One year with Emacs

It’s now been a bit over a year that I’ve decided to give Emacs a try after using VIM and Sublime Text and Textmate before that for the last 10 years or so. And since even small anniversaries have to be celebrated, here a quick run-down of things I’ve learnt:

• 10 year means a lot of muscle memory to get rid of, so after a month I’ve stopped trying and ended up simply integrating the amazing evil-mode into my Emacs setup. Best of both worlds!
• I’ve enjoyed Elisp more than I expected. I even started learning Clojure last month which will hopefully re-animate me to get into Elisp again 😉
• Currently, my Emacs configuration is stored as one larger OrgMode file. As much as I love OrgMode, I’m not convinced anymore, that this is the right way for me and my config. Perhaps I just need to write more a story around each setting but as it is right now (with little by-text except for source-references etc.) it doesn’t feel like an improvement over multiple .el files with comments.
• Last year I thought that OrgMode would end up being the killer feature for me, but - as it turns out - Magit is even more amazing for my workflow. Previously I was using git nearly exclusively through the commandline as no wrapper could actually make it easier to more convenient. And then came Magit 2.0. Simply try it!

Well, that’s basically it so far. I’m still writing far too little Elisp for my taste but at least only lazyness is stopping me right now. Whenever I see something I’d like to have automated in my workflow I open *scratch* right away and start hacking. VIM never got me that far! But I haven’t gone beyong these simple scripts so far.

After 13 months now I’m still enjoying nearly everything about Emacs and for now am looking forward to many more years of using it! That and I hope I will finally try to write about new things I learn and find for myself here. It’s not like I haven’t tried that before …