Sharing my GNU Emacs experience

2022-07-13

Important note

English is not my mother tongue and I always try to write the best I can, if you think I made a grammar mistake please contact me here.

Introduction

I have long time without writing anything, I always wanted to write something but I normally don’t have ideas, I personally don’t like writing stuffs that are already on Internet so my frequency of writing is highly reduced by this. I also write in 3 languages, mainly because my mother tongue is Spanish and I promote the use of Esperanto as second language, it’s hard but I try to do my best.

Now, getting to the point, this post will be so short, I just want to share how my experience used the suite because I never considered GNU [Emacs] (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) as simple editor, from now on I will call it just Emacs for simpler purposes, because I know it was made to be extensible.

Attempts

I have been vi/vim user for long time and I always love it, the main reasons are:

It’s installed by default on almost all the servers I admin.
It’s simpler than emacs and I like to use the simplest as I can.
Syntax colour by default is something I have always liked it.
The way it handles the line change is something I always prefered over nano, for example.

First attempt

The first time I tried Emacs I did it just because I was trying taskwarrior and someone in fosstodon recommended me org-mode. What I did not know was that org-mode is an Emacs extension, so I just installed GNU Emacs to give it a try.

I knew I could use “Evil” mode in Emacs so I could use almost the same vi/vim keybindings on Emacs but I am quite stubborn so I decided to install a Vanilla version and I wanted to learn the Emacs way from the beginning.

I would say the first attempt was a failure and those were mi mistakes:

I installed Emacs but I never used it to edit the files on my work computer, if I don’t use it I will never get use to.
I tried to use org-mode directly. Nothing is impossible and anybody can learn this way but It is a lot of harder.
I never made my best to learn. This is the most important, without the will it’s impossible. I read a couple of pages from “Mastering Emacs” but I didn’t make the effort to really learn.

This just brought me a lot of frustrations because sometimes Emacs opened other frames and I didn’t know how to close them, and It conflicted with my way of working with my Window Manager. I couldn’t use the org-mode properly because the simple “Shift + arrow” didn’t allow me to select my text and It was because I didn’t read the org-mode documentation.

So in the end I just gave up and I stopped using Emacs. I have to admit that I never had a bad opinion about the suite I just was not prepare to use it.

Second attempt

My second attempt could be considered is now, maybe 1 or 2 months ago since I write this post in “2022-07-13”.

This time I decided to change some things, I just reviewed what I did wrong the first time and I decided to try Emacs again. So this time what I did was this:

I use Emacs as much as I can, I still keep vi/vim and I still use it because it is something I do automatically but I try to use Emacs to edit every single file I have on my machine. This has been good because this way I could just get use to the suite.
I started with the basic, I knew I needed to learn to walk first before running, so I decided to use the Vanilla Emacs version. I did not installed extensions, this include org-mode of course, I just used the most vanilla Emacs version I could. This was good because I couldn’t think about using org-mode if I don’t know how to use Emacs first.
I changed the way to learn. Instead of reading books and manuals from Internet I just decided to try and look for specific information. I still consult the “Mastering Emacs” book but only when I don’t remember anything.

Once I could use Emacs properly then I decided to configure it and use it my way and now my sensations are different, I love the suite. I use the Mastodon client while at the same time I just edit a file in other buffer. I installed Magit and I just code and I use git without leaving the suite, I am not a big fan of using a single software for everything, I’d rather use different tools but with Emacs the sensation is pretty different.

What about org-mode? It’s so fucking awesome, I am still a beginner but at least I know what the hell I am doing when I use it. It’s not like in the past that I had to close the org file many times because I pressed the wrong keys and I didn’t know how to get back.

So, what is next?

I still don’t know how to configure my email, I want to do stuffs like this website mentions:

For example, if you are using gnus to read your newsgroups and Org Mode to manage your notes, you can direct a newsgroup article to an Org buffer to annotate it or save it as an inspiration.

I am doing stuffs like copying software recommendations from Fosstodon to my org-mode but I still find gnus so hard to configure and get my emails the way I want, at the moment I will stay in Mutt for while.

I also really want to learn Emacs lisp, I tried some stuffs and I could configure my Emacs but I still haven’t got the time to learn Lisp or Emacs lisp properly and sometimes I don’t what I do, something I personally don’t like anything.

Conclusions

I know Emacs is not an editor for everyone, It requires some time and dedication, there are other Emacs distributions like doomemacs and spacemacs that would fit better with my way of working but for me it’s important to understand how things works as much as possible so I might try those distributions but at the moment I believe the best way to learn Emacs it’s using the vanilla version. I also encourage people to give it a try, at the beginning it can be quite “overwhelming” but once you get use to you will probably love it.

I have to admit I started to like the suite a lot but there are things I didn’t like.

For example, is it necessary to have a Tetris game inside the suite? I don’t know if it’s something that come by default or it’s from distros maintainers but in my opinion it could seem a bit bloated, maybe some extensions have to be by default to make the experience less painful for newbies like me.

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