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My Emacs misconceptions

Emacs Carnival Mistakes and Misconceptions

Philip Kaludercic has started the Emacs carnival on the subject Mistakes and Misconceptions. Here's my contribution.

Vim to Emacs

In 2021 I switched to Emacs after using Vim for more than 20 years.

I was thinking about learning Lisp and Forth, and somehow I had the notion that programming in these languages is better supported in Emacs. Also, I had discovered that extensions like rec-mode and ledger-mode offer much more than the Vim plugins for the GNU recutils and ledger-cli.

And than there is the lure of org-mode.

In the past I had tried Viper-mode a few times, but never was happy with it. So I toke the plunge and started trying to learn using Emacs with the default keybindings.

Misconception: Vanilla keys are impossible to learn

For many years, the O'Reilly book "Learning GNU Emacs" from 1996 sat on my bookshelves, and each time I opened it up, I was completely overwhelmed by the Emacs keybindings.

My misconceptions:

  • I had the impression that typing the keychords would result in your fingers getting tangled.
  • There are so many keybindings, and unlike Vi, they are all combinations of several keys, so I assumed I'd never master them.

The man-page of mg, the micro-emacs that comes with the OpenBSD installer, has a nice compact list of the keybindings. Guessing the priority, I sorted this list by what I expected to be their relative importance, and dedicated a full weekend practicing the first few keybindings. In the week following this weekend, I transferred my task list that was in Taskwarrior to org-mode, and started using Emacs during my day-time job, gradually learning more keybindings.

In hindsight, my ideas were wrong. In the beginning the keychords are weird, but I have never had my fingers in a knot :) And giving it some effort and time, the muscle memory rapidly adopts the keychords.

My ~/.xinitrc maps the CapsLock key as Control key, and I have never experienced the so-called Emacs-pinky.

Misconception: Dired can be ignored

I prefer working on the command line and on Linux and BSD have never used a file manager. With one exception: in the nineties I used Midnight Commander to upload complete directory-trees over FTP.

Just like Midnight Commander, Dired, the Emacs file manager, can be used with the keyboard, no need to use the mouse.

In the beginning I didn't look into Dired. Only after using Emacs for some time, I discovered that Dired is very useful and now I am gradually incorporating it in my workflow.

I still have to dive deeper in it. Of course it can be used just like any file manager, like renaming files and moving files from one directory to another. The real power of Dired is, based on my limited knowledge and experience, in the integration with the rest of Emacs.

Misconception: Underestimating the impact of using Emacs

Moving from Vim to Emacs, I had the notion of replacing one editor with another. I couldn't be more wrong.

Stealthy--like a ninja in the night--Emacs creeps into your life and gradually takes over everything. The integration of so many functionality make Emacs a wonderful desktop environment.

The advantages of this is that it makes everything much easier, everything has the same user interface, and it all works the same on any platform. From window manager to IDE, Emacs can do it all.

This is a small anthology of my use of Emacs:

This is not a complete list. F.e, I write magazine articles in org-mode, and when ready, using the org-mode export functionality, export the article to ODT-format. And before my retirement, I wrote reports and policies in org-mode and exported these to LaTeX.

0rg-mode supports simple calculations in tables. The calculations to fill out my three-monthly VAT tax return from are in org-mode, automatically extracting the numbers from the ledger-journal using ledger-cli. My yearly financial statements are also compiled in a few org-mode tables.

I have used the Emacs X Window Manager but after a while went back to the old faithful ratpoison window manager. I think this is faster than EXWM, but have never done any real measuring.

Misconception: Emacs Lisp is not a general language

While learning Emacs and starting to use Emacs Lisp (also called Elisp) I discovered that Emacs Lisp is a very capable language.

The many different packages that are available for Emacs proof this.

I have build a static website generator in Elisp, and an application to generate my invoices and the ledger entries, and much more.

My mistake

In the post "Emacs Carnival Mistakes and Misconceptions", Philip asks us to mention our mistakes. Of course I have made many, f.e., in the beginning is setting up your configuration not easy.

My biggest mistake however, is not making the switch much sooner.

Emacs is a powerful environment

The development of Emacs began in 1984. Using Lisp for its development was a brilliant choice. Emacs Lisp is very capable and has a low threshold. This empowers its many different users.

Emacs has evolved over more than 40 years by endless user contributions. Because these are daily users solving real problems, the result is a very powerful and versatile environment that can be used for a plethora of tasks. Nothing comes even close to it.

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