Christian Tietze has a nice post on sharpening the Emacs saw as part of this month’s Emacs Carnival on Maintenance. Like many of us, Tietze found that he was moving more and more of his work into Emacs. Finally, he found himself with a bespoke Emacs that was his alone.
Once you have your very own personalized Emacs, you have to maintain it. It’s not necessarily that way for other editors. I was a Vim user for over two decades and very rarely did any maintenance other than compiling and installing new versions. With Emacs, it seems as if I’m always tweaking some setting or adding a new package.
Tietze compares this to taking care of your tools and work area in, say, a woodworking shop. As he puts it, you can’t cut with a dull saw. You need to take care of your tools, not just use them. Equally important, you need to think about how you use your tools and what you’ve accomplished with them in the past.
Tietze says that he considers the time spent tinkering with Emacs and personalizing his computing environment as an investment in his future. It’s like sweeping out and organizing the shop and keeping everything neat and tidy so that you can work unfettered by distracting clutter.
Tietze makes a point I’ve often made myself. Once you shape Emacs into the computing environment that’s specialized for you, you have a perfect tool that you can take with you wherever you go. In our environment, that means whatever operating system or computer you’re using. Emacs runs just about everywhere.