Ten Years of Emacs

When I first tried Emacs I hated it. Hated it! Compared to Vim, just trying to navigate around felt agonizingly cumbersome: mashing modifier keys, relying so much on my left pinky, firing off random commands by accident. Vim, with its modes, values movement: a lot of programming is jumping around like crazy and shuttling text from one place to another. Writing is not the bottleneck.

And yet I had to admit Emacs had two very cool things: org-mode and magit. I liked magit because it built a powerful UI on top of git without obscuring the underlying commands I was used to. (I’m one of those weird people that actually likes command line git.) Similarly, org-mode built something wildly rich on top of plain text, again without obscuring it too much. Something about the ethos of all this appealed to me.

Emacs values composability. Building rich systems out of simpler parts. Vim is a chainsaw; Emacs is a box of LEGOs which can produce a very dull chainsaw, but also lots of other things. Just watch where you’re walking.

So I started using Emacs and never really stopped. It’s been with me daily at work, my IDE for PureScript, Rails, C#, and now Scala. I use it for reading and writing email, for task tracking, for journaling. There have been periods – usually when I start a job – where I switch to a JetBrains IDE or VS Code until I get my Emacs config up to speed. But the truth is that Emacs can work pretty well wherever VS Code can now, largely thanks to LSP (and, increasingly, tree-sitter).

I’ve gone through several iterations of my config. Currently I’ve switched to using the newer generation of more composable packages that build on top of existing Emacs subsystems: consult, corfu, vertico, orderless, embark. There seems to be a movement in the community lately toward smaller, simpler and more modular packages over comprehensive and monolithic packages like helm.

I still use org-mode and magit every day.

There is something rewarding in picking a tool, sticking with it, and getting to know it better over time, whether it’s Vim, Emacs, IntelliJ, whatever. I suspect I’ll still be using Emacs in next ten years, although I’m sure my day-to-day use will look quite a bit different as more and more text and code gets slung through LLMs. I hope that whatever interface I’m using for this holds to the principle that the best systems are composed of simple, understandable parts.