2025 02 26 Emac or Not Emac

In the last two posts, I wrote extensively about emacs. However, today I have come across this post. I have learnt the term .emacs Bankruptcy.

In his case, over the days, the configuration of his emacs is getting bigger and bigger that needs a reboot, or fall under its own weight. He also doubts that whether he needs the power of org-mode. He repeatedly emphasizes that he likes emacs. At some point during last week, I even seriously thought about getting a 10-inch chuwi just for emacs. My goals was to have a dedicated emacs “appliance” so that I can carry it anywhere. But nothing beats the wake-up speed, or snappiness, of a macbook. So I gave it up quickly.

But

realized that I enjoyed customizing it more than I actually enjoyed using it in my day-to-day.

I do share the same idea to a certain extent. I enjoyed fooling around my init.el file, learning some lisp programming, digging into the source tree of eamcs repo. Then suddenly, I recalled that I started with searching for a terminal based editor to write some blog posts.

For most terminal based text editor users, may it be neovim or emacs, one of the main reasons is to NOT using the mouse. Well, I am not a very keen mouse user. I use trackpads.

In fact, in recent years, I have seldomly touched a decent keyboard. My hhkb type-S is sitting quietly in my drawer. I enjoy the experiences of using a keyboard with a large trackpad beneath it. My 14-inch macbook air is a text book implementation of it. My X13 also offers a similar keyboard with trackpad usage experiences.

When I am moving my fingers over the trackpad for GUI related things, I don’t feel distracted. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the trackpad is a good pointing device.

I have even seriously looking for a trackpad that works with my hhkb, but soon I gave up. There is a huge mechanical keyboard market, but there is no a trackpad market. That is why I stick to a laptop no matter where I am. I am writing this with my mac book air on my desk.

So here I am again, writing my blog post with VS Code in markdown. There is one thing that org-mode does not have - mermaid which is very handy to present some basic diagrams.

I am not taking any realms or sizes and I am open. I don’t mind using or trying any text editors or tools. I just use the right tools for the right task. Hugo has native org-mode support as well as markdown. org-mode is powerful that markdown. But for me, I just want to write and jot down something quick and easy. Markdown serves me well yet org-mode is an overkill. So I just go back to markdown. As simple as that.