Running Your Life With Emacs

I’ve written a lot about how I hate leaving Emacs and find that its consistent UX and key bindings make a huge difference in the efficiency of my workflow. Not everyone agrees. Many people think I’m being overly sensitive when I say that I can’t effectively use multiple editors because the different key bindings mess with my muscle memory.

On the other hand, Garrett Hopper agrees with me. In a post entitled Running Your Life With Emacs, he says

…I often want to use the same efficient key bindings I use while programming when I’m doing other tasks. I want to be writing an email or documentation and edit a code snippet in the same way I normally edit code. I want to manage Git repositories right from my editor without having to touch the mouse. I want to browse the web in my editor, so I can easily copy code examples and run them. I want to track my to-do lists and the amount of time spent on each task.

That’s an excellent summary of my feelings.

Hopper says he hates switching context and that by doing as much as possible in Emacs, he reduces it to a minimum. He even does much of his browsing in Emacs. I find that eww doesn’t render sites reliably so I have a hard time embracing it. Almost all my time is spent in either Emacs or Safari so eliminating my reliance on Safari would mean I would almost never have to leave Emacs. I can only hope.

The rest of the post covers the many advantages of Emacs including

  • Discoverability
  • Built-in documentation
  • Customizability
  • A rich package system
  • and, of course, Org Mode

It’s an interesting post and if you’re an “everything in Emacs” adherent, it provides some self affirmation.

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