Why I Use Emacs
Table of Contents
I work on a computer all day everyday. The work I do involves reading, writing, and editing source code. I am not the most talented engineer skill wise so I must make up for that in other areas. The area I’ve chosen is tooling. I strongly believe and would encourage all young engineers, even if you are much brighter than me, to dive head first into one of the more “niche” editors be it emacs or neovim. The circles that you will be able to run around “normy” software developers will quickly become apparent.
I originally read this on hacker news but one of the commentors mentioned that learning to use / master one of these editors requires a shift in your general mindset from that of a software consumer to a software producer. The reality of relying on open source software (but really any software) is that there will be bugs and when your ability to work depends on this software you kind of have no choice but to investigate the cause of your issues rather than throw your hands up and ask somebody else to fix it. The nice part about it being open source is you have the ability to read the source code and make at least some attempt to debug an issue yourself.
This kind of “mindset shift” has been apparent to me primarily when I compare myself to my coworkers and it has also allowed me to actually contribute back to the community that has provided me with such an amazing tool to begin with, see My Doom Emacs Bugfix.
Day to Day Emacs Benefits
Create and edit pull requests using magit forge
Org mode
Rest Client
Project management
Buffer management
Keyboard Navigation
I’m an evil user that occassionally experiments with becoming holy again with
default keybinds but can’t quite commit. I started out using VIM in college and
the modal editing experience is deeply engrained at this point. No matter the
keybindings you choose, being able to navigate through text with the keyboard
will make you look like you at least have a clue what you’re doing. Emacs
packages like avy and swiper make you a wizard. It will become difficult for you
to watch your coworkers use their computer while attempting to help with an
issue.
For me, writing good code is like writing an essay in that I need to iterate on it. My first attempt ought to be heavily edited and refactored. In the real world we have deadlines and non-technical product managers / business folks who do not give a damn if your code is elegant or maintainable or generic and they sure as hell do not care about the concept of technical debt. That is to say it is important to me to be able to iterate fast. Mastering an editor is an important piece to this puzzle.
My take on Emacs versus Neovim
Emacs’s biggest weakness for someone like me is emacs-lisp. It is a language that I will probably never master so long as I have a day job. I occassionally stress that Emacs might die out one day due to lack of popularity and work on my Neovim setup to prepare for the inevitable. That said there is nothing like Emacs in terms of integration, it’s difficult for me to put it into exact words so I’d say you just have to try it. Even when I watch folks on YouTube use their super customized Neovim setups (which are really cool btw) there’s always a few little things that jump out as deal breakers to me, they’ll still issue shell commands to interact with files, , have to open up a dedicated rest client, or use another program all together (usually tmux) to manage concurrent projects.