Emacs

I am writing something again. The last two years have been rough for me. Ups and downs, changes in the family etc. Now I have got enough time to write about something.

I would like to write about emacs. I am writing this post in vanilla emacs configuration. Even spell-check is not working properly. I am doing this in a terminal, on a mac. There are a lots of alternatives such as byword. Why I am torturing myself with a 40-year old text based software?

I have been “editor-hopping” for a while. neovim, VScode and micro are among the text editors that I have used.

I like plain text. I have had very bad experiences with MS word. Over the years I have to deal with the same problem again and again with MS word. Mis-alignments, fonts not found etc. are distracting me from working on the contents. Plain text frees me from all these issues.

Then why emacs now? The first part is why emacs? If comparing apple to apple, why not vim but emacs? Because vim/neovim are for programming and emacs is for text writing. In this context, I can freely use basic arrow keys and delete keys to do basic word editing. The vim keystrokes or “language” is efficient for processing program code.

Another reason is that 我喜歡寫中文啊。The crtl based keystrokes in emacs works fine when I am typing chinese, but the esc based neovim keystrokes are really in my ways. Using emacs frees me from these hassles.

If comparing apple to orange, why not GUI based tools but emacs? The mouse. For a text based software, particularly word authoring software, keeping my hands on the keyboard and not touching the mouse is vitial. Moving the wrist of my right hand to reach for the mouse is a distraction for me. That is why I am a touch pad user. Whenever there is a touch pad on my laptop, I will not use the mouse. Keeping my hands to the keyboard while I am writing is a vital requirement for my humble workflow.

Why now? Timing. In the Chinese new year, I have got some time at my own disposal. When I was discussing new year wishes with my wife, writing something has been brought up. Somehow I ended up learning emacs again. This was not the first time that I tried to learn emacs yet it was the most fruitful one. At least I have got a grasp on how to use it with vanilla configurations. For example, I can still write this post in markdown without getting markdown mode working. Nor spell-checking. So please bear with my typos.

Emacs seems to be a very powerful text processing software. For example, orgmode. There is even a fountain mode. It seems that emacs is used by some professionals other that computing. So proabably it is worth learning. Probably now.