a god. First of all, I made tables of the words that I didn't knew and wrote their meanings, and I also have the choice of making them to flashcards once I set up org-drill, and I also can export my notes to HTML (which looks gorgeous) or Markdown, and I also noted my homework as TODO and gave it a deadline just in one place. And now, every time I open Emacs, on my dashboard, I see my weekly agenda, my TODO's and my homework.
This is just one workflow that I can utilize Emacs in. I can also:
- Take notes while reading a book.
- Take my face-to-face classes' notes.
- Code, really efficiently and like a book with Org-Mode and tangling (which I actually started using with my init.org file)
- Check my e-mail, or read my rss feed while quickly creating notes from them (still in development since I'm still learning org-mode)
I don't want to configure the heck out of Emacs because in terms of knowledge of the actual program I am still really, really an inexpert. I can't know what to configure if I don't know how to use a program or what even bothers me- so I would like to take it slow from now on since I have an usable configuration.
One tool for all: Is it a great thing or a bad thing?
I would like to say Emacs made me productive in a way that everything is so much integrated and really customized but it made me a less productive person because of two reasons; The first one is well, it took hours and hours to create a configuration file, then I needed to rewrite it over again, and I still have some bits that won't work correctly like they're supposed to do, as expected, like which-key.el. The second one is since I am at home and writing all the time lately, whether it is writing in general, blogging, note taking or coding, I am looking at a damn screen all the time. And doing these things in the same app is really boring.
The side benefit of this is I take frequent breaks now. Because I am getting so bored of looking at the same GUI, same theme.
Will I be using it forever? Will I use other apps?
Like I said, this is still a question that will given an answer with time. I give Emacs 1 month. I can postpone the end of these one month as much as I would like to and I can say I have at least 6 months so play around with it.
That being said, I am considering other apps because I need access to my (for example) notes from multiple devices and multiple places.
Conclusion and a formal closing (idk & idc <3)
I would like to thank you for listening -or reading- to me yapping about things. I am ~1 week into this hole and I think I am going to have so much fun while doing this.
As always, love those 4 people who read my blog posts (why?) and see you soon!