My Emacs adventure

For reasons unknown I always wanted try Emacs. I'm a VIM (neovim in my case) user for many years and I'm used to it. It does exactly what it should for me. Still, trying out things is something I enjoy and do on a regular basis (never stand still ;)).

Installing Emacs is fair and simple on most distros and starting up was ... awkward. I'm used to be in my CLI and was baffled that Emacs presented me a GUI right away.

There's a fast and simple "fix" for that. Just run Emacs with -nw: emacs -nw. Still can't wrap my head around why the GUI is the standard, but that might just be the ShellOwl in me.

Starting it up brought me to my next point right away, the tutorial. Since I have no idea how Emacs works and especially the keybinding, it was nice to see that there's a tutorial from the get-go.

Not even 10 minutes into it, I struggled with how different the keybindings are set and wanted to change them right away. Doing a couple of searches I saw, that many people have this problem and it seems that those keybindings can even put your health at risk.

After a couple more minutes of reading, I found something that exactly did what I needed: Having VIM keybindings in Emacs (and much more which I wasn't prepared for): Doom Emacs.

This was another beast to tame. Reading the docs was very helpful and slowly but steady it did grow on me. I fell in love with ORG-MODE and other tricks that I didn't know were possible. Doom Emacs even has the option to activate an IRC Client, an E-Mail Client and what not.

Emacs is supposed to be a text editor, but it's can be way more and I didn't even scratch the surface so far. I will try it out for a couple of weeks to learn more about what I can do with Emacs.

There's just one thing that kind of bothers me. I'm a simple man with simple needs and I have the feeling that Emacs just does too much for me that I will not need in the end. That said, we will see how this adventure goes on.