Emacs, Elisp and Org Mode

I have a confession to make.

I'm sort of an Emacs fanatic.

Well, perhaps fanatic is a strong word but it does reflect the manner in which I try to integrate my whole workflow into and around it. And so far, I rarely ever have to leave the leave Emacs or the terminal. Best of all, I almost never have move my hand those dreadful decimeters to the right to use the mouse.

Personally, I've been using Emacs for the better part of 5 years now; during most of my education and the full duration of my professional career. When I started out, I just copied some basic configuration with some saner defaults that was given to me by a friend. Over time, I kept changing these settings more and more and today they are comprised of around 3k lines of elisp code and about a hundred third party packages.

What am I using all that for? Well, mostly to support my usual workflow or to improve some specific function, such as grammar inspection (langtool) or efficient error checking (flycheck). The best thing however, is the fact that no matter what language or configuration format you find, there's bound to be an elisp package that can properly edit and highlight it.

There's also another tool that should be mentioned. I have only recently started to use Org Mode as my primary task-list and markup format. In my mind it is essentially a (much) better Markdown format that is built directly into Emacs. Naturally, it can do a whole lot more than that but suffice to say that it is one of the primary reasons this blog exists in the first place. In fact, this is the first post I've done using Nikola's Org Mode generator and so far I'm quite happy with the results. Naturally, it'll probably be a while before I've tried all of its features.

Don't take all this Emacs talk the wrong way though, whatever editor you choose to use is up to you, and you alone. I will not try to push Emacs on anyone. For the simple reason that…

If you're arguing, you're losing. – Dan Saks

…and I'll leave the whole Emacs vs. anything at that. This doesn't mean I won't give hints and tips to people who're already using it however. Emacs has an enormous library of utilities but it is somewhat lacking in the regard of discoverability of these features. Thus, the more people that can bring some of these features to the forefront, the better.

In time I intend to share some of the things I've done with Emacs along with snippets of elisp code or third party packages that I find useful.

…but I'll leave all that for another time. 'til then!