Emacs Induction

sidenote: this is my first post using orgmode. so apologies for any weirdness.

I've always been fascinated with the culture around text editors. Each one is formed of its own clique of dedicated users, with either a flourishing ecosystem or floundering community (see: Atom). You have the vim users, swearing by the keyboard shortcuts, the VSCode users, pledging allegiance to the flag Microsoft and Node, the Sublime fanatics, with their focused and fast editor, and the emacs nerds, living and breathing (lisp). And all the other editors and their hardcore users (seriously, we could spend all day listing them). And the fantastic thing is, all of them (except Notepad) are perfectly valid options for development. Thanks to the advent of the Language Server Protocol, most text extensible editors can be turned into competent code editors (not neccesarily IDE replacements, but good enough for small or day to day use).

Up until recently, I've been using Sublime. It's a focused experience with a very small development team and a newly revived ecosystem, and native applications for any platform I care to use. I've used VSCode, Atom, and Notepad++ previously, but never really delved much into the world of "text based" (for lack of better term?) editors, including vim and emacs. The most exposure was using nano for quick configuration edits on servers or vim for git commit messages. Emacs evaded me, and I had little interest in switching away from the editors I already understood. But as I grew as a developer and explored new topics, including Clojure and Lisps in general, I quickly realized that to go further I would need to dig deeper into more foreign concepts and stray from the C-like languages I was so comfortable with. The first few days at CircleCI, I was introduced to Clojure, and I quickly grew more comfortable with the language and concepts (although I am nowhere near experienced enough to write a more complete application), and I have that to thank for my real interest in lisps.

Several failed attempts later, I managed to get a handle on how Guix works on a surface level. My motivation for this was trying to package Sublime Text, which, while I make significant progress, I hit some hard blockers that proved tough to defeat. This sparked me to invest time into emacs, the operating system with an okay text editor. For a while, leading up to this, I've subscribed and consumed System Crafters, an excellent resource for getting started with emacs configuration (among other related topics). It was part of my inspiration to pick up emacs and play around with it - I don't typically enjoy watching video based tutorials, especially for programming, but thanks to the livestreamed format presented it was much easier to consume.

So far, I'm enjoying it. Now that I have more of a handle on how lisps work, it's a much smoother experience, and I do encourage developers to exit their comfort zone of C-like languages and poke around a lisp. There's a learning curve, for sure, but the concepts can be applied to non lisp languages as well. The configuration for my emacs setup is (so far) relatively straightforward, and I haven't spent much time setting it up with language servers or specific language modes, but for writing it's pretty snappy (and pretty). Orgmode is a very interesting experience coming from being a staunch Markdown defender, but it's not a huge adjustment and the experience with emacs is sublime. It's also usable outside of emacs, although I can't speak to the experience, and GitHub supports it natively (and Hugo, thank goodness). Literate programming also seems like a really neat idea of blog posts and documentation, and I might switch my repository READMEs over to it for things like configuration templates. These are still early days though - I've only been using emacs for a few days and am still working out where it fits in to my development workflow beyond markdown/orgmode documents.

sidenote: emacs or Emacs?