My friend and erstwhile colleague Watts Martin has been seeking the one true path of light and virtue. After years of aborted attempts to embrace Emacs, he has, it seems, finally succeeded. Actually, snark aside, I understand his journey. It largely parallels mine.
Back when we were colleagues, I was still a Vim user but had already begun making feeble attempts to move to Emacs. It was always a silly thing, like the default scrolling behavior, that drove me away. In my case, it was finally moving to Lisp that pushed me over the edge to embracing Emacs. Martin’s journey was similar. He tried several times to move to Emacs but it just wouldn’t take, until it did.
While we Emacers can rejoice in another convert, Martin’s post is actually a balanced account of the strengths and weaknesses of Emacs. The downsides that Martin mentions are mostly the usual difficulties that n00bies encounter. Those of us who have made the journey from n00bie to journeyman can forget how hard it was at first. In particular, Martin calls out the difficulty of coercing Emacs into behaving as a “modern” editor by which he means using things like Tree-sitter and LSP. He complains, correctly, that there isn’t a good guide to help beginners configure Emacs to support a useful, modern workflow.
On the other hand, he notes that Emacs can molded into whatever you want it to be. It is, as I always say, a light weight Lisp Machine, although Martin doesn’t use that term. That fact, he says, makes it unlikely that folks who aren’t willing to “hack around with their editors” will ever adopt Emacs.
Martin ends by saying,
But the thing is, I think I also get Emacs. And once you get Emacs, there’s probably no going back.
I doubt he understands how true that is. He’s like a guy who’s fallen into quicksand and doesn’t realize it. For him, as for us, there is no escape.