Overview

• This repo is to capture all things related to my emacs stuff.

Background

History

• I’ve been a long-time emacs user since ~2004. My first exposure to emacs was via my first mentor/manager and I was always dazzled by the multi-file management, and the interactive shell. I started with vi and tried to simulate the foregoing, but never got the same effect.
  • Then one year, as part of a New Year’s resolution, I committed and never looked back. When I learned, and even until recently, I had the following guiding principles:
    1. Minimize customizations to .emacs files.
    2. Don’t add extra packages.
    3. Summarizing (1) and (2) don’t customize beyond what is shipped with standard bigbox distributions (RH/SuSE).

    The major reason for these ideas was because a software product we had worked on would often be deployed at remote sites without any internet access. Thus, dragging around .emacs files or packages was not practical, and in a sense could actually be a liability! Further, I did not want to develop too heavy a dependence on more capable environments, and feel helpless when working on customer systems.

  • I had converted a number of people over time to the virtues of emacs. Every single person I had converted went like this:
    1. One sit down, usually remote session, and going over some basics.
    2. Close out the meeting saying run: C-h t and follow it until the end.
    3. Then let’s talk.

    In 100% of the conversion cases all of the people were teaching me things about emacs, and they found out very quickly I was far from a power user, but simply proficient with some basics. That’s an awesome thing about emacs where it meets you where you are. It will follow you to the nth degree, or in my case, < nth.

What About Now?

• I still live in emacs for:
  • Development work. Old habits die hard. I do like intellij quite a bit, though.
  • Note taking for:
    • Meetings.
    • Collaborative desktop sharing sessions.
    • High stakes engagements with customers for efficient debugging + note taking sessions.
  • Documentation
    • Active use of ox-jira-export, etc.

• Most recently I’ve been dipping back in and catching up with the world on what’s happened with emacs.

  Also, this is in line with the Roosevelt line:

  “We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.”

  I’ve been re-visiting lots of things, perhaps for another repo.

  Youtube and the web, as thy do, always reveals the craziness with what is possible. It’s clear that I should make some effort to learn some more, or at least re-calibrate what is considered “minimum viable emacs.” Things like packages, extending org-mode, and adding IDE like features, all seem so normal now.

• Warning: Things which will be checked in here will be considered very rudimentary by most people’s standards and thus high on the cringe.