I Used Emacs for A Month

Today I talk about the last month with emacs.

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#ramble #emacs #thelinuxcast

[mandos]

I'm a person who uses both NeoVim (for a few years) and Doom Emacs (for half a year) on a daily basis. I separated responsibilities, Vim is for dev work, Emacs for notes, second brain feature (org-roam), task/project management, RSS reader (mostly Org-mode), and for now I'm happy with how it works. I can understand you very well (I have a few frustrating months with vanilla Emacs) and I think a second try with Org-mode is a good idea, there is a lot of features for a person who needs an extensible wiki/second brain/notes system.
ps. I think I will implement some things from Doom Emacs in my Vim configuration, they are neat.

[SerHergen]

I used doom emacs for a half year to realize that I just used it as a text editor. I made the switch to spacevim and have loved ever second of it. I use the gui version of spacevim (gvim) so it is functional the text editor portion of emacs

[slalomsker]

Emacs starts to replace my shell/terminal emulator. It all started with org-mode, continued with magit and got me hooked for good after discovering tramp with sudo!
the kicker is that if the remote file is in a repo I can commit and push with magit through the tramp ssh sudo pipe, run commands like systemctl reload service.
I now have a whole collections of such ssh+sudo bookmarks in my emacs.

[buntun]

major respect for this channel - and thanks for everyone on the comments section very respectful.
I tried out emacs and I found it to be the thing I had been looking for all this time.
I'm a dev and like a unified experience where I can access everything from a few buttons and the screenswitching be seamless.
So I reproduced that using
it was nice I could have all the apps I need run in tmux sessions and easily switch to them when I need

Enter doom emacs, which is vim inside emacs and everything I already use already configured and ready for use.
The learning curve is there but I am always ready to learn.
Now I have everything from a few keystrokes and it feels like an evolved version of my previous workflow.
To anyone who is curious and has not tried emacs, give it a try - you'll realize things you didn't know you would enjoy.

- I have a vimwiki and org-mode does that better.
- I use mu4e for email, waaaay better than mutt.
- Navigating code is so nice, I can jump to definitions and references of every function/variable. Since I'm used to vim, I just use the same old keybindings
- My favorite feature is being able to display all my todos, filter through them and be able to see my schedule.

[outofahat]

A man uses Emacs for a month, this is what happened to his brain

[paulspl]

As someone who uses emacs myself, I think you brought up some very fair points. For someone that doesn't do much editing and likes to stay in the terminal, vim or kakoune are just fine

[GavinFreeborn]

Respect for admitting when something isn't a good fit for you. While I like Emacs as a dev I understand that most don't have a use for Emacs. Especially if you don't have much of a programming background it's pretty hard to take advantage of Emacs. If anything it will overwhelm you. Especially if you are going to use something that includes so much more like spac/doomemacs. I found the hardest thing for people to wrap their head around is not needing the terminal anymore. Often you take advantage of M-&, eshell, and ansi-term/vterm when you really need it. If you don't think it's a good experience for you I get it. Even I took a long time to get comfortable with the experience.

[kenneth_mata]

Reasons to use Emacs :
- Supports Ligatures no questions asked
- Variable font size when previewing Markdown/Org
- Keychords are fun

[BrucesWorldofStuff]

I'm happy with my nano and Xed that is all I need... :-)
Thanks Matt!
LLAP

[ghsinfosec]

I just started trying emacs about a week ago to give it a fair try. I'm a vim user too and so far I'm still unsure how I feel about it. I do like org mode and I could see myself using it for creating video agendas, and writing reports for work, but like you I'm not a developer and I don't know that I'm willing to change my workflow. I'm going to keep experimenting for now, but we will see. It's almost too much.

[AmirHosseinHonardust]

All valid points. Emacs is not just another application to adapt to an existing workflow, rather it is a foundation to base a workflow on. If you don't need that, emacs is probably not a worth it for you. However about the keybindings list, what is wrong with M-x and which-key?

[jeremydoerksen]

Vim key-bindings, everywhere. If I'm anywhere, without Vim key-bindings, I have a panic attack.

[enderger]

Yeah, I think you might want to try using Neovim (as Neovim rather than Vim). The new updates (Lua, LSP, and Tree Sitter) make it an even more powerful editor (in some ways, even more powerful than EMACS if only because it is MUCH faster) than standard Vim (it has projects like Neorg) while still running quite fast and having a decent OOTB workflow.

[beast]

You can definitely keep the org-mode train going with neovim at least! There’s plug-ins and what not.

[ishanagarwal]

I used it for sometime and I just plain don't like lisp. I have moved to 4coder instead.

[nonetrix]

Other criticism is valid mostly but just use window swallowing I just do that and pretend it's a terminal that happens to be very good at GUI for some reason

[noferblatz]

My problem with vimwiki was I couldn't see all the hierarchy of files in the wiki. With zim, I can see all the hierarchy of files off on the left. How do you handle this?

[glsek]

Well first of all gui emacs is the most complete version but from what I hear you could use it in terminal and you wouldn't miss much. I use both vim and emacs and I think that as a fast editor vim is better but with emacs you can build nice IDE straight out of the box while in vim you need some plugins for that.

[fatbeard]

Hope you had a Great Thanksgiving. Honestly yeah I want to eventually make something for the Linux Community, but for now I'm just an average daily LinuxMint user which I love very much.

[sentinel]

Who told you you're supposed to use GUI? GUI Emacs only have benefits that a GUI Vim would offer. The manual doesn't have preference of terminal or GUI. Terminal Emacs is awesome.