Over at the Emacs subreddit, kudikarasavasa asks a question dear to the hearts of many of us: How did you start living inside Emacs permanently? He says he keeps hearing people say they live inside Emacs and the idea seems appealing to him but he doesn’t understand how people made the journey. Did they start out to live in Emacs or was it just something that happened along the way?
Of course, it’s the answers not the question that are interesting. There are all sorts of stories. The majority of them say that living in Emacs is just something that happens after you’ve been using Emacs for a while. The usual story is something along the lines of starting to use Emacs, liking the interface, and moving all the easy tasks, coding, writing, note taking, agendas and TODO lists, and maybe even version control via Magit, into Emacs. Later, these people find, as I did, that writing and editing in other applications has become painful.
So they move “harder” applications—like email and RSS readers—into Emacs. Pretty soon, they start thinking, “why should I have to go a separate app to play music?” and they move their music playing into Emacs. Before you know it, they’re doing everything except, perhaps, browsing from within Emacs. Like me, they probably have a couple of tasks that they use other apps for—calendar, texting, and reminders for me—and that remain outside the Emacs sphere but essentially everything else is done from the comfort of Emacs.
Some of the other people are a bit more hardcore. I especially liked this quote:
The alternative journey is you read a lot of stories about Lisp, get hyped about Lisp machines, figure out that Emacs is the best you can actually get, and decide to run with it as far as you can.
I can relate.
It’s worth reading all the comments because there are several useful suggestions for dealing with things like shells and remote editing. As this post shows, it’s pretty easy to move the majority of your computer tasks into Emacs. It’s a really interesting discussion and well worth spending a few minutes reading.