Author: David Beazley (@dabeaz) August 29, 2021
In a recent class, someone remarked that I must have some kind of crazy emacs setup--especially given my certain reputation for live coding, and, well, using emacs. However, he was somewhat shocked when I said I never customize emacs. This got me thinking about my relationship to emacs--an editor that I've now been using for 30 years.
In short--I blame my summer student internship from 1991. On the first day, they showed me my desk, a Sun 3 workstation, a copy of the K&R C Programming book and said "go figure it out." I had never even used Unix before. It did not go well. "ls? man? What the fuck?!?!?" Ahem. Pardon me. Oh yeah, "also go learn this editor." Needless to say, the first couple of weeks were rough going.
Did I mention that I was also supposed to write code to solve stochastic differential equations? Did I know anything about stochastic differential equations? No, I did not. So, there was also a small stack of dense math papers involved. Learning the text editor was the least of my various head-exploding problems at that point.
Anyways, my use of emacs stuck from that point forward. Almost all of my later work took place in the terminal and Unix environments. I didn't even own a computer from 1988-1995. For a short time, I owned a VT220 terminal that I'd use for dial-up into the university. Emacs was almost always available and it worked decently well on that setup.
As for my continued use of emacs in the modern era, I just use it straight-away in the text terminal (typically iTerm2)--no GUI or anything. There's no real reason for doing that other than the fact that I'm used to it.
Not much as it turns out. Here is the combined sum knowledge of stuff I generally know about emacs:
- Quitting.
- Basic cursor movement and scrolling around.
- Loading and saving of files.
- Search-and-replace.
- Split-screen (both vertical and horizontal!).
- M-x font-lock-mode (to disable colors in an emergency if giving a live demo on a bad projector)
- I once defined a keyboard macro (but had to look up how)
Also, I think I once had to customize .emacs back in 1996 when I was first learning Python and I wanted to install Python-mode.
Honestly, that's about it when it comes to me and emacs. Honestly, it's not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. For what it's worth, the first three bullet points also describe the sum total knowledge I have about using vim. I mean, sometimes you're in a real pinch and you might have to edit the Makefile for emacs. I digress.
There's always a danger in getting too set in one's ways. So, seeing a three-week window before my next course, perhaps now would be a good time to just abandon emacs cold turkey. Learn something else--maybe even one of those new-fangled IDEs that all of the cool kids are using.
Anyways, I wrote this blog post in VSCode. I'll report back later with further progress.
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