Emacs: The Final Frontier

This past week I spent a good deal of time experimenting with XMPP, a messaging protocol that works kinda like email when it comes to it’s design. In that journey I re-encounterd Joshua Blais in a few channels, as well as his IRC channel #technicalrenaissance. I was curious, as I can’t say I’ve really tested IRC, so I joined. In the conversations I was also reminded of how Joshua uses Emacs, and his numerous YouTube videos on the topic. Again Emacs was something I had seen in passing, mostly the debates between Vim and the jokes that it was more of an operating system. Curiosity bit me again, and I took the plunge to start learning what Emacs is and how it works.

I was not prepared for what I would find, yet in other ways I was. My technical journey has been leaning towards minimalism and self sufficiency, as many of you have probably seen. My side project Andromeda was one of those efforts, trying to build my own minimal apps do remove distractions and subscription tools. As the years have gone by, my mental model towards computing has been conditioned to go simpler and use less resources. As I started seeing what Emacs could do, I realized that this was my final journey. It has just about everything you could need for daily computing needs:

• Text editing for coding and writing
• Task and project management
• Calendar for events and scheduling
• RSS feeds and minimal text browser
• Email and IRC clients for communication
• Calculator / Spreadsheets for managing numbers

Even in just my two days of using Emacs I feel this just scratches the surface. It’s endlessly configurable and extensible, with 40 years of history backing it’s development and community. What really got me going is using text buffers for UIs. It’s hard to explain, but this video does a better job than I ever could, showing how the UI model creates scenarios that you could never imagine.

Perhaps I’m naive. Maybe this will wear off in a month and I’ll go back to my normal habbits and apps. However, I haven’t felt this way about a program since discovering vim. I already have Email, RSS, IRC, and tasks going with ease. This blog post is being written in Emacs as I switch between those other tabs.

Emacs is the final frontier, and I’m going warp speed.